AT FIRST GLANCE, ARIZONA State University hardly seems like fertile ground for a religious awakening.

A combination of 362 days of sunshine and an influx of wealthy California transplants, results in a campus flush with perfectly tanned, waxed, and (occasionally) plastic body parts displayed in all manner of highly fashionable undress. Not for nothing was my alma mater voted Playboy's number-one party school in 2002. And a couple of years ago, Maxim, that bible of upwardly mobile miscreants--or at least those miscreants who would like to deceive single women into believing they are upwardly mobile--voted Phoenix "Best City on Earth" based almost solely on the merits of the aforementioned body parts.

But for all its party-school reputation, Arizona State is still a university. And so, as much as the inhabitants of Tom Wolfe's fictitious Dupont, the majority of professors and students embrace a strange mix of liberal ethos and licentious abandon. That is, embrace the kind of environment that, at once, requires passing a feminist theory course to graduate, yet welcomes Baywatch to the campus mall to select, by measure of male applause, a coed for a bit part in an upcoming episode.

My degree program, English literature, was perhaps more exposed to this paradox than any other on campus. After all, engineering and physics students don't have to deconstruct the racist, misogynistic, homophobic subtext supposedly present in the work of their masters. A mathematical formula either works or it doesn't, and the prevailing beliefs held by its author at the time it was created hold no bearing over its worthiness. Not so with literature studies, in which appreciation for John Donne's subtle, metaphysical metaphors has been replaced by appreciation for Adrienne Rich's obvious, sexual ones.

On the downside, that left a lot of room for would-be intellectuals to take up class time debating homoerotic interpretations of As You Like It and Richard III. On the upside, it also left a lot of room for B.S. And since B.S. requires considerably less study time than more concrete disciplines, all but the most serious English undergrads spent the extra hours waiting in line at whatever nightclub was least likely to scrutinize IDs. Unfortunately, I could hardly count myself among "the most serious English undergrads," so to this day my understanding of Paradise Lost remains seriously lacking, while my grasp of how to approach a bouncer so as not to seem suspect is nearly expert.

Why "Survey of English Literature: 800 to 1750" should have been any different I can only chalk up to providence. Certainly, it wasn't the professor, Dr. Helms. Though he presented himself as the stereotypical cloistered academic, complete with wizened brow, liberal rhetoric, and mop of unkempt white hair. On closer inspection he resembled nothing if not a dirty old man. After offering his students a rote regret that most of the literature of the Middle Ages is characterized by repressive religious overtones, he would titter so continuously at the Wife of Bath's brazen innuendo (making sure no potential phallic symbol, no matter how dubious, was lost on us) that we couldn't help but wish a little of that medieval repression might find its way into ENG 221.