MORE QUARRELING IN THE MUSES’ BIRDCAGE
For the men of the Iliad, the heroic life was simply defined: to be a speaker of words and doer of deeds. The trick was to make your words become actions and not mere substitutes for them. Thus after warriors meeting one-on-one had engaged in their customary taunting, it was quickly time to turn speech into deed. Aeneas’s words to Achilles are typical:
“But come, let us no longer stand here talking of these things like children, here in the space between the advancing armies.
For there are harsh things enough that could be spoken against us
both, a ship of a hundred locks could not carry the burden.
The tongue of man is a twisty thing, there are plenty of words there
of every kind, the range of words is wide, and their variance. The sort of thing you say is the thing that will be said to you. But what have you and I to do with the need for squabbling and hurling insults at each other, as if we were two wives who when they have fallen upon a heart-perishing quarrel go out in the street and say abusive things to each other,
much true, and much that is not, and it is their rage that drives them.
You will not by talking turn me back from the strain of my warcraft,
not till you have fought to my face with the bronze. Come on then
and let us try each other’s strength with the bronze of our spear-heads.”
He spoke, and on the terrible grim shield drove the ponderous spike, so that the great shield moaned as it took the spearhead.
(20.244-60, trans. Lattimore)
This link between what we say and do, so central to Greek thinking, has of course been completely severed in the modern university, where we are judged solely by what we write or say to a handful of colleagues and not at all on how this matches what we do or how we live. This disparity is found on both sides of the ideological divide. The two books reviewed in this chapter represent some of the best that has been written by reasonable academics concerning the perversities of the current curriculum and publishing “agendas” in the New Humanities. And they also persuade us—if we still needed persuasion—that the plight of classical studies is merely one small part of the much larger collapse of the humanities in the university over the past few decades. Yet one cannot help but be struck by what is missing from the discussion—nowhere here will you find an earnest examination of teaching loads, course-release policies, classroom pedagogy, grading, tenure and promotion protocols, graduate school training, much less a plan of any sort to attempt to eradicate the sophistic crop that has taken root in the humanities.
This is perhaps one of the most uncomfortable aspects of academic populism—it requires us to act differently, to spend more time with students and less in research centers, to teach more classes, to write for a broad audience, and to trust in our material. If we limit our efforts to the admittedly important task of documenting the degeneration of the quality of our discipline-especially if we do so for fellow academics in the comfort of reduced teaching and skipped classes—we can hardly expect to bring about change. At some point in the near future—and books like the two under review here convincingly reveal just how much work is to be done—we must, like Aeneas, stop our talking and hurl the spear, even if we are doomed to fail. Aeneas loses his battle with Achilles and even his final, brutal triumph over Turnus is filled with ambiguity, but he ultimately changes the world.
“Can this be? Here is a strange thing that my eyes look on. Now the great-hearted Trojans, even those I have killed already, will stand and rise up again out of the gloom and the darkness…”
Iliad 21.55-57, trans. Lattimore
I. KILLING THE BOGEYMAN
Literature Lost. The Killing of History. Can Classics Die? Who Killed History? The Death of Literature. Who Killed Homer? The stench of death seems to be wafting about the humanities these days. Despite the promises of youth evoked by “New” Historicism and the “New” Humanities, despite the hope of regeneration implied in the replicating manifestations of the prefix post-, one senses an aura of decay poorly concealed, like the powdered and perfumed cheek of an aging relative. We’ve smelled it before, of course, many times. But this is more serious, we are told, something different from the time-honored contest between the liberal arts and vocational studies, the yin and yang of Western education that have always kept scholars of the humanities honest, that made them come down from the ivory tower once in a while to joust with the knights of commercialism. The enemy is the worm within the apple this time, and it has grown fat on the ever-diminishing fruit. Inevitably, and sooner than we’d imagine—“But please, oh please, let it be after I retire,” we mutter—we’ll have only bloated worms presiding over an empty orchard, that is, cultural studies.
The two books reviewed here—What’s Happened to the Humanities?, edited by Alvin Kernan, and Literature Lost, by John Ellis—examine the practice of current scholarship and, to a lesser degree, the curriculum, in the humanities, particularly literary studies.1 Although neither book specifically lays out the principles that link the various schools of the New Humanities, it would be helpful to review quickly the basic tenets that shape this scholarship. This task has been done concisely by Keith Windschuttle in The Killing of History (in this respect, John Ellis’s book might be fairly termed “Windschuttle Lite”), who finds the following four common denominators:
Knowledge: These theories are united in the view that inductive reasoning and empirical research cannot provide a basis for knowledge. They challenge the concepts of objectivity and certainty in knowledge, arguing that different intellectual and political movements create their own forms of relative “knowledge.”
Truth: They believe that truth is also a relative rather than an absolute concept. The pursuit of unconditional truth is impossible, they argue. What is “true,” they claim, depends on who is speaking to whom and in what context.
Science: They claim that science cannot be value-free or objective. They also agree that neither the human sciences nor natural science provides us with what could be called knowledge. We invent scientific theories rather than make scientific discoveries.
Disciplines: Most believe that the traditional divisions of academic disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are inappropriate. The established disciplines should all become far more multi- and cross-disciplinary. The adoption of the term “studies” reflects the new emphasis. Supporters of the movement advocate that, instead of being organized into disciplines such as history, law, and English, teaching and research be reorganized into new, cross-bred fields such as “cultural studies,” “textual studies,” “women’s studies,” “peace studies” and “media studies.”2
Most of the twelve contributors to What’s Happened to the Humanities? (WHTTH?) are in essential agreement with John Ellis’s thesis in Literature Lost that the abuse of critical theory and the politicization of literary and historical research in obeisance to the above principles have had drastic consequences: reasoning and evidence that lead to conclusions receive minimal attention; intellectual curiosity and freedom, along with the complexity of literary and historical works, are reduced to a low level; opposing viewpoints are rejected on moral and ad hominem rather than intellectual grounds; the political arguments themselves are opportunistic and ephemeral. One also finds in these essays an underlying concern that the spread of the new is not merely diluting the old but replacing it. Like some irrepressible exotic moss, the New Humanities have deoxygenated the pond, killing off previously thriving and important species, leaving nothing in the water but, well, moss.3
These are damning charges, not infrequently heard, to be sure, although they are not usually found in publications from university presses.4 And, to be honest, despite the intelligence, sincerity, and broad learning on display throughout these two books, even to a sympathetic reader it’s all beginning to feel a bit stale. If there is a consensus among these sensible and serious scholars—one finds little of the passionate disgust of Bloom or the insightful wit of Paglia here—about what is wrong, then what can be done about it? How much more analysis can we stand without action? Logos ergou skiê: speech is the shadow of action, runs the Greek proverb. For although these books successfully undermine the intellectual foundations of much of the New Humanities, I am not convinced that they can account for the rapid metastasis throughout the academy, and they offer few prescriptions for a cure. The New Humanities have been dissected and irradiated hundreds of times over the past twenty years, but they keep coming back in new and more virulent forms. If success in the modern university truly depended upon the quality of ideas, the “posts” would have been buried and forgotten long ago. But as we all know from the sequels to slasher movies, you can’t kill the bogeyman. The humanities, by any definition that seeks to avoid parody, are in fact fading away. The antihumanists have proudly, and to a large degree successfully, proclaimed the “death of God” and the “death of the individual subject,” indeed, the “death of man.” Apparently, these constructed entities gave their lives so a few academic careers could thrive at the end of the millennium. Requiescamus in pace.
