Written by John Claborn (English)
Monday night’s (Oct. 26) author’s roundtable and lively discussion with Frank Donoghue proved sometimes bleak and less often hopeful, but consistently provocative. Donoghue began his talk by recounting two formative moments that set a professor of eighteenth-century British literature on the path to writing The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. The first was his move from Stanford University, a financially secure institution insulated from state politics, to Ohio State University, where attacks on “professors who don’t really work” were rampant and budgetary constraints occupied faculty and administrators. This gave him a private/public double perspective on higher education, and it reminds us that he writes with an eye specifically to the problems of public schools like the University of Illinois. The second moment was his reading of such books as Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education and Roger Kimble’s Tenured Radicals in the midst of the then-emergent “culture wars” of the 1990s.
Joining an ever-expanding genre of books on the deplorable state of academic labor in higher education, Donoghue’s The Last Professors dismantles what may be our last comfort: the rhetoric of “crisis” used to characterize the plight of the humanities. “Crisis” suggests that current problems sprang up in the recent past and, therefore, they just may resolve themselves somehow in the near future. Instead, Donoghue reframes this crisis as “an ongoing set of problems” (1) in a “long dialectic between business and higher education” traceable back to the nineteenth century (23). Humanists, he shows, are still simply rehearsing the same debates put forth by Matthew Arnold and Andrew Carnegie in the Victorian era—debates about the usefulness of people who study and teach literature to corporate America’s bottom line. As history has shown, Carnegie’s utilitarian ideals of productivity and efficiency have proven more powerful than humanist ideals (though to be fair to Carnegie, he aspired to be a “man of letters”). By mapping a genealogy of corporate vs. humanities discourse within higher education, Donoghue challenges us to reformulate the debate’s key terms and move beyond the “rhetorical rut” of Arnoldian defenses of humanities education.
Donoghue then moved on to a critique of the “publish or perish” tenure system and academic freedom. He argued that the increased emphasis in recent decades on publication for determining tenure has lead to a “scholarly publishing industry” that places enormous pressure on upcoming generations of scholars. Productivity measured in terms of articles and books is symptomatic of corporate values, even though only about 2% of these “commodities” are ever cited. To conclude, Donoghue summarized arguments advanced in his new article, “Why Academic Freedom Doesn’t Matter,” in which he traces the history of how the principle of academic freedom became linked to the tenure system.
Each of the responses from Dave Morris, Antoinette Burton, and Dianne Harris, as well as the ensuing discussion, centered on current, concrete struggles within the university. Many good questions were raised: how can we find ways to critique corporate values without reverting back to empty arguments for the intrinsic good of critical thinking? What is the value of scholarly work when it rarely reaches a non-specialist audience and when it is viewed primarily as a means to obtaining tenure? What kinds of leadership exist, or should exist, to organize both full-time faculty and the exploited adjunct multitude into coalitions capable of combating regressive administrative policies? How do we make local coalitions formed around local problems more national (and international) in scope that can effectively address larger systemic problems affecting, say, Ohio State University, the University of California, and the University of Illinois?
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Written by David Morris (English)
The following comments are informed by several positions I’ve occupied at UI. I’m a seventh year grad student in English. During my time here, I’ve taught seventeen courses and assisted for five more. I’ll be on the job market next year. I was heavily involved in negotiating the 2006 GEO-UI contract, and I’ve been sporadically involved in the GEO ever since, especially in health care access and quality on this campus. I’ve spent lots of time thinking about my experiences with the GEO since 2006. So in my capacity as grad student, contingent teacher, job candidate, and skeptical activist, I want to offer a few observations on points that I found particularly useful in Frank Donoghue’s book. Most of my comments address the intersections of labor union discourse and academic labor organization, noting some of the strengths and limitations of this convergence.
