It's four years old now, but William Chace's "The Decline of the English Department," which appeared in the autumn of 2009 in The American Scholar, remains a provocative read and would undoubtedly give us much to talk about. It could probably carry a subtitle like "Why Literary Studies is Increasingly Irrelevant, Riven with Strife, and Governed by Incoherence" (!), and to that extent it's part of a group of like-minded laments that tend to be maddeningly generalized, as well as nostalgic and regressive in terms of their understanding of the field. Regardless of the merits of Chace's arguments, though (and there are some), you will no doubt find it to be an interesting essay ...
From an economic standpoint— the humanities have little to offer the corporate structure of a university.
ReplyDeleteThe pragmatic student with student loans coming due six months after graduation routinely asks, “What can I gain in income, status, power within these departments? I live in the capitalist, Darwinian container— How can these studies help me survive?”
The mandatory offering of the English department is seen as punitive— the “Intro Comp Class”. This can’t be an enticing proposition for entry into the department. The new pedagogy for this discipline has much to offer by the use of multi-media, hybrid and online collaboration platforms that engage all learning modalities— not just the visual. What if this entry point to the department weren’t painful but instead was exciting and enriching— maybe even fun? What if this class bridged the gap between the hypertext of the internet and and two dimensional nature of text, allowing freshman to integrate the ‘how’ of writing with their previous experience of technology.
Looking at our culture, every entrenched economic and political system is running on empty, surviving on life support through vested interest groups. These crises are being exploited by grassroots movements that are generating a new response— Occupy Wall Street, TEDx events, micro-loans,etc.
As long as humanities departments look to the culture, the administration or taxpayers to resurrect their purpose— they will continue to fade into obscurity. The more they continue to discuss the question . . . “Are the humanities any longer relevant?” the more they affirm this mistruth.
The meaning must be generated from inside the gates— by faculty and students accessing the same passion that generated their will to succeed in their quest for a M.A. or Ph.D. That wonder, that sense of grace at having landed in a graduate department, having found the financing, the courage— all these feelings can still be accessed. A radical refueling needs to be done that could effect these departments on a personal and an organizational level.
Salaries are not comparable to that of less education leaders in business or other fields. This comparison is destructive and offers nothing positive to the discussion. Highly educated Americans lead a privileged life— a life shared by less than 1% of the global population.
Isn’t this the place to start? Yes it can be discouraging to look at the new pharmacy building or the business building . . . or the education building. But how can this advance the hope for a renewal of faith in a liberal arts education? This focus is not helpful— it only begets a prospective of ‘poor us’.
This ‘us vs them’ thinking creates a ghetto-like mentality that is crippling. The comp-rhetoric offering is the key to integration. If it were rethought and reformulated it could begin to build a healthier bridge to the greater university community.
Is the university system following the lead of other American corporate structures that are self destructing? Is it cutting it’s core components in a short sighted move that will weaken the system, surely degrading the quality of graduates in many disciplines?
Is this the same ‘crisis’ situation that has led to many grassroots American movements blossoming in the last few years? Maybe this is the moment of rebirth, the time for the humanities to revisit their individual passion for their vocation and rethink their leadership role in the greater university community.
I attended the GSA (graduate student association) meeting today which was depressing in its own right due to the outstanding turn out of myself and four other individuals who seemed to be quite unsure of the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteApart from the shameless use of ASUM as a punching bag there wasn't much covered except for the budgetary issues faced by the association. Most of the five supporters were in the "hard sciences" and had their own issues with the Graduate school. While a lack of acceptance for us "humanities" students is often just a bump in the road there is apparently a huge amount of money attached to an "offer letter" to those students who were accepted into the hard sciences programs.
As they went on about how they were accepted and not able to sign a contract which dictated a specific amount of support (aka $$$) I didn't even feel like it was a valid place to voice my concerns about the lack of and unequal distribution of TAs.
It was as though since we didn't require per-arranged grant funding we were just a gigantic succubus feeding off the stretched, empty teet that is the University budget.
The stats that were shown indicated that the increase in enrollment was generally distributed evenly throughout all departments (ie: even though the university has 10,000 more students than it did 50 years ago the percentage of students in each department is relatively similar). So then where is the breakdown, why is English increasingly deemed more and more irrelevant field"? Is it because we are instrically tied to the University? We don't necessarily pump out grants proposals every other day and beg national foundations for equipment and tuition funds, maybe we should start. Maybe if grant writing 101 was part of core curricula we would find a voice, or at least a recognizable platform for the voice we already have.
In response to Margie's comment on the return to grassroots movements- I think across the humanities we all hope for a return to the original University purpose, where humanities were valued above all else, where people came simply to expand their mind and attended trade schools or apprenticeships if they sought to be employable. But since in our hyperbolic capitalist culture makes such a return unlikely maybe we need to adapt. Why not structure the BA curriculum as a more interdisciplinary audience? Most people who major in English of any kind and seek to employ themselves in an academic or "english-y" field get an MA or PhD anyway so why can't we redirect ourselves, re-brand and bring some life back into the curriculum that forces/compels attendance in more than just WRIT101. We know we are valuable but what is stopping us from making everyone else see that as well?
I don't think we should completely obliterate our core values, shatter the canon and throw out the quintessential English-ness of our department and or curriculum but we can't necessarily deny the current atmosphere of the University system anymore. Rather than advocating for our relevance in journals and blogs and columns that people just skip over lets act, lets make changes and create a base that reaches out and embraces globalization and makes enough of a splash that administration, media and students recognize us.
Yes, Margie and Tarren, where to begin with all your pertinent comments? I'm of course very much in agreement with your call for "engaging all learning modalities," Margie. You make an interesting and compelling claim, too, when you imply that we in the humanities unwittingly give life and credence to the issue of relevance by even entering the debate (and yet I must say that I love to read smart and fresh articulations about the value and role of the humanities!) ... And, Tarren, I think you're right to see great opportunities related to a (more interdisciplinary) reinvention of the undergraduate curriculum. Combining your notion with what Margie says about Composition, wouldn't it be great if we could somehow find more robust ways to get the Composition Program, Computer Science, and Media Arts to collaborate every so often? We have these individual strengths that, if combined in innovative ways, could produce some exciting collaborations (whether at the level of individual classes or more programmatic kind of renovations). And you're right, too, that we need to enter the thicket of grant writing to create some new inroads (maybe to fund some of the very collaborations to which I refer?). Until our antiquated notions of scholarly activity change, though, as well as the reward structures that are still beholden to those old definitions of scholarship (always the single-authored monograph, always the peer-reviewed articles), there tends to be little incentive or time to follow such paths.
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