Deresiewicz on leaving academia

William Deresiewicz explains why he left academia. He begins:

If I care so much about college — about students, about teaching, about the humanities, about the transformative potential of the undergraduate experience — then why did I leave? Why, in 2008, after 10 years on the faculty at Yale, did I say goodbye not only to that institution but to the profession as a whole? A lot of people have asked me that question; a lot more have assumed they know the answer. Did I quit in disgust at the corruption of the academic enterprise? Could I no longer bear to participate in the perpetuation of the class system? If I didn’t get tenure at Yale, did I regard it as beneath my dignity to work at a less prestigious institution? No, no, and no.

Here’s why I left: I didn’t have a choice. I not only failed to get tenure at Yale — which was completely expected — I failed to land another job anywhere else. Let me explain how it works.

A cautionary tale about the academic humanities, from graduate study to the tenure track. Pairs well with William Pannapacker’s “So You Want to Go to Grad School?,” “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go,” and “Just Don’t Go, Part 2.”

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If I were to choose just one OCA post that captures my sense of what’s wrong with English studies, it’d be this one: Hoagies, pizzas, and English studies.

[Deresiewicz’s essay is free for a limited time from Quillette. I suspect that this will be the first and last time I link to anything from Quillette. Pannapacker’s essays are behind the Chronicle of Higher Education firewall, but available (I think) with a free, limited-number-of-articles subscription.]

Doing without teachers

William Deresiewicz:

If you want a good education, you need to have good teachers. It seems ridiculous to have to say as much, but such is the state that matters have reached, both in academia and in the public conversation that surrounds it, that apparently we do. Between the long-term trend toward the use of adjuncts and other part-time faculty and the recent rush to online instruction, we seem to be deciding that we can do without teachers in college altogether, at least in any meaningful sense. But the kind of learning the college is for is simply not possible without them.

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014).

Related reading
Other Deresiewicz posts

[Deresiewicz is not arguing that an adjunct cannot be a good teacher. He’s arguing that an institutional reliance on adjuncts is at odds with a genuine commitment to teaching.]

Elitists and liberal arts

William Deresiewicz:

It is not the proponents of a liberal arts education who are the elitists; it is those who would reserve it for a lucky few. If you think the humanities have any value, whether as a doorway to enlightenment or just as cultural capital, then they are valuable for everyone and should belong to everyone.

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014).

I’m reminded of something I wrote in a 2015 post: “The idea that the humanities are for ‘rich kids’ is one that any humanist must reject.”

Related reading
Other Deresiewicz posts

[As I write this post, the public university where I taught for thirty years is considering an ad hoc committee’s recommendation that the philosophy major be eliminated. Philosophy? Don’t even think about it.]

William Deresiewicz on heroes

William Deresiewicz on the word heroes and what he calls “the cult of the uniform”:

Perhaps no word in public life of late has been more thoroughly debased by overuse. Soldiers are “heroes”; firefighters are “heroes”; police officers are “heroes” — all of them, not the special few who undoubtedly deserve the term. . . .

The irony is that our soldiers are the last people who are likely to call themselves heroes and are apparently very uncomfortable with this kind of talk.

An Empty Regard (New York Times)

Deresiewicz v. D’Agata

“It kills me to think that there are going to be people walking around who believe that Socrates was an essayist because a self-important ignoramus named D’Agata told them so”: William Deresiewicz writes in the Atlantic about John D’Agata’s conception of the essay and his blithe disregard for fact.

I gave up on D’Agata on the second page of The Lifespan of a Fact (2012, co-authored with Jim Fingal). Curious about the anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009), I just looked at Amazon to see what D’Agata says about Thomas Browne. A sourceless sentence that D’Agata presents as George Orwell’s made me curious:

It is Browne’s introspection which shifted us from the outside world of rhetoric, to the inner and private world of mystery and wonder.

It turns out that the sentence is impossible to find online. As far as I can tell, it cannot be found in Orwell’s work. And it turns out that a reviewer wondered about this very sentence in 2010. I did find a version of the sentence in David Shields‘s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010):

It is Sir Thomas Browne’s introspection that shifted us from the outside world of rhetoric to the inner and private world of mystery and wonder.

In Shields’s book the sentence is attributed only to “Orwell,” without further detail. Shields quotes from or cites D’Agata frequently. I think it’s reasonable to wonder whether the sentence about Browne is really from Orwell. Surely D’Agata must know.

But that’s the end of my look at John D’Agata’s work. Arthur Schopenhauer: “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”

[Does the sentence even sound like Orwell?]

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December 15: I e-mailed D’Agata asking about a source for the sentence and received an automated “away” message making it clear that he will not be replying.

A related post
Make it known (Four sources for three D’Agata epigraphs: Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, and the poet who first put those three together, Douglas Crase)

Make it known

John D’Agata’s The Making of the American Essay (2016) has a witty sequence of epigraphs from Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, and John Ashbery, one epigraph to a page: “Make it plain.” “Make it new.” “Make it sweet again.”

