Can Criticism Survive Inside the University?

Below you will find the opening statements from the recent conference, “The End of the University and The Future of Criticism,” which took place on the University of Chicago campus on Thursday, April 3rd. The statements come from the four participants—all of them both professors and public-facing critics—in our first panel, “Can Criticism Survive Inside the University?” Michael Clune, who moderated the discussion, is a literary critic and writer of both fiction and nonfiction who teaches at Case Western University; his novel, Pan, is coming out with Penguin this summer. Jesse McCarthy is an essayist and critic, as well as a professor in the English and African American Studies department at Harvard and an editor of The Point; his most recent book, The Blue Period, came out with the University of Chicago Press last year. Sophie Pinkham is a writer and critic who focuses on Russia and the Soviet Union and teaches in the comparative literature department at Cornell. Her next book, The Oak and the Larch, will be out with Norton in early 2026. Merve Emre is an English professor, critic and contributing writer for the New Yorker. She serves as the director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, an initiative dedicated to teaching the art and practice of criticism.