According to his and other accounts, a department that in the late '80s sought to become the most innovative in the country instead became a war zone. A group of queer theorists attempted a coup against the established order on one hand and various factions of social scholarship on the other. The department head, Andrew Ross, got his own graduate degree in literature. But under the influence of '70s politics he and his contemporaries began teaching interdisciplinary courses, exploring the arts primarily as indicators of social change. Hired at Princeton as a specialist in poetry, he never taught it.
People have to put food on the table.
You sell people down the river if you disconnect these things. At the conference's open-bar reception, held in the Marriott's grand Harvest Room, members mingled and offered toasts to Goethe in German. Meanwhile, in a small, bare conference room upstairs, Bertonneau met with the group's graduate students. Only five showed up. Awkward moments of silence loomed between two-minute introductions.