I'm getting a PhD in literature. Recently, for a fellowship application, I had to write a personal statement. This happens about every five minutes in graduate school, and usually you just claim to have invented sliced bread and you're done. For this application, however, I was asked to provide more of a motivational story - a narrative, if you will. I sent the finished product to my friend to look it over.

She sent me back her advice. "Remember all those conversations we had about what it means to be a public intellectual?" she said. "I think you should put all of that in there, talk about your role in the public sphere."

Only I don't really believe in public intellectuals anymore. I certainly don't believe that's what I'm training to be. Literature PhDs who are holding onto the fantasy of being public intellectuals are some of the most dangerously unbalanced people I've ever met.

If there's one thing I've learned from the combined brain-power of these lunatics, however, it's that there are multiple publics, not just one. Probably the biggest real "public" that I belong to, galvanized around NPR, comprises some 30% of the nation. Public intellectuals are simply part of an intellectual public, one that values a certain way of thinking and talking. And although I do believe these individuals influence policy decisions, I'm not confident I understand how that happens in the echo chamber that is "public" debate. Moreover, the role of literature in these conversations is that of window-dressing, like the book review by Maureen Corrigan at the end of Fresh Air when the interview runs a little short. Literature pretties up its slender publics without really changing them.

Three of my closest friends dropped out of literature programs at prestigious universities, one to be a doctor, one to be a lawyer, and one to be a teacher. In terms of real-world skills, the last is the only one I can really relate to. Being in graduate school for four years (five if you count the masters), the main thing I've learned about myself is that I enjoy teaching undergraduates. This may not sound like an unusual trait for a person intending to be a professor, but in my department it marks you as a kind of happy-go-lucky, flower-picking dreamer with stars of misplaced idealism in your eyes. In a recent meeting, I mentioned to my advisor that I've been adjuncting at a nearby university. He struggled for a moment with his disgust, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, and finally asked, with a real effort at sympathy, "Do you need the dough?" Somewhat as if I had told him I was stripping, not teaching a survey of British literature.

The study of literature is a backward profession. It was not intended to change worlds; it was barely intended to change minds. The history of literary criticism is tied up with the rise of the university system, which is linked with the rise of market capitalism. Its chief social function is to cement social stratifications by according what is called "cultural capital" to students either born into the elite or able to pay their way in.

The study of literature is a useless profession. However, its purposelessness, as Kant would tell you, is its chief purpose. It is a lifelong intellectual absorption in an aesthetic realm whose real-world effects are mysterious, ephemeral, and unpredictable. No matter how much we attempt to invest it with a politics, it remains stubbornly - not apolitical, but diversely political, diffusely political, political in a funhouse mirror. So we are caught in a public that is not even really a public, a private public, an ivory tower. Any messages that manage to escape through the window and fly out into the real world almost immediately lose their relevance in the tower world. What stays in the tower, however, has real beauty and even usefulness, such as it is, the Kantian aesthetic usefulness of being outside (or inside, but protected by and from) capitalism.

But the teaching of literature, though bound up in social stratifications, is not useless. When you've taught someone something, you know you've done it. The effects of teaching are mysterious, ephemeral, and unpredictable, but you can see them with your own eyes.

The university where I'm adjuncting has a "social justice mission." Does this mean that the ideas taught in the classroom are ideologically liberal? Maybe, but that's not what's important at this university. What's important is quietly announced in the framed photographs that line the halls. This urban university admitted black and white students side by side in the forties and fifties, and the black-and-white photographs show them rehearsing side by side for school plays, studying on park benches, volunteering in the community, raising their hands in non-segregated classrooms, and graduating, with huge happy smiles and stars of misplaced idealism in their eyes. What I am teaching my students in the classroom is the same thing I am teaching myself just by being there, just by caring about their existence, just by putting my body in front of a classroom and learning all of their names. The study of literature is useless, but in a useful way; the teaching of literature is vital.