II. SOME FACTS
Since much of the scenery on this road will be familiar to readers of this volume, perhaps I can be forgiven for taking a rather tortuous route through the arguments. First—philosophical wrangling aside for the moment—what exactly is the current status of the humanities in the classroom and the bookstore? It would require little effort to believe that philosophies based on the denial of objective truth could appeal to today’s casually cynical youth, a generation whose lack of engagement is vividly symbolized by the dispassionately shrugged “Whatever” echoing across America’s campuses.5 Nor would it be difficult to see why minorities who historically have suffered from discrimination might devote themselves to a curriculum that speaks endlessly of a power structure that privileges hegemonic groups and insists that Western culture consists primarily of a conspiracy to keep a white, male cabal in control. We would not be surprised, I think, to learn that university students might prefer cultural studies that reinforce their limited experiences, prejudices, and identities of race, gender, and class to works that challenge their preconceptions and demand hard-earned skills of rational argumentation and analysis. And who would be shocked if adolescents flocked to faculty who turned scholarship into confessional accounts of personal traumas, who transformed the classroom into an arena of self-hype and wounded self-esteem?
But this is exactly what has not happened. The enrollment and graduation statistics presented in the appendices of WHTTH? reveal dramatically that over the past thirty years the New Humanities have failed to attract much interest beyond the scholars themselves and their critics. The decline of the appeal of the humanities, in fact, oddly coincides almost directly with the rise of “race-gender-class scholarship,” as Ellis refers to it. “Meanwhile, falling enrollments in the humanities carry a message that is not getting through: students are voting with their feet against the direction that the humanities have taken recently” (86). Overall, the percentage of bachelor’s degrees in the humanities has declined by over 40 percent since the late sixties, from 20.7 percent of total degrees in 1966 to 12.7 percent in 1993.6 Doctoral degrees in the humanities declined from 13.8 percent to 9.1 in the same period, which is a good start. A recent article in Harvard Magazine summarized other aspects of the slide: humanities faculty representation in the university has decreased (in 1960, one of every six faculty members taught liberal arts; in 1988 one of thirteen); the verbal scores of the SAT and English literature scores on the GRE have plummeted; humanists receive on average the lowest faculty salaries by thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and rely on adjunct part-time, nontenured appointments more than those in other fields.7
Students, it turns out, are wiser than the revisionist gurus give them credit for—they recognize the difference between indoctrination and education, even if their professors don’t. As one Berkeley student recently said when asked why he watched the crude TV animated series South Park, “It’s so anti-PC, which I love, because we are so bombarded with PC stuff here.”8 And why would those students who are actually interested in absorbing the new dogma choose to enroll in half-baked humanities courses when the whole meal is waiting for them across the hall in sociology and communication departments? Minority students are not interested in the theory or social agenda either—they take fewer B.A.’s and fewer doctorates by percentage in the humanities than do whites (WHTTH?, 20). And university presses, finding it increasingly difficult to survive by publishing the cant-ridden prose of academic scholarship, much less the intentionally obscure and illiberal research of the new academic Left, are turning more and more to general interest books.9
Moreover, the past thirty years of affirmative action, segregated housing, cultural studies programs, and increased emphasis on a non-“oppressive” curriculum have created more racial resentment among college-educated whites and blacks than among those without a college education (Ellis, 112). There is no evidence that students of the humanities are now more civil, judicious, caring, and empathetic than earlier generations or than their coevals in the natural sciences, business, or engineering. The inevitable coalescence of most academic multiculturalism—enforced respect for rather than understanding of the Other—with identity politics (what Shelby Steele has called the politics of difference) could hardly lead to the social utopias imagined by the engineers of the new curriculum. Commitment among undergraduates to “helping to promote racial understanding” fell in 1996 to its lowest point in a decade.10 Louis Menand aptly summarizes the situation in literary studies as it stands after thirty years of disintegration of disciplinary authority:
Literary studies has existed since the 1960s in a heavily professionalized system in which the positions are subsidized, the research is subsidized, the journals and presses that publish the research are subsidized, the libraries that buy the journals and monographs are subsidized, and the audience is increasingly limited to peer specialists. There is no “reality check” on this work because the only reality is the rapidly shrinking profession itself, buoyed up by dollars that will now be disappearing. Almost no one outside the profession cares even to understand what goes on inside it; they will, given a choice, certainly not care to pay for it. (WHTTH?, 215-16)
Something has happened to the humanities in the past thirty years, something of a different order than ever before. As James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield summarize the “vital signs” of the field: “Past declines of the humanities were changes in degree. In 1998, with weakened faculties and less well-prepared students, we face an imminent, dangerous change in kind.”11
III. THE NEW CURRICULUM
So, in one sense the “death” of the humanities hinted at by many of these writers accurately refers to the failure of recent scholars to attract student or public interest. One would think that the experiment would by now have run its course, the lab closed, the “retexting” experimenters deleted and the “unpackers” sent packing. But nowhere is the increasing isolation of higher education from the larger community, the remarkable unaccountability to the university and public more evident than in the curriculum of the humanities. The more students have rejected the courses, the more books sold by Bloom, Kimball, and D’Souza, the more legislators have threatened to shut it all down, the more tightly the revisionists have wrapped their tentacles around the throat of the curriculum. The New Humanities have spread with amazing swiftness through the American university system. Foreign exponents of cultural studies, for example, gasp in admiration at what has been accomplished here: “I am completely dumbfounded by it. I think of the struggles to get cultural studies into the institution in the British context, to squeeze three or four jobs for anybody under some heavy disguise, compared with the rapid institutionalisation which is going on in the US.”12
Although the proselytizers for the New Humanities increasingly control conferences, journals, grants, promotional peer review, and professional organizations, more important by far for the future of the humanities is the place of these theorists in the curriculum and thus in the training and hiring of new faculty and program directorships. True, thanks to tenure, the transformation of the humanities faculty and curricula has been and will continue to be less furious than the feeding frenzy of publication. At present, most departments represent some kind of mixture of old and new. Margery Sabin finds a typical situation in the Amherst English department, where there is a near “total separation between the traditional literary courses taught by the ‘old’ Amherst faculty and the new courses taught by the young. This conspicuous segregation spells trouble for both the present and the future.”13 For now, the department is split, so the students are exposed both to close readings and courses with explicit political agendas. But what will happen when the “old” faculty retire? Departments will not merely continue to hire New Humanists who in time will become the majority, but older faculty now often retire without any replacement at all—the position goes to another school or program (WHTTH?, 28).
Even if the various incipient countermovements pursuing traditional modes of scholarship were to have some influence on the curriculum, the posthumanists will shape the university. As Gertrude Himmelfarb observes, countermovements, “like counter-revolutions, never return to the status quo ante. Certainly the new subjects, which now have so much institutional as well as ideological support—African American, ethnic, cultural, multicultural, feminist, and gender studies—will not disappear.”14 Is there any reason to believe that methodologies will fare any differently?
