Lots of established academic hand-wringing in these final days of 2013. It’s like, I know that you told all your colleagues you’d “get some writing done” over the break, and instead you’ve been binge-watching Scandal and eating pot pie all day, so now to assuage your impostor syndrome/productivity guilt you have to do something that has to do with The Field, and so why not weigh in on an Internets War between two veritable nonentities, and then tsk-tsk people on their inappropriate tones, and “comfort” them by telling them that it’s OK, they’re just coddled millennials who’ve never been rejected from anything, ever, and this is how the big, bad world works?

Why not do that?

That’s pretty much the same as writing and submitting for publication a monograph whose peer reviewers laud it as a field-changer. Pretty much.

Oh, but here I go again. Would you look…

O Academic Martyr Squad, your paper-grading crosses your defining characteristic–I see you the cross of grading, and raise you the cross of ACADEMIC FREEDOM.

A little backstory…

When I published “The End of the College Essay (An Essay),” I definitely expected a fracas. Here, in no particular order, is what I expected, and could handle:

1) Righteous indignation (the more senior the faculty, the more prestigious the institution–in short, the less likely one is to have graded an average Freshperson paper from the American hoi polloi in the past decade).

2) Disagreement and passionate defense of the essay, even when students don’t want to write it. And this was kiiiiinda my point. If you’re so wedded to the idea, then we need to work to fix it, pronto. The plagiarism, the rush jobs, the general consumer mentality of today’s American college students–these are real problems, and they need to be…