COLLOQUY

I just dropped out of the market for a tenure-track position because of three stories: (1) the Sunday Times Magazine piece (March 2) about the layoff of Don Snyder, a tenured English professor at Colgate with two books published who was regularly voted Best Teacher on Campus by the Honor Society; (2) a news-service story about the troubles Christopher Ricks, an internationally known modern and Eliot scholar, is having with the English department at Boston U.; and (3) the hype over Jane Gallop's breathless account of her affairs with professors and students.

These three stories add up to a sad autopsy of the academic study of English literature. They have also convinced me that neither tenure nor an international reputation can any longer outweigh the disadvantages of being a white, heterosexual male in today's English departments.

I am not giving up teaching, nor research and publication. Once adjunct teaching has been decoupled from any notion of a career track, there are some benefits for students. I no longer worry that my lack of concessions to trendy nonsense in my teaching and publications might ruffle a future colleague.

For those tenured faculty in my field worried about the "dillettantism" of adjuncts: Take a look at what often passes for career-making scholarship under the label of "theory," etc., and tell me what's left to protect other than cushy, tenured positions.

--Anonymous (posted 4/3, 1:30 p.m., E.S.T.)