During the Sixties and early Seventies, public attention was briefly focused on the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus, where student protests reached levels of violence that were astonishing even for that violent time in American life. Many people concluded that the radicals had virtually taken over the campus. They were right, of course. Since then, the violence has subsided, but the radical control has not. The Left is institutionally entrenched here, and there is no better place to observe its baleful effects than in the university’s English department.

Of course, all the recent trends of academic life are evident in Madison, as they are on so many campuses across the country. In the English department, a student is much more likely to read Kate Chopin than Herman Melville, if he reads American literature at all. (There is no American literature requirement for English majors, or for education majors who plan to teach English.) A walk through the library’s magazine room shows the abstrusely deconstructionist Critical Inquiry on prominent display, along with the most recent issue of Madison’s own academic quarterly, Contemporary Literature, featuring articles on Jacques Lacan, feminist fiction, and “post-structuralist” theory. Other crucial publications—like Off Our Backs: A Women’s News Journal and Challenge: The Revolutionary Communist Newspaper—c&n be found in the undergraduate library in the spaces set aside for “women’s studies” and “ethnic studies.”

The school’s literary magazine, The Madison Review, featuring poetry and short fiction by both students and established writers, is