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Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Language Log on Fish
Mark Liberman has a thoughtful reply to Fish over at Language Log. He notes that, in the 19th century “academic humanists were expected to teach grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, ethics, and theology; to give their students the concepts and skills needed to read and interpret important texts, both sacred and profane; to that end, to improve and transmit the knowledge of classical languages and literatures; to investigate the languages and literatures of other ancient civilizations; to document modern languages and cultures, especially the dominant language of each nation-state; to keep the past alive through historical narrative, and to extend those narratives into the advancing present.” This is the understanding, and the system, that was in place at the beginning of the 20th century. “In that context, it made sense for the majority of faculty positions to be allocated to humanities departments. Over the past century, the proportion has been eroded—though (I believe) that this is because new things have been added, mostly in science and engineering, and not because the size of humanities departments has been reduced.”
Lieberman is fine with the old answer, though he suspects that many of the changes in the humanities “since 1900” are “very problematic for the academic future of the disciplines involved. As Prof. Fish eloquently explains, the social contract that established the humanities in academia is now void. At least, the most of the academic humanists think that it is. Most of them would vigorously reject the idea that they might be part of a system for creating and sustaining their society’s culture. Many of them see their role as actively opposing any such system.” He expresses a certain “nostalgia for the days before the advent of what my colleagues in literary studies call ‘theory’.”
Update: Our Fish threads are now linked at Language Log. & the comment count for Fish2 stands at 416 as of 5:42 PM Eastern time on Tuesday 15 Jan.
Comments
Liberman: “So why does the MLA—to name just one of the professional associations of academic humanists—still have 30,000 members? There are two obvious reasons: externally, many influential people still accept the “ideal [that] belongs to an earlier period”; and internally, academia is one of the most conservative cultures in the world. “
I would say no to both. (Rather, the second may be true, but it is not determinative.) The reason that there are so many humanists is that contemporary society requires a certain percentage of people in the workforce who can read and write at an advanced level. Not at a literary-studies level, but sufficient to, for instance, work in middle management or bureaucracy. Most humanists are needed in order to teach these people how to read and write in a complex fashion. Academic conservatism comes in to help keep humanities professorships from being completely adjunctified away, but so does status competition among universities.
Your comment about adjuncts hits the mark, Rich. The more I think about it, the more Fish’s argument seems deeply narcissistic. He really does seem to wonder: “Why the hell are they paying me to experience the pleasure of interpreting texts?” Well, in Fish’s case, status competition is part of the answer. He really does seem to be oblivious to the teaching that gets done by humanities faculty, full-time and adjuncts.
* * * *
I have no idea what I’d say if I took on the justification of the humanities as a project.
Fish certainly does well represent the corruption of those who hold long-established but now functionless sinecures. What his statement means beyond that I don’t know.
Historically, up until a certain point poets everywhere were kings, prime ministers, local rulers, military leaders, and trusted advisers of the ruler. Not all, probably not most, but a very significant proportion. In the 19th century they started to be free lance writers and depressed alcoholics living in basements. By a certain point there were very few poets living of the market any more, and they all lived in basements. Then, since about 1950, they started to be petty bureaucrats who pretended to teach.
Literary studies is a slightly different story, but not wildly so, especially after 1950.
Since the rise of the “social science” model and technocracy, literature and other forms of generalism (old-style big-picture philosophy, old style big-picture history) have been increasingly irrelevant. The idea that someone might try to sum things up in one story, or that one mind might try to comprehend the whole at all, is excluded in a world ruled by technical specialists and experts.
We still do have generalists, but they’re usually cheesy freelancers who puff up some kind of quasi-science into a pop book. Or Dick Cheney types, visionaries remaking the world on the basis of cliches from business administration and western novels.
I feel worse about this than Fish does, because I don’t have the sinecure.
You’re all very welcome.
You’re right about the mis-fit between old-style generalism and the research university. There ought to be a place for that in undergraduate colleges, because that’s the level of discourse you’re aiming for: something that can be read by undergraduates, but requires half a lifetime of learning to put together. Alas, the people who teach at those places were trained in the research university of specialists. They have no role models for generalism and a professional world that rewards specialty publication.
