I have been very glad to see eloquent and well-informed responses to Ron Srigley’s screed “Pass, Fail” in The Walrus (which largely reiterates his screed in the Los Angeles Review of Books). I was disappointed in both venues, frankly: it seems to me to show poor editorial judgment to publish rants of this kind without checking their intemperate anecdata and wild generalizations against at least a broader sampling of facts and opinions about the very complex business that is higher education. I would have expected both journals to think better of themselves and their readers. Both Aimée Morrison and Melonie Fullick have offered valuable critiques — but because these writers don’t go to extremes, either rhetorically or ideologically, their thoughtful pieces almost certainly won’t get as much attention, and because Srigley is preaching to a nasty choir of higher ed haters, rather than actually trying to engage people interested in meaningful dialogue, critique, or reform, the people who are gleefully linking to his article are unlikely to step back and reconsider the nature or value of his arguments.
I thought about writing a detailed response as well — not because I have done the kind of research that makes Melonie so well-qualified to speak up, but because I found Srigley’s sweeping denunciations of “contentless” classrooms, the replacement of what he considers important topics by “narcissistic and transparently self-promoting twaddle,” and professors who “pandered to [students’] basest inclinations while leaving their real intellectual and moral needs unmet” profoundly insulting — to me and my colleagues and to the generations of students we have taught. Further, the claim that “most degrees involve no real content” is not just a lie but, in our current economic and political climate, a damaging lie. Yes, there are grains of truth in his criticisms of the way universities are run and in his descriptions of the sometimes incompatible priorities of students, staff, and faculty. But most of us who are dealing with these problems every day on the job (and evenings and weekends too, much of the time) do not need “friends” like Srigley, who is actually an enemy of the enterprise we are all, collectively, engaged in, in good faith if sometimes with flagging spirits.
By the time I finished his LARB piece I was seething, and I was seething again, and also profoundly discouraged, when I saw it resurrected in The Walrus. Is this really the story about higher education that people want to read? It must be, or relatively sober publications that could certainly afford to turn it down wouldn’t run it: they must have figured that it would generate traffic, and I’m sure they were right. (You’ll notice I have not linked directly to either iteration here, because I hate that the internet incessantly rewards the worst over the best.) I fervently believe that my work, and the work of thousands of others like me, is not a “retail scam”: maybe, I thought, I should try to explain why not.
But then I realized that I have said so, that I have made my argument — over and over, for almost 10 years. Here at Novel Readings I have posted regularly about my teaching, for instance, since 2007, when I began my series on “This Week In My Classes” because of other equally vitriolic and unbalanced public criticisms of my life’s work. I have shared details about what my classes are studying, I have raised questions about pedagogy, I have fretted about students who don’t seem engaged and celebrated the much more numerous ones who care a lot, I have explored new subjects and developed new material, I have sought advice and sometimes comfort. In other words, I have tried to do the opposite of Srigley’s grand dismissive gestures: I’ve invited anyone who’s interested to come inside the academy and see for themselves what I’m up to.
I can’t rule out the possibility that someone would read through my archive of teaching posts and still reach Srigley’s dire conclusions about the state of higher education. I know, too, that I’m just one professor, so my first-person experience is also, in its own way, anecdotal rather than conclusive. But I honestly think my efforts to meet my students every time with the best that I can come up with are more representative than Srigley’s dystopian exaggerations. I’m surrounded every day with colleagues who similarly strive, with all their intelligence, creativity, and fortitude, to bring their students with them to intellectual places they think are both interesting and vitally important. Every day, we are all surrounded with students who meet us at least half way, and some who take us further than we would have gone on our own. Sure, some don’t, or won’t, for both good and bad reasons, some of them individual and some of them structural. But an imperfect process is a sign of a work in progress, which is always what education is.
Novel Readings is still a pretty quiet corner of the internet; whatever hope I had, back in 2007, that my teaching posts would make even a slight difference to the larger public narrative about higher education has long subsided. But the archive is there for those who want a different perspective: rather than grand statements, they provide a steady record of particulars. I’m not going to attempt any further response to Srigley, because in these posts I have, implicitly, responded already, over and over and over: instead, I’m just going to keep doing what I’ve been doing, both here and, especially, in the classroom, where it really matters.
