Escape from the Ivory Tower

Tags:: higher education

Despite the stranglehold that the “Ph.D. Octopus,” as William James called it, still has on the economics of who gets hired to teach, my experience at Bennington gives me hope that perhaps other enlightened institutions will also discover that having a Ph.D. may have nothing to do with loving literature and being able to teach it well.

I am a hopeless romantic, and a hopeful democrat. I always tell students that Shakespeare already belongs to them as their inheritance, but that they have to do the work to own him. Literature does not belong to the academy, it belongs to each of us; and the right teachers—in or out of the academy—are the ones who can show us how to take it, and own it, for ourselves.

« Previous
1
2
3
4
5

Single page /
Email

First Name Please enter a first name.

Last Name Please enter a last name.

Address Please enter an address.

Apt./Suite

City Please enter a city.

State Please select a state.

Postal/ZIP Code Please enter a valid
zip code.

Email Address Please enter a valid email address.

Country Please select a country.

Canadian subscribers add $10; All other international subscribers add $40.

More Essays

Post a Comment

Name
Email
Remember personal info?

Comments (You may use HTML tags for style)
Verification

Note: Several minutes will pass while the system is processing and posting your comment. Do not resubmit during this time or your comment will post multiple times.

Published In

Ways of Learning

About the Text

April Bernard is a poet and novelist whose fourth poetry collection, Romanticism, will be published in the spring of 2009. She teaches literature and writing at Bennington College in Vermont and is also on the graduate faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.

If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.