This kind of stupidity really annoys me. If they think they get rich with writing that means they already think they are good at writing, so why not learn something useful in the off-chance they don't get famous multimillionaire authors? They can still write in their free time, like a normal person with a hobby, and don't have to have their existence threatened when they don't get famous (like 99.999% of art degree students).
The math professor in my online vocational training told us about Fermatists. Fermatists are people who think they've proven, or about to prove, Fermat's Last Theorem. They've been a persistent thorn in every math department's side since before FLT was proven and they haven't stopped; many of them think the existing proof is deficient, and those which don't still think they've found, or about to find, a better one.
My physics professor, back at the university, told us about how he got fucked up by a guy who found an empty solution for Schroedinger's Equation: see, you can write it in terms of vector potentials, and that one guy solved it for vector potentials and found what he thought was a new class of physical phenomena. Of course, actually feeding these functions to the proper SE would give a trivial case of 0 == 0. My prof, then an undergrad, was tasked with writing a reply, and the guy didn't like the reply and tried to get my professor punished.
Now, these look like
bad examples; they suggest that studying math or theoretical physics on your own is
kind of a bad idea. (A better example would be my own: I took vocational training for shits and giggles and built a career out of it.) But it does prove that one can study math or theoretical physics as a hobby
for one's own satisfaction.
Why can't the tranny study literature on his own? He complains about a professor assigning him a "transphobic" book. If he knows better books, why doesn't he read them himself for free and have more money for castration revisions?
The answer is he doesn't actually love Shakespeare or literature,
he loves the idea of being a Shakespearean scholarly authority. Now
this takes money.
We are in a Spenglerian "Second Religiosity". Which is a rising in spiritual seeking when things (specifically rationalism and in our case the faith in tech & progress) fail to deliver the happy utopias that were promised.
It's been a long time since I read* Spengler but the spiritualism thing started a long time ago. I keep complaining about this in

threads: most atheists, and also many believers, can't imagine a god who wasn't explicitly supernatural. This has never relented since the inception of Romanticism. Even the rare people who believe in God rather than in the morality of identifying as religious ("good for the kids"), often have a completely materialistic understanding of daily reality and think of their religion as a cheat power they have over normies.
* I only read
The Decline of the West and didn't understand shit at the time, I was like 13. I'm going by Auron "they're just evil and want to diddle kids" McIntyre's deleted xitter post I still have in my bookmarks, "Oswald Spengler predicting that the west will abandon science".
Decline was published in 1918 and 1922. Romanticism had started over a century earlier.