At the end of chapter one of The Last Professors, Professor Donoghue illuminates factors that have prevented professors from organizing for administrative influence and better working conditions. While the book contains some criticism of AAUP and labor-union like organizing, it seems to hope for faculty organizing of a basically labor union style. We see this in Professor Donoghue’s focus on labor as an organizing concept, noting that professors often do not view what they do as labor in the economic sense. Adjuncts and grad employees have historically had better luck organizing. I want to point out, though, that around many issues—academic, community, employment—there has been successful organizing and activist work enacted by coalitions of people at various academic ranks. There’s a habit in certain quarters of academic unionization—I’ve seen it in the GEO and especially in its parent organizations, the Illinois Federation of Teachers and American Federation of Teachers—to adopt the organization and mobilization strategies and the rhetoric of national unions like Service Employees International Union which represents an array of service professions. This model relies heavily on numbers of rank-and-file union members and on the legislative power of the parent organization. While this model has its uses, it’s somewhat less than ideally democratic, and often ends up mimicking the kind of top down corporate structure of governance it would seek to combat. To a certain extent, it requires ideological near-uniformity at mobilization time—or, at best, it ignores its own diversity. I’d like to suggest that organizing around issues, organizing at micro levels for faculty, adjunct, and grad influence in higher administrative decisions, and organizing for diverse purposes are still effective methods. This requires us to rethink what we mean by solidarity among academic laborers, and to recognize assemblages instead of monolithic organizations. This allows for diversified methods, diversified goals, and diversified rhetorics among people who share common interests in quality education and research measured outside of corporate criteria.
Professor Donoghue’s demand in chapter 4 for a new, compelling defense of the humanities implicitly demands that we consider the extent to which uniform defenses are necessary or even desirable. In other words, the question we face when defending the value of the humanities is not just “what message do we have?” but, is it necessary to have just one and to “stay on message” with it? In chapter 3, he suggests that to combat accusations that the humanities are impractical, “humanists tend to produce one manifesto after another in defense of the intrinsic good of critical thinking. Instead, I believe that humanists first must use the tools of critical thinking to question the widespread assumption that efficiency, productivity, and profitability are intrinsically good” (88). This argument reminds us that a critique of corporate values must be sustained, piercing, and public, unlike the critiques many of us do make on occasion (often while rolling our eyes) lamenting the philistinism of students, administrators, or faculty in non-humanities disciplines. I’d like to add two observations to this argument. The “manifestos” “in defense of the intrinsic good of critical thinking” appear in various places, but often in front of specific audiences. The way we defend the importance of the humanities ought to vary depending on the audience; what we tell each other ought not necessarily to be the same as what we tell public school boards, state legislators, and administrators--for two reasons. First, while I don’t particularly like ends-justifying-means arguments, I find a limited compulsion to be particularly sincere to some administrators. If making the Matthew Arnold-type arguments about the enrichment of the whole person works on an audience, I’m going to use it. Second, and more importantly, I’d like to suggest that it wouldn’t necessarily be desirable to have a single voice—or a single organization representing all of us—articulating a monolithic, totally coherent and consistent defense of the humanities that goes beyond specific occasions. This would tend to belie the diversity of approaches to humanities research and education.
I advocate, in other words, trying to come up with models of organizing that accommodate diverse assemblages—of activists, of organizations, of disciplines, of methods, of goals. I’ve been encouraged in the last few years to see people within the GEO doing just this. Members and staff have made great strides at bringing together campus organizations with diverse memberships and goals around specific issues. Ideological and methodological uniformity are unnecessary, as diverse methods and approaches can all work toward generally similar goals—whether they are in support of contract organizing, better services for international students, non-discrimination, etc. Active membership in GEO has grown under this approach.
There are limitations to this model—it tends to be messier, and it can appear organizationally weak as compared to, for example, city of Champaign government or UI administration. I leave Professor Donoghue’s book, however, with hope for the future of the humanities driven in part by the successes of diverse models of organizing. Despite a series of insults from administrators over the past two years—including threatened tuition waivers, crummy contract proposals, not always sincere efforts in making the campus more diverse, and a maddening focus on “branding” of the university—and despite the dark diagnoses and predictions of The Last Professors, I also see hope in this: Organizing academic labor involves a sometimes messy assemblage, one that suffers setbacks and rarely wins clear victories, but the corporatization of administration also involves a messy assemblage, one that suffers setbacks and rarely wins clear victories. It’s difficult not to view administrative-market assemblages as monolithic, extremely well-organized, and omnicompetent. They are none of these things, as the recent failure of UI’s “global campus initiative” and the somewhat ignominious demotions of the President and Chancellor suggest. Structurally, it probably doesn’t matter that White and Herman are gone—the machine will continue to run. But it does remind us that the march of corporate HR-style administration isn’t unstoppable, even given the potent market forces described by Professor Donoghue.
