Schopenhauer tells us that all major artists ask and in their fashion answer a single commanding question: "What is life?" The critic works to show how the author frames that query and how he answers it. Critics are necessary for this work because the answers that most artists give to major questions are indirect. Artists move forward through intuition and inference: They feel their way to their sense of things. The critic, at his best, makes explicit what is implicit in the work.

This kind of criticism is itself something of an art, not a science. You cannot tell that you have compounded a valid reading of Dickens any more than that you have compounded a valid novel or a valid play. When others find your Dickensian endorsement of Dickens to be of use to them, humanly, intellectually, spiritually, then your endorsement is a success. The desire to turn the art of reading into a science is part of what draws the profession to the application of sterile concepts.

Mark Edmundson, "Against Readings"

English majors want the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of people who—let us admit it—are more sensitive, more articulate, shrewder, sharper, more alive than they themselves are. The experience of merging minds and hearts with Proust or James or Austen makes you see that there is more to the world than you had ever imagined. You see that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense—more alive with meaning than you had thought. . . . 

Love for language, hunger for life, openness and a quest for truth: Those are the qualities of my English major in the ideal form. But of course now we're talking about more than a mere academic major. We're talking about a way of life. We're talking about a way of living that places inquiry into how to live in the world—what to be, how to act, how to move through time—at its center. What we're talking about is a path to becoming a human being, or at least a better sort of human being than one was at the start. An English major? To me an English major is someone who has decided, against all kinds of pious, prudent advice and all kinds of fears and resistances, to major, quite simply, in becoming a person. Once you've passed that particular course of study—or at least made some significant progress on your way—then maybe you're ready to take up something else.

Mark Edmundson, "The English Major," an essay from Why Teach? Essay adapted here.

Why is "excellence" a bad word? It's not, in and of itself. But people around universities who use it are people who want to talk about worldly distinction without talking about ethics. "Excellence" means we're smart, we're accomplished, we're successful--and we can be these things without any obligation to help our fellow human beings. When colleges start talking about "humane excellence" or "generous excellence," then I'll want to listen.

You also have my permission--in fact my encouragement--to gently snout-pop people who talk about "leadership." Why is leadership so bad? In itself, it's not. But what people usually mean by a leader now is someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all of the values of the people who are in charge. . . .

The residents of scholarly enclaves are harder to spot than the denizens of the corporate university, and I can't give you a definitive field guide to finding them. But I'll say first that they don't talk about being a leader and being an entrepreneur. They talk about working in a lab or developing a questionnaire for psychological research or writing a novel, or getting people who don't belong in jail out of jail, or defending their country against its enemies. And they are not smiling all the time. They are aware of the enormous gap between what humans aspire to and what remains to be done. They tend to take joy in their work, but they never feel that they have quite gotten it right. The people in the corporate university are forever pleased with themselves. They are always succeeding, getting A's that will soon be converted into dollars.

Mark Edmundson, "The Corporate City"

This morning I'm reading Mark Edmundson's essay "The Corporate City," which is a fantastic critique of the corporate values that rule most universities. There's an adapted version of this essay on the Atlantic.

Mark Edmundson's essay "Do Sports Build Character or Damage It?" is excellent.

I encourage people who teach in universities--and especially humanities departments--to ... stop the professional posturing and prestige chasing and liberate themselves and others into the fields of joy and salutary change that the liberal arts at their best provide. I'd like them to step up and oppose the commercialization of their universities. I'd like them to think less about their careers and more about the hopes that brought them to the study of great books to begin with.... I'd like all of us to have a little more fun.

I'd like us to blow a hole through the university's ethos of entertainment and training for success and to bury its wearisome work-hard, play-hard frat-boy ideology. We should blast away the customer-coddling deans and student service hacks; blast past academic pretension and the hunger for "standing in the field." Blast university presidents so afraid of offending a potential donor that they won't raise a word in behalf of social justice or political sanity. Blow away the trustees who think that they're a corporate board of directors and will not rest until their schools resemble Walmarts. Blast them all. And while you're doing it, have a good time. Because knowledge is joy. Creativity is ultimate freedom. Real thought is bliss. Sapare aude, as the old thinkers liked to say: Dare to Know; Dare to Be Wise!

Mark Edmundson, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education

Education now is not for the individual. It is not geared to help him grow to his potential and let him find out what he truly loves and how he might pursue it. No. Education now is a function of society. ... Current schooling, from the primary grades through college, is about tooling people to do what society (as its least imaginative members conceive it) needs done. We are educated to fill roles, not to expand our minds and deepen our hearts. We are tooled to slide into a social machine and function smoothly with a little application from time to time of the right pleasing grease. Education now prepares us for a life of conformity and workplace tedium, in exchange for which we can have our iPhones, our flat screens, our favorite tunes, Facebook, and Twitter. But what we want is real learning--learning that will  help us see the world anew and show us that there could be more to our lives than we had thought. (xii)

Mark Edmundson, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education: