Naomi Schaefer Riley’s interview with British writer David Lodge entices me to take a look at his satirical novels about university life, Changing Places, Small World, and Deaf Sentence. Because Lodge mocks some professors, notably those who call themselves Marxists while living like millionaires and who get paid royally for spouting idiotic literary theories, he says he is considered “‘transgressive’” by most Europeans. So much do the latter still believe, he says, in the “dignity” of the professorate that they can’t fathom satire of higher education.
Many of us this side of the Atlantic have long held no such illusions.