This might well be obvious and implied but I thought I’d hold it up for a closer inspection;
Is the problem not that the modern humanities ultimately have their roots in a very different intellectual climate, namely that of the renaissance?
The renaissance was partially characterised by a rediscovery of classical learning. Not just within the theological tradition but proto-scientifc and philosophical. At this point, it was NECESSARY for students to pick up skills of interpretation and critical analysis because study was largely an archeological pursuit… you’d delve into the past and interpret or re-interpret a text so as to shed new light on contemporary concerns.
You can see the off-spring of this in every philosophy department in the western world. It’s over 2000 years since Plato was writing but you STILL have people writing about him.
In many ways, I see the question of studying Plato as a microcosm of the wider debate surrounding the humanities.
There was a time when it was necessary to study Plato because a) people were making up for lost time and were trying to work out the full depth of what the Greeks had worked out and b) there was an intellectual climate that made breaking new ground quite difficult.
The thing is that we’ve now not made up for the lost ground of the dark ages, our understanding has outstripped anything that the Classical world would have ever deemed possible.
So why is academia still dominated by people who sift existing texts?
We need the humanities (or rather, certain academic disciplines) so that the demand for middle management and bureaucrats can be filled? That certainly ties in with Althusser’s notion about the independent state apparatuses serving the dominant ideology.
We have the notion that the humanities are dependent upon, for the most part, our current state-supported higher education systems. We tie humanities and these systems together, and often we assume they are the same thing. That’s a mistake, I think. The last winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature stopped formal schooling at 14. How many of our best writers and artists have PHDs? Yet we talk about how much better “readers” we are because we’ve learned some of the techne of literary and cultural analysis.
Arts and literature don’t need defending. They are just what people do. We might as well defend walking. What needs defending is the current academic systems associated with the humanities. As much as I hate to say this, I think Fish has a point: He is being paid several times the national average income to indulge his pleasures.
This isn’t just an academic observation. We live in a time in which information of all sorts is readily available. Many if not most colleges and universities offer courses online. From a student point of view, what is the difference between taking an online course and researching their interests themselves? The former is pre-packaged, of course, but I’d wager that pre-packaged courses are either available now or shortly will be. The real difference is accreditation. A student with the drive to learn on his own does not receive certification or degrees. This matters to the world at large, _unless_ the student is a writer or artist.
Higher education is changing, as it must. Can we really justify requiring taxpayers to pay exorbitant salaries to a professor because he happens to be the editor of a prestigious journal?—in which case, his teaching load is either nonexistant or minimal? In some ways, Fish’s point about the academic priesthood is spot on. And attacks on priesthoods generally always seen as attacks on what the priests claim to serve.
The humanities are a good place to dump smart people.
"We need the humanities (or rather, certain academic disciplines) so that the demand for middle management and bureaucrats can be filled? That certainly ties in with Althusser’s notion about the independent state apparatuses serving the dominant ideology.”
This isn’t true of just the academic humanities, of course. Let’s take astrophysics, say. When I was an astrophysics grad student, it quickly became apparent that the astrophysics department had three main functions. One of them was the research done by the professors. The second was training the grad students to become future professors. No one outside astrophysics particularly cared about either of these, of course. But the third, and the one that was the primary point of contact between the department and the rest of the university, was Astronomy 100. The university had a requirement that every undergrad take at least one science course, no matter what their major was, and Astro 100 was reputed to be the easiest one.
So the professors and grad students served as a pool of labor for teaching Astro 100, all so that the undergrads, who would duly go on to doing who knows what in some middle layer of our economy, would be exposed to a smidgen of science at some point in their lives. This was useful to them, I would guess. Not so much in terms of knowledge. (I did teach people that the Earth went around the Sun who had not known that, but after all, you don’t have to know that.) But because it forced them to think briefly in a certain way that their employers found useful later on.
