Can Criticism Survive Inside the University?

“The End of the University and the Future of Criticism”: Part I

Below you will find the opening statements from the recent conference, “The End of the University and The Future of Criticism,” which took place on the University of Chicago campus on Thursday, April 3rd. The statements come from the four participants—all of them both professors and public-facing critics—in our first panel, “Can Criticism Survive Inside the University?” Michael Clune, who moderated the discussion, is a literary critic and writer of both fiction and nonfiction who teaches at Case Western University; his novel, Pan, is coming out with Penguin this summer. Jesse McCarthy is an essayist and critic, as well as a professor in the English and African American Studies department at Harvard and an editor of The Point; his most recent book, The Blue Period, came out with the University of Chicago Press last year. Sophie Pinkham is a writer and critic who focuses on Russia and the Soviet Union and teaches in the comparative literature department at Cornell. Her next book, The Oak and the Larch, will be out with Norton in early 2026. Merve Emre is an English professor, critic and contributing writer for the New Yorker. She serves as the director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, an initiative dedicated to teaching the art and practice of criticism.

The conference, organized and co-sponsored by The Point and the Parrhesia Program for Public Thought and Discourse, brought together scholars, critics, fiction writers, editors and institution builders to discuss the future of literary culture at a time when the institutions that have long mediated literary life, beginning with but not limited to the university, seem to be either disappearing or transforming in ways that are not well understood. In the coming days, we will be sharing additional exchanges of interest from this panel and from the others that took place that day.

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MICHAEL CLUNE — “AESTHETIC EDUCATION”

I’m going to frame my remarks around both the challenges and potentials I see with respect to the university’s place in fostering literary culture and criticism.

To my mind, there are a couple obstacles to criticism, or what I think of more broadly as aesthetic education, in literature departments today. One is what I think of as a general confusion about the nature of the discipline, its aims, methods and core texts. This has been a long process. Literary studies has fragmented into various subfields and different pieces. Many English departments now contain writing programs, composition, creative writing, journalism, cultural studies. And there’s a corresponding lack of consensus on what the core methods and texts within that department ought to be.

The second is the widespread sense in English departments of the incompatibility of literary judgment with scholarly methods. One symptom of this, I think, has been the strange prising apart of the practice of close reading from literary judgment. The relation of literary judgment as an intrinsic component of close reading has been either forgotten or occluded in recent years.

And finally, related to this, is the displacement of literary judgment, which for I think obvious reasons is fundamental to the practice of criticism, by political or moral judgments. John Guillory made an observation about this thirty years ago in Cultural Capital that I think is still relevant. He observed that English professors increasingly have a hard time saying that one literary work is better than another literary work but have no problem with moral judgments or political judgments of all kinds. I think that’s a further challenge to the English department, in particular, as a place that fosters literary culture and literary criticism.

Now, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the value and the potential of the university as a place to shelter literary work and literary criticism. And the first and the most important one for me is the university’s status as a relative place of shelter from the demands of the marketplace. It is a space that still to this day supports thousands and thousands of professors, students, graduate students and so forth. To my mind at least—and this is an open question for the conference, others may disagree—the university’s role is irreplaceable at present. I don’t think there’s any institution, any space, that can do the work that the university continues to do in terms of providing a potential, and in many ways actual, shelter from the marketplace for something that—though it often falls short—is at least oriented towards the ideal of a democratic aesthetic education.

So, given the preciousness of the university and the resources that are under assault in various ways, how can we renew the potential of the university to serve as a space that shelters criticism and literary judgment and aesthetic education?

I think one really interesting option is new institutional formations within the university that are outside the English department: program centers, possibly departments, that are focused on literary studies and criticism, perhaps in collaboration with creative writers, that can provide a new disciplinary home and institutional space for the cultivation of criticism and of literary culture. And I would just deduce some examples: the center that Merve Emre runs at Wesleyan; I myself am moving to a new center in the fall at Ohio State University—I’m done with the English department. So I just want to raise that as a possibility. Right now I think one of the major challenges that we face in the context of widespread public attacks on the humanities is the loss of faith in higher education and in English as a discipline in particular. New institutional structures, by focusing on the question of aesthetic education, which I believe does have public support, can create the possibility of mounting a politically and publicly viable defense of the study of literature—something that is completely absent right now from the traditional English department.

