On being a true critic

Our academic institutions lack a presiding presence. Our expert devotions, endlessly critical, can never be commanding. We are stuck with our faith in criticism, only marginally different from popular versions of the endless expressional quest or liberated understandings. A true critic, I think, would be one who teaches in an institutional order critically opposed to the established ease of questioning. If we were true critics, then our work could not be taken up and laid down as it is, one enlightenment crowding another, and certainly we could never be hired for what we are not: each of us his own 'Perfesser,' at his piano, tinkling interminable blues for the masses of traumatized now gainfully employed in the cat house of intellect. These people are not clinically ill. They are the next worse thing: culturally disorganized.

-Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1973.