No doubt the teaching job could be done with more economic efficiency if the research was jettisoned. But wait—could it? Grad students were paid about $7,000/year to teach, perhaps $13,000/year in today’s money. How are you going to find people to teach cheaper than that? And the research done by the professors, and its cost, is I think adequately explained by status competition. A university that just gave up and hired all adjuncts would not have high status compared to other universities. And the professors to some extent pay their way, from the institution’s point of view, through fund-raising for research funds from the government.
People like Fish may have lost sight of this, I don’t know. But society couldn’t function without someone teaching all those undergrads something. And people in Fish’s position are the visible prestige point that keeps the rest of the pyramid standing.
People like Fish may have lost sight of this, I don’t know.
Well, Fish did spend a couple of years as dean of arts and sciences at U of Illinois at Chicago.
Trent, Jonathan, I have to be honest: I’m getting a little exasperated.
Yes, in the film Good Will Hunting, we are treated to a little speech about how you can get a perfectly good humanistic education for $1.75 in overdue fees at the library.
That may be true if you live in Boston, as the protagonist does, in a state with one of the densest concentrations of universities to be found anywhere in the world.
If, on the other hand, you grow up in a small town in Northern California, I can assure you that the existence of some website somewhere, with badly translated excerpts from Hegel, and amateurish accompanying analysis, will never, ever deliver you to the world of German Romantic philosophy and its modern reception. You need knowledgeable professors. You need lively discussions. Otherwise, you won’t ever encounter Hegel, or hundreds of other authors, or the discussions that incorporate them, or the communities of skill and passion that help the best intellectual work to come to fruition.
Yes, you can read Dickens on your own, but the idea that the world of literature and knowledge functions independently of the academy is the kind of fiction that sticks around just long enough to float some new assault on the preservation and progress of knowledge.
In part, people still read Plato because new people, having only recently been born, have not yet had the opportunity. But they also read him (or, in a sense, re-read him within the culture) because contemporary history casts a changing light upon him. We should not be eager to announce that the work of reflecting on epochal moments in Western culture has already been completed.
OT: My theory is that Good Will Hunting was a “Mary Sue” vanity project for the actor-writers (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck). They wished they were street punks, they wished they were geniuses, and voila! in the movie they were. Or one of them, anyway.
The movie was well-intentioned and had some good things in it, but I just couldn’t accept the premise. A klutzy nerd math genius living on fast food in his mom’s basement—that I could accept.
In support of Joseph, I can testify that autodidacticism failed me when it came to philosophy. Philosophy is something one does rather than something one reads, and I doubt I ever could have come to even the elementary understanding I have without structured interaction. There’s a reason the Academy started there.
Literature and other arts of one’s own culture are another matter, however. There I’ve never felt deprived (or been made to feel deprived) by lack of classroom experience: only by lack of access.
(I don’t claim to be any avatar of normality in this regard—just giving evidence.)
Probably this is a dead thread, but everyone should read this.
JK,
Yesterday morning I wrote a reply but it seems to have been lost in the ether. After I wrote it, though, I discovered that John Emerson on his website covered some of the same ground, but in much more depth. And I don’t have the time atm to try to recreate what I wrote earlier.
However, I don’t have problems with humanities departments per se, but I do think the paradigm has to shift. The cost of tuition continues to increase by double percentage points each year; something has to give. I understand the benefits of a good formal education, but it’s also a fact that students—even that guy in Northern California—has access to cheap or free books. Isn’t it a bit of stretch to say that that student must have his reading mediated by literary or cultural scholars before he can become a thoughtful humanist? Libraries are everywhere, internet access is becoming ubiquitous, books from Amazon can be quite inexpensive. Learned communities are easily accessible through news groups and other forums.
Many if not most undergraduate humanities courses are not taught by prestigious scholars, or even by tenured faculty. Online instruction (or as they call it at my school, distant learning, ugh) is going to become more prevalent. How long until subversive minds recreate or create such courses and make them available for free? Are such courses as good as live interaction with knowledgeable scholars? Not to me. But as I said, something has to give. And regardless what happens, good thought will still be readily available to anyone who seeks it out.
(Sorry I frustrated you. It was really not my intention. It’s not so much that I necessarily believe everything I’ve said as I find myself resisting some of what others have said—even the stuff I often say myself.)
