SOURCE: Romano, Carlin. “The Troves of Academe.” Nation 270, no. 23 (12 June 2000): 53-6.

In the following essay, Romano finds connections between The Human Stain and Francine Prose's Blue Angel.

“A university,” poet John Ciardi acidly observed, “is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.” Add this contemporary counterpunch: A college is what a university becomes when its faculty and administrators lose interest in truth. Though liberal arts colleges don't acknowledge it in the snazzy brochures they express-mail to high school seniors, many elements of all but the best institutions—the modest franchises, the flimsy finances, the self-preservationist instincts of timeserving faculty—subvert the visionary claims historically made on behalf of higher education.

That “genus gap” between aspirational ideal and quotidian reality may explain what draws protean novelists like Philip Roth and Francine Prose to campus, following in the tracks of such earlier anthropologists as Mary McCarthy...