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intellectual atmosphere... they float almost unnoticed, part of the ambi–
ent spiritual pollution of our time." Unconcerned with academic pro–
motion and grant application (which cow the professoriate), Kimball is
a rogue antagonist, a critic-at-Iarge pressing his cultural ideals against
the idols of the academic mind with wit and fury.
For academics, the challenge that Kimball poses is triply frustrating.
First, he spots errors in their scholarship and solecisms in their sen–
tences-galling criticisms weakening the credibility of professors who
pride themselves on their rigor and sense of language. Second, Kimball
has an extramural readership, and academics do not. Far better than
they, he fills the coveted role of public intellectual. When academics
descend the Ivory Tower and go public, they often speak as though they
were still in a department meeting. With luck, their books sell seven
hundred copies. Last year, Kimball's
The Long March
sold twenty thou–
sand cloth copies.
Third, and most troubling, in the court of public opinion, Kimball
won the polemical war. The epithet "tenured radicals" stuck. That a
narrow-minded PC mindset dominates the humanities became a truth
universally accepted and academics have been on the defensive ever
since. The strategy was simple. Kimball observed professors in their
habitat, cited their speech-e.g., Houston Baker equating Gertrude
Himmelfarb with Strom Thurmond-and readers recoiled. Academics
countered that Kimball quoted them out of context and that the terms
they used have greater nuance than Kimball acknowledged. Hence,
when Den·ida says that writing precedes speech, he doesn't mean that
inscribing letters comes before uttering words in a historical or ontoge–
netic scheme. "Writing" signifies something more complex, bearing
upon cognition and representation per se. This may have worked-with
people who spent years in graduate seminars incorporating those sub–
tleties. But absent an academic training, the apologies sounded hollow.
This is the space that Kimball exploits, between academic under–
standing and common sense. The former requires too much forebear–
ance, too much credulousness from the uninitiated. Kimball's
arguments are occasionally rough, and his distinctions could be
sharper-e.g., deconstruction is not a species of Leftist criticism-but
greater finesse would blur the point. To observe the wily conceptual
shadings and stylistic excesses of academic critique would be to capitu–
late to its rhetoric, which is itself part of the problem. For Kimball,
adjusting oneself to its ironies, abstractions, neologisms, scarequotes,
sneerquotes, parentheses, paradoxes, qualifiers, and redefinitions is to
lose one's intellectual bearings. Academics say, "First, you must learn