Commentary are Fish2 is now closed at the NYT, with 448 comments. The last comment, by John Bartholomew, is as lucid as any I’ve seen on the subject. Here’s the last half:
A math department is funded to train students in math - that is its justification. However, that training is largely unrelated to the academic study of math. Consider Wiles’ effort to solve Fermat’s last theorem. Solving that riddle did little to educate students and, therefore, was largely unrelated to the justification for a math department. The effort and the achievement seem to be their own reward. Creating an environment in which faculty are free to study mathematics is simply what it costs a university to have great minds train students. Likewise, training students is the cost to the professor who wishes an environment in which to study mathematics.
Thus, there is no larger justification to the study of mathematics than to attract the best minds to teach math. The justification for teaching math is clear as is the need for a department of mathematics to train students. Similarly, although there is no justification for the study of humanities, the justification is clear for the department of humanities to train students. Fifty books on Hemingway is merely the cost to attract great minds to teach Hemingway.
I’ve said several times in the past that it’s sometimes almost impossible to match money going into higher education with tasks performed by higher education, or to match payers with beneficiaries.
Tasks: tech education, vocational education, undergrad education, grad education, scholarly research, applied research, propaganda research, sports and other entertainment and party time.
Payers: Students, parents, foundations, individual donors, endowments, and a multitude of governmental organizations of many different kinds at many different levels.
Beneficiaries: undergrad students, grad students, students’ parents (?), employers, The American Republic, the worlds of art, scholarship and science, tenured faculty, untenured faculty, non-faculty staff, think-tanks, clients of university consultants, and donors gaining goodwill, credibility, legitimacy, etc.
And there aren’t a lot of simple input-output relations in that mess.
Right, John, there aren’t. Good point.
Students also benefit from learning specific job skills, from gaining employability for reasons unrelated to specific skills, from gaining in class status without gaining employability, from partying at someone else’s expense, and—of course—from the intrinsic joy of learning and participating in the great liberal arts adventure.
Trent,
The cost of tuition continues to increase by double percentage points each year; something has to give. I understand the benefits of a good formal education, but it’s also a fact that students—even that guy in Northern California—has access to cheap or free books. Isn’t it a bit of stretch to say that that student must have his reading mediated by literary or cultural scholars before he can become a thoughtful humanist? Libraries are everywhere, internet access is becoming ubiquitous, books from Amazon can be quite inexpensive. Learned communities are easily accessible through news groups and other forums.
In order for us to discuss these sorts of historical trends, we have to keep their causes in mind. Tuition rates continue to rise for many students due to decreasing public support for higher education. In California, the UC system has faced drastic cuts, as have the Cal State colleges, as have the community colleges. Is the rising cost of a formal education the result of skyrocketing salaries for tenured professors in the humanities? Absolutely not; in the past few decades, salaries for CEOs have risen disproportionately—not the salaries of scholars.
“Access to cheap or free books” is also a complex issue. Sure, compared to 300 years ago, getting access to books is incredibly easy. On the other hand, in the past fifty years, the price of paperback books has risen all out of proportion to inflation. Libraries are not always sufficiently well-funded. Big cities, like New York, and rich communities, like Newport Beach, have great libraries. However, within a few miles of the wonderful Newport Beach Library are branches of the Orange County Library system, and they’re not very good at all.
Online communities are also a mixed bag: just look at the comments thread following Fish’s post. At certain points, you have standout comments from lucid writers. In other places, you have pure noise: unfounded bias, flattery, tangential arguments, hot air. You would think creative writers would be most hostile to institutional settings; in fact, the overwhelming majority recognize the various benefits of getting an MFA degree at a place like Iowa.
