The Human Stain
by Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 361 pp., $ 26
 
Blue Angel
by Francine Prose
HarperCollins, 304 pp., $ 25
 
Disgrace
by J. M. Coetzee
Viking, 220 pp., $ 23.95
 
Virtual Morality
by Christopher Hill
Pushcart, 325 pp., $ 24.50

It was in his 1919 poem “The Scholars” that William Butler Yeats savaged universities and the dry sticks who populate them: All shuffle there; all cough in ink. . . . / All think what other people think.