When the author left California for the University of Minnesota twenty-five years ago, he vowed never again to become involved in departmental or university politics. He'd had enough of that at California State, Los Angeles, and he was determined to devote his full attention, apart from teaching, to several scholarly projects that had simmered so long on the back burners that they were beginning to scorch the bottom of the pots. Just a few years after arriving in Minnesota, the malignant cells of French literary, philosophical, and political ideas that had been kept more or less quarantined at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and an Ivy League campus here and there, suddenly metastasized across the whole country. The standard curriculum of English and American literature was being trashed. One time, Peter Shaw invited the author to participate in a panel on Deconstruction at the forthcoming first convention of the National Association of Scholars in New York. That was in November of 1988. That convention was the beginning of a long, unexpected education for him.