JESSE MCCARTHY — “SECULAR CRITICISM”

I’m going to try to touch on maybe three points: one about political economy, one about the culture war and one about the idea of secular criticism. I think one of the reasons we’re here—and one of the terms that floats over the conversation we’re having today and that has been part of a conversation that’s been ongoing for a long time now—is this notion of the crisis of the humanities and how to think about it: who’s to blame for it, what to do about it, how to remedy it. And when I think about this question, I often think what we need first and foremost is to marshal a critique and a reflection on the changing political economy of the university.

I say that because, for example, at Harvard where I teach, there’s often a kind of wrangling in the English department between members of the department: Are we teaching too much of X or not enough of Y? And this gets to the point about the culture war. People will say, well, the reason we have such declining enrollments for majors in the English department is because we’re trendy or too quote-unquote woke—you know, we had a very popular course on Taylor Swift. But we also get it from the other side: people will say, actually, you’re too conservative—because in fact there’s not a semester that goes by where we’re not teaching Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer and so forth. We teach the canon regularly. And so some people on the other side will say it’s because you’re not adapting, you’re being too rigid, too conservative.

But when I talk to students and ask them “Why are you not taking English courses?” I always invariably get the exact same story: They say, “We love English classes. Those are actually our favorite classes to take. But everybody knows that you can’t be an English major.”

Everyone knows that you can’t be an English major because it won’t get you a job and because we get signals from the institution itself at very high levels that, in some sense, not only the English department but all of the humanities departments are somehow not as valid, not as serious, not as valuable to your future progress and career once you graduate.

And on top of that, we’re coming in as a generation for whom college is expensive. We’re past the period in which, relatively speaking, college was more affordable. So we’re talking about a situation where people are feeling constrained in what they can do, and they’re making choices that are, by their own accounts, motivated by the economics of the university.

There’s also been a transformation at the level of the governance of the university, because the soul of any university is fundamentally its faculty. But since the 1980s, or maybe a little bit later, we’ve seen a great progression, where a greater and greater proportion of the university’s own resources are going to an administrative class. There’s a lot of good empirical data that’s been accumulated about this. There was a famous study done at Yale where, I think, the university tripled or quadrupled the number of administrators but not the number of faculty. And those administrators, many of them perhaps unsurprisingly having had former careers in the world of consulting, don’t have the same ends as the professors. They don’t regard the university in the same way that a faculty member would—and they have no incentive to. Their ends are fundamentally to look at their balance sheet, to cut wherever possible and to protect the endowment.

At the end of the day, this has meant that they have not defended the humanities. This is something that I just have to insist upon when we’re talking about “the ends” or “the end” of the university. What I find really disheartening is that most of the attacks I get on my profession don’t come from other faculty, they don’t come from students, they don’t come from the public; they come from the higher levels of the university itself, which in some sense has embraced the notion that it’s mainly there to be a degree factory. As long as the numbers look right, we’re just going to steamroll along and we don’t actually care whether or not the humanities are a vital part of the mission of the university. And we’re actually perfectly fine with a world in which the humanities are a fig leaf for an institution that has turned into, basically, a business school or an antechamber to the business school.

I want to touch on one of the reasons why I think some of these shifts have gotten the kind of traction that they have. And this is not new. It goes back to Russell Jacoby. It goes back to the Eighties and Nineties of the culture wars and the ways the university has been drawn into politics. When it comes to this, I do think that we deserve a certain amount of criticism. And maybe there’s an opportunity in this historical moment for a certain amount of self-examination. For obvious reasons, I’ve been rereading and thinking a lot about Edward Said these days. I’m partial to Said’s concept of “secular criticism”—from the famous essay in The World, the Text, and the Critic, where, following Erich Auerbach, he makes the case that the critic, and perhaps especially the literary critic, should practice a kind of principled skepticism and opposition to power. And that can’t be partisan. In other words, if a Democratic administration happens to be in power, you shouldn’t be making your work or your public pronouncements in fealty to it. You should be acting in criticism or in opposition to it. And when an alternative administration comes into power, you should be opposing them in exactly the same way. You should be opposing them on principle and in that way in a sense upholding a certain concept that I would endorse of the integrity of the critic, the integrity of a certain kind of ideal of judgment. And this sense of integrity would create, I think, a sense of distance that many people can and would come to respect, in a more profound way, if they felt that what we do was not simply to be invested in a particular angle on the cultural war.

If I can put a point on it, I want to say that I really think that this is a moment in which the question of the integrity of the university, the sense of what a university is in its core mission, in what its ideology actually is, is partly what’s at stake.

