A 60-Year Duke Professor on Literature, Grade Inflation, and Whether Academia Will Survive

In 1992, The New York Times profiled literature scholar Stanley Fish, who was in the midst of building Duke University’s English department into a world-renowned hub of avante garde academic trends. To speak for Duke’s old guard, the paper turned to Victor Strandberg, who had been teaching in the department for 25 years.

Fish and the superstars he recruited would leave Duke within the decade, but Strandberg just taught his last class at Duke this month after 60 years on its faculty. 

Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the Vietnam War, the Reagan Revolution, the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic all happened during Strandberg’s career at Duke. When he was hired in 1966, after four years at the University of Vermont, he was offered $9,500 a year and he bought a house for $22,000. 

His tenure included the entirety of Mike Krzyzewski’s reign as Duke’s men’s basketball coach.

“That’s been a pleasant surprise,” Strandberg said of Duke’s basketball success.

I sat down with Strandberg in April in his Duke office to discuss how English and academia have changed over his decades as a professor, what he’s thinking as his career comes to an end, and whether he’s hopeful about the future of liberal-arts colleges as he’s known them.

At the end of the conservation, I asked Strandberg if he had any last thoughts. He recounted all of the presidents who led the university over his time and Duke’s growth into a global research powerhouse. Then, calmly, he said: “Well, there’s an end to everything. After 60 years, it’s the end of my teaching career. It’s been a very happy one. I don’t feel I’ve necessarily deserved it, but I’m glad that it did come my way.”

My recording ends just after that.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you feeling right now?

I’ll miss the classroom. It’s been my life, my purpose, my identity for 64 years. I taught for four years at the University of Vermont before coming here. I’ll miss it very much. But at age 91, it is time to step aside.

I think I’m mentally sharp still—sharp enough to do this job. But physically, I don’t have the stamina. My voice has degraded in the last two or three years.

Had you considered retiring previously?

No.

Why did you make the decision now?

What moved me was the university is trying to shrink its faculty in the face of Trump’s budget cuts. And they offered an inducement to all the faculty: You get a year’s salary when they retire. And I figured at age 91, I might meet my maker at any time—I better take that offer.

Come the fall, how do you think you’re going to spend your days?

I am trying to line up some teaching functions. These would be voluntary, free of charge. There are undergraduates who have a book club. These are students who read books outside of class, just for the love of learning. There are no exams or term papers, which certainly is a great relief to me. That’s the worst part of teaching.

One of the things I would have considered was doing something in prisons, maybe poetry. But now, at age 91, I don’t have that much stamina for travel. So I guess I can’t do it unless it were on Zoom.

Back when you were starting, what did you think this job would be like? And was it what you expected?

Well, I started in 1962 at the University of Vermont. And that was a very difficult year. The first thing they did was throw me into teaching world literature, most of which I had never read.

I had to teach Greek plays—Euripedes, Aeschylus, Sophocles. I had to teach the Bhagavad Gita, the most influential sacred writ of the Hindus. I didn’t know anything about that, but I had to teach it. I had to teach familiar classics like Don Quixote, Goethe’s Faust, The Brothers Karamazov. All this is my first year, which I didn’t know anything about really. So that was very tough.

But after that first year, I’ve been living on the hog ever since. I’m still teaching world literature—right now I’ve got a course on it.

How has the field of English literature changed over your time, and how do you feel about that?

I was brought up, in grad school, on what was called the New Criticism. And what it was, essentially, is you would focus on a great text—The Great Gatsby, The Wasteland, Moby Dick. And you would explore the internal dynamics of that text using all the information available from outside the text—biography, psychology, religion, history, whatever was relevant. But the most important thing was to get the best understanding that we could possibly manage.

I still follow that guideline, and I always have.

So when Stanley Fish brought in Critical Theory, I was a witness and an observer, but not a participant. I of course would take an interest in Marxism or queer studies or feminist studies or whatever to the extent that they were inherent in the text we were looking at. But otherwise I did not propagate an ideology. That was not my purpose behind the lectern, and it still isn’t.

