How to Be an Intellectual

JEFFREY J. WILLIAMS has published widely on criticism, the novel, and the politics of higher education, in Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, LARB, Salon, and VLS, as well as in major academic journals. He is one of the editors of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. He also served as editor of the minnesota review from 1992 to 2010. He is Professor of English and of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University.

The book's 32 essays cover a vast stretch of territory, from profiles of prominent critics to the impacts of student debt to an analysis of how universities are portrayed in film. . . The book thus draws connections between 'post-welfare state university' and everything from the importance of being 'smart' to the 'conceptual shrinkage' in literary theory.

—Michael Bérubé:
“For more than twenty years, Jeff Williams has been one of the indispensable critics of the politics of American higher education, and one of the most reliable and perceptive commentators on the intellectual trajectory of cultural studies. Since taking over the minnesota review in the early 1990s (when he was what, maybe twenty years old?), he has also become something else: the most astute and rigorous interviewer in the business. No one has even attempted to perform the kind of interlocutor/archaeologist role Jeff has defined for himself—and I am not sure anyone could. Every essay here, and every interview, offers an invaluable demonstration of how to be a responsible, engaged, and organic intellectual.”

Jeffrey Williams has provided ample evidence here of a passionate and principled intellectual engagement with the political and financial interests that are combining forces to gut higher education. There could not be a better time for all of us working in the academy to follow his example.

—Frank Donoghue:
The scope of this book is astonishing, and Williams in one of the very few academic writers who could have pulled it off.

—Thomas Docherty:

This is a book full of shrewd insights, illuminating and suggestive histories
of how the intellectual has been and could be. The criticism without footnotes approach helps bring the crucial questions into a much clearer and open light than is usual. In short, it helps to make its reader an intellectual. This is a vital and necessary book.

—Bruce Robbins:
Jeff Williams makes the case that the university, thanks in part to the dramatic loss of job security for faculty, is no longer marginal to American life, but central to it. His book is compulsively readable, lucid without being populist. It makes you see that while being an intellectual is hard in all sorts of ways, old and new, it's still worth giving it a try.

Irving Spivak:
'How to Be an Intellectual' can best be recommended because of Williams scathing and fact-filled indictment of colleges, in concert with the politicians, who have decided that the education biz is just that: a business.

—Rita Felski:
Critics, books, journals, institutions, money: Jeffrey Williams takes on the many faces of the humanities in this engaging book. If only more scholars wrote with such verve and clarity! How to be an Intellectual is the perfect guide to the idiosyncrasies of academic life.

—Laura Kipnis:
The 'criticism without footnotes' that Jeffrey Williams proposes and enacts in How to Be an Intellectual makes for lively and engaging reading. His shrewd assessments of contemporary critical pashas, schools, and fashions are necessary reading for anyone involved in the literary and cultural issues of our times.