Writers, in my conception—critics and literary critics—have always flourished regardless, and they will flourish with or without these institutions behind them. Institutions can and have played an extraordinary and important role in irrigating our society. But I think they can only do that if they actually believe in their mission, and if they believe in the mission, then they have to actually stand up for its values. They have to also practice something like secular criticism, and encourage the people involved in the areas of cultural inquiry that we belong to practice it as well.

SOPHIE PINKHAM — “CULTIVATING READERS”

I agree with so much of what Jesse just said, and it resonates very much with what’s happening in my school as well. In my first-year composition class, I teach a lot of students who are in the arts and sciences school and engineering, et cetera. I have a lot of engineering students who are passionate readers and are desperate to take humanities classes. In some cases—I ’ve had this with some of my best students—they will be taking my classes as their sixth or seventh class, and are getting up at 5 a.m. to do the reading because they want to take a humanities class so badly. I heard another story recently of a historian who had a student in his office who was sobbing because he wanted so much to major in history, but his parents wouldn’t let him. As Jesse pointed out, this is very closely linked to the astronomical costs of college, and the financial pressure everyone is under.

On a more granular level, I’ve been thinking about how this affects the experience of reading for students, as well as for everyone else who is living in this particular hyper-capitalist moment. Literary criticism is hard work, of course, as discussed in the Guillory text we all read in preparation for this conference (Professing Criticism). But for most people, reading is predicated on leisure time, on free time, on time that they can spend quietly with a book, not being desperately distracted. And I think about this in relation to students’ experience of the humanities, because it’s clear that their time is under an enormous amount of pressure right now. It’s very hard for them to find the time to sit and read a book, even when they want to very badly. So I would press for a much more materialist, if you will, understanding of the student experience in relation to how we should think about our curriculum, and about the humanities in the university.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the latter half of the nineteenth century in Russia, which is a time when you had, on one hand, literary critics who were among the most famous and politically influential people in society, and on the other hand, a population that was overwhelmingly illiterate. Only a very small fraction of the population could read. When you start thinking about the position of literary criticism and of literature in society, and also the relationship of literature to politics, going back a few centuries, you are reminded that the situation of universal literacy or nearly universal literacy is one that has been very unusual historically. It’s a recent development. I have been wondering, especially as I read about things like AI with native voice recognition, as I hear about an increasing number of students who are doing their reading on audiobooks, whether the bottom is starting to fall out on universal literacy in America—or at least on literacy at the level where you have a large and invested reading public. I’m sure we’ve all seen the statistics about how few books the average American reads. And as someone who teaches composition and is also a professional writer, I’ve been wondering whether writing by humans, given what is happening with AI, is going to become something that is the equivalent of handmade suits, which are also coming back into fashion—that is, whether it’s becoming a kind of artisanal activity.

But some of the technologies accelerating that decline in universal literacy, in reading as a leisure activity and an extremely common form of entertainment, are also helping to produce new kinds of reading publics, or micro-publics. In some ways we’re moving backwards from the model of the lay reader versus professional literary critic. Today there are far fewer lay readers than there used to be, but there is also the emergence of extremely invested, specialized nonacademic reader communities enabled by social media, for example. We might think of the so-called “bro modernists,” a term that was recently coined. These are whole communities of people who spend enormous amounts of time reading, discussing literature in a completely different way, outside the academy—often online. So I think it’s important to remember that as old models fade, new reader communities emerge.

In terms of looking forward, I think anyone in the humanities needs to very forcefully make the case for reading, for cultivating a new generation of readers, for thinking creatively about how to carve out space for students who really want to be able to study the humanities. To me it seems absurd that people should be going to these institutions with huge humanities resources and yet not be able to take even two humanities classes when they want to. That’s something that universities need to try to think through in terms of making that space obligatory for students.

As far as new institutions, I’ve been fascinated to see Merve’s work at this quite novel institution at Wesleyan, and I think those kinds of institutions, that are within the university but oriented towards the public, will be important going forward. So will people who have one foot in the academy and one foot out, who can make the case for reading, who can make reading seductive and appealing and who can also cast reading as an important political act. Not a political act in the sense of these largely meretricious culture-war disputes, but as a process of reclaiming your time, reclaiming your ability and your willingness to think a thought from its beginning to its end, your willingness to discuss abstract ideas within a community, whether it’s in your internet reading community or in an actual classroom. Our time has never faced so many demands. And that has to do with economics. It has to do with technology too, obviously. So that’s really what I think of as our job: to cultivate readers among students and to defend reading and defend the humanities to the public through our own work.

