Why do so many graduate programs teach students to hate what made so many of us want to become teachers and scholars when we were undergraduates: reading literature — old and new, from every culture — as if it was more than symptomatic of deplorable cultural pathologies? —Thomas H. Benton —College and the Fall (Chronicle)

I can’t exactly say I’m basking in the self-satisfied glow this professor projects — especially now that midterm grades are out and students are worrying about their GPAs. On the other hand, I don’t think I ever was really angry in graduate school — or, if I was, I was angry at the fashionably alienated graduate students who surrounded me.