It is getting awfully hard to be a humanities professor. Or rather, it’s getting hard to be a humanities professor and still maintain the heady confidence in the fields that the faculty had 20 years ago. The daily grind of teaching, research, and service haven’t much changed, especially for tenured professors who aren’t touched by the steady increase of adjunct teachers in their departments. But to remember the atmosphere of the 80s and 90s is to experience the loss of prestige, the decline of energy keenly.
Back then, Queer Theory and Gender Studies were new and exciting, taking up ever more oxygen in the journals and presses, conferences and hiring committees. Postcolonialism was, too, a species of political critique that had all the conceptual sophistication of deconstruction and thus avoided the crudities of what was termed “vulgar Marxism.”
Enrollments were holding fairly steady, and the popular press now and then paid attention to what the stars were saying. If the humanities weren’t still hot, Lingua Franca, the cool magazine of the 90s, wouldn’t have paid so much attention to them, nor would the culture warriors on the right.
[Diversity Requirement at UCLA Threatens Academic Freedom]
Where are the humanities now?
When we review the fields today, the main story isn’t anything conceptual such as a new theory; nor is it political, such as the liberal bias of the curriculum. Nor is it a notable event such as a major conference, or even a scandal (notwithstanding instances of misbehavior such as the Avital Ronell affair or the grievance studies hoax).
It is, instead, the progressive shrinking of the disciplines. Enrollments are sliding; programs are disappearing. I don’t even want to link to any reports showing waning numbers such as the stunning fact reported by the Modern Language Association that 650 programs in foreign languages have been cut in the last few years. With results like that, who cares what a prof at Columbia says about intersectionality, or that the students at Yale took down a picture of Shakespeare?
The only real news is which program is going to disappear next. The hard question is why the cuts are happening.
That makes a recent commentary at insidehighered.com worthy of notice. It bears a promising title: “Shrinking liberal arts programs raise alarm bells among faculty.” The author, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, an English professor at Linfield College in Oregon, is the author of a book on postcolonialism and the editor of a forthcoming volume on free speech and academic freedom. Her topic is, precisely, cuts administrators have made to liberal arts programs in recent years, which she terms “a death sentence” in the second paragraph.
[The Cult of Diversity Shows Its True Face]
But then comes this in the very next sentence:
It is a simultaneous devaluation of the many underrepresented, first-generation and social justice-oriented faculty (who were hired as a result of various diversity initiatives) who teach in disciplines such as foreign languages, women’s and gender studies, area studies, critical race, and global studies, etc.
That’s an interesting turn. Not only does it say explicitly that the faculty victims of these cuts disproportionately come from under-represented groups, some of whom were hired precisely to bring more diversity to the school. It says implicitly that the liberal arts have a social justice mission.
Here is how Professor Dutt-Ballerstadt clarifies that mission:
A liberal arts education provides a much-needed interdisciplinary framework for understanding the various modalities of human interactions, social justice issues, racial, class and gendered politics, and the impact of geopolitical-economic forces locally, nationally and globally.
Very well, that is now the predominant sense of the liberal arts fields. Race, gender, politics, social justice—not Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Waterloo, Das Rheingold, logical positivism, On Liberty. Those materials may be found in liberal arts courses, to be sure, but studying them in themselves is not the goal of the pedagogy. The goal, instead, is to understand social and political relations.
The president of the Modern Language Association is Judith Butler, who specializes in gender theory and whose humanistic feel for language may be measured by the clotted, clunky prose she writes. Her humanitas is limited, but that’s no stumbling block. Scholars and teachers are valued more for their ability to rehearse a theoretico-political interpretation of a text (which can be just about anything) than for their erudition or connoisseurship or aesthetic discernment. It is more important for a job candidate to show she can cite Butler properly than it is for her to explain why Moby-Dick is a great book.
[Why More and More Students Won’t Speak Up in Class]
I hope you see the problem. The reason we have a humanities crisis in the first place is that undergraduates aren’t enrolling in humanities classes in sufficient numbers. They’re going elsewhere, to business, psychology, and STEM.
And why is that? Because students come to the humanities for inspiration. They are guys who like Hemingway and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” girls who love impressionism and Mozart and Virginia Woolf. For at least some of them, the social justice approach turns them off. They want to look at Monet’s lilies, not consider the “male gaze.” They are struck by Ivan Karamazov’s atheist crisis, not by class relations and the peasantry. The bare humanity and soaring rhetoric of Frederick Douglass hit them more than his blackness.
