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Dietrich Schwanitz. Der Campus. Frankfurt a.M. Eichborn. 1995. 382 pages. DM 38. ISBN 3-8218-0391-6.
Der campus is the story of Hanno Hackmann, academic entrepreneur extraordinaire, creator of his own sociological institute as well as of a new subfield ("neoconstructionism"), who tumbles from these Olympian heights via, yes, that all-too-human temptation to which professors are supposedly hyperprone: sex with one of his students.
The setting is the University of Hamburg, where Dietrich Schwanitz himself has taught for some years. The subject is academic politics, with feminism and, especially, the democratization of the university its chief evils. With education more accessible and students commensurately more apathetic, one must hire hungry drama students to put on a demonstration if one wants to rise in this new academic environment.
That is Schwanitz's thrust, and it suggests a satiric edge; but he somehow keeps...