It was after that, alas, that women's studies programs, with their anti-male, anti-science, anti-art, anti-beauty, anti-porn ideology, began to spread on campuses. Today's young women have been given a false picture of feminist history of the past 35 years. The dissident feminists with whom I am allied were never "anti-feminist" (my record as a flamingly militant feminist at my first teaching job in the 1970s is well documented). We were rebels against a rigid feminist orthodoxy that over the past decade has been gradually losing power but that is still miserably entrenched in the curriculum of too many colleges and universities. Educational reform is my top priority.

Two weeks ago at Philadelphia's annual The Book and the Cook Festival, my partner Alison and I were very pleased to meet again two women whom we regard as superb examples of an enlightened feminism: Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, chef-owners of the Border Grill restaurants in Santa Monica, Calif., and Las Vegas and of Ciudad in Los Angeles. The authors of three cookbooks, they are best known as the "Too Hot Tamales" from their popular TV Food Network show (which I celebrated in a 1996 column for the Advocate).

Milliken and Feniger are craftsmen, artisans, entrepreneurs and practical proponents of a progressive multiculturalism. (Their cuisine is based on their own research in rural Mexico.) Milliken is married to the Los Angeles architect Josh Schweitzer and is the mother of two small sons. When we saw her in Philadelphia, Feniger was eagerly anticipating a three-week trekking adventure with her partner in the wilds of Mongolia.

With their exuberant warmth and down-to-earth values (it's no coincidence they were both born and raised in the Midwest), Milliken and Feniger show what feminism could and should be as a social movement. Perhaps working with the sensory dimension of food, responding to customers' primal desire for pleasure, creating a daily performance space, and managing intricate supply and scheduling demands give those in the restaurant business a greater sense of reality than that shown, let's say, by academic theorists. Contact with the trades would benefit not only young people trapped in their boring schools (as I argued in my last column, which produced a flood of amazing reader letters), but it would liberate teachers too. All theory must be tested in the concrete realm.

Speaking of teachers, I was saddened to hear of the recent death at age 90 of the critic Maynard Mack, one of the last of an illustrious generation of literary scholars whose like, given the present state of campus philistinism, we may never see again. Mack's reputation was built on his studies of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. He was a model of selfless scholarship whose lineage extended backward to British and German classical studies and beyond that to the monks of the Middle Ages.

Though no one could be farther across the cultural divide than that courtly WASP gentleman, Mack was unusually kind to me in graduate school at Yale University. I will never forget his telling our small 1969 seminar on the Augustan Age about the moment when he had finished laying out on his living-room floor the thousands of note cards for just one volume of his canonical editions of Pope: So overwhelmed was he by the mammoth task before him that he broke down crying.

It was devoted scholars like Mack -- or the distinguished specialist in Old English, John Collins Pope, who exuded the sacred serenity of a golden-skinned pharaoh -- who gave us a sense of history and calling. All that is gone, of course, with today's showy crowd of smirky academic careerists, ripping off inflated salaries for mouthing postmodernist platitudes. I owe my first scholarly publication to Mack, who despite his record of resisting Freudian interpretations of literature loved my term paper, "Lord Hervey and Pope," and urged me to try to get it published. (It eventually appeared in the spring 1973 issue of Eighteenth Century Studies.)

Well, I grimly suppose I must make some comment about the Academy Awards, whose broadcast last month had all the excitement of a turgid river of molasses. That the peevishly pursed and clunky Russell Crowe and the goofy, grinning, stork-legged Julia Roberts now hold Oscars is one of the many tacky ironies of current popular culture. How far Hollywood has fallen from the era in which (as I recently remarked to my media class) Marlon Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire" could lose the Oscar to Humphrey Bogart in "The African Queen."

As a huge fan of pagan movie epics of the 1950s and early '60s, I found "Gladiator" boring, badly shot and suffused with sentimental p.c. rubbish. It would be difficult to say whether Crowe or Joaquin Phoenix (nominated for best supporting actor) gave the worst performance. Julia Roberts owes her Oscar for "Erin Brockovich" to director Steven Soderbergh's skillful editing, which gave the illusion of continuity to what was a shockingly obtuse reading on her part of what she condescendingly believed was a working-class character. (The real Brockovich is middle class in background and job experience.) For Juno's sake, Roberts didn't even know how to hold a baby in that film.

Let us contemplate, in contrast, the inspiring example of Nadia Sawalha, a star of the long-running British TV series "EastEnders". Of Arab lineage, Sawalha (sister of Julia of "Absolutely Fabulous") has everything Roberts lacks -- not only acting talent but intelligence, animation and authentic sensuality. Roberts merely mimes these things; her mannerisms are calculated and her sexuality manufactured. Roberts' buffoonish hogging of the stage after she won the award was the most ridiculous performance by a woman since Gwyneth Paltrow, another untalented luminary, sobbed and hiccuped her thanks to the world and her dear, dear family two years ago.

The best media moment in recent weeks was in my view American Movie Classics channel's superb two-hour "Backstory" documentary on the making of "Cleopatra," the studio-busting extravaganza starring Elizabeth Taylor and released in 1963 that remains one of my favorite films. The program was filled with revelations about the technical production of the film and illustrated by stunning archival footage and candid stills. This fascinating program demonstrated what scholarly examination of popular culture ought to be -- not twisted, pretentious European theory plopped onto works of imagination but traditional, historical techniques deftly deployed for maximum accessibility to the mass audience, for whom great Hollywood movies were always intended.

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