An Interview With William Deresiewicz

ROL's Longest and Most Involved Interview Yet

Dear Republic,

This one is a real treat for The Republic of Letters. William Deresiewicz may well be, full stop, the best writer working now. He’s probably still best known for the (oxymoronic-sounding) viral American Scholar article The Disadvantages of an Elite Education but writes prolifically on art, education, the professional-managerial class, et al. This interview is very long, but what we can do? — there’s a lot to talk about.

-ROL

AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

1.I want to start off by painting a picture. I met you because I was taking Daily Themes as a college junior. You were an extremely popular teacher and this was one of the most iconic classes at Yale — you had to apply to get in, everybody who was there wanted to be there, and every week five pieces out of the whole class were selected to be read out loud, which was catnip for the Yale mind. This was 2007, so it was Yale in the full height of its glory, I think very few people there had any doubt that Yale was paradise on earth. And then at some point it gets around that you were up for tenure and hadn’t gotten it. And then at some point you start saying these very critical things about Yale, about the student body, about the English department — some of it in kind of coded ways and some of it pretty direct. And then the semester ends, everybody knows you’re not coming back — and are maybe leaving academia for good — and you get this round of applause that must have lasted for five or ten minutes. The whole thing was, really, the most dramatic ‘event’ the whole time I was in college and seemed to really open up a crack in this whole consensus that everybody had. So, first of all, I’d be very interested in hearing about that semester from your perspective.

Oh God. That all sounds very glamorous. I had no idea how any of this looked from the students’ perspective. (I also think the length of the ovation may have expanded in your memory, but never mind.) That semester was my Waterloo in academia. I didn't expect to get tenure at Yale; it's rare for top universities to tenure from within, because the standard at such places is something like being “a world leader in the field,” which very few people have established themselves as by the time they come up. Really, I shouldn’t have been at Yale at all by that point. The idea was to publish a book, which I had done, then go on the job market, which I had also done. Three years in a row, in fact, with steadily diminishing returns.

Finally, that year, I thought I had a real shot at getting that next job. Eugene Lang, the undergraduate college at The New School, had invited me to apply for a position. I didn’t even know that was a thing. It was a joint appointment in the departments of literature and writing, because they were looking for someone who could bridge the two disciplines, basically try to induce some of the copious writing majors to come over and take more classes on the sparsely populated lit side (which, you know, kids who want to write but not read). In other words, if you had started with me and worked back to a job description, this would've been the one you ended up with. So I figured I was in.

I was not in. One of the things I came to admire about academia is the way it manages to screw everyone in a slightly different way. As the dean explained it to me afterwards, I had been the choice of one department, someone else had been the choice of the other, and though I had the edge between the two of us, was ranked first overall, they went with number three, as the compromise candidate. Who also happened to be a Yale colleague and longtime rival for various opportunities.

Also, yes, my tenure process was playing out at the same time, and let’s be honest, however doomed I knew it to be, I couldn’t help but hold out some wild hope that the department would recognize my unique awesomeness and tenure me anyway as a kind of scholar/teacher/public critic triple threat that they would create an exception for. As if things worked that way. So, yeah, when it all collapsed, and I faced the unthinkable prospect of being ejaculated from academia, I got pretty bitter, and I wasn’t particularly careful about concealing it.

As for you guys, there is always that moment for undergraduates at places like Yale when a popular teacher fails to get tenure and they discover that the university isn't really about them.

2.Where did ‘the critique’ come from for you? Was there a moment in time, or a sequence of events, where you felt yourself souring on Yale and, more broadly, on the ‘Ivy meritocracy?’

It was a long and gradual accumulation. I mean, I had always been fully bought in myself. Columbia-professor father, Columbia degrees, fully Ivyfied milieu and mindset—as in, if you went somewhere else, you were lesser, a loser. And believe it or not, Yale had always been my ideal, from people I knew or met who’d gone there, an institution that seemed to nurture an especially attractive combination of creativity and intellectual depth. Paradise on earth, as you put it.

I should say, as well, that my ten years there did not entirely disabuse me of that idea. I mean, especially compared to Columbia, which really is a dismally preprofessional place, Yale made room for a remarkable free flourishing of talent: a cappella groups, theater, student publications, etc. I was really struck by that when I got there, all these truly wonderful kids. It took me a while to start to see beneath and around that.

Beneath, meaning, a lot of covert careerism, not a lot of genuine intellectualism, a graduation-time stampede to high-status/high-wealth professions. Many of the students who came to hang with me in office hours confessed to feeling aimless and adrift. My favorites—the readers, the seekers, the “fiery particles of spirit,” to quote Alfred Kazin—confessed to feeling alienated from the institution, the system, from their peers above all.

Around, meaning, how the whole thing was designed to reproduce the class system. How fucking hierarchical it was, at the level of the grown-ups. Junior professors were basically the help. How, yes, really and truly (and I owe this understanding only to the happy accident of having married someone from outside the elite-college meritocracy), those assholes weren’t more worthy or in some cases even more intelligent than the “ordinary” people whom they so transparently disdained.

