One might conceivably be a victim if one works in a coal mine or a steel mill or in the fields as a sharecropper, but no one who works as a teacher in a university, or for that matter is a student there, is a victim. To have a teaching job in a university is to work roughly seven months a year in a generally Edenic setting at intellectual tasks largely of one's own choosing. Relativity of relativities, a victim among university teachers is someone who isn't permitted to teach the Shakespeare course, or who feels he has stupid students, or whose office is drafty, or who doesn't get tenure (which is lifetime security in the job) and therefore must find another job within (usually) the next 16 months. These are not exactly the kinds of problem faced by, say, boat people fleeing Cambodia.

Yet an increasing number of university teachers nowadays teach one or another branch of victimology -what might not unfairly be called Victim Lit. The more prestige-laden the school, the more victimological studies are likely to be a strong component in its curriculum. ''Unfortunately,'' writes a black Harvard graduate named Christopher H. Foreman Jr. in a letter to The New Republic about ethnic sensitivity training at Harvard, ''the psychological comfort of being simultaneously privileged and oppressed seems too enticing for many people to forgo.'' Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and other only scarcely less august institutions compete among themselves lest they be caught without a goodly supply of angry teachers of victimological subjects. Irony of ironies, nuttiness of nuttinesses, the scene thus presented is that of the fortunate teaching the privileged that the world is by and large divided between the oppressed and the oppressors, victims and executioners, and that the former are inevitably morally superior. As a tuition-paying parent, I used sometimes to think, writing out those heavy checks to universities, that the only true victims in this entire arrangement were those of us who helped to pay for it all.

Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic people), are not usually counted as victims and thus rarely get included in affirmative action or other quota favoritism programs. A victim, then, is someone who insistently declares himself a victim.

People who count and call themselves victims never blame themselves for their condition. They therefore have to find enemies. Forces high and low block their progress: society is organized against them; history is not on their side; the malevolent, who are always in ample supply, conspire to keep them down. Asked by an interviewer in Time magazine about violence in schools that are all-black -that is, violence by blacks against blacks - the novelist Toni Morrison replies, ''None of those things can take place, you know, without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.''

For victimhood to be taken seriously, there has to be a core of substance to the victim's complaints. Blacks were discriminated against, de facto and de jure, in this country for a very long while. Women were paid lower wages for doing the same work as men and they were indubitably excluded from jobs they were perfectly capable of performing. Mexican-Americans often worked under deplorable conditions. A case for victimhood cannot simply be invented, though some people try. I recall some time ago watching a television program that stressed the problems of the unwed teen-age father. Greatly gripping though they doubtless were, I remember muttering to myself: the unwed father, another victim group - who'd've thunk it?

Even when there is a core of substance to the victims' complaints, they tend to push it. A subtle shift takes place, and suddenly the victim is no longer making appeals but demands. The terms lady and homosexual are out; it's only woman and gay that are acceptable. Public pronouncements from victims take on a slightly menacing quality, in which, somehow, the line between victim and bully seems to blur. At some point, one gets the sense that the victims actively enjoy their victimhood - enjoy the moral vantage point it gives them to tell off the rest of the country, to overstate their case, to absolve themselves from all responsibility for their condition, to ask the impossible and then demonstrate outrage when it isn't delivered.

Apparently, the victims of our day rather like this state of affairs. I say ''apparently'' because it has been many years since any of the victim groups have shown anything approaching a genuine interest in organization. Instead, they seem to function chiefly as loose repositories for the expression of resentment. A strong sign of this is the striking absence of leadership in any of the major victim movements of the time: black, women, gay. The Rainbow Coalition - it might more accurately be called the Victim Coalition - isn't cutting it. Like the wild rookie pitcher in the movie ''Bull Durham,'' the various victim groups are ''all over the place'': blaming racism for black teen-age crime, male psychology for capitalism, the Government for AIDS. There is something fundamentally unserious about all of this. Whereas once the idea was to shake off victimhood through courage and organization, nowadays the idea seems to be to enjoy it for its emotional effects.