The French disease

"I had hoped," Karswell continued, his voice the very model of pained disappointment, "that of all my junior colleagues, you might have remained professionally chaste. Your dissertation, while deficient in certain crucial respects, was admirably reasonable for someone your age." He gazed sorrowfully through the blinds, tapping her rolled-up paper against his palm. His face was in shadow, but strips of light fell across his waistcoat and his bow tie.

"But I see that you are, or have become," he went on, "intellectually promiscuous, giving yourself wantonly, like the rest of your thrill-seeking generation, to the vulgar pleasures of postmodernism."
[...]
"And what is the result of your promiscuity, my dear Virginia?" Kaswell seemed to be waiting for an answer, but she would deny him that at least. After an awful moment, he lifted her paper by a corner between his thumb and forefinger, letting it uncurl like a shriveled flower.

"The result," he said sharply, "is that you have become infected with the French disease." [192-193]

Hynes, James. Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror. Picador, 1997. ISBN: 0312156286.