3.There does seem to be a kind of seminal moment, when one of your students says that she felt you were calling everybody at Yale “excellent sheep.” Can you talk about that moment — which then became the title of your book. What went into that? Was that kind of a lightbulb moment — or more a label for critiques that you already had?

That was indeed an extraordinary moment. I was teaching a seminar in the literature of friendship—this was year eight, the year before you took Daily Themes—and one day we got around to talking about the importance of being alone. The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students, is the essential precondition for living the life of the mind, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this in for a couple of beats, then one of them said, and you could see she was making a sudden intuitive leap, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”

I didn't think I had been saying that, but she made me realize that of course I was. And the phrase immediately struck me as terrifically apt and persuasive, especially since it came from a student, in a sort of startled moment of collective self-recognition.

4.What happened after Yale? I think everybody had a different impression from what was going on. We all believed that you were leaving the academy. You clarified in Quillette that you actually did apply widely and just didn't get hired anywhere. First of all, that's sort of astonishing. But is it as simple as that there weren't enough spots, or that you hadn't published enough, or was it more that it was kind of obvious that you had moved into a dissenter space within academia and departments just didn't want to deal with that?

No, it's what I said in that Quillette piece, which I called “Why I Left Academia (Since You're Wondering)” and which is included in my essay collection, The End of Solitude. Over the course of those four years that I was back on the market, I applied for jobs at 39 schools, of all different kinds and levels of prestige, got five interviews, two campus visits, and no offers.

I had published a decent amount, a book and five unrelated articles, which is plenty for tenure at most schools. The problem was not that I was known as a dissenter, because I wasn’t one, at least in public, yet. I was a good citizen of the department, pulled my weight on committees, behaved pleasantly, and the job letters from my senior colleagues reflected that. I undoubtedly lost points for not focusing single-mindedly on my scholarship—putting a lot of time into teaching, publishing in general-interest outlets like the New York Times Book Review—but the main problem, and I did downplay this in that Quillette piece, because I knew that people would seize on it, was my white penis. Without question. That thing that happened after 2020 in publishing and the arts, where white men were the objects of animus and the subjects of reverse discrimination, happened years, really decades earlier in the academic humanities. This was perfectly clear and universally understood, if also universally denied. In fact, although that dean had told me that I didn't get the New School job because the departments were split (which may also have been true), a member of the hiring committee whom I ran into at a conference some years later gave me a different explanation, one the dean would obviously not have shared with me. “They were determined to hire a woman,” he said.

5.But then you really did leave and burned the bridge in a pretty spectacular way with “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” and then Excellent Sheep. Can you talk about how those came about, the reception they got, and then what that meant in your own life?

As I said, a series of criticisms had been slowly assembling in my mind for all those years at Yale. Eventually, especially once I suspected that the end was in sight, I started to think about putting them together into an essay, as a kind of valedictory fuck you. My last year, as it happened (this is now the year after your Daily Themes experience), I got a chance to do a test drive when St. A's, St. Anthony Hall, a semi-secret student society and literary salon, very posh and very Yale, invited me to give a talk on, as they put it, a subject of my choosing. Well, that was the subject. (Perhaps you were there.)

I was pleased enough with the result to repurpose the talk as a piece for The American Scholar, which happened to come out my very last month in academia, June 2008. It went viral almost immediately. I didn't see that coming; I thought that if it found an audience at all, it would be a small one of fellow academics. But somehow the internet got hold of it, and within a few days my inbox started to be flooded with long, anguished, confessional emails from students at elite schools across the country, quite extraordinary documents, thanking me for putting their private disappointments into words. The piece went on to become a sort of selective-college samizdat that circulated online for years.

A short digression about the evolution of publishing in the online age. For a long time, I went around saying that that serendipitous and ultimately career-making virality could not have happened too much earlier than it did in the development of the internet. I still think that's true, but what I realized only recently is that it also couldn’t have happened too much later. A few years, I would say, not more. Once Twitter became a thing, virality was reserved for tweets, images, memes, not 5000-word essays in smallish literary quarterlies. I mean, when was the last time a piece not published in a place like New York or The New Yorker broke through to a mass audience?

In any case, the essay led, again almost immediately, to invitations to speak to students at the kinds of colleges I was talking about. That very fall, just four months later, I gave a talk at Harvard, then drove five hours to Cornell the next day to give another one. And so it went for years, at schools across the country. The events were thrilling and cathartic, and, yes, they made me feel like a rock star (okay, maybe an indie rock star). The rooms were always overflowing, the events invariably went longer than scheduled, students would follow me out to my rental car to keep the conversation going. Just an outpouring of need to talk about the fundamental questions that a college education is supposed to help students address but rarely does: What is college for? What is worth caring about? What should I do with my life? After one particularly intense event at Brown, with students sitting on all four sides of this theater space plus up around me in the balcony, the professor who'd invited me said, “That was like a two-hour advising session.” Exactly the idea.