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The Neoliberal Arts Education: Some Points of Refusal
Written by Antoinette Burton (History)
Before I begin I want to remark on how many people have been in contact with me over email about this panel, sending viewing material and references of all kinds.
The most common item I have received is segments of the “Save the University” forum staged at Berkeley before the September walkout. It can be found on You Tube, and I recommend especially the speeches by Wendy Brown and Ananya Roy. Much of what I say tonight echoes their words, their diagnoses and above all, their refusals of what Roy calls the inevitability of the demise of the public university.
More proximately, I’m grateful to Frank Donoghue’s book, The Last Professors, even while it was very, very hard to read. Not only have we been living through much of what he describes, but we have been reading about the fact that we have been living through what he describes for a long time as well.
The collective wisdom of the argument is (and I paraphrase):
“The language of economic management is the dominant discourse in the University”
“Consumerism is the model for curriculum building and program elimination”
“Efficiency is the watchword, in knowledge production as in administrative speak”
“Faculty and especially humanists have had their heads in the sand about this for decades”
and, therefore, “the humanities are doomed to disappearance.”
These are ideas to be found not only in The Last Professors, but in the late great Bill Readings’ 1996 book The University in Ruins and in John Guillory’s 1993 Cultural Capital, both of which Frank cites.
Readings’ book focused more than Donoghue’s does on the disappearance of the liberal subject of humanism, that every-person who was the original aspirational object of modern university education. In fact, that every-person began as the rights bearing elite white straight Christian male of the Enlightenment paradigm, and our students are not by any means all that now, if they ever were and even if they want to be. Whatever we might say about how the university has “adapted” to demographic change, its social, economic and political ramifications have not been fully countenanced. “Diversity” is cordoned off in ethnic and gender/women’s studies programs that compete asymmetrically for resources and struggle to both build their own curricula and institutional capital and to transform the traditional disciplines themselves. There are some success stories, and important ones, but mainly there is a lot of pious talk about diversity – so that we have a thriving and innovative American Indian Studies program but we cannot, finally, get rid of the Chief. And if tuition and fees – those revenue generating pathways to the privatization of the public university – if tuition and fees continue to rise, people of color and working class students will be disproportionately affected. They will effectively be closed out of an institution where social hierarchies have arguably been re-made (pace Roy) and cultural hierarchies have been challenged for a quarter of a century – not perfectly, not ideally, but remade and challenged nonetheless.
If not diversity, what about globalization, that most prized project of the neoliberal institution? Despite the corporatized rhetoric about this as well, the university is not equipping its students in curricular terms to face a truly global or multicultural world – in part because it sees ethnic studies and area studies as incommensurate, and race and gender and class analysis especially as distinctive from “international” studies. There is so much to be said about this, but let me focus for now on how the student “market,” we are told, should be geared toward curricula that solve real world problems – sustainability, health, energy, global warming. But that’s a very particular market slice, fueled by a specific moment in the long and possibly stuttering history of corporate capitalism.
What we need, I submit, are courses on and programmatic attention to global histories of poverty, the ethnography of the global prison industrial complex, the literatures of global social movements, the sociology of global violence and war, the political economy of underdevelopment world-wide – in all their raced, gendered, and classed dimensions, bolstered by cutting edge research that starts with a critique of global power rather than with a not-so-hidden desire to be incorporated in it by reaping its benefits and disappearing its real, material inequities. Heck, I’d settle for a short, simple multi-disciplinary course pitched at all LAS first year students on cultures of capitalism, if only so we could devote a few sessions of our undergraduates’ general education to an informed understanding of what socialism, actually is, what redistributive justice actually looks like and why we need it. We need courses on the globalized phenomenon of neoliberalism in the university, from Urbana to Cape Town, not least so we can understand the accelerating advance of labor regimes that impact adjuncts and our own graduate students – so that our undergraduates can, in other words, fully understand why the GEO has voted an intent to strike.
Though they are touted as the new frontiers of research and thinking, and money is constantly being thrown at them so that they can give our students the tools they need for the so-called real world, I submit that sustainability and public health and digital technology are, arguably, subsets of the questions I mentioned above – capital, poverty, war and violence, uneven development – rather than the superstructural drivers of the new socio-economic order we are continually told they are. As articulations of a global and globalizing neoliberal agenda, sustainability and digital technology – I take these as random and nonspecific examples - need to be positioned in critical, dialectic and continuous relationship to the material conditions that produce them as the apparently exclusively desirable commodities in the curricular market place. At the very least they need to be arrayed alongside research and teaching that insist on longstanding histories of environmental racism, the yawning chasm of the digital divide and the persistence of famine and war of so-called failed states around the world. And they need to ask, of course, why the post-Katrina US is not counted in that category.
