What are academic instincts, and are they about more than survival? For Frederick Crews, emeritus professor of English at Berkeley, literary study in the university is a Darwinian battle for power and status, with professors 'teaching the conflicts' as they claw their way up the academic ladder. For Marjorie Garber, William R. Kenan Jr Professor of English at Harvard, the university, if not a utopia, is nonetheless a satisfying environment where intellectual controversy reigns. Garber believes that academic jargon is actually 'language in action', marking 'the place where thinking has been', while Crews believes that it is the inscription on the tombstone of the place where thinking died. While they deal with many of the same issues - the star system, cultural studies, literary theory - these two writers come up with revealingly different descriptions of the profession of English in the American academy.

LRB 1 November 2001 | PDF Download