Pretty quickly, as all that unfolded, I realized that this needed to be a book. I had more to say, more to think about; students were asking questions that I didn't have good answers to as yet. So, six years later, Excellent Sheep, preceded by an advance piece in The New Republic that became the most read in the history of the magazine. It was like standing in the eye of a hurricane, 15 minutes of fame that extended about four months, culminating in an appearance on The Colbert Report. Another flood of emails, this time including ones from parents, high school teachers, hiring managers (telling me how much they hated Ivy League graduates), people around the world. And a collective temper tantrum on the part of representatives of the kinds of institutions I was criticizing. Steven Pinker being dense as only he can; not one but two dismissals in The New Yorker; an epic shit show of a book tour event, presided over by Homi Bhabha, at Harvard; a mendacious, rancid notice in The New York Review of Books.

Of course, it changed my life, especially at first. I got four more years of speaking out of it, at much higher rates. Harper's and The Atlantic started commissioning me. Securing the next book contract was relatively easy, and I was even able to get them to throw in that essay collection. More than ten years later, I still hear from students, get invited to give talks, etc. And this may sound pious, but the best thing is the knowledge that I’ve really changed people's lives, young people's, lots of them. Like, whatever else is written down next to my name, when it's all over, this I'll always know I've done.

6.To summarize a long story, how has your life been since then? Have you been able to make the kind of living that you've wanted to? Does the loss of the platform of a university affect your reach or your ability to do what you want to do?

The living has been up and down, as always for a freelance writer, but generally quite adequate. As for the loss of the platform of a university, well, it’s not a platform. Maybe (maybe) teaching at Yale helped enable me to start contributing to the Times Book Review back in 1999, but since then my ability to get commissioned has depended exclusively on my work. No, in terms of doing what I want to do, the results have been perfectly bifurcated. I want to teach and I want to write, and now I can’t teach at all, but I can write a whole lot more. For my writing career, it’s been an utter liberation.

7.Do you ever have sleepless nights where you regret it? Feel like you should have published in more journals as an associate professor, attended the American Comparative Literature Association meetings with a brighter smile on your face, not labeled a significant number of your students “excellent sheep”?

Not for a single instant. The opposite, in fact. I missed teaching quite a bit those first few years (missed forming relationships with students), but everything else was always a ghastly chore that I put up with only for the sake of teaching. Plus, look what's happened since I left. The collapse of the humanities, the ascendancy of campus wokeness, the student intifada, the discrediting of the entire enterprise (and now, ChatGPT). I say a little prayer every day that I avoided all of that. Can you imagine what my life would’ve been like if I have gotten that job at Eugene Lang? Forget cancellation; they would’ve burned me in effigy.

8.Just a little back story. It seems like you’ve spent your life exiting institutions. You grew up orthodox and moved away from that, including leaving/being kicked out of a yeshiva? Can you summarize that chapter of your life?

My parents were immigrants from Old World backgrounds, the kind who spoke Yiddish at home as kids. They decided to raise us Orthodox (Modern, not Ultra-) because they felt that that was the only way that we were going to have a Jewish experience as dense, and thus develop a Jewish identity as intense, as theirs, as they wanted us to have. This is in suburban New Jersey in the 60s and 70s. And, you know, I took it all for granted, the way kids do. My world was yeshiva day school, synagogue, all the holidays and rules, the pack of feral Orthodox boys I ran with in the neighborhood, even Orthodox summer camps where we studied Talmud in the morning.

My attitude started to turn when I got to high school. The rabbis who taught the religious subjects were martinets, truly mean-spirited people. And I started to question. Well, what actually happened, and this almost sounds too perfect, is that I came across a copy of Civilization and Its Discontents in the school library. I still remember the green covers, the feel of the slim hardback. Within a few pages, I had lost my faith. And I became increasingly lax, as the year went on, about concealing that fact. It’s one thing to misbehave, as I always had, but now I was a disease carrier. They let me finish the year, but only with the understanding that I wouldn't come back. It was a major turning point for me, and yes, it prefigured my expulsion from academia. In both situations, I found myself within a kind of iron frame that seemed unthinkable to leave, yet leaving proved not only easy but tremendously generative.

9.And then how did dance and dance criticism come into your life?

There’s a bridge here, between ages 15 and 23, that I won't do more than mention but that represented the key experience of my life and will constitute the central subject of my next book. I joined a progressive Zionist youth movement (there, I said it, the Z-word), which I stayed in through the rest of high school, college, and a post-college year in Israel. One of the things we did was Israeli folk dancing, which I ended up getting really into in college, even joining a semi-professional performing troupe that included some serious modern dancers. That led to classes in ballet and modern, and those led in turn to a class in dance criticism that turned out to be another turning point, simply because the teacher was so good (another reason I believe so fervently in pedagogy, mentorship, the classroom experience). She was a working critic, the columnist for New York, and for the first assignment, she didn’t send us to the theater. She sent us into the world, to simply look at people move. Look, and describe. My life changed that day, truly and literally. I learned that I had never seen the world before, because I’d never bothered to, and I also learned that that is what art, and loving art, are about: seeing what’s in front of you. Finding out the truth.

