No, the book-plus standard for tenure will continue [Benton has just noted the MLA‘s formal position paper arguing against the mindless bookolatry of humanities departments], perhaps sustained by the use of ever-larger subsidies, weaker editing, and smaller print runs, until the publication of most books -- excluding the flagship productions -- with a university press will become of little more significance than having photocopies of your college memoir spiral-bound at Kinko's. [No, not this analogy. The next one.]

…I [having himself, he notes, begun non-university press forms of publishing] no longer feel beholden to the petty rivalries and resentments that characterize academic life. It's like being born again. [No, not this analogy either. The next one.] Imagine it for yourself: There are people out there -- possibly millions of them -- who are willing to pay for the pleasure of reading your work. Those people could give your ideas, expressed in a single mainstream book, the impact of a lifetime of scholarly writing. You can also earn the posthumous respect of Samuel Johnson, as well the relatives who warned you that professors tend to be paupers. Poverty and obscurity, as the world sees them, are not necessarily signifiers of academic virtue.

My experience as a writer in the last year is something like that moment in the 2004 film, The Village [this analogy], when a blind teenage girl named Ivy ventures through the terrifying woods that enclose her 19th-century farming community to obtain medicine to save her dying fiancé, Lucius. Eventually, after escaping from a member of her village disguised as a forest monster -- the one she had been warned about all her life -- Ivy reaches a stone wall and climbs it. On the other side, is the modern world: It is the "real world," from which the elders of her community long ago fled to build a utopia that, in time, became a den of resentments, rivalries, and secrets as bitter as the life from which they had escaped.

After Ivy returned with the medicine, I wonder if she and her husband stayed in the village. Or did Ivy tell Lucius of her discovery, and they went away together to live in the 21st century with all its freedoms and conveniences? Perhaps she kept her secret or passed it along to only a few kindred spirits whom she recognized, the way teachers often do with their students.

Once you realize there's a world outside the academic village, almost any future seems possible.