Twenty years ago, as the country was awakening to the problem of political correctness and tenured radicalism on campus, the Modern Language Association sponsored a panel discussion that won instant notoriety, thanks to the negative attention heaped upon it by Roger Kimball and others. The session was called “The Muse of Masturbation.” One of its papers was titled “Clitoral Imagery and Masturbation in Emily Dickinson.” Another was “Desublimating the Male Sublime: Autoerotics, Anal Erotics, and Corporeal Violence in Melville and William Burroughs.” The star of the show, however, was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She had recently been hired by Duke in a concerted effort led by Stanley Fish to attract left-wing theorists to the English department. Her paper was called “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” It perfectly embodied the weirdness of what passed for intellectual life in our colleges and universities, and helped the public understand an emerging problem that remains with us now.

On Sunday, Sedgwick died of breast cancer at the age of 58. RIP.