She was also funny, worldly, and in her written critiques, brutally honest. She saw potential in me and pushed until I got good, and then, when the year was over, she recommended me to the reviews editor at Dance Magazine. That's where I cut my teeth as a professional writer, eventually moving on to review-essays for some of the dance quarterlies that were springing up in the early 90s, pieces for the Village Voice, and a stint as the New York Dance Correspondent for the Financial Times, where my editor was Ian McEwan's wife. All of this while I was working (and procrastinating) on my PhD.

10.And what went into the decision to go into academia, and into English in particular?

It took a lot longer than it should have. As I said, Jewish immigrant parents. The range of vocational options presented to me as a kid ran from doctor to doctor. Majoring in English, let alone trying to make a career of it, was inconceivable. There were no role models, growing up in that suburban community (and I think that role models are crucial for imagining different life trajectories), that came anywhere close to something like that, no one involved in the arts or humanities (or journalism or media, for that matter).

I had always been a reader, but my love of serious literature was kindled by my 12^th-grade English teacher, Mrs. Siegel, whose class in modern European literature (where I discovered Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Camus) was the first one I had ever taken that actually felt real, like it was about something that existed as more than a “subject,” an academic exercise. Still, I didn't take the hint. When I got to Columbia, I immediately decided, before I took a single class, to do a joint major in biology and psychology. I would sit there in calculus with a novel open on my lap as the professor droned on at the front of the lecture hall. Halfway through college, I I realized that I had made a terrible mistake, but by then it seemed too late. I truly felt that I had blown it, missed my one chance to have the kind of education I now understood that I desperately wanted. Plus, I had no idea what to do with my life. (All this would later feed into my drive to help students make better choices than I had—that is, in a better way than I had.)

It was only about three years after college, as I flailed about professionally and existentially, terribly unhappy with myself, that I had my epiphany. Again, this may sound too perfect, but it came like the proverbial lightning bolt. I can almost point to the spot where it happened, which was, ironically, at Yale, in the parking lot behind the gym. I was visiting a friend at the architecture school who was telling me how miserable she was in the program. Finally she said, “I've got to leave graduate school,” and I immediately thought, I've got to go to graduate school. It sounds paradoxical, but I realize now that she was giving herself permission to do what she knew she needed to, and it gave me permission to do likewise. I decided, I insisted, that it wasn’t too late after all to be the English major that I had come to understand I had always wanted to be. That I wasn't going to let it be too late.

11.Was there a period early on where you felt that this was the best thing ever? Somewhere or other in your writing, you eviscerate just about every part of academia and of Yale, but it is important to understand that, from the outside anyway, this seemed like a very desirable position — these were big and very popular classes, and I'm sure there were a lot of people who would have wanted the job that you had. Were there good times? What was it like in the good times?

Oh God, yes. I mean, I had that experience in graduate school, certainly in the first few years, that doctoral students often talk about. You know—holy shit, they're actually paying me to do this. I had some terrific professors. I made some good friends. And when it came time for me to teach, I discovered that I loved it just as much as I had thought I would. It wasn't long before I started making friends with some of my students, as well (one of them, from my third semester in the classroom, remains a dear friend to this day).

All of that continued at Yale: the joy in the classroom, the friendships with students, the bonding with peers. I mean, all the way through, all ten years. There was so much that I deeply loved and miss. The shitty stuff had all to do with the professional side of things. I pretty much always hated having to produce academic work, and the farther I went along, the more professionalized I was expected to be, the more I hated it. It just seemed so narrow and pointless, and it’s one long hazing ritual, and you’re so often being judged by idiots. Plus, the dynamics with your senior colleagues, at a place like Yale, are truly degrading. Maybe even especially at Yale, which in some ways resembles a feudal estate. We would have departmental meetings, then the untenured professors would leave, and the senior faculty would start the real meeting. Did you know that when you get tenure at Yale, they give you an honorary master’s if you don't already have a Yale degree? Yes, because you cannot teach at Yale unless you have one. Imagine dealing with the atmosphere at a place like that, when you know they're never going to let you in the club.

12.I want to try to pick apart some different aspects of your vision/critique, because every so often you sound like a Biblical prophet denouncing the entirety of the professional managerial class. So I want to try to really understand what the fixable problems and what the unfixable problems are, and where there are possible solutions.

So, first of all, I'm trying to go back to what my perception was of Yale before I'd come across your critique — which is not so easy, actually, because ‘excellent sheep’ in a way really reshaped my whole generation's perception of itself. But I think what I would have argued at that time is that Yale was more heterogeneous than you made it out to be. That, yes, there were a lot of kids who were hell-bent on McKinsey, and a lot of kids with what David Brooks calls “the Miss America syndrome” of super-presentability, but that this wasn't necessarily the majority. A lot of people there really were nerds, and I think a lot of what was going on was that there was a mainstream, somewhat jock-y culture, and people felt some obligation to fit into that, and then were hiding their truer, nerdier selves. And a lot of the campus subcultures were about that — it wasn't necessarily about trying to be more elite, it was about trying to find enclosed, protected spaces with the truly like-minded. I know exactly what you’re talking about when you say ‘excellent sheep’ but I'd argue that that might have largely been a more extroverted, more visible student minority.

