I've been posting this week on how the label "conservative" operates in the academic humanities to demarcate and demonize not just those who are conservative per se, but those whose ideas about what literature is and what it means to study it depart from prevailing politicized methodological norms. Nowhere is that process of demarcation and demonization more powerful, and more potentially damaging, than at the gate. Advanced English majors who want to go on to graduate school in the field, and beginning graduate students who are commencing a course of study that is also a prolonged period of professional initiation, are extraordinarily vulnerable to the policing techniques of faculty and fellow students.

Here's a letter I received last winter from an English major at an Ivy League university:

I thought I should send you an e-mail since you appear to verbalize what I encounter everyday at [prestigious Ivy League university]. For about a year now, I have planned on attending graduate school in English but now I am starting to doubt my choice. The wave of postmodernism has not only crushed graduate students in its wake. Now, it's beginning to take hold of undergrads. In almost every class I attend, I encounter some sort of leftist pyschobabble. A class on Renaissance poetry no longer examines a poet's conceptions of beauty or virtue. Instead, it depicts a sixteenth-century sexual revolution complete with metaphors in which language acts as a prophylactic, separating the speaker from the reader. If the professor ... chooses to give sex a break for one afternoon, he declares, with great suspicion, that all the poets of the period employ their work as a means of acquiring social elevation. When a student (me) doesn't buy this garbage, his classmates gather together after the seminar in order to complain about his conservativism, and he receives an e-mail from the professor that acknowledges his intelligence but that threatens to lower his grade if he "monopolizes" the class with his opinions again.

My dilemma, Erin, is that I love literature. I would like to be able to make a career of studying and teaching it. Can one get through graduate school without becoming a supposed Spenser, without saying what's needed in order to procure admiration? Your posts on the corruption that mires graduate programs have frightened me. I can see that you are right. Teachers no longer read texts with the spirit in which they were written in mind. They just seek opportunities to inculcate their liberal political agendas. One cannot win this battle. Whenever I try to speak out, which is rare, I'm either told that I don't have the right opinions or I'm threatened with the possibility of losing a necessary recommendation for graduate school and fellowship applications.

Several years ago I went to grad school in English and found its political and (anti)intellectual atmosphere intolerable. "Cant" is too mild a term! After getting a low grade and spirit-crushing comments on a "naive" and "humanist" paper I'd spent all semester researching, I abandoned my professorial career plans and went to work in the corporate world.

I joined the graduate program in the Fall of 1999 (fresh from [ancient, honored British university], where I got my B.A.) and lasted until the following summer. Words like "alienation" and "humiliation" come to mind. Hipper-than-thou graduate colleagues literally smirked when I voiced my thoughts in class, then snubbed me in the hallway; professors dismissed my papers as naive and romantic. In a private meeting, one professor questioned me about my "evident resistance" to critical theory, which she described as a "problem." Chiding me to "rise above the undergraduate level," she encouraged me to adopt more "rigorous" critical approaches. When I asked her to elaborate, she reeled off a dozen theorists--Jameson, Spivak, Said, etc.--whose "sophisticated" analyses should "inform" my thought. Even though I don't identify myself as a conservative, such slavish imitation of "loony left" (as they say in Britain) theory wasn't something I felt willing or able to perform. To cut a long story short, I grew so disillusioned that I dropped out. At present I work as a project manager for [very large corporation] in New York. My job isn't a "perfect fit" (I'm considering law school in '03), but at least I work among relatively SANE people!

UPDATE: At Tiny Voices, J.M. Coetzee's Nobel Prize occasions fond reminiscences of graduate school:

I heard about it this morning on the news and immediately, I wanted to reread Disgrace.

It also brings back horrible memories of a post-colonial literature class in graduate school, in which we read Foe and then were made to re-enact conditions on slave ships traveling through the Middle Passage, as well as scenes from the book, all the while listening to the sound of a fetal heartbeat being played on a c.d.

I drank straight whiskey after that. This fact means a great deal.