The editors of Lingua Franca offer a summary of academic goings-on in Slate, January 20, 1997:

Tired of being attacked by other leftists for, among other things, obscurantism, pointlessness, and a lack of political commitment, academia's postmodern leftists have decided to fight back. On Jan. 31, heavy-hitting literary theorists, including Judith Butler of the University of California at Berkeley and Jonathan Arac and Paul Bové of the University of Pittsburgh, will convene to explore the previously unrecognized right-wing affinities of such thinkers as Nation political columnist Katha Pollitt, feminist Time columnist Barbara Ehrenreich, and New York University physicist Alan Sokal. (Sokal is the author of a parody of science-studies scholarship that was unwittingly published as serious scholarship by the postmodernist journal Social Text.) "A specter is haunting U.S. intellectual life: the specter of Left Conservatism," explains the flyer advertising the workshop, which is to be held at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "We can see, in the work of some of the writers listed above, ... claims for a certain kind of empiricism, for common sense, for linguistic transparency." "Left Conservatives" are also guilty of "an attempt at consensus-building ... that is founded on notions of the real." None of the writers to be discussed was invited to the workshop.

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