Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

There is a sting of practicality in Hacker's diagnosis: literature survives on campus not because institutions cherish it, but because something else needs it. The line reads like an autopsy report on the American humanities, where "devaluation" names a cultural shift as much as a budgetary one: languages framed as expendable skills, reading framed as leisure, and both treated as luxuries in a job-market university. Hacker isn't mourning in soft focus; she's taking inventory.

Her sharpest move is the pairing of two academic failures that are usually discussed separately. First, the collapse of foreign language study, which shrinks literature into an English-only echo chamber and makes "world literature" feel like a curated export rather than a lived exchange. Second, the graduate-school habit of letting "theory" eclipse "text" - not as an attack on ideas, but as a critique of professionalization, where interpretive frameworks can become a substitute for attention, craft, and actual reading.

Then comes the twist: creative writing programs, often dismissed as workshop factories or vocational tracks for would-be novelists, become the accidental life-support system. "Keep literature courses populated" is deliberately unromantic. Students take lit because it feeds their writing, fills requirements, or simply offers a human-scale alternative to abstract theory. Hacker is hinting at an institutional irony: the most marketable wing of the humanities ends up subsidizing the least marketable act - sustained engagement with books.