She's right, but it really upsets many academics for someone to say that. Good.
Having students pay for everything (e.g in US) makes their education into a product and they are the consumer. Students can then demand to have certain conditions met. The consumer knows best, is king.
Whereas in the US, college attendance generally* is determined by ability to pay, and a student who can pay will almost certainly be able to find some college that will let them attend, whether they take their studies seriously ("value their education") or not.
*Of course achievement still matters if you want to get into the most selective institutions ... but I gather you can do that with (a lot) of money, too.
-Foucault is quite interesting and accessible (his writing contains much more facts and observations than jargon)
-Lacan is a complete fraud
-Derrida might have interesting things to say but it's extremely hard to tell
Is it "good" just because it upsets academics? Is she "right" just because you agree with her? To me, her comment sounds like a very uncharitable critique of those writers.
I'm not a fan of Derrida or Lacan, but I've noticed they get a lot of criticism from people who've never read them. They were not necessarily original thinkers with revolutionary ideas, but they definitely offered some new insights.
No offense but it appears you've never read Foucault. He never said power is unfair. It's like saying gravity is unfair because someone was hurt after a fall.
Orig. https://next.liberation.fr/livres/1997/10/18/sokal-et-bricmo....
Cf. http://www.critical-theory.com/read-derridas-response-sokal-...
There is some truth about their writing being too obtuse, but this is (was ?) unfortunately a requirement in some circles in Paris. Also, culturally, being pedant in French has been for a long time a sign of sophistication culturally speaking (http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/jean_searle_on_foucault_a...). I find French more "overfit" for pedantism than English, but that could just be because French is my native language / culture.
[edit] the link above in openculture.com actually links to a video when Chomsky and Foucault discuss about social organizations. Foucault is as clear, if not clearer than Chomsky. I find Chomsky's language extremely dry, to a point where it is difficult for me to stay engaged.
In the article, that is one of the criticisms Paglia raised. That it doesn't make sense to apply the techniques of these French thinkers to non-French culture and art, when their work is so specific to French academic traditions.
If you want an easy way to engage with the ideas these French thinkers put forward I highly suggest listening to Stephen West's "Philosophize This" podcast. He not only covers "French Philosophers" but much of Western philosophy and does so in a pretty accessible and relatively unbiased manner.
The "Introducing" series of books can also be a good resource for understanding complex thinkers: https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Foucault-Graphic-Chris-Ho...
Although honestly, it's just as important to understand other thinkers in the Western philosophy tradition to grasp where thinkers are coming from.
Having said all that, yes, there are many people in American academia whose understanding of these thinkers is just as bad if not worse than Paglia's and these folks give academic study of French philosophy a bad name. Paglia has built a career of attacking people like these, not by holding them to higher standards but by merely sinking to their level and engaging in simple-minded, yet entertaining, polemics.
But it's always going to the be the case that poor thinkers abound. There's also a lot of very poor thinkers in CS, physics and other so-called "hard science" fields. It's just that they're a lot easier to ignore because they're so boring.
So her criticism might be right in substance (in the American context) but targeting the wrong thing.
Derrida is pretty much Gödel's incompleteness theorem for philosophers instead of just "reducing everything to language and then making language destroy itself"