In a recent Quillette essay, William Deresiewicz explains why he has left academia. After ten years on the faculty at Yale, he had failed to get tenure there or land another job elsewhere, despite having a “decent publication record,” including a book accepted for publication. The problem was that he “wanted to read books” because he loved them and lived his “deepest life in books; because art, particularly literary art, meant everything to me.”
He didn’t realize that genuine love of literature was antithetical to an academic career in English. The purpose of the English profession is not to study or appreciate literature, but “to interrogate texts” for their ideological commitments. The question driving the research is: what political beliefs are covertly driving this text? During Deresiewicz’s first week of graduate school, a professor said to him: “The most important thing for a first-year graduate student to do is to figure out where they stand ideologically.”
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