If you want to know what academics admire most in each other, spend some time listening to them share their enthusiasms. “I became a literary critic because of Leslie Fiedler,” Jonathan E. Freedman of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor said at the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2013 meeting in Boston. “It didn’t hurt that he smoked pot and, as my father told me, ‘Showed up at a cookout wearing cut-offs and nothing else, looking for all the world like a half-naked satyr.’”

The thought of Fiedler in any state of undress is not for the faint of heart.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
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