In the time I have left I want to continue my focus on the risible fictions of free market logic to which we are relentlessly subject at this particular moment. We must be market driven, market responsive, market anticipatory – this is what we are told over and over and with increasing desperation lately. And we just have to deal with it. Student demand is like consumer demand, we are told; it has to be fed, or else they will take their bodies and their dollars away. And humanists are especially at risk because, in the words of one of my colleagues recently, we persist in teaching a 19th century curriculum (the specific target was classics) that we need to abandon because it’s outmoded and effectively useless in today’s world.
We as educators respond to the market call as if the market really is this invisible hand, moving toward everyone’s self interest, or worse, as if that individual self-interest really adds up to a common good. Are we serious? Are we really prepared to let this interpretation stand, discipline, and govern us? Do we know no history, no scholarship of the last 25 years, and more to the point, have we not been paying attention to the real world since the end of Lehman? Forget Lehman - remember Enron? When where and under what conditions, Adrienne Rich might ask, has a corporate model ever realized its own self-stated goal, guaranteed long-term profit for its investors? When? Forget Enron, think about Global Campus, right in our back yard. I must stop here and refer you to Ananya Roy’s case against the argument that virtual campuses democratize higher education and reach underrepresented communities. She calls this the formula for a “subprime education,” modeled on the subprime lending practices of rapacious bankers and speculators that helped to produce the current crises; she calls it “segmented inclusion” that comes at a huge price. I urge you again to watch her analysis on the Save the University You Tube site.
Meanwhile, when administrators and colleagues tell us we need to be responsive to student need we need to tell them, actually, faculty need to be more involved in driving that need. Corporations (if that is our touchstone) shape market taste all the time. Why aren’t we fighting to do this, to claim our professional expertise and demand more of a role in molding how it impacts the student “product”? Otherwise students could teach themselves. We know that many people, both in and outside the academy, think that students can do that in the humanities, that they are autodidacts when it comes to literature and art, but certainly not in engineering. And of course they think that because these humanistic subjects are thought to be simply entertainment, with no redeeming socioeconomic value, let alone scholarly dimension. It's simply not true. Students need us all as much as we need them.
Please let me say, I don’t intend this hubristically. I aim to be a practitioner of feminist pedagogy, I am a lover of Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I believe in the Socratic method (if not in its pure form). But I also think that learning happens through teaching, which is a dialectic, reciprocal process and, however you slice it, is also a relationship of power. We as educators have power here and we need to use it now – ethically, responsibly, and with intellectual purpose, but we need to use it nonetheless. If we don't strive to shape student needs in terms of subject – demonstrating to them why breadth and depth are valuable, why really knowing a subject is hard, damn hard, but also life changing and even, yes, even concretely useful in the world - then a truly critically engaged, multi-dimensional liberal arts education will only be possible outside the publics. And I want more for students who come to a state university like ours than a vocational pathway. I think many people here do too.
These feel like questions well beyond our ken as faculty at Illinois but I think we can and should have the conversations and lead at this moment from a set of shared, or at least struggled-over, convictions about the content as well as the political economy of the curriculum. This is to say nothing of how curriculum changes will impact research. People will tell you, as I have heard, it’s too late for that. We need to decide what core mission is and make hard decisions about what to scale back on and eliminate. But if “core mission” is simply “research and teaching,” that’s not a guide to what we value and should be willing to defend. It’s a place-holder and we need to fill out its meanings with specific intellectual and ethical commitments as to what we think matters in a liberal arts education.
