At a Web site entitled 3quarksdaily.com, David Schneider has a powerful reminiscence of a few years spent at Oxford in the early ’90s studying English literature. The contrast in seriousness and engagement with U.S. humanities study circa 2009 is remarkable, enough so that Schneider can single out a commitment that never should have to be announced: “More than anything else, my Oxford tutors tried to communicate the idea that studying the literature of the British Isles was an important endeavor.”