D’Agata does not identify sources. If there is a source for Whitman, I’m unable to find it. Two children’s biographies of Whitman have him writing these words:

“Make it plain,” he wrote. “Lumber the writing with nothing — let it go as lightly as a bird flies,” &c.

Catherine Reef, Walt Whitman (1995).

“Make it plain,“ he advised himself. “Lumber the writing with nothing — let it go as lightly as a bird flies,” &c.

Milton Meltzer, Walt Whitman: A Biography (2002).

But the relevant passage from Whitman’s prose is missing “Make it plain”:

Make no quotations, and no references to any other writers.—

Lumber the writing with nothing, — let it go as lightly as a bird flies in the air — or a fish swims in the sea.

Selected Poems, 1855–1892, ed. Gary Schmidgall (1999).

There are various accounts of Whitman using the words “make it plain” in conversation. He is reported to have said, in speaking of slavery, “I never lost any opportunity to make it plain where I stood.” But I can find nothing that suggests a Whitmanic imperative related to writing.

Pound’s imperative “Make It New” (properly capitalized) long ago became a motto of literary modernism. Here is a fine account of the imperative’s history.

Ashbery’s words, followed by an exclamation point, end the poem “But What Is the Reader to Make of This?” (A Wave, 1984):



And what is the reader to make of “it”? Is “it” “the general life”? Or the mood? These lines give us Ashbery in Romantic mode, with the hope of recovering something lost (as in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”) and with echoes of Shelley (“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass”) and Stevens (“Alas, that they should wear our colors there, / The silken weavings of our afternoons”). But Ashbery’s words are hardly a precept for writing.

What most surprised me in looking into these epigraphs is that they have appeared together before, in Douglas Crase’s introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays: First and Second Series (1990):



No one owns these words, of course. But it’s clear that Crase got there first. I still don’t know what to make of “Make it plain.”

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January 19, 2017: A source for “make it plain,” from a Whitman notebook page:

Rule in all addresses — and poems and other writings, etc. — Do not undertake to say any thing however plain to you, unless you are positive are making it perfectly plain to those who hear or read. — Make it plain.

Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier, vol. 1, Family Notes and Autobiography, Brooklyn and New York (New York: New York University Press, 1984).

“[Y]ou are positive are making it”: not a typo. Grier dates the materials on this notebook page to “probably before and shortly after 1855.” “Make it plain” seems to have first seen print in Paul Zweig’s Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Thanks to the reader who pointed me to these sources.

A related post
Deresiewicz v. D ’Agata

Leaving a Ph.D. program

Here’s an anonymous piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Why I’m Planning to Leave My Ph.D. Program.” The subtitle explains it all: “My family can’t live on $17,000 a year.” An excerpt:

Over four years in my English Ph.D. program, I’ve taught 132 students as the instructor of record, a total of 396 credit hours, and so, at my college’s stated tuition rates, helped it bring in something on the order of $575,000. While those funds aren’t entirely profit, the minimal overhead of my class means I’ve more than paid my way. In addition, I’ve served as a research assistant and worked in the writing center. In exchange, my institution paid me a stipend averaging $17,000 per year.

The writer quotes from Ulysses at the end of his essay, likening his contemplation of his young daughter’s future to Stephen Dedalus’s contemplation of his sister Dilly’s sad prospects. More bitterly, I think of repurposing Stephen’s famous observation about Ireland in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man : Academia is the old sow that eats her farrow.

For me the saddest thing about the Chronicle piece is that the writer never considers what might follow the completion of his degree. One cautionary tale along those lines: William Deresiewicz’s account of why he left academia.

A swipe at John D’Agata

John McPhee, in Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (2017):

Is it wrong to alter a fact in order to improve the rhythm of your prose? I know so, and so do you. If you do that, you are by definition not writing nonfiction.

That must be a swipe at John D’Agata, who in The Lifespan of a Fact (2012) explains that he changed a “thirty-one” to a “thirty-four” in a piece of reportage because “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence.”

If McPhee takes other swipes at D’Agata, I’m not able to recognize them, because I gave up on The Lifespan of a Fact after two pages.

There are many things to like in the essays of Draft No. 4, but the essay that gives the book its title has by far the best stuff. And speaking of titles and factual accuracy: I want to be accurate about the title of McPhee’s book, but I’m not sure how to be. On the title page: Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. But the Library of Congress catalogues the book as Draft No. 4: Essays about the Writing Process.

Related posts
Deresiewicz v. D’Agata (With a quotation (?) from Orwell)
Make it known (D’Agata borrowing without attribution)

"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education"

William Deresiewicz, who taught at Yale for ten years, has been thinking about elite education:

An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn't understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students' experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State.

Read it all:

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (The American Scholar)

(Thanks, Matt, at Submitted for Your Perusal, for pointing me to this essay.)

What’s art for?

From William Deresiewicz, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art” (Salmagundi ):

Art is for increasing life. That, I believe, after all the other purposes receive their due, is really what it’s for — why we revere it, why we give our hearts to it.