I’ve noticed a trend lately in Substack Notes that attack academic English departments and celebrate their decline, along with the return of reading to “common people,” and yet the departments they seem to imagine bear no resemblance to anything I have witnessed in thirty years of studying and working in English departments. The departments I know are filled with passionate teachers and scholars who are fighting the good fight against a tech culture that is bent on eroding attention spans and critical thinking. Also, be careful what you wish for. Where do you think interest in writing that doesn’t happen to make the bestseller lists is advocated for and sustained? Who do you think edits literary texts and keeps them in print, some of which otherwise would have passed into oblivion? Are English departments perfect? No. Could we do better? Yes. Do we have the support of the larger academy? Not really. But we are fighting to sustain a literary culture and making the case for its value. Who else is doing that in our cultural institutions? Some publishers, some philanthropists, some independent readers and scholars, perhaps. But if you purport to love literature and yet are celebrating the decline of English departments, then there is some real cognitive dissonance at work.