I like to think I have a certain advantage as a teacher of literature because when I was growing up I disliked and feared books.
—Gerald Graff

The profession of literary studies in the university has become so risible a subject in newspaper and magazine articles that tremors are beginning to be felt in the academy. What, professors want to know, is going wrong? It does no good to tell them that they have corrupted the rich curriculum of literature in English into a mind-numbing, monotonous replication of the same old left-wing ideological harangue—the race-class-gender victimization thing. And it is pointless to tell them that their preoccupation with the jargon of incomprehensible theory is driving students away from literature classes. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987), Dinesh D’Souza in Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991), and Roger Kimball in Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990) took the problem seriously, suggested various remedies, and—in the critical quarterlies and at literary conventions—were savaged for their pains.

However, these books had the effect of clarifying a wide range of disturbing phenomena about higher education. And out of their work has emerged a general consensus, which goes something like this: “Nothing can or will change in the academy in the near future. Those within the academy who might have acted to reintroduce reason