It sounds more poetic 
It’s a busy time at work, with papers and midterms piling up a bit, so it’s still a bit quiet over here at Novel Readings.
The “literary” book I’ve been reading “for fun” is Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Long View, which I bought after my book club read and enjoyed 
Also, when I’m busy and distracted, the lure of television is very strong! And, conveniently, Netflix recently dropped two tempting series — the fourth season of 
Great news: New Directions is putting out a new edition of 
One of the most fascinating explorations of this in the novel is the story of the pianist Kenzo Yamamoto, who becomes obsessed, not with how to play a particular note or phrase or piece, but with how else you could play it, or how else it could sound:
Not for them — for me!
Another reason teaching is a tonic for me, though, is precisely that I am not faking my interest in the course materials, and time spent really focusing on them brings me back in touch with the things that brought me into this profession in the first place. I loved being an English student myself (well, I loved being an undergraduate student – I mostly hated being a graduate student), and it’s in the classroom that the reasons for that are most present to me: the books themselves, of course, but also the open-minded engagement with them — teasing out what is most interesting, looking at the details and trying to put them into patterns that illuminate the whole, thinking and talking about the ideas that animate them, and all this, best of all, in conversation with other keen readers who bring their own questions and ideas to the process. This week’s readings are very purposeful, too, which gives our work on them extra urgency: in Mystery & Detective Fiction, we’ve just wrapped up 
Valdez himself is an interesting character: though he feels no ambivalence about his specific conflict with Tanner, he is less certain about his own role in life more generally, and the relationship he develops with Tanner’s fiancée Gay (whom he kidnaps as leverage) adds more nuances. It’s to be expected, though, that the protagonist will have some depth, so what I appreciated more is the way key secondary characters also have their own motives and their distinct roles to play in the denouement, including Gay herself but also Tanner’s “segundo.” One of the best bits in the novel is wholly inessential to its plot but adds a great deal to the atmosphere and to our sense of the kind of world its characters live in. Valdez shoots one of Tanner’s men and sends him back with a message. He delivers it and then lies dying, and we spend nearly two pages with him as he reflects on Valdez, and on his own life and immanent death:
I don’t want to leave the impression that frustration with the rigidity of academic practices is all I took away from my Louisville conference experience. There was definitely value for me in the work I put into my own paper, as well as in hearing and discussing the papers my co-panelists presented. So I thought I’d follow up 
Mendelsohn’s article was one of the sources I cited in my paper, in which I explored some questions about what we mean by “critical authority.” As he notes, once you move outside the academy degrees are neither a necessary nor a sufficient measure of the relevant expertise. But it’s not easy to pin down what does count, how authority is established, especially in a field of inquiry where there are no sure or absolute standards of judgment. Literary critics know that their authority is unstable because the history of criticism teaches us how judgments change over time, while simple experience shows us how much they differ among individuals. We can call variant assessments “gaffes” or “errors in individual taste,” as Mendelsohn does in his recent 
If critical authority is not something you simply have but something you have to earn and maintain by your own participation in a dialogue — if it is best understood not so much as a top-down assertion of superiority (“the critic’s job,” Mendelsohn proposes in his recent review, “is to be more educated, articulate, stylish, and tasteful … than her readers have the time or inclination to be”) but as a process of establishing yourself as someone whose input into an ongoing conversation is sought and valued — that helps explain why “expertise” is such a tricky thing to define for a critic. Mendelsohn’s original formal training is as a classicist — despite his wide-ranging erudition and critical prestige, he would almost certainly not qualify for an academic position in any other field — but obviously he has written with considerable insight on a wide range of subjects, from Stendhal to Mad Men. That so many of us read Mendelsohn’s criticism with interest and attention no matter what he writes about is a sign that we have come to trust him, not as the last word on these subjects, but as someone who will have something interesting (“meaningful,” to use one of his key terms) to say about them. If we disagree with him, we are not challenging his authority but continuing the conversation — and in fact one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is how little disagreement really matters to this kind of critical authority. If what we go to criticism for is a good conversation, then engaged disagreement can be seen as a sign of authority — a sign that you care enough about the critic’s perspective to tussle with it, if you like. I can think of a number of critics in venues from personal blogs to the New Yorker whose views I would not defer to, but which I want to know because they provoke me to keep thinking about my own readings — which (however definitive the rhetoric I too adopt in my more formal reviewing) I always understand to be provisional, statements of how something looked to me in that moment, knowing what I knew then, caring about what I cared about then.