Well, I won't argue with your perception, because I didn't have your perspective. In fact, and you're helping me articulate this for the first time, my claim is not a sociological one about student culture at Yale or anywhere else. My perspective was that of someone talking one-on-one with students in my office, which is to say, listening to them. They didn't tell me about the sociology, for the most part; they told me about their own psychology: their sense of being adrift, especially as the end of college began to come into view, about what they wanted to do with their lives.

My perspective also came from knowing what students did after they graduated. Particular students, but mainly students in the aggregate, the statistics. The lion's share, well over half, went into finance, consulting, medicine, or law. Today you would add tech, of course, and maybe subtract medicine and law, because apparently even those relatively lucrative and high-status professions have been cannibalized by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the consulting business. If anything, the numbers were better at Yale than at most peer institutions, no doubt for reasons I suggested above with respect to the school's relative hospitality to creativity and intellectualism. But Stanford, Duke, Penn, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, as well as elite liberal arts colleges like Williams (I’ve been to Williams a couple of times in recent years, and it’s like the entire student body is circling a giant vortex of finance and consulting): all of them appalling, in terms of that.

13.The next place I'd try to argue with you is when you claim — this is in Excellent Sheep — that the students you talked to had “toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression.” I'm a little skeptical of this. I remember being very happy in college, and had the impression that most people I knew were pretty happy. Campus was kind of chill, on the whole. Certainly, nobody was worried about flunking out; and the job market was a distant thought for most of the time there. I’m not denying that there were anxieties connected to high expectations, but I am wondering if you're like the kind of skilled cop who can always lead a suspect to a confession — and the students you were talking to ended up unburdening themselves to you in a way that wasn't really representative of campus culture.

Actually, that was the one piece of it that I was completely oblivious to as a professor having those office-hours conversations. I only became aware of it once I started to get those emails after the essay came out, because that is exactly what so many of them were about. Really heart-wrenching stuff. And then when I would talk to former students, I would ask them about it. Two in particular, I remember, both of whom seemed perfectly chill, as you say, as well as interesting, creative, and, if anything, unusually “real.” One told me that she had been depressed and stressed out the entire time she was in college. The other said she didn’t have friends until senior year, when she started to decelerate a bit.

See, students are really good at hiding their unhappiness. Maybe some of your friends were hiding it, too, I don't know. But maybe you don’t either. At some schools, they have an expression for this phenomenon. At Stanford, they talk about “duck syndrome”: serene on the surface, peddling madly underneath. At Penn, they talk about “Penn face,” that fake expression that says, I'm fine.

Once I started to hear about all this, I looked into it more. There were already books about the epidemic of mental distress among high-achieving students, at least at the high school level. Two great ones were Madeline Levine’s The Price of Privilege and Denise Clark Pope’s Doing School. Levine cites statistics: “Preteens and teens from affluent, well-educated families…experience among the highest rates of depression, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, somatic complaints, and unhappiness of any group of children in this country.” Mental health problems “can be two to five times more prevalent among private high school juniors and seniors” than among their public-school counterparts. Etc.

There is zero chance that those problems just magically go away when kids get to campus, and the statistics on mental health in college bear out that they do not. After all, affluent kids are not unhappy because they are affluent. They are unhappy because they are subject to unbearable achievement pressure that starts before high school and continues through college and after. I’ve heard from a million people about this by now, including lots of parents and teachers. Again, I'm glad to hear that you and maybe your friends didn’t feel that way, but maybe you and your friends were not typical. Clearly, given what you've chosen to do with your life, you at least were not.

14.The next place where I’m a bit skeptical is of the unfavorable comparison of the Ivies to state colleges. That's kind of the hinge of “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” and it really surprised me when I read it. You write, “[Students at Cleveland State] get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it's not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks.” The implication is that there's something salutary about the state college model — it builds character, toughens kids up for life, etc — but I'm less than convinced that that's a superior educational model. A student — you tell this story — getting a D for the semester because her waitressing shift ran long and she missed a deadline and then having no one to appeal that to doesn't necessarily seem like it’s what the more elite colleges should be trying to emulate.

You’ve misunderstood the point. I was not suggesting that the state college model is superior because it builds character or whatever. I was exposing the truly disgusting discrepancy between the way students are treated at a place like Yale and a place like Cleveland State. Basically, the treatment you receive is preparation for the class position you are going to occupy. I'm not suggesting this is conscious; it’s an outgrowth of attitudes that everyone takes for granted. As it turned out, there was already a fairly famous sociology paper that made the same point, but about fifth-graders. It's called “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work,” by Jean Anyon. Rich kids are taught to be in control; upper-middle-class kids are taught to be independent and creative; middle-class kids are taught to be bureaucratic; working-class kids are taught to be obedient.

