That academics encounter beauty in their private lives as a mystifying or corrupted alien force was a cliché by the time Stanley Fish cast his eye on the faculty parking lot. Yet the inconsistent treatment beauty has received in scholarly research demands explanation. In the humanities, beauty is ignored or seen as a vague embarrassment, and in the social sciences the topic is treated only superficially. If beauty remains a serious subject of study anywhere, it is in the sciences, certain corners of which have enlisted beauty as an organizing ideal.