Everyone I know is an auto-didact. My friend, the investor, reads Pynchon and Mencken. Another friend, a fellow graduate student in English, works hard on improving his knowledge of how to fix and maintain his car. My partner, a union organizer, reads little-known contemporary poets and writes poetry herself. I would imagine that all our social circles are like that, but none of this proves that the humanities are useless. In part, this is because, as much as I value all of these moments of intellectual and practical curiosity, I also know that all of these people have weeks where they don’t have the leisure or the energy to work on side projects. The institutional work of research and teaching in the humanities should not be buffeted by overly sentimental versions of what people do in their unpaid spare time, often in the absence of informed conversations they would like to have about the novel or history they’ve just finished.
I should also point out the difference between the Newport Beach Library and the University of California libraries. As long as your definition of “books worth reading” mostly means canonical behemoths like Jane Eyre, then yes, most libraries can help you, and so can Project Gutenberg, and that’s a great thing. But when that definition includes the consideration that probably some group of people should be researching and discussing Heidegger’s more obscure writings on metaphysics in conjunction with T. S. Eliot’s dissertation on pragmatism, then the local community library ceases to suffice.
JK,
I can buy a used copy of Being and Time off Amazon for under $17. (Compare that to the prices students must pay for even crappy textbooks—there’s a whole ‘nother topic; the many ways students and their parents are exploited.) In fact, if I were going to _do_ Heidegger again (it’s been 15 years or so since I last plumbed those waters), that’s what I’d do—buy books off Amazon or ebay, if I couldn’t find them cheap elsewhere. Further, you can find many learned books on Heidegger on Amazon. I would not shell out the bucks it would take to enroll in a program in which I could study Heidegger—that’s simply out of the question considering my own budgetary restraints.
Yes, state support for higher education has declined. Budget considerations will always be a pressure. So? And yes, internet discussion forums are a mixed bag. But what isn’t? Some of the courses I took in university were terrible, some were ok, a few were wonderful.
I’ve kind of lost the thread of what we are debating. I know that higher education is a good thing, but I also know the paradigm is changing. The academic “delivery mechanism” appears to be undergoing tweaking, as it were. I simply believe that humanities are not equivalent to academic disciplines. I never said the humanities are useless; on the contrary, I think they are essentially human. An attack on the current system of higher education is not per force an attack on the humanities, though of course it would be painted that way.
(You know, when I was reading PKD back in the ‘80s, I would love to have had some good conversations about his books in an academic setting. But they weren’t to be had. I had to talk with friends. Even today, if I want to talk about, say, The Diaries of Jane Somers, there is almost no one on campus I can talk with. Again, I have to rely upon well-read friends. If I wanted to discuss something that has had long approval in the academy, such as, say, Heidegger, then, sure, the academy is great.)
At any rate—look, I’m not really sure we fundamentally disagree. I love the academy; it has given me much pleasure—I was one of those perpetual students—almost 17 years of continuous enrollment, and I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. But a chief defense of the current system is essentially a (humanistic?) version of Reaganonmics. If our tuition and taxes are used to support a, say, feminist critic at several times the average income of the taxpayers who pay for everything, then something good might trickle down to the 19-year-olds taking freshman comp (such as, commandments to write “server” instead of “waitress"). And yes, I’m being a bit glib ;)
I don’t pretend to have the answers. As a matter of course I vote for politicians who make noises supporting higher education. But I do think the times are changing. It’s very possible that only the affluent or exceptionally gifted will have the luxury of taking classes with top scholars (actually, that’s pretty much the case now); everyone else will be taught by menial academic grunts or through online courses. When we reach that point, then the value of college courses over freely downloaded courses (and they will come) will simply be that colleges can certify.
I don’t say these things with relish. Rather, regret, but also faith that we live in times in which anyone who truly wants to learn anything can do it. At the moment, we often try to pound concepts or ways of thinking into the heads of many students who couldn’t care less. ... (Yesterday, in fact, a student told me she hadn’t read a book since the second grade—I wanted to ask, why the hell are you here?)
Trent,
Here’s one way of characterizing a potential disagreement, though I’d much rather if there weren’t one: is it the fault of the humanities that they are being subjected to budget cuts and all kinds of hostile scrutiny? If, as some people do, you believe that, because of postmodern theory or feminism or what-have-you, the humanities have lost their way, then your answer is yes. To an extent, I think Fish does believe that the humanities have lost their way and are responsible for their own decline. I disagree.