15.The ultimate target of your jeremiad seems to be the professional managerial class — and you are pretty unsparing. You write in Excellent Sheep, “that class whose time to leave the stage has so evidently come.” What does this really mean though? What exactly is supposed to replace this class? And if this were one of the Books of the Prophets, what is the real sin of the professional managerial class? On the one hand, it seems to be overcommercializing itself — subordinating everything in education to career advancement. On the other hand, it's out of touch with the real life of people who have actual jobs. But the counter-argument would be that these are elite schools — they're trying to produce leaders, and no matter how you design a society, the leaders are going to come from somewhere or other. So I guess the question is — in the end, how revolutionary/totalizing is your vision when it comes to supplanting this class?

Such a good question. If I had had a good answer, I would have offered it. Your invocation of the prophets is to the point, because I was aware (self-importantly), that I was speaking in the mode of prophecy, which, as I understand it, is one not of prognostication but of intimation. One sees as through a glass, darkly. So that shit show of a tour event at Harvard ended, after an agonizingly protracted post-panel dinner, with my shouting at the last few people who had stuck around to the bitter end, “The sky is falling, and none of you seem to realize it.” I was referring to the fact that the liberal elite had, as I said in the book, lost its authority, lost its legitimacy, but did I know what I meant more specifically? I did not. But the rough beast glided down his gilded escalator only eight months later.

We've all been trying to figure out since then what will indeed come next, what will replace that elite as it is currently configured. I fear the answer will not be good. What I would like to come next is suggested in the book: “As [John] Ruskin told his own [Victorian] elite, grabbing everything you can isn’t more virtuous when you do it with the power of your brains than when you do it with the power of your fists. ‘Work must always be,’ he said, ‘and captains of work must always be,’ but ‘there is a wide difference between being captains…of work, and taking the profits of it.’” That is the real sin of the professional-managerial class: creating a system that not only enables it to hog the fruits of productivity, but to pass its position along to its children. Creating, as I put it, a hereditary meritocracy.

Yes, we need an elite, and we need colleges to train it. But they should not be in the business, as they now so clearly are, of reproducing the class system. The whole fucking thing is rigged, and that’s why I’m so pissed about it, and that's why almost everybody else is, too.

16.I always get a bit of cognitive whiplash reading you because you always seem to disillusion wherever I am at the moment. You definitely did this in The Death of the Artist. I think at that point I had embraced this idea of artistic purity — that artists had of course chosen a very difficult path for themselves but that merit would out eventually, and that there were rewards to be had in this cosmic dice game of betting everything on art. And you said, basically, no, no, no, it's money and systems all the way down. You have this brutal line in the book, “It's one thing to know that life will stink while you're establishing yourself; it's quite another to know that it will always stink.” Can you say more about what the takeaway is from that — is it more about establishing new kinds of artistic economies or trying to fight (although the ship may have already sailed on this) the Silicon Valley narratives that glorify giving content away for free?

To be clear, I'm not cynical about the value of art as an autonomous realm of activity. I mean, I’m a proudly unreconstructed humanist. The idea that taste is purely a matter of social capital, signaling, “distinction,” etc., is a bunch of crap as far as I'm concerned (ditto that art should be subservient to political ends). And, ideally, artists wouldn't have to think about money. My point in the book—in some sense, the whole point of the book—is that unfortunately they do, and therefore they should.

Which is a very different place from where I started out. That book, too, began as an essay (of the same name), and the latter expressed the classic purist position, the one that says that the market is evil and if an artist thinks about money they are ipso facto selling out. But one of the first artists I interviewed for the book was an old student who’d become an indie filmmaker (and who was also, not coincidentally, the grandson of the painter Alice Neel, who spent many years in poverty). He totally called bullshit on me. You're part of the problem, he said. That belief you’re expressing, that's the line that young artists are fed, and it’s the reason so many of them end up disillusioned and bitter. They are told not to think about money, so they don't think about money, so they end up not having any. And all those figures who are held up as models of unworldly integrity (he mentioned Fritz Lang), they sure as hell were thinking about money, they just didn't talk about it.

I have enormous admiration for anyone who sets out to be an artist, and I would never discourage them from doing so. But of course it is terrifically naïve to think that merit will necessarily be recognized. There absolutely are rewards for betting everything on art, they just don't often come in the form of money or fame. The reward is in the act itself, and that is pretty much what all the artists I talked to, especially the older ones, said.

As for the line you quote, that is specifically about the way the internet has reshaped the lives of artists by undermining the economic basis of their existence through the demonetization of digital content. In the second half of the 20th century, once we had built out this enormous postwar infrastructure for the arts, if you were decently successful, not a huge star but just a serious professional artist (musician, writer, painter, etc.) who had achieved a modicum of recognition in your field, you could have a middle-class existence. Not anymore.

In terms of what can be done about it, it would be lovely if the government used antitrust to intervene in the market to redirect the flow of revenue from the platforms back to creators. But of course we cannot wait around for that to happen. Substack is great as far as it goes, but like all online platforms, it will inevitably follow a power-law distribution. A few creators will get rich, somewhat more will do okay, most will get nothing or close to it. I wish I had a good answer, but I don't.

