Naomi Schaefer Riley on the novelist David Lodge, who frequently pokes fun at professors and universities, in WSJ:

For those Americans who have not read Mr. Lodge’s works, it should be said that they are not shocking so much as mocking. Take Morgana Fulvia, a wealthy literature professor in “Small World,” who, when asked how she manages to “reconcile living like a millionaire with being a Marxist,” replies, “Those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse.” Or Morris Zapp, a professor at Euphoria State University (based loosely on Berkeley), who makes appearances in several of Mr. Lodge’s novels, always being paid handsomely for offering the most absurd-sounding literary theories.

Lodge’s new novel is Deaf Sentence, about a linguistics professor who begins to lose his hearing.