I fear, at the tender age of 48, being considered on the wrong side of the apparently inevitable paradigm shift toward the instrumentalization of all coursework and research to the solving of what are deemed the most important contemporary problems. Yet with my colleagues in the UC system I refuse the inevitability of this – and I especially refuse it in the name of economic necessity when administrative positions and salaries grow exponentially and those who do the real work on the ground – TAs, administrative assistants, janitors and electricians and lab techs – struggle to make ends meet and live in constant fear of losing their barely living wage jobs. (As Roy asks, what have they been managing? And if outcomes assessment is the new regime, why aren’t they being fired for having failed to produce winning fiscal outcomes?) We need spaces outside this logic of instrumentalization and management and all the values it implies. We need spaces of creativity and critique. And the university is one of the few places that still has the capacity to preserve those, not as spaces of privilege but of absolute necessity for a thriving civic society, for a pluralistic democratic humanism. Should there not be planning for spaces outside market forces in the landscape of the 21st century public university? Can we imagine no place in its architecture that serves as a refuge from the exigencies of capital, if only to see what that looks like and remind ourselves that we have the capacity to will such things into existence and sustain them? The alternative is survival of the fittest and silos of hegemons – an unfortunate mixture of metaphors but apt, perhaps, for a Midwest land grant institution.
Again, we hear all the time that the moment for this model is gone. It is only gone if we let it be. Will we at Illinois have the courage and energy and conviction and, yes, passion – a very unfashionable word in the age of principled, disinterested pragmatism - to mobilize for the sake of these things? I think we should be modeling our own creative offensive around what constitutes a liberal arts education for the 21st century in ways that are not just reactive, despite how intense the fiscal crisis is, and speak to what we think our fields can do for the student who is, for better or worse, a global citizen coming to a university to be fitted for “useful” work in the world - because the research and the teaching that go on here enable that robustness of mind and posture, that rigor and vigor required to navigate the now. I sit on a lot of committees that have been constituted because of this crisis; none of them appears to be the place to do this work. But shouldn't it be happening somewhere? And don’t we as humanists, as faculty, need to be making it happen? if we don’t, I can tell you, no one will.
I suspect there are people thinking things like this to themselves but they think that the train has already left the station, or that their jobs are in danger, or that the forces arrayed against us are too enormous to fight, or that the institutional debt is too huge to combat with a creative offensive at this moment. All of these things are more or less true. History is cruel, but it cannot paralyze us. I don't want modern/romance languages – I take these as random and nonspecific examples as well - to become just service/teaching units with no majors. If this is already the case, we need – we all need - to work harder to draw students to them. That’s right. Historians need to stand up for languages; chemists need to stand up for history; sociologists need to stand up for classics. And if the article in last week’s New York Times is anything to go by, we all need to stand up for Political Science as well. We need continually to remind ourselves why this is so. We need to have conversations about why our students need the insights from all literatures, histories, cultures to make their way through a chemistry major; and why they need math to become a lawyer, a social worker, small business person, a union leader. And why the global is not the only category, or that when we see the global we see it from North America not from francophone Africa, and that impacts how we see it. This is, to cite Rich again, “the atlas of the difficult world” that we have the capacity to make visible in the public university. Some courses we teach will be directly relevant to this; some wont; and we need both. Some courses have payoff today; some repay years from now in ways that can’t be captured by the accelerated speed valued by corporate capitalism, which is inimical to deep, deliberative study as a precondition to action in the world.
People who do good and great things in the world – as we hope our students can and will do - need inspiration as well as technical knowledge; they need the discipline of learning another language and the skill to recognize in "unfamiliar" terrain like the classics both timeless and historically specific trends and ideas and patterns. They need to encounter worlds they didn't know existed, to be knocked off their feet, to have their realities queered, to find their place anew - or not - because that's what the university has the potential to offer, against all odds. And we as humanists need time and money for research support, to make the new discovery, to develop the contrarian argument, to critique the paradigm shift and to bring all that directly back into the classroom. Innovation is great; sure, it’s the American way. But we also need people to study innovation, its design genius, its aesthetic beauty, its consequences for actual people, its payoffs and its violences – and from my point of view, especially its histories. This is what a critically engaged, flexible, adaptive but idea-driven liberal arts education has the power to offer all those who are lucky enough to have access to it. If we don't believe this, why are we here? I believe this, and not just to save my own job or to reproduce myself in undergraduates and graduate students. I believe it because I have seen the transformative power of the liberal arts at work – not always immediately, not always commodifiably, but materially nonetheless. And I insist on it now as it becomes the vanishing point of our time, when as an embodied principle it is being subjected to a form of reckless, panic-driven and market-oriented radical doubt unprecedented in the history of the university itself.
