Academic literature has magnitude when it presents a character so robust that he or she takes off from the page and lands to nest in ordinary parlance. Three contrasting examples described in this article are: (1) "Moo," by Jane Smiley; (2) "The Human Stain," by Philip Roth; and (3) "The Crazed," by Ha Jin. Significantly, all three of these wonderful novels lie within the zig-zaggy, porous boundaries of realism. As pundit after pundit, higher education--the advanced production, distribution, and consumption of knowledge--is changing radically. The literature that most acutely and imaginatively represents the emergence of the new is neither realism nor punditry but speculative fiction.