I was working on an essay recently about my experiences taking the GRE subject test in literature and what that test may say about English departments’ curricula. When I sent a draft of that essay to one of my colleagues, he pointed out that I generalized about other English departments’ curricula based on our own, which he argued is not typical. After several years of reading about higher education and writing occasional essays such as this one, I’m beginning to believe that we all generalize about academia based almost exclusively on our own experiences.
