To the Editors:
I can’t even begin to tell you how much I enjoyed your reflections with respect to the “Professor of Hip,” Andrew Ross. Of course, I read the New York magazine article on Mr. Ross; I reveled in your coverage of the ever-scandalous MLA gathering in which Mr. Ross figured (February 1995) and am tickled by your latest installment in Notes & Comments (November 1995).
Why such an interest on my part? In the fall of 1990, as an English major at Princeton, I made a horribly uninformed decision; I signed up for Mr. Ross’s then hyper-popular course, dubiously entitled “Contemporary Culture: Postmodern Theory and Practice.” As a product of the wayward academy, I was neither apprehensive nor suspicious.I didn’t even know the culture wars existed, and why would I?
However, if you are able to withstand one of Andrew Ross’s lectures, replete with all the postmodern jargon, the outlandish extrapolations, the non-sensical analogies, and the glorification of pop icons, then you can’t help but feel that something has gone terribly awry in academe. Mr. Ross opened my eyes to the culture wars. I was studying with the enemy!
Imagine my horror when I entered the classroom one day only to find one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s most explicit offerings on the large screen at the front of the hall. How was this to contribute to my degree in English? Then there was the lecture devoted to the likes of Grace Jones and Madonna, both of whom were hailed as self-transforming,gender-bending pop divas. (I believe this was also the lecture in which Mr. Ross used the expression “cyber-fuck.”) And I couldn’t make heads or tails of the selected reading in the course packet, but then again, antinomian theorists like Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan have never meant much to me. And to add insult to injury, upon having a paper returned to me by one of Mr. Ross’s postmodern graduate flunkies, I was berated for my use of “gender-specific” pronouns.
You have Mr. Ross’s number, and you have accurately assessed his brand of “driveling neo-Marxist pabulum.” So for future battles in the midst of the ongoing wars, I thought you might enjoy these brief, yet revealing, glimpses into Mr. Ross’s lecture hall.
Andrew P. Madden
San Francisco, Calif.