If you have trouble picturing what such a humanities curriculum will look like, let me suggest that you spend a few days out here on the sunny West Coast. We in California—recent immigrants mostly, where our traditions are dated in weeks—do not have the patience to wait for the university of tomorrow. It is here, now, just an hour away from where I sit.
Between 1960 and 1990 the number of institutions of higher education in the United States increased from 2,000 to 3,595, with the number of public universities nearly doubling (WHTTH?, 4). These schools, created amid much of the transformation of the humanities, often reflect a strange combination of traditional and novel curricula. California added three research universities, the most famously experimental being the now rather staid if slightly schizophrenic UC Santa Cruz, which spawned such influential practitioners of the New Humanities as Fredric Jameson, Hayden White, and Norman O. Brown, and provided shelter as well for such diverse figures as Angela Davis, Page Smith—and John Ellis.
But just last year a new state university was launched at Monterey Bay, and here we can see down which holes the posthumanists are leading us. The Cal State system (not to be confused with the better known system of nine research universities that includes UC Berkeley, UCLA, etc.) was established and has been developed over the past thirty years to prepare California students for practical success. The charge of these twenty-two schools is primarily vocational: nursing, counseling, teaching credentials, business and management, engineering, and more. Over a third of a million students are enrolled in this system that awards more than half of all the baccalaureate degrees in California.15 Now, at the turn of the millennium, a new campus with a new curriculum is in the process of being established. How have we taken advantage of the opportunity to build an educational program from scratch? Where do the humanities fit into the new education?
We won’t consider the uniquely Californian twist given to the CSU Monterey Bay “Vibrancy” requirement that seeks to create in the student “a holistic and creative sense of self including an ability to demonstrate knowledge of wellness theory.” Nor is it completely certain that the combined “Equity and Culture” requirement fits under the rubric of the humanities, but given the expanding and disintegrating boundaries of literary and historical research we should consider it. The “Equity” requirement demands that students “produce an informed historical interpretation and analyses [sic] of contemporary issues of struggles for power as related to the oppression of various racial, cultural, social and economic groups of people in the U.S.” This includes “an understanding of the differential and unequal treatment of people of color, females, gays and lesbians, the poor, and others from historically oppressed groups in the U.S….an understanding of strategies and policies such as affirmative action which are intended to address inequities in institutions such as schools, governmental agencies, and businesses,” and an understanding of “how you, the student, have worked towards building a more inclusive and equitable society.” (One presumes that an acceptable answer to the latter would not be “campaigned for the elimination of affirmative action.”) For the “Culture” requirement, “students must grapple with cultural diversity within the U.S., or connections between cultural groups originating outside the U.S. and those within the U.S. We are particularly interested in students’ ability to interact with and comprehend contemporary U.S. citizens—real people who are here, now—who differ culturally from themselves.”16
Especially relevant is the “Literature/Popular Culture” learning requirement—the conflation speaks volumes—through which students are to acquire “the capability to understand, interpret, and appreciate literature and/or diverse forms of popular culture as artistic and cultural representation.” This requirement can be met through one of twenty-nine courses or by various independent assessment mechanisms, one of which is a “20-page paper or three 5-8 page papers, which examine and interpret 3 issues related to race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexualiry [sic], disability, age, and/or nationality in at least 3 works of literature or visual representations and/or forms of popular culture.” Not one of the twenty-nine courses, the titles of which I list here in a note, focuses on the European or American classics.17 Shakespeare was not in the Cal State Monterey Bay curriculum last fall, and a visitor to the campus bookstore found no literature at all by British or European or American writers.18 American literature is limited to American ethnic literatures and cultures, a syllabus defended by the instructor with the claim that “American people are from different cultures and should get rid of bad habits.”19 This is the future as current trends would dictate: Shakespeare and Homer banished from the core, Latina Life Stories and Introduction to Teledramatic Arts and Technology representing the diversity of options for a literature requirement, and politically correct ideas about race, gender, and sexuality mandated for graduation.
The curriculum of the New Humanities—the curriculum of the future—has arrived in full force. So what—intellectually, that is—is wrong with that? That question, despite the neutrality implied by the title of Kernan’s strangely organized volume, is what both these books set out to answer. Those familiar with the academic culture wars will find few surprises here, but the situation is laid out particularly well, if not in great detail, in Ellis’s book (with a few important exceptions discussed below), and several of the essays in WHTTH? provide insightful analyses of the processes that have led us to the current situation.
IV. THE IDEAS
Ellis sets out to give the “new orthodoxy” the kind of careful scrutiny it has managed to avoid as it spread throughout the humanities. He wants to explain how in literature social activism—the question of oppression, particularly in the West, by virtue of race, gender, and class, with its superficial moral appeal and arcane language—has become the major purpose of literary criticism, and why this entire enterprise is replete with logical contradictions and false assumptions. Ellis is especially good on the contradictions involved in the West-bashing of such well-known literary scholars as Fredric Jameson: “Those in the grip of this impulse are critical of the Western tradition and define themselves by their opposition to it, yet the impulse itself is so much a part of the Western tradition that the attitudes it generates can be said to be quintessentially Western” (12). He traces how the West has idealized other civilizations in moments of self doubt; the West alone fosters such fantasies. It will seem puzzling to classicists that, although he occasionally uses the word sophist, he traces the origins of multicultural theory—“or rather cultural relativism, according to which cultures can be judged only by their own standards” (21) to Johann Gottfried Herder, the major ideologist of the German Sturm und Drang movement.
Ellis rightly sees that the amelioration of racism and sexism has come and will continue to come not from the rejection of Western society but by an alliance with Western values. Western culture is uniquely self-scrutinizing. Since Homer, Thucydides, and Plato the tendency in Western literature, historiography, and philosophy has not been to support the regime, mouth platitudes, quote the emperor, or praise the status quo, but quite the contrary. Ellis makes the familiar—but no longer countenanced—argument for literature as a liberating and subversive force, rejecting such oafish remarks as Terry Eagleton’s that “departments of literature in higher education are part of the ideological apparatus of the modern capitalist state” (quoted, 51). It is only in the West, and especially in Western universities, that students and scholars trained in the liberal arts are praised and promoted for their critical analyses of their own culture. The revisionists themselves are thriving and voluble witnesses against their own dogma.
J. Hillis Miller has condemned as “repressive” the practice of “forcing a Latino or Thai in Los Angeles, a Puerto Rican in New York, an inner city African-American in either city to read only King Lear, Great Expectations, and other works from the old canon.” Denis Donoghue, who quotes Miller in his essay in WHTTH?, unravels this simplistic argument (note the words “forcing” and “only”), observing that Miller is cheating and “patronizing those students by claiming that they are not to be asked to read great literature or to be taught how best to read it” (135).