Current humanities professors regard those loves as mystifications, or as denials of the realities of race, sex, class, and empire. The freshmen and sophomores who enroll in their classes thus find that their inspirations are suspect and unwanted. They are told that their passions need to be politicized. The descriptions of the fields quoted above can only appear to them unappealing. Only those 19-year-olds who already share the leftist vision want to hear more of it, and they aren’t enough to keep enrollments healthy.
What can the humanities professor do? Her training through graduate school has primed her to think in just these identitarian, progressive terms. It’s what got her a job and will ensure her promotions. We have a heavy indoctrination coming from above, while at the same time a steady estrangement from below, on the part of the undergraduates.
Professor Dutt-Ballerstadt doesn’t mention slipping enrollments in her discussion because she can’t. It blunts her blame-finding purpose. The fact that undergraduates are walking away from their classrooms prevents the professors from blaming mercenary administrators, conservative politicians and columnists, a money-mad culture, the high cost of college, and other preferred causes of the decline. Liberals don’t like to criticize the young. It makes them start to sound conservative.
It also touches deeply upon their identity as teachers. They are supposed to be instructing the young in the ways of the world. That means, in their eyes, teaching them the realities of –isms and phobias and how they afflict certain groups. The professors believe fervently in the moral goodness of their instruction—indeed, in the necessity of it, if we are going to create a more just world. And the undergrads don’t want it!
And so, the slide continues. No wonder there is so much unhappiness in the humanities ranks. The fields can’t align their outlook with the constituency toward which they aim it. They can’t say to their brethren, “We have to drop the identity fixations.”’ Their colleagues won’t like that. It would be like math professors being told to drop statistics. But they can’t keep telling 19-year-olds, “You’ve got to lose this naïve identification with Elizabeth Bennet and the Invisible Man – we need more critical thinking – there are power relations to register – you must learn different ‘modalities.’” And so, fewer kids will show up next semester.
As older professors who were trained before identity obsessions took over (before 1990, roughly) leave the field and retire, the hijacking of the disciplines will continue. So will the enrollment trends until we hit bottom, perhaps, five to ten percent of the undergraduate population who believe it worth their while to major in one of the identity-centric fields. The humanities will reach the point of classics by the mid-20th century—a boutique field.
This is what our best and brightest have wrought. I remember graduate school in the 1980s when literary theory was a campus-wide topic of discussion. We heard about all these brilliant minds pushing forward, some of them barely past the Ph.D. Everything was cutting edge and radical and transgressive and transformative. How fatuous it all looks now.
The identitarians won. They seized the levers of personnel and publication. They rose to the highest ranks. They spoke of themselves as a revolutionary cadre. Well, they were. And they managed to injure the fields, which may be beyond repair since the people who oversaw the decline still run the operation.
The old English department and History department and the rest were elitist and white and male and Eurocentric. No more. They had to be changed, and they were. Now they’re intersectional in one way or another. And a lot less influential and admired.
I just received my Master’s in English at a university in North Carolina the past month. Everything in this article is true to my experience. It’s a horrendous state of affairs.
Preach, Mark Bauerleine! I am a senior at an ivy league college studying English, and the man speaks the truth. I’ve done my best to take courses with profs older than 70. But what’s happening to the field of literary studies is appalling, and more people should be talking about it.
Mark,
My memory of this transformation precisely mirrors yours. It seems clear that the humanities have been committing suicide for some time, but in the early 1990s it was called “multiculturalism,” not diversity–different name, same game. That’s when our annual faculty reports began to ask for details about our “contributions to multiculturalism” in the three areas of teaching, research, and service. I was on a faculty senate committee discussing this change way back then and many people on it wondered what they were expected to say to this. One asked: am I supposed to list how many Black students I have in each class? By now, of course, new PhDs are indeed required to pledge fealty to “diversity” and list their contributions to it in “diversity statements” that many universities insist on as part of a job application. So their diversity statements read, e.g., “As a gay, biracial, child of a single mother…” etc. One student (very talented, incidentally) with whom I discussed this responded that there was no choice but to comply, however demeaning it is to have to stress and itemize personal identities and in effect brag about one’s “intersectionality.”
In English rhetoric programs in particular, here there is the (required) writing courses place curricular emphasis on social justice and identity issues, not on intellectual development, and certainly not on independent thinking.
As for the faculty, I could never figure out why professors who have contributed to the decline and numbing repetitiousness of their new pedagogy thought students would want to study second-hand politics in literature courses instead of going straight to the source in, say, poli sci and related programs (not that it was excusable there either to turn classrooms into ideological training sessions).