Whereas I think propagating an ideology was the purpose of Critical Theory. And that’s what happened when these superstars came and propagated their ideologies—not everyone did, but most of them. 

Throughout all this time, there have frequently been people claiming that the novel’s dead, that the author’s dead, that the humanities are dead—

Well I can tell you something about that. 

Please.

When I came here, and up to around the year 2010, students were very interested in literature on campus. I had these big classes—150, 200 students. They all wanted to learn more about literature and the great works.

And then I think what happened was two things: One was the rise of social media, which gradually distracted these students, took down their attention, broke down their attention span, which is required to study literature, especially novels. The other thing was the great market crash of 2008 that almost ruined the world economy. It came within a hair of something worse than the Great Depression. 

The effect of these two things was to promote a college education as training for a profession—pretty understandably. I think that’s been a big factor up to the present, and it’s been amplified by, of course, AI, and other such complications. 

I’m going to use Faulkner as my example, who I think is our greatest writer. I had a central mission: A university could not be a great institution if it did not have a course on Faulkner every two years, so I made it my business to offer Faulkner every two years. 

It was a very successful course for the first, oh, 40-some years. It culminated around the year 2000. I had a Faulkner course that got 125 students who volunteered to read maybe our most difficult great writer. About five years ago, I offered a course on Faulkner and got 17 students. That’s pretty good, in the circumstances. 

Three years ago, I offered a course on Faulkner, and I got zero takers. For the first time, I could not teach Faulkner. 

There was one comment that came to my attention. There was a student who wrote: “I took Faulkner because of Strandberg. I had no idea who Faulkner was.” That was part of the picture: Nobody had ever told these students who Faulkner was. They had never heard of him in high school. And that’s because in high school they couldn’t teach him. They’d rebel.

Duke is a wildly different institution than it was when you first came here. 

Oh yeah.

How do you feel about the way it’s changed? 

I came here in 1966. It had been desegregated for only three years. I did have one Black student in my first year, C.B. Claiborne. And then I added a few as time went on.

In 1970, the university made a big push to include more Black students and the undergraduate body. And I was proud of that. We offered a special course in the summer to help them adjust to college, and I helped run it. That’s one of the changes. 

Demographically, the other great change is a huge increase in the number of Asian American students. In my first few years, I don’t recall ever having an Asian American student. Now, they’re a large part of my classes.

That’s an interesting story of how immigration works in America. The first generation has to earn a livelihood. They won’t show up in my classes, but they make sure their children get the best chance in life, and they will study really hard and they will show up in my classes and they will be damn good students. 

The quality of the Duke students has always been first rate. Now, the competition to get into Duke is even more intense, so perhaps they are even better now, but they’ve always been very good.

A big change, academically for a professor, is the disappearance of the grading scale. When I started, if I had a class of 30 students, maybe one student would get an A or an A-minus. Maybe nobody would. That continued until the Vietnam War. By then, if a student failed at Duke, a male student would be sent to Vietnam. That put pressure on the grading scale. 

So the grading scale weakened, but it didn’t disappear until I would say the mid-2010s. The Duke Chronicle every so often would say what the average grade was at Duke. I noticed when it went to an A-minus. More recently, I noticed the average grade is an A.

There’s so much that has so many people in universities worried: AI, the crisis of literacy you spoke about, adjunctification of the workforce, all these things. What is your level of optimism for academia? Will it survive?

I think we’re going through a very tough period with Trump making war, mostly on very elite colleges—getting revenge, I suppose, for not being Phi Beta Kappa or something when he was at University of Pennsylvania. 

I think it’s quite clear now colleges have to hunker down and—sort of like the Blitz of London, go into the air raid shelter and wait for the bombers to pass over and go home. You’ll have to do that for the next three years. 

Some people say it’s cowardice, they should speak up and resist and so on. I think when it comes to survival, that comes first. Shakespeare comes to our rescue: discretion is the better part of valor. 

I think eventually we’ll get through this and come out of our bomb shelters and resume our proper business.