The cheating, however, goes well beyond the loss of mere exposure to great literature. By withholding the study of Western culture from minority students, teachers are depriving them of the single most effective way of learning about the culture into which they will have to fit to become a success. It is through this necessary acculturation that minorities and immigrants can best hope to become part of the mainstream society, to gain access to the skills, knowledge, and opportunities they have historically or geographically lacked and now desire. That’s why they go to college. As David Bromwich points out in an excellent discussion of the problems of expansion and diversification of a communitarian curriculum based on cultural identity, the purpose of the New Humanities to immerse students in their own microculture is completely inverted (233). He criticizes Lynn Hunt’s argument in the same volume that the demographic changes-more women and minorities are now enrolled in higher education than ever—must put feminism and multiculturalism “inevitably on the intellectual agenda” (19-20, 29): “The entry into universities of persons ever more various in their backgrounds might just as plausibly have prompted a stress on the value of scholastic rituals promoting unity and harmony” (230). They all would have been served better by a resurgence of the study of Western culture as a necessary aid for entering the larger, increasingly Westernized world.
The revisionists’ fixation on oppression with regard to race, gender, and class misses the richness and complexity of literature; it searches instead for simple and monolithic answers to human suffering. What gets lost in this redundant pursuit, as Ellis argues, is the diversity of thought and experience of the “endless puzzles of human existence” (39). That is what makes Western literature “universal”—as important for the girl from the ghetto and the adult immigrant from Asia as for the burger-flipping white boy so despised by the radical academic. Anyone in doubt should read an account of how the Clementine Course in the Humanities—a rigorous exposure to traditional courses in literature, art, logic, American history (through documents), and political philosophy—changed the lives of a group of mostly minority poor from New York’s Lower East Side. The creator of the program introduced the course to the first gathering of homeless, pregnant, drug-addicted, AIDS-infected, English-impaired, excon volunteers without compromise: “You’ve been cheated. Rich people learn the humanities; you didn’t. The humanities are a foundation for getting along in the world, for thinking, for learning to reflect on the world instead of just reacting to whatever force is turned against you…. Rich people learn the humanities in private schools and expensive universities. And that’s one of the ways in which they learn the political life. I think that is the real difference between the haves and have-nots in this country.”20 The results of this program—based on (we have been told) canonical, hegemonic, phallocentric, and totalizing texts originally composed (we now know) to oppress the underclass, texts taught in a variety of humanistic methodologies that fail (we have all learned) to grasp the authentic selfhood of man-proved him right:
A year after graduation, ten of the first sixteen Clementine Course graduates were attending four-year colleges or going to nursing school; four of them had received full scholarships to Bard College. The other graduates were attending community college or working full-time. Except for one: she had been fired from her job in a fast-food restaurant for trying to start a union.21
Ellis takes the theorists at their word. He dissects their arguments to reveal their incoherence, contradictions, and illogic. He believes that their anti-Western rhetoric, which blames our ills always on society never on our nature, comes from a sincere if misguided wish for the fulfillment of utopian promises made by alienated intellectuals. That interpretation would be more credible if any of them ever volunteered to teach twice as many classes or to do their own grading in order to liberate the “proletariat” underclass of part-time teachers and graduate students; to turn down an offer from another institution without demanding that their own university match it; or to hit the streets to tend to the downtrodden races, genders, and classes about whom they are so concerned.
The intellectual foundations of the New Humanities are so easily skewered by Ellis because they were never really intended to stand up to scrutiny. A silly form of liberal guilt—“guilt spawns theory,” as Julie Ellisons has argued22—added to a blatant desire for self-advancement equaled the jumble of the New Humanities. Margery Sabin comes closer to the truth in her summary of this process: “radical social protest in the late 1960s; deconstruction in the 1970s; ethnic, feminist, and Marxist cultural studies in the 1980s; postmodern sexuality in the 1990s; and rampant careerism from beginning to end. What else is there to say?” (WHTTH?, 86). Not much, really.
Ellis examines in three separate chapters the work of gender, race, and class critics. His basic premise is sobering: “The corrective to the view that literature has nothing to do with politics is that it has something to do with politics, not that it has everything to do with politics” (62). If his attitude seems old-fashioned, his analysis of feminist criticism is positively atavistic—and generally compelling:
Two contradictory impulses are at work, therefore: the insistence that there are no good reasons for the past differentiation of roles pushes feminists in one direction, whereas the claim that there is a distinctive female contribution to knowledge pushes them in the other. The result is paralysis; a concern with new knowledge is often announced, but a recitation of grievances always follows, both because it is easier and because that is the nature of the underlying drive. (81)
This is decidedly unfair to a number of critics of the seventies and eighties who brought the study of the role of women in literature and society into the mainstream of research and the curriculum. But it accurately reflects the current state of much of feminist studies, at least in classics. We can see this, for example, in the recent spate of books on Penelope, who has become the focus of critical whining about the place of women in the ancient and modern worlds—and a project for reviewing decisions at midlife by disappointed classicists trying to come to terms with their failed relationships and stalled careers.23 As Ellis concludes:
It is easy enough to use the theory of a malevolent patriarchy as the basis for commentary on how Ophelia or Desdemona or Cordelia is mistreated, or how The Taming of the Shrew is full of misogynistic prejudice. But quite apart from the fact that this approach applies a historically unrealistic theory of relations between the sexes, it also applies indiscriminately a preconceived idea as to what will be important. We are back to the central critical sin discussed in the previous chapter—that of letting the critic’s obsessions determine in advance what is going to be important for a particular work. (75)
It is no coincidence, for example, that it is a self-proclaimed feminist, Judith Hallett, who has led the APA-sponsored panels on the “personal voice,” the classics version of the latest critical fad of subjectivism discussed briefly by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Himmelfarb describes this égo-histoire, or better, nouveau solipsism, as an approach to any subject that “is insistently personal, dwelling upon the feelings, emotions, beliefs, and personal experiences of the scholar” (WHTTH?, 155). Bromwich is again on the mark when he concludes that the “growth of confessional criticism shows [that] the talk of scholars about politics and their talk about ‘complicity’ has become, to a remarkable degree, uninhibited talk about themselves” (234).
Similarly, Ellis quickly outlines the logical inconsistencies of recent scholarship on the white European’s mistreatment of other races. The now-familiar arguments from this school are examined, with special attention to those of Edward Said—“The novel, as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other”—and Stephen Greenblatt—“Shakespeare became the presiding genius of a popular, urban art form with the capacity to foster psychic mobility in the service of Elizabethan power” (quoted, 90). What becomes clear here is not only the poverty of this recent literary criticism, but also the weakness of historical analysis in the hands of literary theorists. Ellis sums up the contradictions inherent in much of this scholarship:
Here the position of race-gender-class scholars can be stated simply: they argue that objectivity and truth are naive illusions of traditional scholars and, more generally, of the Western tradition and that they have demystified these ideas. There are no value-free facts, they argue, because all knowledge is socially constructed. The odd thing about this position is that it is diametrically opposed to the reality of what both newer and older groups have actually done: first, as I have argued before, the race-gender-class scholar’s commitment to his and her truths about the reality of sexism, racism, and oppression is as rigid as anything could be; and second, traditional scholars—both philosophers and critics—have often been skeptical about truth and objectivity. (191)
Ellis’s chapter on class—and as he points out, many Marxist scholars are quickly reinventing themselves with the collapse of Marxism as a viable political system—is particularly depressing. Fredric Jameson insists even now that Mao’s primary mistake in the Cultural Revolution was that he “stopped it too soon” (122). No less offensive is Jameson’s defense of Stalinism: “Stalinism is disappearing not because it failed, but because it succeeded, and fulfilled its historical mission to force the rapid industrialization of an underdeveloped country (whence its adaptation as a model for many of the countries of the Third World)” (quoted, 122). Pol Pot and Paul de Man are similarly exculpated and extolled by this influential literary critic.