Budget considerations are not always a problem. At private institutions with large endowments, budgetary pressures on departments and scholars are less. Departments that corporations think valuable are actually affluent. But no, nothing positive is going to happen for the humanities without a fight, and Fish would rather wave his arms helplessly.
I can buy Heidegger off the Internet, but a) it’s not free, and b) the fact that it becomes part of my library does not make me automatically capable of discussing it in an informed manner. You can buy a book here and a book there on a tight budget, but as somebody who just bought a fraction of the books required for my comprehensive exam, I can say that building a real library, even of acceptable used paperbacks, takes a lot of time, effort, and expense.
The situations you’re describing could go various different ways, depending on what we as a society decide to do. Yes, there is a certain trend towards online courses, and in many cases this is a boon for established universities. But, to the extent that it saps the life from campuses, we are obliged to take a position on it—I mean a real, active, argued position, and not just a resigned presumption of inevitabiliity.
The problem with Reagonomics is that money is finite; if I give a dollar, I lose a dollar, so I have little incentive to let money trickle down. That is not true of learning. If the United States has a population of well-supported feminist scholars, they disseminate their learning to students and colleagues, and everyone gains. The work they do multiplies itself, not just through circulation (the Keynesian phenomenon of the mutiplication of currency), but through duplication.
When I say that online communities are a mixed bag, first of all, I say it as a dedicated blogger, but what I mean is that there are situations where only semi-open communities of scholars can accomplish more than fully open referendums on various scholarly subjects. Just because most people don’t know what the Derridean “trace” means, doesn’t mean the concept inherently lacks value.
The humanities have the capacity to change themselves, and do so organically, as a result of interactions with students and scholarly dialogues. They owe no thanks to the politicians and pundits who don’t understand their value, and who seek to create crises of funding and public support. During my very first year in college, I took a seminar on “Technology and Popular Culture,” where we were assigned to watch Blade Runner and the book that inspired it. It was, as it happens, my very first introduction to the writing of Philip K. Dick.
JK,
Actually, the comparison to Reaganomics may be more apt than you think. The idea that there is a finite amount of wealth is an old feudal concept; modern economists know that wealth can be created or lost quite apart from anything tangible. That’s why, for instance, the value of the nation’s housing stock can increase or decrease so quickly. Last I heard, $2 trillion in housing value has just evaporated.
Regardless of how each of us chooses to emphasize certain aspects of the situation, I think we can both agree that some concepts in higher education are outdated. University systems, like most systems, are very hierarchial, are very conservative. The chief beneficiaries of any system are invested in maintaining the system. Try to discuss calmly problems with the tenure system, for example. In this discussion, I’ve seen the premise that humanities = academic disciplines. No. Academic disciplines can focus on the humanities, but they are quite distinct. They are concerned with all the mundane concerns of self preservation and aggrandizement—securing positions, defending positions, carving out niches, gaining influence, etc., etc. Any organizational study of academic departments would find that they are fundamentally the same as any subset of a large company. Equating humanities with these academic departments obscures that fact. It’s rhetorical legerdemain.
Am I saying that society or government should not support the humanities? Or education in general? No, not at all. The very premise of our democracy requires an informed/educated citizenry. But I am saying we shouldn’t be locked into thinking our present system is the only or best way to serve the humanities. I’m thinking this through as I write; a lot of these things have been floating in my head, and I’m not certain how they will if ever eventually crystalize.
In my county in Minnesota, I have access to the entire U of Minnesota library system, together with most of the other university libraries in the state. Having a university-quality library is essential.
I also just visited NYC and looked at the NYC Public Library card catalog, and it’s superior to the UM system’s library.
Libraries are a somewhat peripheral question.
Trent,
While I don’t wish to remain mired in feudalism, I think regarding wealth as infinite, rather than simply a bit plastic under modern capitalism, produces confused thinking. Despite the plasticity of wealth, tax cuts are still a priority for wealthy citizens. Even giving one penny to all the people who read my not-remotely-famous blog, whenever they click over, would bankrupt me, and yet in each of those cases there is at least the potential for an exchange of ideas.
