A scholar natters on

March then made some mention of Aristotle ("who, as you know, I'm sure, implies the necessity of cause in his discussion of the laws of probability and necessity") and Jill nodded—oh, yes, of course—but at last she moved on: first, to a graduate seminar she was thinking of proposing for next year in "Kantian ethics and the eighteenth-century British novel," and then to an undergraduate class in critical theory she was teaching this term, and how much difficulty some of her students were having ("You know the way they'll look at you sometimes, alarmed and uncomprehending and bored all at the same time? As if you were criminally insane, speaking in a foreign language, and failing to produce the rabbit they were hoping was hidden in your hat, all at once?")—and at this Jill almost laughed, despite herself, but when March went on, "It's feminist theory in particular that seems to be their bête noire," it was only a yawn she had to restrain), and finally March took up the subject of the committee assignment she and Jill were to share this spring, the newly formed Committee for Teaching Excellence. 

Michelle Herman, Dog: A Short Novel (San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2005), pp. 68-69.