Ellis gauges the self-contradiction of the race-gender-class dogma, using Stanley Fish as an example in his exploration of Foucault’s “PC logic.” It is a logic of “adolescent sophistry” whereby all conflict is reduced to an issue of power.
The only puzzle here is why Fish does not then brand the whole of race-gender-class a right-wing phenomenon, since it is surely based upon a rigid set of social beliefs. He ignores the fact that if race-gender-class scholars were forced to choose between their hard-edged views of capitalism, sexism, and racism (on the one hand) and their pretensions to epistemological sophistication (on the other), there can be little doubt that they would abandon the latter rather than the former. (179)24
Although Ellis concentrates on the intellectual vacuity of the arguments, what he refers to as “ironies,” “contradictions,” “corruption,” “mistakes,” and “blindness” are surprising only if one assumes that the scholars are personally as well as professionally serious. Either Jameson, Fish, and their many acolytes are ignorant—and this possibility cannot be excluded entirely, for their dismissal of historical fact is often embarrassing—or they are simply laughing all the way to the bank. Can we really take seriously a scholar like Fish who denounced “the increasing squalor that daily life in the U.S. owes to big business and to its unenviable position as the purest form of commodity and market capitalism functioning anywhere in the world today” (quoted, 131) while he simultaneously held an endowed professorship at a university that owes its very existence to two of the most brutally successful forms of commodity and market capitalism, the tobacco and utility industries? Ellis’s focus on ideas rather than on behavior also logically requires him to treat all forms of the current critical pathologies. It is impossible, however, to keep up with all the “corruptions.” Ellis does not include queer studies, porn studies, c’est moi subjectivism, or whiteness studies in his account, all of which have staked recent claims on the study of literature.24 It takes more than logic to kill the hydra.
Ellis is perhaps at his best in his examination of theory. The author of several excellent books on literary criticism, he points out that what “is wrong here is not theory but bad theory” (181). He well observes—and Bruce Thornton has also demonstrated (see chapter five)—that “literary critics have always been prone to amateurish misuse of borrowed concepts” (185). Over time, the word “theory” has become identified with ideological currents rather than with the activity of analysis. Ellis notes that Paul de Man claimed that opposition to deconstructionism was a “resistance to theory”:
As theory became fashionable, there arose a theory cult in literary studies, and its leadership became a kind of theory jet set, a professional elite with a carefully cultivated aura of au courant sophistication. In this atmosphere, only recent theory counted; anything from earlier times was wooden and outmoded. The persistent ignorance of prior theory was therefore no accident but an essential feature of this new development. The new elite shared a set of assumptions but not a penchant for analysis. (200)
What is intentionally abandoned by the new approaches is close reading. Sabin rightly fears that close reading at Amherst will be lost when “Studies in the Literature of Sexuality” and “Native American Expressive Traditions” take over the curriculum (88-91). After all, the point of these courses is to emphasize the political; the analytical, the logocentric, is the enemy. Donoghue, whose essay argues for close reading, worries that our students are losing the ability to read,
or giving up that ability in favor of an easier one, the capacity of being spontaneously righteous, indignant, or otherwise exasperated…. I believe that the purpose of reading literature is to exercise or incite one’s imagination, specifically one’s ability to imagine being different…. A good reading is in that sense disinterested, as we used to say. I know that disinterestedness is commonly denounced as just another interest, flagrantly masked, so I use the word only in a limited sense. But it is possible to distinguish a reading more or less disinterested from one demonstrably opportunistic. (123-24)
So, finally, how did we get to this sad state? These scholars, interested as they are in the history of ideas, all have suggestions: the pressures of changing student demography; the weakness of the leadership of professional organizations like the Modern Language Association; a cultural desire for transparency deriving from a broader assumption that all knowledge is socially constructed; the collapse of disciplinarity and the rise of a narrow professionalism guided by the reaction against formalism and essentialism, with the familiar continental pedigree of posthumanism (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault) and the decline of liberal tolerance in the post-Vietnam War era. These suggestions all have plausibility, but I do not think they get to the heart of the problem, nor can they (and they are not meant to) get us out of the morass.
V. THE FUTURE
The antihumanists and self-contradictory literary critics and social theorists are winning the battle for space in the curriculum and slots in the faculty. Cal State Monterey Bay is not alone in its dedication to the social agenda. The impetus for these changes did not come from the West Coast (although Stanford’s famous dilution of Western culture is one of the markers), and there is no reason that their fulfillment should stop at the Sierras. California is an odd state, to be sure, but it is not consistently liberal. We are, after all, the home of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, property tax and immigration reform, and the elimination of affirmative action. Our U.S. senators may be liberals, but our previous governor was a conservative. There is no obvious reason the new curriculum should take hold in the present political climate.
Nor is the new charter merely a reflection of our notoriously diverse population. The freshmen at Cal State Monterey Bay tend to come from affluent areas, nearly half from the prosperous upper-middle-class towns of Santa Barbara, Irvine, and Huntington Beach.25 And do not feel smugly comforted by the fact that California taxpayers are footing the bill for the incubation of this ungainly infant—we’re not. Thanks to the hard work of then Monterey Peninsula congressman and House Budget Committee chairman, later White House chief of staff, Leon Panetta—coincidentally, he and his wife have made $1,400 a day as consultants to the president of the fledgling university—federal funds have paid for 90 percent of the cost (with three-quarters of the $200 million project left to be completed).27 And the development of the university on the former grounds of Fort Ord is now being held up as a model of development of “downsized” government properties—Culture and Equity, not to mention Vibrancy, could be coming soon to an abandoned military base near you.
The curriculum is also a model for another proposed new CSU campus (Channel Islands), and the ideology has carried over to the new UC campus in Merced scheduled to open in 2005. This campus, to be a major center for research and graduate education like Berkeley, will eliminate the nasty rubric of the humanities altogether. Instead, because the “humanities are undergoing a search for new definitions to mark the boundaries and approaches of research programs,” the campus will have a division of Arts and Cultures.28 “These programs will provide explicit consideration of cultures of origin and the immigrant experience” and offer a “rich experience in cultural studies.” In addition, “The study of Valley native cultures and immigrant, migrant and refugee experience will enrich understanding of the human conditions of place, movement, transition, adaptation and survival.” In itself, the prospects are bad enough—the San Joaquin Valley alone, which the campus is to serve, is an area larger than ten states and has a larger population than twenty. The curriculum of a University of California campus is far more likely to influence other colleges and universities throughout the country than that of the Cal States.
