Hot off the press at The New York Times is a field report on one of the bloodiest battlegrounds in academe, Columbia University's Department of English. Columbia's English Department has been so torn by the aptly named culture wars, so polarized by internal political factions, that it has been unable to do its own hiring for a number of years--today, only 37 of its 46 professorial slots are filled. The rest languish in the no man's land of ideological impasse, caught between traditionalists who want to hire good old-fashioned literary scholars and trendy radicals who want to see the positions go to people for whom literature is more a platform than a value, for whom it is less a thing of inherent worth than a means of approaching the pet issues of contemporary identity politics (race, class, gender, sexuality, oppression, imperialism, etc.). So paralyzed has the place become that it has finally entrusted hiring to five respected professors from other top-ranked English departments (one of whom is Penn English's own chairman, David Wallace). I sure hope for Columbia's sake that this is going to solve their problems--but I have to say it looks a little bit like using arranged marriage to treat someone who can't form lasting relationships. For more on departmental malfunction in academe, see Lingua Franca's classic "As Bad As It Gets: Three Dark Tales from the Annals of Academic Receivership."