MERVE EMRE — “INSTITUTIONALIZING JUDGMENT”

I thought I would begin with a working definition of criticism, or at least one that works for me, which is that criticism is a series of persuasive utterances that mingles judgment and interpretation. I like the capaciousness of this definition. I think it accommodates many distinct forms, genres and mediums. It allows for criticism to be both oral and written and to exist in the scene of the classroom and its collective utterances and in the journal or the magazine.

I teach a class at Wesleyan on the history of criticism that begins with John Dryden and Margaret Cavendish and ends with podcasts, Goodreads, and Substacks written by some of the people who are on the second panel. One of the things that my definition of criticism allows me to insist on to my students is that criticism is a historical category, and what it looked like or what it included three hundred years ago is not the same as what it looks like or what it includes now. It is better to begin thinking inclusively about what criticism has been in order to understand what it could or should be.

What a definition like that lets me do is to orient different examples of criticism along three axes: X, Y and Z. We can call the X-axis the standardization of production. Some magazines and journals that publish criticism have highly standardized, highly bureaucratized processes of getting a piece through a pipeline, from a pitch to its eventual appearance in a magazine. Other places have far less standardized processes of production. Processes of production can be standardized in different ways: peer review is one such process of standardization, but so is fact-checking and copyediting.

The Y-axis is the relative specialization of criticism’s consumers. How specific are the objects that a particular work of criticism is picking out is? How rarefied the sociolect in which the critic is speaking is? For instance, is she using words like “rarefied” and “sociolect”?

And finally, the Z-axis is how openly or widely a work of criticism circulates. Those of us who write in peer-reviewed journals know that what we’re doing, in part, is responding to something that’s already been written and inviting responses from other people. Those who have Substacks or who write articles in which there’s a comment section, or in which there is the ability to retweet or to share or to send an article to somebody, know that the circulatory mechanisms of the piece that you are writing are different from the circulatory mechanisms of the piece of criticism that is behind a paywall or that you need an institutional subscription in order to access.

Onto those axes you can also map certain rationales or justifications for what criticism should do. We’ve already heard a couple elaborated in the comments so far. Michael equates criticism with aesthetic education tout court. Jesse gave us a description of criticism as secular and oppositional to power. Sophie’s understanding of criticism was more oriented to practices of literacy. The reason that I suggested we read that concluding chapter of John Guillory’s Professing Criticism is that all these rationales are laid out in that chapter. The final rationale, the one that chapter ends with, is the epistemological rationale for criticism: that criticism exists because it is a practice of knowledge production. The way that criticism is currently institutionalized, at least in English literary studies, is oriented toward that rationale. The process of getting a Ph.D., of taking coursework, of passing orals, of writing a dissertation, of turning it into a monograph, of getting a job and working one’s way up through some kind of rank hierarchy, is oriented to the epistemological rationale of criticism.

I take the interest of a lot of people on this panel to be what would it look like to institutionalize criticism so that it was oriented to a different rationale. If what we wanted to do was encourage, as Sophie points out, the entertainment value of reading, such that it was creating a feedback loop between pleasure and to basic literacy education, how would we think about teaching criticism? To Jesse’s point, if we wanted to institutionalize criticism so that it taught people to be oppositional and skeptical in the Saidian model, how would we teach it? And to Michael’s point, which is where my own sensibilities or sympathies lie more, if we were trying to institutionalize criticism for the purposes of aesthetic judgment, what would we do? How would we you teach judgment? What are you teaching when you teach judgment? I think you’re teaching more than just taste-making. I think you’re teaching a collective mode of perception and cognition. What would be the professional market for people who judge? How is it different from the professional markets that the university stabilizes through the social formation of the professoriate?

I am going to answer these questions more as an administrator than as either a scholar or a critic because this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the center that I run at Wesleyan. I was brought in and asked to design a center for criticism with a minor in criticism. It had to be something distinct from academic writing and composition, from literary study as a discrete domain of disciplinary expertise of the other, and finally something distinct from creative writing.

I think that challenge really gets to the point Michael started out with, which is that many different rationales and priorities have been folded together under one departmental or disciplinary umbrella. Those of us who are thinking sociologically about these things are often thinking about functional differentiation. How do we pull these rationales apart so that good fences make good neighbors but also so that we are pursuing the rationale that we want to pursue, orienting it to the market that works for that rationale, and thinking about distinctive patterns of production, consumption and circulation?

For me, thinking about this as an administrator—as somebody who is really tasked with designing a curriculum and building a faculty for criticism—helped me disentangle a couple things that are often quite tangled in the conversations we have about criticism, about literary studies, and about politics and professionalization in the university.

