The Shadow Knows

The Graves of Academe By Richard Mitchell Little, Brown, 229 pp., $11.95 Richard Mitchell, a professor of English at Glassboro State College, is well known as “the Underground Grammarian.” He is the fearsome fellow who writes things like this: “Are those ‘public school oriented teachers’ actually teachers in public schools, or could they be teachers anywhere who just happen to be obsessed with thinking about the public schools? Could they even be teachers who face in the direction of the public schools?”

Mr. Mitchell smites the Philistines hip and thigh, and with their own weapon: the jargon of an ass. But let him describe his functions himself: “The Underground Grammarian . . . has been accurately enough described as a journal of radical, academic terrorism. It is radical because it seeks in language the root of thoughtlessness that more and more seems to characterize our culture. It is academic both because the tenor of the study to which it subjects the work of its victims is scholastic and because it finds the most egregious examples of mindless and mendacious babble neither in the corporations nor in the Congress but in the schools. It is terrorist because it exploits the fear many academics feel when they know that their words might appear in print before the eyes of the public.”

JT

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J. O. Tate

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The Graves of Academe By Richard Mitchell Little, Brown, 229 pp., $11.95 Richard Mitchell, a professor of English at Glassboro State College, is well known as “the Underground Grammarian.” He is the fearsome fellow who writes things like this: “Are those ‘public school oriented teachers’ actually teachers in public schools, or could they be teachers anywhere who just happen to be obsessed with thinking about the public schools? Could they even be teachers who face in the direction of the public schools?”

Mr. Mitchell smites the Philistines hip and thigh, and with their own weapon: the jargon of an ass. But let him describe his functions himself: “The Underground Grammarian . . . has been accurately enough described as a journal of radical, academic terrorism. It is radical because it seeks in language the root of thoughtlessness that more and more seems to characterize our culture. It is academic both because the tenor of the study to which it subjects the work of its victims is scholastic and because it finds the most egregious examples of mindless and mendacious babble neither in the corporations nor in the Congress but in the schools. It is terrorist because it exploits the fear many academics feel when they know that their words might appear in print before the eyes of the public.”