As a person whose best years to date were spent pursuing an expensive, but wholly worthwhile MFA in creative writing, it should come as no surprise that I came already offended to “Get a Real Degree,” Elif Batuman’s essay in the new issue of The London Review of Books. Batuman—author of the admittedly excellent The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them—has always made a point of celebrating her decision to get a PhD rather than an MFA, and here she takes creative writing programs further to task for what she believes to be their collective role in fostering an era of literary mediocrity.

Batuman does make some strong and necessary points in the piece, which also serves as a mixed review of Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and The Rise of Creative Writing. Particularly damning is her critique of “high culture pluralism”—literature that “tends to assign novelistic alienation to the domain of ‘the alienated ethnic outsider,'" and that's "documented by the blog and book Stuff White People Like," which charts "the loss of cultural capital associated with whiteness, and the attempts of White People to compensate for this loss by displaying knowledge of non-white cultures.” She also makes a strong point about the ingrained feelings of shame MFA students and professional writers experience over the perceived privilege of their own chosen profession, a shame that leaks into those writers' work, and taints it.

But I find fault with Batuman when she gives too much credit to creative writing programs for shaping our current literature. Surely there are powerful market forces at work here as well. In my experience, the kind of writing she complains about feels less encouraged by MFA programs (or at least the one I attended) than by a publishing industry eager to capitalize on an equally prevalent shame among readers. Also, Batuman seems to imagine that all writing programs have the same agenda: overvaluing self-expression and craft, and ignoring the importance of literary and world history. This stereotyping is on par with saying all PhD lit programs encourage candidates only interested in theory, with no appreciation for literary artistry; a stereotype disproved by Batuman herself, who clearly loves (and writes) literature. Finally, her ultimate assessment that contemporary fiction consists mostly of well-written but mediocre books rings completely false for anyone with the patience and dedication to actually buy and read more than two new books a year—Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes, Alexander Hemon's Lazarus Project, and Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned are a few good examples—and to seek out fiction from a variety of sources including small presses and weird journals, as well as big publishing houses.