The first thing that it let me disentangle was what happens in the undergraduate classroom from what happens in the graduate program. I think there’s too often a collapse of those two things, and pulling them apart is really helpful, both for thinking about what we’re teaching and how we’re teaching it, but also for addressing some of the larger material issues that both Jesse and Sophie were pointing to about the opportunity cost of people’s educations. The graduate program is defined by scarcity and exclusion—scarcity of jobs, scarcity of resources. This is not true for the undergraduate program.

The second thing that curricular planning let me pull apart was how we teach reading from how we teach writing. Anybody who has taught a literature class and either a composition or a workshop class knows that the way that we teach reading isn’t the same as the way we teach writing. Those two things can be integrated with one another, but oftentimes they’re not and they don’t absolutely have to be. The way that I think about institutionalizing the teaching of criticism is to teach reading in distinctive ways. This is where the history of criticism becomes important for me, because the history of criticism gives us a number of different models for thinking about teaching reading and teaching writing for judgment that have more or less been exiled from, or forgotten by, the contemporary university and by the way that literary studies has developed in the contemporary American university.

In our criticism program, the introductory poetics courses are based on I.A. Richards’s model of teaching practical criticism: you give the students a poem, with no title, no author, no date of publication, and you ask them to write an anonymized evaluative protocol, which you use as the basis for classroom discussion. The introductory novel courses are oriented around teaching narratology. One thing I have discovered is that my students come to me and they can usually talk about the characters in a novel, they can talk about the politics of a novel, but they can’t tell me what the events of a novel actually are, how those events are arranged, and they can’t usually do a lot of fine-grained analysis around point of view, focalization, story time, fabula time and things like that. They have very few skills that let them hold a novel in their minds, and so judge it as a whole. The second, intermediate level of the curriculum turns from reading to writing. The writing side of our curriculum as I’ve been thinking about it is really oriented to the different genres of criticism. The long-form journal piece at around eight thousand words is different from the mid-form magazine piece at around 4,500, which is different from the book review at around 1,200 words, which is different in turn from the Goodreads entry at around three hundred. Having students think carefully about the demands of the mediums that people are writing in, about the forms and the genres that can be accommodated by those mediums, is a way of teaching them how to write criticism that isn’t necessarily tethered to a particular brand of criticism or a particular department. This works as well for the English-literature student as it does for the American-studies student, for the Slavic student, for even the molecular-biology student.

Trying to think about how to institutionalize judgment, how to map that onto a curriculum, how to house that curriculum in a different part of the university and how to have that different part of the university interact with a lot of different departments and disciplines has really helped me clarify that criticism is not just the domain of the English department, not just the domain of literary studies; it is a set of techniques more than it is anything else and it can come with a particular habitus, a distinct way of being in the world. One of the things I always tell my students is that the idea that you are going to grow up to be something, whether it’s a critic or a novelist or a translator or a professor is really the wrong way to think about the professionalization of criticism. Most of us grow up to be three or four different things. We do that in part because of the financial demands of our lives. But we also do it because the different kinds of work that we do, as novelists and critics, as professors, as administrators, as translators, as teachers, is all cross-fertilizing. It makes more sense to think about all of us as plural actors—that’s the sociologist Bernard Lahire’s term—than as faithless academics, with one foot in, one foot out of the academy.

The final thing I will say is that I have been thinking a lot about how to teach criticism in the cheapest way possible. I agree with Jesse that often there are people above us who are managing the money of the university in ways that we can’t always see and don’t always like. But we also have choices in how we spend our money, in how we allocate our own departmental resources, how we allocate our own personal resources, like our research funds, for instance. One of the ways that is helpful for students in the classroom is to just buy all the books for them. In my introductory narratology course, I buy all the books for my students and reverse-serialize them. I think about how to organize a class around criticism so that it can be taught cheaply, not only by the standards of a place like Chicago or Harvard or Cornell or Wesleyan, but by the standards of the center for prison education at Wesleyan or Gateway Community College right down the street from me in New Haven. We might not be able to change the larger finances of the university, but I think that there are little things that everybody can do to make the classes that they teach affordable, and above all appealing because surprising in its accessibility.

Further reading…
John Guillory, Cultural Capital
John Guillory, Professing Criticism
I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism
Edward Said, “Secular Criticism,” from The World, the Text, and the Critic

Part II—with the Q&A from this panel discussion—can be read here, and Part III—from the second panel on literature outside the university—will be published on our Substack later this week. Stay tuned for more…