Joseph Keegin in The Point:
In 2012, at the age of 25, I quit my part-time jobs cooking and cleaning houses and, having dropped out during my first semester seven years earlier, went back to school. To help pay for the modest tuition at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, Indiana, I took a work-study gig at the university library. The campus of IUS is small, and most students are commuters; the library was accordingly quiet, the work languid. So in the many slow periods between tasks, I read. Essays, stories, poems—whatever I could get my hands on. My reading was omnivorous and unstructured: like the critics in the first part of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, I pursued knowledge like sleuths in a roman noir, or like the poet Juan García Madero from his Savage Detectives, for whom “every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.” I followed a friend onto Twitter—the early 140-character years, with few journalists and politicians and no blue checkmarks—and there I came into contact for the first time with the world of magazines, small and large, that constituted the internal chatter of the educated American upper-middle class.
Amid this cacophony of culture-talk—heard from a remove, like music from a distant room—I began to discern a theme. I listened, equally interested and perplexed. It concerned the state of American higher education: plummeting enrollment in English, philosophy, history and other bookish, scholarly disciplines leading to the annulment of programs and the shuttering of departments; skyrocketing tuition and ballooning student debt; a pervasive sense of panic and despair.
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