In my first post, I took pains to separate academic departments from the humanities more generally; I entirely agree with you there. That said, conversations about reforming tenure (for example) tend to fall back on the capitalist rhetoric of competition; a much larger problem for intellectual work is what happens when scholarship is subjected to the pressures of continual job insecurity, and as universities move towards reducing tenure-track positions, that is the situation for an increasing number of scholars.
Any organizational study of academic departments would find that they are fundamentally the same as any subset of a large company.
This is an unfounded claim; speaking purely from my own experience with both, it has no basis whatsoever in fact. I’m not saying that academics have no interest in securing positions, or carving out niches, but as far as that goes so does the crankiest author and auto-didact.
But I am saying we shouldn’t be locked into thinking our present system is the only or best way to serve the humanities.
Absolutely. I want to be clear about how much I agree with this statement. The problem I’ve encountered is this: when I start talking about how a writer like Jacques Derrida does or does not fit in with the traditions of humanistic education, or how a large concept like “rhetoric” should be understood and taught, most readers assume I’m speaking as a specialist in esoterica. There is, unfortunately, much more interest in lumping all kinds of work together under the banner of crappy postmodernism, lamenting the loss of a golden age, and then cheerfully discussing budget cuts, the elimination of tenure, and the streamlining or outsourcing of teaching in the humanities. This seems to me to represent a very different set of values from my own, and, in most cases, to merely pretend to solidarity with researchers, teachers, and students.
There is an old conversation / flamewar here on this subject that I’ve mentally filed under “how Tim Burke turned me to Edmund Burke”. No one can say that any system is the “only or best way to serve” anything. But calls for reform, even implicit ones, have to be conscious of the prevailing political climate. Whatever the flaws of the current system in the academic humanities, it has to be better than whatever “reform” we’d get if it were actually changed at this point. Consider, for instance, what happened to the people who supported a war in Iraq because of what they thought it would do if it were well-run, and what they actually got.
JK and Rich,
I don’t even know where to begin. I feel that many notions are being put into my mouth. Did I mention postmodernism (or theory in general), except for one cheerfully glib statement? Have I evoked a Golden Age? For the record, I take it as axiomatic that the reflectiveness of literary and cultural theory is a good thing.
I feel as if I’m being lumped with the enemies of culture for daring to suggest something is rotten in the state of academia. I haven’t been too specific because, as I said, my thoughts are not fully formed, but maybe they don’t have to be since I’m getting so many thoughts ascribed to me! And moving from my observation that the concept of finite wealth is outdated to stating that wealth is not infinite—well, we’re seeing so many strawmen I’ve afraid this thread is going to spontaneously combust. And Rich, your comment is so deeply conservative I don’t even know how to begin to respond to it, but I’ll harzard this: fear often stands in the way of change. It was very sly to equate people who suspect change in academia is needed with those who marched lock step toward our stupid and wasteful war.
However, I accept that my claim about academic departments being organizationally/sociologically similar to groups in business organizations was overstated, but seems true based on my own experience. Why should we expect anything different? Organizations have inertia, individuals have their own interests, etc.—I merely was suggesting that self interest is behind some resistance to change, and that we need to be clear about the difference between the self interests of academics (and academic departments) and society’s interest in a humanistic education.
At any rate, let me toss this idea out. Given the movement toward online courses, and given that even in the traditional academy that freshmen are often taught by journeymen academics (heck, I first started teaching the very first semester I was a master’s student), why shouldn’t we allow people not enrolled to take standarized tests in order to get the credit for mastery at a certain level in certain subjects? To keep this simple and to eliminate some obvious objections, let’s assume the subject is calculus. If I buy a good calculus book, study it thoroughly, take the test, why shouldn’t I get credit for it without having to pay thousands of dollars for enrolling in a university? (I know all about advanced placement; I’m talking about something different.)I’m not suggesting (now, at any rate) that such a system is appropriate for all topics, but hypothetically speaking, would you agree that it’s appropriate for some courses?