Even so stately a critic as Frank Kermode answers his own question—“Does epistemic change come in different sizes or is it always catastrophic and total?”—with pessimism: “It is reasonable to believe that…the situation really has grown worse” (161, 175). Ellis too, who has traced the rise and fall of other approaches to literature in previous books, argues that the shifts are more serious this time, since departments within the humanities have tenured (and, for the near future, are likely to tenure) faculty who accept the principles of the New Humanities. Major Ph.D. programs—the system that trains future scholars and teachers—are the most likely places to find the leading members of the new wave. As Bromwich observes, choices have been made that affect the future in important ways. Even the history department at Yale—ranked number one in the nation at the time of Bromwich’s essay—had no senior professor who made a practice of teaching the Founding Fathers, or the career of Lincoln, or the politics of the New Deal.29 Abroad, things are a little better, if only because the institutions change at a slower pace. But as Windschuttle points out, new institutions in Australia and Great Britain have followed the same pattern as Cal State Monterey Bay, offering cultural studies, communications studies, and media studies while rejecting traditional historical or literary approaches and programs.30
The writers under review, most of them well-known scholars who have witnessed the transformation first-hand, offer little hope that current trends will change.31 Obviously, if you have stock in the New Humanities, you should merely hold on tightly to your portfolio—you have already profited far more than anyone would have expected. And there is tremendous pressure on young academics to get in line. As Sabin observes, commenting on the plight of writing instructors, “professional success means investing in the same stocks of avant-garde radicalism—post-structuralism, social constructionism, and cultural materialism—that have brought such profitable returns to their prosperous colleagues elsewhere in the humanities” (99). But must we give up, merely hoping that the revisionists will devour themselves before they can finish off the rest of us?
Gertrude Himmelfarb—no stranger to these conflicts—concludes her essay by wondering if there is some middle ground: “In the mean-time, traditionalists and postmodernists alike will have to tolerate and be civil to each other” (157). Sensible advice, no doubt—genuine civility is in short supply these days in the academy. But there is also an abundance of mock confrontation as well. Too often the leaders on both sides of the debate have seen this competition for the hearts and minds of our students as an intellectual game in which the participants duke it out at conferences by day and after which everyone chummily retires to cocktail hour like divorce lawyers after a busy day in court. Nothing is resolved, but careers are built on the papers, talks, and networking. Gerald Graff’s concept of “teaching the conflicts” is an especially unhappy example of this tendency. As Menand notes, this “represents a kind of perverse consummation of professionalism, the last refinement on the isolation and self-referentiality of academic studies: it makes what professors do the subject of what professors do” (214-15). The great works and historical issues come ready-made with all the tensions, ambiguities, and complexities needed to raise the important questions.
VI. A PROPOSAL
Let me offer what may seem a bizarre course of action, a plan for reform that combines the romanticism of the Odyssey with the tragic necessity of the Iliad. The cure I propose will seem almost worse than the cancer—I don’t expect it to be taken seriously. Yet this dose of chemotherapy to the diseased humanities may do its job, obliterating the tumor just short of destroying the patient. Yes, it is just as likely to kill us all as well, but the facts suggest that, without some drastic intervention that everyone admits will never come from within, we’re fading fast anyhow. Anything is better at this point than writing another analysis of the problem, than merely whimpering to our pals about the deconstructionist bullies down the hall. Pantôn to thanein: in the long run, no one gets out alive.
As several of the authors of WHTTH? point out, the tightening of the purse strings will play a greater role in most of academics, especially at state schools. Legislatures and elected officials are currently engaging in another round of “faculty-bashing.” A recent article by William Honan in the New York Times entitled “The Ivory Tower Under Siege” summarizes the criticisms:
The main complaints are that faculties have usurped control of educational institutions and run them chiefly for their own benefit, not the student’s; that they are accountable to no one, and that colleges have failed to increase productivity and that they cost too much.
The critics also contend that all too often, students are unable to graduate in four years because faculty members are off pursuing hobbies masquerading as scholarship or research, and not teaching enough sections of required courses. And, they say, as a final slap to the taxpayers who finance public institutions, professors have created an inflexible tenure system that guarantees them lifelong employment at a time when almost no one but Federal judges and Supreme Court Justices enjoy that privilege.32
James E. Perley, president of the American Association of University Professors, admits in the article that he is denounced almost everywhere he goes. “It’s 360-degree bashing. All around us, people are throwing things. I’ve been a teacher for thirty-three years, and I can tell you it’s never been this bad.” In another recent article in Business Week on “The New University,” we learn what we already knew: over the past fifteen years government support for higher education has been cut, tuition has soared, and—even assuming current spending cost trends do not get worse—there will be a $38 billion shortfall in 2015 in what schools require to meet expected student demand. Except for only the most richly endowed universities, something is going to have to change—is, in fact, already changing. “Universities are rethinking the big lecture halls, faculty tenure, discrete academic departments, and other features that have defined traditional institutions for a century. They are designing curriculums more relevant to employers, communities, and students. Schools are pursuing fiscal discipline, forcing accountability on organizations that for decades have expanded as they pleased.”33
In other words, departments, programs, and disciplines are going to have to justify their existence. If the curriculum does come under careful scrutiny from outside, here’s my advice: embrace the process, welcome the philistines (that is, the politicians, journalists, and parents, many of whom are a good deal brighter than the academics) into the camp, open your cupboards and bring out your oldest wine. Only by creating a venue for debate can anything change. Currently there is no place in the academy for genuine disputation, since the proponents of the New Humanities philosophically reject the possibility of using the “indeterminacy and contrariness of language” to arrive at a “better” answer, much less the “truth.” That is, they know they’ll lose.
Humanists are hoplites standing in an open field, vainly hoping their opponents will crawl out of the groves of academe to meet them head on. There simply is no real dialogue about these issues, only separate and impenetrable camps. Bromwich, in discussing the “exigent resistance” that led to the revision of the National Standards for teaching American history in grades 5-11, draws the following conclusion: “If the result suggests that a licensed curricular project may, in the current climate, eventually produce an appropriate curriculum for public schools, it also leaves in doubt to what extent such pragmatic effects are probable without intervention from an articulate public” (230). Perhaps a similar intervention can work for the humanities as a whole, at least regarding the curriculum. But before the traditionalists invite public scrutiny, their own camp must be put in order. This will involve two changes.
First, old-style humanists—wiser now for not taking for granted the “traditional” benefits of the study of literature, history, philosophy, and so on—must stop mumbling to themselves about loss of status, stop deferring in self-loathing, uncertainty, and timidity to the arrogance of the literary critics and social theorists. Donoghue puts his finger on the problem:
As humanists—in the special and limited sense in which we are teachers of the humanities—we are unable or unwilling to say what we are doing, or why our activities should receive support in the form of salaries, grants, and fellowships. We are timid in describing the relation between training in the humanities and the exercise of the moral imagination. (123)
When legislators come knocking on the door, when the presidents and deans complete their transformation of higher education into just another $250 billion business, it is time for some of the old arguments to come back. As Sabin concludes, “Those in a position to influence academic currency now have the obligation to reconsider the distinctiveness of humanistic reading and writing that can no longer be taken for granted” (101). The focus must once again be placed on the value—and values—of an education in the traditional humanities.
