Well. I wonder what Carrol would have said to the Trotskyist woman in Greece who came up to me and said, "You know, here, Trotskyists beat their wives." Should I have told her that she was confusing the personal with the political?
My post, as all my posts, suffered from being too cryptic. But my reaction to Michaels being presented as a radical for his opposition to diversity was incredulity. After all, I had worked in the same dept with the man, attended a lot of the meetings he attended, was caught up in a lot of issues he was dealing with for many, many years. And I had never seen any evidence of his radicalness. On the contrary.
When I organized the graduate students at UCB to protest working conditions and the new requirement that grad students pay tuition (whether they were taking classes or not.....a lot more detail here, but I'll spare you), where was Michaels? When the bean counters (professional middle managers) were taking over the university (leading to the exploding tuition raises) and some professors in the dept stood up and urged everybody to fight this, where was Michaels? When it was his explicit responsibility to find jobs for graduates, where was Michaels? (Remember, this was U.C. Berkeley, supposedly the second best English dept in the nation (after Yale).....and no one got jobs on his watch? Several years before, when placement was in the hands of Anne Middleton, someone who actually cared about the students, they placed 90% of the applicants.)
So, I tried to point out that we should interpret his anti-diversity spiel in the context of a careerist academician who was threatened precisely by the token woman/black and could only earn brownie points by taking this very useful position (to the U.C. administration) from the left.
Shag and Alan Rudy made excellent arguments based on Michaels' texts, and I thank them. But I will not allow that the information I provided was "poison." (Though I do apologize for alluding to how he originally got his job; that was irrelevant.....)
J.