I imagine the higher education lobby would oppose such a move because it involves potential loss of revenue and, perhaps more importantly, diminishes the role of universities in certification, which of course is so important to employers, but not necessarily to society, particularly in its reception of cultural artifacts, such as art, music, literature, etc. Here’s another idea. Why don’t we teachers cut out the middleman and teach students directly? We might get paid more than we do now, the students would pay much less, and when the class is over, the students can go through some sort of testing procedure to receive certification. We could probably figure out a way to prevent forcing students from paying outrageous textbook prices. Just some thoughts—in a comment section of a blog I figure it’s ok to toss out rough ideas ;)
Anyway ... JK, I find your closing comment about solidarity to contain some slippage. It assumes much, you know.
"And Rich, your comment is so deeply conservative I don’t even know how to begin to respond to it, but I’ll harzard this: fear often stands in the way of change. It was very sly to equate people who suspect change in academia is needed with those who marched lock step toward our stupid and wasteful war.”
Trent, “fear often stands in the way of change” is a bromide. It wasn’t sly to compare people who suspect change is needed in academia with people who marched toward our stupid war, it’s the heart of my point. People never seem to generalize it, and until they finally do, it doesn’t hurt to remind them of it again. People can make all the nice plans that they want, but in fact those plans mean nothing to the people with the power to carry out change *except* as general agitation and reinforcement of the supposed need for change. To see what will actually happen, you have to evaluate the people who will actually be carrying it out. Conclusion: no changes to basic societal entities should be made at the present time in the U.S., whether they “need” it or not. That’s not fear, that’s political reality. Because anyone who doesn’t think that the change would in fact be for the worse is deluding themselves in a very similar way to how the liberal hawks deluded themselves about the Iraq war and the need for a change from Saddam.
Of course people can just chat about it in a comment box. But really, why bother? It’s not just in the not-going-to-happen category, it’s in the would-actually-be-harmful-if-it-somehow-happened category.
Rich,
In other words, just shut up? Okay, I guess we can get back to discussing literary theory or fiction or TV shows and change the world that way.
Or, you know, you could either not chat on blogs and instead actually do something if you think the issue is that critical, or, alternatively, wait a year.
People don’t like the Iraq war comparison, but as long as they continue to characterize a perfectly ordinary political observation as “just shut up” then I think they should hear it. Your response has all the same characteristics, really, as people’s did to the antiwar people, which I’d paraphrase as “What, you want to do nothing? Why, you fearful conservative! Well *some* people are brave enough to try to change things especially when the situation is so horrible” etc. etc. Which is exactly why those people marched lockstep for Bush, and exactly why academic reformers would be marching lockstep for Bush.
Rich,
So I _retroactively_ deserved to be told to shut up?
Wait a year? We can’t think about what we might do in a year? We should press our lips together and say Shhhhhhhh, we don’t want to give a lame duck president any ideas? Regardless, this entire thread was about the humanities and academic disciplines; I didn’t realize I had transgressed boundaries. And, Rich, you don’t know what I do or don’t do in practical political terms. But point taken. Don’t discuss banning handguns at NRA meetings.
You can have the last word if you want.
Trent,
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a problem that you feel as though you’re being told to “shut up.” It’s not the sentiment I want these discussions to produce.
Conversations about reforming the academy have followed a format very similar to earlier conversations in this country about reforming the public school system. At every step, the idea of simply funding the humanities (or the schools) more has been rejected or not even raised; the counter-proposals have been based on standardized evaluations for students, more surveillance and less job security for teachers.
When you get right down to it, I’m open to the idea of reforming the structure of academia, but I haven’t heard any good proposals. All I’ve heard are proposals that would de-stabilize departments—such as the elimination of tenure—without any proof that the results would be beneficial.
Most of my critiques of humanities departments are really content-based: I agree with this philosopher, disagree with that one, value one writer but not another.
In fact, the standardized testing system you’d like to see already exists in the form of AP tests. Such tests work decently well for disciplines that require a lot of knowledge of facts, such as chemistry. For graduate students, a high score on the English Subject Test GRE says almost nothing about whether a given student will become a successful scholar.