Once it was thought that scholars of the humanities taught because they believed in the intellectual rigor of their enterprise, the sensibilities it cultivated, and the connection between thought and action—sometimes called morality. As Ellis proclaims (but does not emphasize enough):
The standard defense of the humanities, on the other hand, was that humanistic education provided all kinds of rewards, but the least important was the enrichment of our leisure through great literature and the arts. The most weighty arguments were that the humanities enabled us to see ourselves in perspective, to become more enlightened citizens, and to think more deeply about important issues in our lives. A society of people educated not just for a vocation but for full and intelligent participation in a modern democracy would be a far better and happier society—so ran the argument—and this overriding social usefulness of humanistic education compensated for its not leading directly to means of earning one’s living. (3-4)
It also taught a discipline of mind that enabled students not only to separate stronger arguments from weaker but also to learn a trade and master a vocation better. And since the humanities were based on great, profound works particularly from the West, they taught above all self-criticism, a ceaseless questioning tempered by duty and responsibility to something larger than the self. The single activity that warranted the expense was teaching—humanists were to share their skills, implant their enthusiasm, develop sensibilities, impart information so that students might lead more productive lives. This, in effect, is what most liberal arts colleges still claim to do. The classic modern formulation of this realizable ideal is still that of John Henry Newman, who more than a century ago defended liberal learning, since the student
who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer…or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to…with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success to which another is a stranger.34
Most of the undergraduate teachers of classics I know still believe this, although they would concede that the benefits of research need to be blended into the mix. And so does much of the public, which wants little to do with political correctness in their universities. A 1993 pilot study of public attitudes towards the liberal arts revealed that corporate leaders, educators, parents, and students all saw the great value of the humanities, but thought the current curriculum failed to deliver.35 Ironically, the one truly radical curriculum that has not been tried on a large scale since the number and diversity of students in higher education increased dramatically is one based on a strengthened core of Western culture and traditional humanities. Once the student population started to shift, academic opportunists and administrative quislings retreated from the curriculum.
Old-style humanists who wish to take back the curriculum must demonstrate to the outside world why their vision of the humanities is superior to that of the new school and why it has any value at all to the physical and metaphysical well-being of the public. And this can only be accomplished by doing research and teaching courses that have some meaning to someone outside the academy. Admittedly, we still do need books such as these two under review, books that effectively dismantle the claims of the New Humanities. Mary Lefkowitz’s patient efforts, for example, have done much to bring to an end Martin Bernal’s fifteen minutes of fame. And of course we still need the traditional scholarly monograph.
But we need more books that display the value of our profession. One can appreciate Christopher Ricks’s confession in his contribution to WHTTH?:
When this collection of essays was being bruited, I found myself saying at an explorers’ meeting that instead of everybody’s talking, yet once more, about “the state of the humanities” and the changes and chances of late, those of us who resist the claims of certain recent developments—as not truly or not sufficiently developments at all—would do better to get on with such work as we believe in. (179)36
Indeed, Ellis’s book would be more helpful if it also told us something about the German literature he has devoted his life to, about the issues and ideas that are raised in works little known to anyone outside the academy. Robert Alter’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (1989) is a model worth following in this respect. Windschuttle’s book also has the great advantage of demonstrating the superior explanatory power of traditional scholarship in comparing the results of various approaches to a series of historical issues. He does some history—readers can see what each side has to offer and make their own choices. Why must it so often be the talented amateur, a David Denby or Michael Wood, who brings ancient literature and history to the public? The three thousand copies of WHTTH? are mostly in the hands of people who have already taken sides in the academic culture wars. Michael Wood’s book on Alexander sold fifteen thousand copies before the PBS series even aired.
The best way to uproot the new curriculum is to put the argument back into the familiar competition of liberal studies versus vocational studies, which is exactly where the public wants it.37 The New Humanists cannot win a battle waged in this fashion, since they have joined the enemy. Ellis again puts things into perspective:
We would have been amused by predictions of what was to happen, because it would have been impossible to imagine that professors of literature would throw away their advantages. Who could have foreseen so complete a reversal that philistines who had never seen any value in studying Milton and Keats would eventually derive their most convincing arguments and draw their strongest support from professors of literature themselves? Or that they would be the ones to tell the world that great literature, far from broadening the mind (as they used to say), actually narrows it by implanting constricting, socially harmful attitudes. (205)
Today’s students—and their parents—are more concerned than ever that a college education lead to a good job. Nearly 75 percent of freshmen surveyed this past fall chose “being well off’ as the most important goal of their education, while only 40.8 percent opted for “developing a philosophy of life.” These numbers are reversed from 1968, when 40.8 percent wanted financial security and 82.5 percent were looking for something more meaningful.38 The New Humanities have nothing to offer these parents and students—and nothing to counter their understandable pragmatism.39 That is, the literary critics and social theorists explicitly reject the emphasis on traditional “linear” skills of analysis, “hegemonic” rationality, and “value-laden” approaches that have for so long been the tools for real social reform, including the challenge to the rampant materialism that the revisionists actually embrace so fervidly in their own careers.
Some of the modern academy will come out fighting, claiming what is good for society is their curriculum. But they have little ammunition and, like the Roman boys educated in the schools of rhetoric on obscure and fanciful tales of pirates and rapes, they won’t be able to perform under public scrutiny. Their ideas do not stand up to rational review, as these books and others have revealed. Their curriculum has not improved society over the past thirty years. They don’t even like their material, as Kermode concludes: “For we all have colleagues who hate or despise literature and the study of literature, and institutional change has given them power” (177).
To be politically realistic, like it or not, most of the cost-cutting elected officials do not share the liberal politics of the academic multiculturalist. When Californians voted overwhelmingly to abolish state-supported affirmative action, the faculty senate at Stanford bravely countered by voting unanimously in favor of affirmative action.40 These freedom fighters, safely snuggled in their half-million-dollar houses in the faculty “ghetto” and the elm-lined streets of Palo Alto, opened their mouths and lifted their pens once again in support of the minorities whose bad schools and difficult lives will continue to keep them on the other side of the eight-lane freeway that divides them from their “virtual” mentors.
Even Ellis himself, who takes their ideas so seriously, ultimately must concede their true motives are not social reform or intellectual “paradigm shifting.” He points out that unlike in the natural sciences, where a new discovery opens up new fields and career opportunities, often in the humanities it means that there is now one less thing to say. So, to make a career in academic publishing, one must reinvent what the humanities mean. Like Joseph Smith in the New York woods, one must dig up hitherto unknown texts and apply the magical lens of revelation to decipher the scribblings. Indeed, with everything now a text, there is no end of new material and new fads. How refreshing it is to read from Louis Menand what seems so obvious to those outside the academic world:
It may be that what has happened to the profession is not the consequence of social or philosophical changes, but simply the consequence of a tank now empty…. Literary history is one thing that the academic structure is good for enabling. There was a job of periodizing, of establishing texts, of exhuming neglected or forgotten work, of producing critical biographies, and so on that could only be undertaken on a massive scale, and with due quality control, in a university setting. This work has now, possibly, largely been done. The only interesting new work being undertaken today is an extension of that old work: the business of exploring canonically “marginal” writing. The interest of this activity is largely historical, and it will eventually run out. There will always be scholarly problems to solve, of course, and there will always be room for critical revisionism. But the notion that work that seemed done a mere twenty or thirty years ago now needs to be entirely redone is a notion suggesting that the larder is pretty bare. Academic literary criticism is now largely in the business of consuming itself. (215)
Here is the Achilles’ heel of most of the New Humanists: they are hypocrites to the core. No doubt some are politically sincere, convinced that the old humanities reinforce social realities which they find abhorrent. But they do not live the lives they profess. As even Ellis must conclude, the “self-dramatizing and self-absorption are real, the politics of social conscience is literary-critical” (211). They criticize capitalism because doing so pays financial dividends. They advocate multiculturalism because it promotes them out of the classroom and away from the lowly undergraduates, the people their curriculum is supposed to liberate. They have the sincerity of Orwell’s dancing pigs, who devour the resources in order to “save the oppressed”: “You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples…. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.”