17.And then recently I've been in this Substack-driven creators’ economy, which branches over into people organizing lectures and classes, etc, and I'm kind of saying to myself at last I’m involved in something that Professor Deresiewicz would approve of, and then, sure enough, I read an article where you say “Higher education as it currently exists is not going to go anywhere” and then I read an article where you say that there is something “parasitic” about these newer academic projects that are trying to siphon off some of the energy of the existing college system and recreate it themselves. So how deep does your critique of this new, primarily-digital space go? To what extent is it just ripping off the labor of the academic/creative precariat?

You're mixing up two different things. I love the Substack-driven creators' economy, I'm grateful for people like you who are pushing it forward, and I'm glad to be involved with it myself, however peripherally (as a contributor to, so far, Persuasion and The Hinternet). It is not what I was calling parasitic. And actually the things I was talking about are things I love, as well: the various non-academic ventures in serious humanistic education that have been sprouting up of late. E.g. The Catherine Project, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and, especially, the one I'm involved with, the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life, a short-term retreat and study program in upstate New York that is mind-blowingly good.

The point I was making about these programs is that they don’t yet constitute a self-sustaining infrastructure that can preserve the humanities outside of the academy, as witnessed by the fact that nearly all the people who teach in them have advanced degrees, usually PhD’s, which is where they acquired the expertise that enables them to do that teaching in the first place. That might be fine for now, except that when I said that higher education as it currently exists is not going to go anywhere, I meant that universities and (most) colleges are not going to be closing anytime soon (periodic predictions to the contrary notwithstanding). We still need places to do research and train experts (engineers and doctors and so forth). But the academic humanities, those might very well be going away, or shrinking to a nub, at least, and in any case they do so deeply suck. So it would be great if we could create a robust culture of humanistic thought and dialogue and teaching independent of them. And, hell yes, Substack absolutely may be part of that.

18.So, I kind of know the direction of your critiques, and I think I can piece together ‘Deresiewicz bingo’ of what it is that you like — which is solitude; the cultivation of selfhood; engagement with one's interiority through reading and reflection; teaching and learning in a genuinely expansive, liberal arts-style way; connectivity with the society outside one’s immediate class; and a career path that's based on values as opposed to just chasing top dollar. And I think I understand what knits it together. You call it “the modern self” — and I suspect that ‘humanism,’ ‘cosmopolitanism,’ ‘transcendentalism’ may be variations of what you have in mind. But can you say more explicitly what 'it' is — how exactly does one get it, and to what extent does it represent a universal system of values?

No, I can't. My thought is not systematic. A lot of it isn’t even thought; it’s instincts, values, appetites. And this “it” you want to "get" (get “exactly,” no less) is not an it, and you don’t get it. It’s a bunch of practices (a word that has become increasingly salient for me), all of which I am sure you are already doing: deep reading, slow writing, careful thinking, patient listening, conversation as opposed to argument, solitude instead of scrolling. It's not like I arrived at these through some deductive or theoretical process. They just feel like the right things for me to do.

19.Let's go through the history of what you're discussing a little bit. Usually, when people offer a critique they imagine a golden era and work out the decline from there. But your pessimism always seems to go back a long way. “[College] teaching sucks, and always has,” you write, and then you’re very cutting about the foundation of modern elite universities. The line from inside academia would be that this is a steadily-evolving institution, that it’s a medieval seminary model that then had a whole bunch of things (liberal arts, research, campus life) grafted on top of it, but that it creates this beautiful incoherent harmony that everybody always seems to remember as the best time of their life. What you seem to be saying, though, is that it just creates the illusion of all of those things. There's a detached professoriate presiding over a nicely-packaged consumer product — that real learning, real research, real intellectual engagement are all pretty rare within it — and that, in the end, it amounts to a kind of early round of training for your Goldman job. How does my perception of your critique match up to what you actually think?

I don’t think of it, any longer, in terms of the existence or nonexistence of some putative golden age. I did once, but the more you look for a golden age, in anything, the harder it gets to find. Still, in that steadily evolving institution, the big change came with the emergence of the modern research university in the late 19th century (earlier in Europe). Now you had two competing missions, which I call the university mission (research and the training of specialists) and the college mission (undergraduate liberal arts education). The former has grown steadily stronger and, for the most part, better. Allow me to self quote: “Wissenschaft, in all its dimensions—the investigation of reality—is a noble and magnificent endeavor, and its results represent the greatest intellectual achievement (one of the greatest achievements, full stop) in human history.”

But the latter hasn't been doing so well. Allow me to self-quote again: “More than any other institution in society, the university is constituted by a set of tensions: research vs. teaching, Wissenschaft vs. Bildung, science vs. the humanities, practical utility vs. the pursuit of knowledge, and of learning, for their own sakes. The tensions in themselves aren’t bad; both sides, in each case, are valuable. What is bad is that over the decades, the first sides have pretty much won (mainly because they're very lucrative, while the second sides aren't lucrative at all). Which means that liberal education has lost.”

