Reader’s Digest

Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. — Oscar Wilde

On the face of things, it was a dream assignment. In the fall term, when everyone was still fresh from their summer vacation and filled with that delicious sense of promise that only the start of a new academic year can bring, I would teach an entire course devoted to the life and works of Oscar Wilde. Everything about the prospect appealed to the literary traditionalist in me. All summer I fed upon visions of the return to campus. As my children built castles in the sand, I constructed them in the air: halcyon scenes of a rumpled but kindly professor leading a dozen or so eager undergraduates through Wilde’s oeuvre as the mellow autumn light played upon the faux-Doric columns of Varsity Towers. It would be, I told myself, a small but significant victory for learning for its own sake. There...