But (and here’s shift number two) humanists can only exploit this hypocrisy—that is, the public will only be convinced—if they have the courage to reject the entire package of the modern academy. If academic politics replace reading, thinking, teaching, and writing, we are indeed lost. Professors must stop wanting or expecting anything from their profession other than the decent salaries they already earn. Not atypical is the following excerpt from an article on Cal State Monterey Bay:
Two experienced academics familiar with the campus (but not affiliated with it), interviewed for this article, expressed unhappiness about the lack of European American or European authors in the reading lists. Neither was willing to be identified, observing that if they were named, jobs and relationships could be imperiled.41
What, some celebrity theorist-of-the-day might snub these “experienced academics” at the next annual meeting? Their colleagues would have confirmed what was always suspected, that these two academics had minds of their own? A grant application, think-tank invitation now at risk? When was it, exactly, that the academy became the repository for audacious charlatans, sycophantic wannabes, and tremulous apragmones?
It is time to return to the model of Socrates and to turn away from the Hellenistic version of the university. Indeed, Peter Green’s analysis of the rulers and scholars at Alexandria seems uncannily appropriate for the denizens of the modern university as well: a foreign elite living among a people whose language and ways it wants nothing to do with in daily life, a world of raging ambition, lack of real political power, intellectual alienation, and urbanism. Despite claims of a radical divorce from the past, they instead reveal a “fantastic desire for stability,” the prime aim, always, being to better one’s position within the system as it stands. The Museum itself—where critics thought of themselves as superior to the artist—was attractive especially for the perks: free meals, good salaries, pleasant environment, good lodging, and plenty of servants (graduate students). There was even the equivalent of today’s race-gender-class utopian agenda in the development of Hellenistic pastoral, likewise an idealized daydream of an urban elite, living on patronage, who would never be caught dead with a sheep. Green aptly refers to the lampoon of Timon of Phlius, which describes the Museum as a wicker coop where academics are maintained like high-priced birds: “In multicultural Egypt, many grow fat as subsidized bookosauruses, endlessly quarreling in the birdcage of the Muses.”42 We need more of Homer, less of Callimachus; more Sophocles and less Menander; a whole lot more of Plato and very little of Epicurus.
Faculty must stop expecting the public to subsidize publication. Research fellowships to individual faculty investigators should be eliminated. John D’Arms laments that the number of these grants, which he approvingly accepts to be “the lifeblood of scholarly research in the Humanities,” declined from 250 to 150 between 1980 and 1994 (35-40). Not enough. The Fellowships for University Teachers go to scholars at major research universities already paid to do research. These scholars have the lightest teaching loads in the world. Nowhere have I ever seen it demonstrated that this research would not be undertaken if my tax dollars didn’t remove them from their campus duties. Indeed, the cup of humanities research runneth over. And over. That such grants could be called the “lifeblood” of research indicates just how anemic the humanities have become, how desperately we need to be weaned from mother’s milk and grow up. It is an insult to the huge majority of scholars who publish without having ever received a penny of outside money. The Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, of which most of the winners come from elite liberal arts colleges and smaller research universities like Notre Dame, UC Santa Cruz, Dartmouth, and Georgetown, should mostly dry up as well. Why waste federal money on research that will get done anyway? If, as a nation, we desire to sponsor humanities research, then let’s take a chance on faculty who teach eight large classes each year to students needing extra attention, professors who may need—and never otherwise receive—the rare opportunity to collect their thoughts and write something important.
In the over five hundred pages of analysis under review here, I found only one acknowledgement of perhaps the greatest transformation of all in college and university teaching over the past half-century, which is that, despite the huge increase in the number of both students and faculty, “over the course of the Cold War period, the amount of time professors at research universities spent in the classroom shrank from an average of nine hours a week to an average of four and a half hours a week”43—with a month less of class to boot! Humanities professors may spend more time in the classroom than faculty in other divisions, but at research institutions in particular this is hardly “quality time.” As recently reported by a commission created by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, baccalaureate “students are the second-class citizens who are allowed to pay taxes but are barred from voting, the guests at the banquet who pay their share of the tab but are given leftovers.”44 With sabbaticals, grants, leaves, and released time, it has been estimated that as many as one-fifth of professors are not teaching at all during any given term.45 A 1991 survey of over 35,000 faculty found that only 10 percent believed their institutions valued and rewarded good teaching.46 As Sabin points out, even undergraduate courses in the humanities now are often little but narrow research foisted upon the unwary (91). The price of “being” an academic is high.
Tell the truth and be prepared to be despised, or worse (apparently), ignored. Achilles, Ajax, Cassandra, the Melians, Socrates—these should be our models, not Ismene who merely wants to be loved in comfort and safety, not the chorus, who merely want it all to go away. If it should suddenly become profitable to teach—that is, if jobs suddenly were dependent upon offering—more classes on familiar authors and historical subjects in traditional disciplines with humanistic methodologies, the New Humanities would quickly fade away. There would be so many conversions and reinventions in the academy it would feel like a revival meeting.
Could we ever be comfortable leaving curriculum decisions in the hands of politicians or alumni? Of course not. We have no reason to think that the presence of outside arbiters will lead to change in any positive direction: we may well soon have mandated courses on creation science, corporate tax-sheltering, and sports psychology. Moreover, the proponents of the New Humanities share with public officials and academic administrators a gift for schmoozing, an unctuous facility for ingratiation. They infiltrated the university by being political, not logical; private, not public. They work behind doors, networking late nights on the phone, born hustlers all. The nature of their success is transparent, as Joseph Epstein noted in his farewell column to The American Scholar after being booted out by the academic revisionists:
Phi Beta Kappa’s Senate, far from being representative of the organization at large, is almost wholly made up of academics, and in academic argument, I have noticed, the radicals almost always win, even though they rarely constitute a majority. Conservatives, dependably a minority, usually don’t care enough to take a strong stand against them. Liberals, the poor darlings, though generally the majority, are terrified about seeming to be on the wrong side of things and so seek compromises that inevitably favor the radicals. The model here is the Russian Duma, with the minority of Bolsheviks cracking the moderation and ultimately the backs of the Mensheviks.47
So even if there were to be a public debate about the role of humanities in higher education, the leading posthumanists would send out their apparatchiks to take a painful but meaningless beating by the humanist thugs, while the politicos themselves made their deals offstage.
But in spite of the likelihood of failure—perhaps because of the very slim chance for success—academics concerned about the collapse of the humanities must take aim at something bigger than their own careers. Call it Millennial Fever. Homer, Shakespeare, the Founding Fathers—they deserve to go out with one final suicidal run, a Pickett’s charge to victory or into oblivion. We little men and women owe them at least that much.