My mistake, agrarian. I thought I had seen you post he was one of your favorites. I do appreciate the spirit and content of your response.
No, that definitely would not have been me, but his name is bandied around so much that the mistake is an understandable one. I'm not in the camp of those who believe that everything that Schmemann said is anathema, just because he said it, but I'd never choose to quote him approvingly, just because we in American Orthodoxy are still dealing with the fruits of what is not so affectionately known as "Schmemannology."
Schmemann is often every non-Orthodox's favorite Orthodox writer, in no small part because he was very gifted at making people feel comfortable around him -- often giving the impression that he was more in agreement with them than he really was. I found it interesting to read of Fr. Neuhaus' mild but very real surprise to read Fr. Schmemann's personal journal entries about events in which they were involved together. Neuhaus obviously thought that they were in much greater agreement, based on their personal interactions, than they really were, based on S's private journal.
One of the most controversial and divisive things about Schmemann was that he so overtly longed to bring academic "respectability" to St. Vladimir's -- so much so that he seemed to place more importance on what non-Orthodox academics thought about Orthodoxy than on what effect his words had on Orthodoxy itself. This longing was shared by Fr. John Meyendorff, his erstwhile academic partner. One could contrast to these two highly feted figures two other contemporary minds who were largely consigned to obscurity in the OCA: Fr. Georges Florovsky and Bp. Nikolai Velimirovich (now regarded as a saint.) The academic credentials and intellect of these two was arguably much greater than that of the former, but because they remained within the Orthodox tradition of how to "do theology," there was nothing interesting about them to the outside world. Why? Because they didn't say anything "new." They didn't find "problematics" to "solve" in the Orthodox faith.
The problem with the entire enterprise, of course, was that clerical formation in Orthodoxy has traditionally been an intensely practical affair, and the very idea of an academically oriented seminary is a bit foreign to our ethos. Even in the heyday of "Westernization" in Russia, when theological academies first appeared in Orthodoxy, there was very little concern about what, say, German professors would think of the writings or syllabi.
Mixing the training of priests with speculative and archeological academic inquiry is, in general, something fraught with potential danger.