An Interview With William Deresiewicz

1.I want to start off by painting a picture. I met you because I was taking Daily Themes as a college junior. You were an extremely popular teacher and this was one of the most iconic classes at Yale — you had to apply to get in, everybody who was there wanted to be there, and every week five pieces out of the whole class were selected to be read out loud, which was catnip for the Yale mind. This was 2007, so it was Yale in the full height of its glory, I think very few people there had any doubt that Yale was paradise on earth. And then at some point it gets around that you were up for tenure and hadn’t gotten it. And then at some point you start saying these very critical things about Yale, about the student body, about the English department — some of it in kind of coded ways and some of it pretty direct. And then the semester ends, everybody knows you’re not coming back — and are maybe leaving academia for good — and you get this round of applause that must have lasted for five or ten minutes. The whole thing was, really, the most dramatic ‘event’ the whole time I was in college and seemed to really open up a crack in this whole consensus that everybody had. So, first of all, I’d be very interested in hearing about that semester from your perspective.