A big university like Illinois is increasingly run not by deans or associate deans but by auditors and Human Resource personnel – people who have no clue about what those who research and teach actually do or how students learn. They are interested mainly in policing a bottom line that cannot compute the daily realities of the true university business: the education of students and the production of new knowledge. There are many candidates for the two cultures thesis beyond its original humanist/ scientist binary, and educators versus HR is the most structurally powerful one, never more so when state revenues are in free fall. It’s tempting to digress into an analysis of the fiscal crisis as overblown - as a pretext for sinister economies, as an indictment of failed leadership and self-serving bureaucratic make-work, as exemplary of managerial capitalism in action - and I hope folks will take these questions up in discussion.
Meanwhile, I've said more than I intended. My remarks grow out of conversations I have been having with colleagues all over the campus in the last year, including with our brave and hardworking dean, who is here tonight – conversations carried on at various decibels, since for better or worse I am known to get agitated and raise my voice: something, it has been hinted to me, which is unbecoming. I refuse that too; I am not interested in that kind of becoming. What I do not refuse is the viability of my conviction that a liberal arts education is not a consumable good but a social good, even a durable good - an urgently necessary vehicle for intellectual, political, social and economic transformations in ways we may begin to grasp now but also have yet to imagine in their most expansive form. We need all the resources of the public university precisely to determine how to move forward.
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Written by Dianne Harris (IPRH & Landscape Architecture)
I should state at the outset that I choose to view Professor Donoghue’s book as a sobering cautionary tale rather than as an account of a fait accompli. There are probably not many among us here tonight who would argue that corporate business models did not begin to hold sway in universities some time ago, and I think we all acknowledge that they have had and continue to have a serious and often deleterious impact on the ways in which resources are allocated, on the direction of administrative action, and on higher education itself. As we approach the implementation of a new budget model that is largely driven by an accounting of the number of student bodies in courses, and that—up this point—has largely overlooked questions about the forces that drive student demand for courses, or the values that structure those forces, it is sobering to imagine the future consequences for humanities curricula. But as I thought about what to say tonight, I found myself alternately battling between refusing to admit defeat (which is to say refusing to admit that his books’ thesis is correct), resorting to the same language in defense of the humanities that Professor Donoghue critiques throughout the book, and searching for ways to prove him wrong, because I really want him to be wrong about our collective fate and that of the humanities—and I think he wants to be wrong too.
I imagine that in writing his book, Professor Donoghue must himself have been caught between the desire to build his argument forcefully and effectively, and by the simultaneous desire to have it be proven specious, flawed, or incorrect. So I therefore hope he’ll actually be heartened by the flaws I find in his text since it means that the career he has built, and the educational and scholarly endeavors that all of us work toward and believe in, might actually survive.
It is also worth noting that Professor Donoghue’s primary frame of reference for this book is the English Department. In a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Bérubé—who served as one of my predecessors as Director of the IPRH—wrote that “although people in English departments habitually forget this, English departments are just a tiny part of the university.” I am not refuting Professor Donoghue’s text on this ground, nor am I necessarily refuting it at all, but I am asking that the questions he poses be looked at from perhaps a wider range of vantage points. There are, after all, humanists in nearly every corner of this and many other colleges and universities and the experiences of those faculty vary tremendously. To teach, as I do for example, as a historian in a professional degree program, is to have a very different experience from someone who teaches the history of law, or from an ethnomusicologist, a classicist, a cultural anthropologist, or a scholar working in the newer realm of the digital humanities just to name a few examples. Funding levels vary of course, but so do departmental cultures and values, and all these have an impact on the issues taken up by Professor Donoghue. So the problems he outlines are real, but they are not equally “real” everywhere on a campus, and the issues humanities faculty face are far more diverse than those faced by faculty in English departments alone.