Still, the sector is very uneven. It's not a matter of, things were good before and are terrible now. They are better and worse: better at some schools, in some classrooms, for some students. I know I tend to speak in absolutes, but I don’t condemn the whole enterprise. There are still real learning and teaching going on. More to the point, students can usually find their way to a genuine education—but only if they are determined to.

As for remembering college as the best time in your life, sure. You're young, you're in an intimate community of smart, creative friends, you have no real responsibilities, the place is beautiful if not luxurious and caters to your every whim. Plus, grade inflation. What's not to love? But that doesn’t mean you get an education.

20.You conclude of academia, “I didn't believe in the profession.” Is there a version of academia — or of let's call it ‘knowledge working’ in general — that you do believe in?

I’m talking there about the field of English lit in particular. I certainly believe, as I suggested, in the value of academic science (however imperfect it may be), even academic social science (as desperately in need of reform as it clearly is). And there are valid research programs in the academic humanities, too, the kind that are, broadly, positivist or, as you call it, knowledge work (scholarly editing, historical linguistics, etc.).

What I don’t believe in very much is academic criticism, the interpretive side of the enterprise. So much of it is dull, or trivial, or you need to buy into some truly ridiculous theories to accept or even understand it. Plus, the prose idiom is a kind of anti-language, designed to repel and obscure. But mainly I don’t think that the self-enclosed space of an academic discipline is where our conversations about literature (or the other arts) should be happening in the first place. When I think of my critical heroes, I think of public intellectuals like Lionel Trilling or Alfred Kazin or Harold Rosenberg, or of creative writers like Virginia Woolf or DH Lawrence, or of working critics like Elizabeth Hardwick or Dave Hickey. All of them are so much smarter and deeper and write so incomparably better than almost any academic you can name. And the few academic critics I do admire, people like Andrew Delbanco or Stephen Greenblatt, also address their work to a general audience.

That’s what I believe that English professors should do. That, and devoting themselves to their teaching. (In other words, what I did, which is why I did it.) The discipline should not think of itself as knowledge work at all. It is, or should be, soul work, however moist or naïvely humanistic that may sound.

21.I’ve been thinking about why you're such a psychological object for me — and I think for a lot of people — and I think what it comes down to is courage. Whenever you write — and this was true in your lecturing as well — you always seem to come up to the thing you're not supposed to say, and know that you're not supposed to say it, and then say it anyway. And you've done that over and over again. What is that for you? Is that how you are temperamentally? Or is that kind of courage a major part of the development of the self that you discuss in so many different ways?

Louis CK once said that the reason he can get up on stage and say things that make his audience uncomfortable, make them dislike him, is that he got in trouble a lot as a kid, so he's used to that feeling of being “bad.” He's comfortable with being uncomfortable. I was the same, as I mentioned before. I got in trouble a lot in school. So I’m used to it, too. I know that it isn't the end of the world. Plus, interesting things happen. It’s incredibly liberating, saying what you think—for others also, because they are also thinking it and because you are giving them permission to be honest, as well. You're demonstrating that those iron frames they live inside are really made of cotton candy, cobwebs. I think of that amazing scene at the end of Invitation to a Beheading, one of Nabokov’s Russian novels, where the hero is lying on the executioner's platform, about to have his head chopped off, and “with a clarity he had never experienced before—at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come, but then suffusing him with joy, he reflected: why am I here? Why am I lying like this? And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up.” That's all that courage, in this context, is.

22.Ok, last argument against you. How convinced are you that being brave is the way to be? If I think about how a society can be organized, I’m not sure it can be hinged on “passionate weirdness.” Aren't a lot of people going to end up being conformist, a lot of people just going to chase financial stability wherever they can find it? And then my life experience is that courage often means having to deal with the consequences of it, and the brave decision can as often as not lead to one's disadvantage. How comfortable are you advising the kind of path that you seem to follow as a path for other people?

You don’t have to be like me. There's that great moment in Walden where he says, after hectoring us for dozens of pages about his house and his expenses and his fucking beans, “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for…I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible.” Of course then he goes on, “but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.” Which is my idea, too. And how are you going to do that without a little bravery?

Still, you're right, it comes with costs. You want to keep your head down, be a conformist, that may be the proper choice for you, for reasons of circumstance or temperament or whatever. I’m not judging; I'm really not. But I will say this: for a writer, bravery is indispensable. If you aren’t willing to be unpopular, you should go do something else.

23.Want to tease the book that you're working on now? Or talk about your current projects in general?

I touched on this before. I'm working on a book that I’m calling, pretentiously, a historically situated memoir about being Jewish in America, though it's really about, even more pretentiously, being Jewish in modernity. Modern Orthodox childhood, progressive Zionist youth, ambivalent adulthood. I sent the very first draft of the proposal to my agent on October 4, 2023, if you can believe it. Three days later, everything changed: the book, the person writing the book, the world the book will enter. It’s been a very intense experience both intellectually and emotionally, and I haven't even started writing yet. If all goes according to plan, it will be out in 2028. And then I'll need that willingness to be unpopular, because I expect to be assailed from every side.