"It is a combination of self censorship, self congratulation, and being enslaved by academic fashion and cultural ideology: unfortunately there are only so many ways to say it that don't make one sound like an asshole, but I'll be the first to admit that Michaels doesn't seem all that interested in avoiding that fate."
I knew Walter Michaels when he was at UC Berkeley. In the late seventies he was the resident theorist. But in fact he had been hired because they wanted his wife, Frances Ferguson. I don't know why they wanted her.
Michaels and Stephen Greenblatt were on the placement committee, the year before my gaggle went out for jobs. The year they were in charge NOBODY got jobs, out of some twenty candidates. When asked, at the first jobs meeting the following year, why no one had gotten jobs, Michaels fiddled with his tie and said that the candidates had not been sexy enough. I was going to raise my hand and say something about maybe I had wound up in the wrong room, I wanted to be a professor, not a whore. But I kept my mouth shut. I was not surprised that no one had gotten jobs that year. Both Greenblatt and Michaels were the sort of men to help who ever was ahead of them on the ladder, not anyone below. They were hardly going to imperil their hard-won connections to get some snotty graduate students jobs.
I always thought he was a prime asshole. And, I did read the essay in question and had the same reaction as Chuck. What's actually politically brilliant about that essay is that on the one hand he situates himself as a radical for bringing up the class question while attacking the only actual 'threat' to the existing power structure: the threat of women and blacks taking white men's jobs. Smart and daring in its own way... Think of him as the Camille Paglia of the 'radical' academicians. In the same way that she did no harm to her career by dumping on feminist professors; his 'ultra-left' critique of diversity did no harm to his career either.
He did in fact make a brilliant career for himself...one of the superstars of his generation.
Joanna