I’m not saying we can’t or shouldn’t defend our critical assessments, but awash as we are and always have been in such a variety of them, it would be naively arrogant at best and solipsistic at worst to imagine ourselves as “getting it right,” no matter who we are or where we publish. Blogging very often reflects that open-endedness in its tone, and its form is based on just the process Booth describes as “coduction”:
I’m back from Louisville, where 
Even taking these good things into account, though, I left Louisville feeling more than ever that, as a profession, we need to rethink how we do things. One of the main incentives for me to participate in this panel was that I have recently been given emphatic notice that I haven’t been going to the number of conferences expected of someone in my position. A significant number of academics apparently consider frequent conference-going a key measure of scholarly productivity and knowledge ‘dissemination.’ Frankly, I thought this was bollocks when it first came up as a criticism of my record, and my experience in Louisville only confirmed me in that view. Here’s why: Under pressure to show I am doing the “right” things professionally, I traveled a long distance at great expense (a significant amount borne by me personally, as the funding available did not cover nearly the full cost) to present a 20 minute paper to an audience of 8 people. All around me, hundreds of other academics were there doing the same, sometimes to even smaller audiences (the smallest I saw was 3 people plus the panelists, the largest, excluding keynotes, was about 16 — for a panel on Joyce — and one of the keynotes itself had an audience of maybe 15). Though there’s no doubt that some of the attendees were genuinely engaged with the papers they heard, most of them will take little concrete away besides a vague sense of the argument. One questioner at a panel I attended prefaced his remarks (as usual, questions were usually of the discursive rather than inquisitive variety) by saying that he’d heard a paper at another conference by someone whose name he couldn’t remember making an argument he dimly recalled had been somewhat similar to the one he’d just heard: though I’m sure there are some exceptions, that impressionistic result seems to me pretty typical, at least of a conference as diffuse as this one.
The small audiences and inchoate overall experience is in part a function of the kind of conference this was: papers were collected under a very large umbrella, and (I suspect) accepted somewhat indiscriminately, perhaps with the admirable goal of being inclusive. But when there are 10 or more concurrent sessions in every time slot, there’s little chance of robust numbers at any given panel, and even less chance of a sizable cohort of conference-goers having much of a common experience and thus much deep, shared conversation. My experience of 
Once upon a time going to conferences really was our best option for letting a wider audience know what we are working on, for getting feedback on work in progress, and for networking with colleagues in our field. But while I think it is possible for a conference experience to be genuinely valuable, particularly if the conference has a narrower focus and a different format (a friend of mine speaks very highly, for instance, of the 
I think I personally would have found the Louisville conference more intellectually stimulating if I were a modern literature scholar myself: I had a harder time even than usual latching on to the papers’ arguments because they were typically quite specialized contributions to scholarly inquiries I know little about. I went mostly to Woolf panels because at least there I knew the primary sources a bit! (I was interested to note that there were no papers, much less panels, on Winifred Holtby or Vera Brittain at all; there was one paper on Sayers, but I saw no sign of Rebecca West or Rosamond Lehmann or Mollie Panter-Downes or Elizabeth Taylor or Olivia Manning or any of those I think of as the ‘Virago’ set. Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Joyce, a bit of Lawrence and Forster — this was a pretty canonical outing. You 20thC people can tell me if that’s typical or just Louisville.)
Novel Readings 