The Claims of Close Reading

Hollowed out. That’s how I frequently described West Virginia University during the nine years I worked there before leaving this summer. There was a library, but it bought fewer and fewer books. The English department had a lovely old brick building, but there were hallways of empty offices after colleagues left and weren’t replaced. Some beneficiaries were identifiable: upper administrators were paid much better than those at comparable institutions when just about everyone else was paid worse. It was easy to compare the university to its state’s mountains: a site of extraction, a public good that had been plundered by the wealthy and left as a shell.