Professor Donoghue asserts repeatedly in his book that the humanities, and humanities faculty as we have known them, are essentially finished. He bases his claims on repeated references to corporate models that for him fix all the rules and establish all the terms of engagement. We, the professoriate, cannot win on the corporate playing field; indeed, we have already lost and are a dying breed. And we know enough, we see enough, to know to be afraid. We also know, I think, that as Professor Donoghue asserts, humanists will not gain traction by repeatedly asserting the significance of our endeavor. But might we not gain a bit of traction by instead examining the flaws of the very system he claims is triumphant? If corporate values, systems, and models of productivity and labor are indeed so ideal and so prevalent, why are corporations failing at a record rate? Haven’t we just witnessed the economic collapse of a financial regime based on the very corporate ideals that Professor Donoghue sees as inevitably taking over higher education throughout the United States? Corporate models have a nasty habit, it seems, of reversing on themselves when their singular adherence to profit causes an atrophy of leadership and a concomitant lethargy of the very levels of productivity so valued by that system. What we are already observing is that a system that cuts out its heart and its brain dies. And for that matter, shouldn’t we be asking why our universities are struggling financially—are in fact in economic crisis— if corporate business models are in fact so compelling and effective? The idea of the corporate university thus already seems somewhat antediluvian, and perhaps humanists can most effectively shape their future by insisting on and helping to formulate or design an entirely new model by doing what we do best: framing intelligent questions.
Professor Donoghue’s text also repeatedly asserts that the corporate university is inevitable, that the abolition of tenure is inevitable, that the transition from the university to vocational training schools is inevitable. But if there is one thing historians know, it’s that nothing is inevitable. As the Pulitzer Prize winning historian Gordon Wood recently wrote, “History does not teach lots of little lessons. Insofar as it teaches any lessons, it teaches us only one big one: that nothing ever works out quite the way its managers intended or expected....(History shows us that ) the best laid plans of people usually go awry.” This is so because the structures that come to bear on our lives are seldom monolithic, and they are seldom all-encompassing or absolute. Professor Donoghue has constructed a narrative that privileges structure almost entirely, and in which individual or even collective human agency is largely absent. And in denying individual or collective agency, he overlooks one of the most powerful and I believe paradigm-shifting phenomena of our time: the digital world.
For evidence from which we might construct a possible counter-narrative to Professor Donoghue’s then, we need only look as far as our laptops. By this I absolutely DO NOT mean to refer to the idea of the Global Campus, of distance learning programs, or of the University of Phoenix model. This is not what I refer to when I say that we should look to our laptops. But there is, after all, plenty of evidence in the digital realm that there is actually an enormous and largely untapped demand for humanities scholarship, much of which seems to have no immediate utility whatsoever (there are actually vast Shakespeare networks out there for example—if you Google the word “Shakespeare” you get nearly 49 million results. Some of that is ‘noise,’ but there’s also plenty of good stuff in there). Millions of ordinary citizens contribute to databases, to public history projects, and dare I say it—to “Wikipedia”—and they do so because they are passionate devotees to their subjects, and they are likewise often very knowledgeable. And contrary to Professor Donoghue’s point, they are reading our work because it is increasingly accessible in digital databases including the Google Books project (and this is a good thing). I don’t have time to cite all the evidence or data that corroborates this point, but the plethora of scholars studying this phenomenon can attest to its verity. Our problem as humanists is not that we’ve done a lousy job of explaining our relevance (though we DO need to be better at that, and to be more convincing as lobbyists so that NEH funding for example might increase), and not that we don’t attract enough funding to justify our existence in a corporatized university, thought these problems are serious enough. Just as important, if not more so, is the fact that we’ve neglected to recognize and tap into the huge demand for what we do, neglected to engage the general public more fully in what we do, and very likely been too concerned about questions of academic authority because we underestimate and therefore are insecure about our own value. What public engagement in the humanities via the internet and public humanities projects show us is that the humanities are not dying, and are not dead. Instead, there is plenty of evidence out there that demand for humanities scholarship is growing exponentially. But the methods by which humanities scholarship is produced, taught, and consumed, are undergoing a profound shift and that shift is not, inevitably, in the direction of the University of Phoenix. Professor Donoghue correctly points to a rupture in the humanities that is driven by a new economic and administrative model then, but it is not the only or perhaps even the most powerful one. Instead, the critical question for the future of the humanities involves reckoning with a revolution that is so big we haven’t yet been able to see it or to fully imagine it, and it involves questions about the role of citizen contributors to our fields, of shifts in what it means to be an “authority” in a field and of the boundaries of professional realms, and of the breakdown of the relevance of disciplinary boundaries that no longer work and are no longer relevant to scholarly inquiry. That, I believe, is the proverbial train that has already left the station. Our task is to try to figure out not only where it is going, but how to be that train’s Engineers, or at the very least to hop along for the ride.
Notes:
Michael Bérubé, “What’s the Matter With Cultural Studies?,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14, 2009; and http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-the-Matter-With/48334/.
Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008), p. 71.
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humanities
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Rothberg
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Michael Rothberg, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
It’s not clear to me that there is a consensus definition of the humanities, especially among non-humanist colleagues, administrators, and citizens, but even among some humanities scholars themselves! According to the Oxford American Dictionary, the humanities are: “learning or literature concerned with human culture, esp. literature, history, art, music, and philosophy.” In our context, it is probably worth adding that the “learning or literature” we’re concerned with is comprised of academic disciplines that study human culture.
Does this question of definition matter? I believe it does. Together with many of you who responded to the discussion of the “crisis of the humanities,” I think that the humanities disciplines will be stronger when they work closely with non-humanities disciplines and remain open to the blurring of the bounds of knowledge that has been central to interdisciplinary cultural scholarship for decades. But I also think we cannot afford to sacrifice the specificity of our forms of knowledge—both for reasons of disciplinary self-interest and, more important, because those forms are essential to the future of our planet. This post arises from my sense (and I could cite evidence) that a fuzziness about the precise contours of the humanities (even if those contours are themselves fuzzy) characterizes a lot of important decision making about the future of the humanities both here at Illinois and, most likely, in other places, too. There may be opportunities to exploit in such fuzziness, but there are also significant dangers.
With that context in mind, here’s my own attempt to formulate a definition:
The humanities are academic disciplines that employ critical, historical, interpretive, and speculative methods to study the meanings, values, and effects of human endeavors.
*By critical, I mean the close analysis of texts, concepts, contexts, and events as well as the self-reflexive scrutiny of the investigator’s own methods of analysis.
*By historical, I mean an understanding of meanings, values, and effects as situated in complex—but at least partially understandable—contexts and as varying and changing according to time and place.
*By interpretive, I mean that meanings, values, and effects are not self-evident, fixed, or inherent in texts, events, or contexts, but rather must be disclosed in discrete acts of critical analysis that will produce varied results (i.e. diverse interpretations).
*By speculative, I mean that the meanings, values, and effects that humanities scholars study are non-obvious and not always empirically verifiable, although they sometimes are and although questions of evidence remain crucial.
I do not presuppose that all humanities disciplines and all humanities scholarship will make equal use of these four characteristics or will makes use of them equally in every work of scholarship. Nor do I presuppose that non-humanities disciplines do not make use of some or all of these characteristics. But I do think that a family resemblance characterizes the humanities and meaningfully distinguishes them from the non-humanities along the lines of the definition offered above.
Does this definition (and set of sub-definitions) describe the humanities for you? If not, what changes would you propose? Please keep in mind that an effective definition will have to be concise, even if its terms are open to further elaboration (as I’ve tried to demonstrate here). Perhaps most important, how can we use such a definition to return to our earlier question: how to defend the humanities at a moment when knowledge is increasingly being corporatized and instrumentalized? I think we can (and need to) use such a definition of the humanities and the value of the humanities in discussions with university administrators and others.
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crisis
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Dainotto
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humanities
,
Rothberg
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Michael Rothberg, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Is there a crisis of the humanities? If so, how do we characterize it and what can we do about it? If not, why is the rhetoric of crisis so persistent?
Duke University Romance Studies scholar Roberto Dainotto takes an approach to these questions that I think runs nicely against the grain of current common sense. In his recent book Europe (In Theory)—which is not primarily about the crisis of the humanities, but rather, as its title suggests, about the construction of Europe—Dainotto writes: “The problem . . . is no longer whether the humanities with their tools—rhetoric, philology, historicism—will be adequate or relevant to the technologized, quantified, and statistic-oriented sciences, but whether the latter are still capable of responding to the humanities” (9).
Is this a useful starting point for considering either the crisis of the humanities or the rhetoric of crisis? How can we reframe the rhetoric so as to avert the crisis?
The questions I’ve posed here are not meant simply as “rhetorical” questions, although questions of rhetoric are obviously at the heart of the issue of “crisis.” University administrators, state legislatures, and that vague entity known as “the public” are constantly asking us to justify ourselves—and not just in Illinois, I’m sure.
In a couple of weeks I’ll be attending the first meeting of a Humanities Board convened by our Provost. We need to develop lines of argument adequate to these times without betraying the importance of what we do. This ought to be a collective effort, so please let me know what you think.
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