Why I Left Academia (Since You’re Wondering)

I hadn t followed the usual route to graduate school. I had majored in science, not English (although, by the middle of college, I dearly wished that I had majored in English). That meant that when I got to graduate school, I was several years behind my classmates a handicap, but not a fatal one. More importantly, it meant that I entered the doctoral program without having been socialized into the profession to even the slightest degree. I entered like an undergraduate, with an undergraduate s idealism and naïveté. For me, graduate school, which I didn t begin until four years after finishing college, was a way of finally doing that English major that I d always wished I d done. I went, in other words, because I wanted to read books: because I loved books; because I lived my deepest life in books; because art, particularly literary art, meant everything to me; because I wanted to put myself under the guidance of teachers who would inspire me and mentor me; because I hoped someday to be such a teacher myself.

Anyone in the academic humanities anyone who s gotten within smelling distance of the academic humanities these last 40 years will see the problem. Loving books is not why people are supposed to become English professors, and it hasn t been for a long time. Loving books is scoffed at (or would be, if anybody ever copped to it). The whole concept of literature still more, of art has been discredited. Novels, poems, stories, plays: these are texts, no different in kind from other texts. The purpose of studying them is not to appreciate or understand them; it is to interrogate them for their ideological investments (in patriarchy, in white supremacy, in Western imperialism and ethnocentrism), and then to unmask and debunk them, to drain them of their poisonous persuasive power. The passions that are meant to draw people to the profession of literary study, these last many years, are not aesthetic; they are political.

via quillette.com

Good essay. I hear his book Excellent Sheep is also good.