On literature: how universities kill them?

After a long, long time, last summer I picked up a full-length fiction piece to read.  I mean, I read short stories all the time.  But, it had been years since I read one that is a lengthy tale.  I re-read Gabriel Garcia Maquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.  I got way more from it this second time.  Then, I was back to short stories.  Over the spring break, it was a potboiler of sorts--Sacred Games.  I am now on to a third in a year: Zadie Smith's White Teeth...

Whether in the short or long form, well told stories typically are more than the simple story itself.  They help me (us?) understand the world, and somehow make order of the chaos that is outside.  As I have noted before, I found so much of valuable insights into what it means to be human from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Dickens, Narayan, Saroyan, Maugham, ...

But, as I have often remarked in this blog, the academic departments in universities present such a distorted approach to literature that I am, in more ways than one, glad that I never read in a classroom context any of the great works that I admire.
So, back to the book that I am reading, and its author ... The talented and accomplished Zadie Smith says:

I spent three years in college and wrote three and a half stories but I read everything I could get my hands on. White Teeth is really the product of that time; it's like the regurgitation of the kind of beautiful, antiquated, left-side-of-the-brain liberal arts education which is dying a death even as I write this. Generally, an English Lit degree trains you to be a useless member of the modern world

Yes, a "useless member of the modern world" ... boy, these writers have such a wonderful way with words :)  And, yes, I criticize universities for what we do now because I value liberal education way too much, and perhaps idealize it a tad ... oh well ....