Writing in LF, onetime "Dirty Harry of literary theory" Frank Lentricchia confesses that he now rejects literary theory and exults in his "secret" self - which he calls "me-the-reader." "I believe that what is now called literary criticism is a form of Xeroxing," he gibes. "Tell me your theory and I'll tell you in advance what you'll say about any work of literature, especially those you haven't read." Favoring undergraduates over graduate students, Lentricchia slips "happily underground in order to talk to people who, like me, need to read great literature just as much as they need to eat."

More than two hundred humanities and social sciences graduate students strike at Yale. They vow to withhold their undergraduates' grades until Yale recognizes their union; they also call for a modest pay increase and a decrease in the number of students in sections. Undergrads are indignant. Some senior faculty revise their letters of recommendation. Administrators lock classroom doors. Five weeks later, the union gives up the strike. LF's Emily Eakin discovers an institutional culture that treats graduate students with officious condescension. Unfortunately, Eakin concludes, "You can strike for respect, but it's nearly impossible to legislate it."

The trendy journal Social Text publishes NYU physics professor Alan Sokal's deliberately awful article on quantum physics and postmodernism. Intended to mock the academic left's embrace of relativism and opaque jargon, Sokal's article links set theory to feminism and maintains that "a liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of the canon of mathematics." Sokal reveals his stunt in the pages of LF - and winds up on the front page of the New York Times. Social Text editors Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins admit that they initially found Sokal's article "a little hokey" but say they published it as an example of how scientists might broaden their horizons. In fall 2000, LF and the University of Nebraska Press publish a dossier of news articles and essays titled The Sokal Hoax.