I think my generation is responsible for most this: professors have by and large not defended the integrity of their own fields, apparently because they do not feel such integrity exists. Identity issues, as you say, have driven out most everything else. Course descriptions and job ads provide undisguised portraits of this depressing scene. It’s a terrible loss of intellectual vitality and in fact shameful — and faculty bear enormous, rarely acknowledged, responsibility.
Ms Patai, it is truly a pleasure to read you again!
I recall fondly two of your books, both long after the issues they address came to my attention, and both remarkably prescient in their treatment.
Ah, the stifled, stuffed and staggering good old humanities. Does it not strike a wee bit of intelligently applied whimsy, that the “humanity” has been removed from them? One might almost surmise, surgically extracted (and kicked unceremoniously to the curb.)
And that all these undergrads, in the midst of current anxieties and panics about their dubiously successful futures for reasons too numerous to mention here – after all the buffering and battering they have endured – to be infantilized to such a degree that all of what the humanities are capable of offering them, should be sanitized, dumbed down, regurgitated and transformed into the very slop that any truly self-aware youngster still capable of questing for truth and beauty – would avoid like the plague it is.
What a considerable shame. I now work in a university Science and Medical library, and along with the good Engineering library in my immediate vicinity, are indeed, quiet refuges (for the time being) from the hacking and slashing that goes on elsewhere on my campus.
But still proud to say, my “identity” lives by its wits, and all of my people-centric fascinations. None of which were ever indoctrinated. All of which were stumbled upon gladly, while I was left to my own affairs and not “messed” with.
Still, I can’t rightly decide if the humanities truly have committed suicide, or if they were in fact, hijacked, adulterated, hoodwinked, mugged, kidnapped (for no ransom) or otherwise murdered whilst they slept, drugged into a deep slumber by supreme boredom but especially the extreme lack of imagination exercised by their abusers.
That they can still rise like Lazarus within public libraries and private collections remains a deep comfort to a haunted soul. The question is though, how does an average current undergrad find that? (without any help from the academy.) Perhaps never the ‘Twain’ shall meet……
First, “scholars” (sorry,if I could figure out how to do lined-through text here I would do so, in homage to sous rature) and teachers, also students, do nothing other than release the lexical hounds, ejecta consisting of strings of stereotyped words expressing pre-thought thoughts, in Bourdieu’s memorable description. The quote from Prof. Dutt-Ballerstadt is a fine example, though comparatively bland.
Second, if the colonized humanities departments starve to death on the chaff they serve in place of wheat, good! Excellent, in fact. Future generations will be able to resurrect the true humanities; there will never be a shortage of brilliant minds (I know it must be difficult to envision the chicken of brilliance without the egg of a PhD, but it happened before in history).
Third, I trust that Bauerlein appreciates the irony in his encomium to his grad student days. At some point in US universities during the 20th century, the idea took hold that to be considered a real scholar one had to “push forward,” be “radical, cutting edge, transgressive, transformative.” So the imperative took hold that Shakespeare and Jane Austen and medieval studies and all of them had to be radically transformed every 5 years. Well, Bauerlein and the rest got their wish.
A few days ago I received a letter from a father whose child was planning to enter university in the next years. He asked whether my distinguished university would be a good place for his child. I said that his child should avoid all social science and humanities departments, and also education, social work, and law, possibly with the exception of economics. Business might be an option. But a STEM subject would be best. My own social science department is one of the worst, and I am very angry that its lovely field of study has been betrayed and destroyed by the identicrats and social injustice warriors.
Professor Bauerlein – whose articles here I always find to be spot on – and I are both riding on the caboose of a train that’s leaving the station. It seems clear to me that when we retire we’ll be replaced by SJWs. My field – music – is all but consumed with popular culture and the intersectional trinity of race, class, and gender. It has been interesting to watch my Humanities colleagues’ stance towards European art music morph from indifference and ignorance to utter antagonism in recent years.
Albigensian’s observation that one can still study the Humanities outside the university is especially true in the case of music. Music lovers at symphony, opera, or chamber music concerts are there to experience beauty and have their inner lives transformed, not to practice the hermeneutics of suspicion.
“Race, class gender” has become the drumbeat of academic mediocrity. It’s a home for those academics who can’t write comprehensible prose, who can’t construct a logical argument (and then claim there’s no need to do so), whose standard M.O. is to start with the answers in hand and only later go looking for evidence (or “evidence”) to support these,
Fortunately those who wish to learn the humanities have many places in which to do so. Although many of these ‘places’ are virtual places, never before have these materials been so widely available, or has education (sans credentials) ever been so easily and inexpensively obtained. Of course, little if any of this can be used for academic credit, but (other than for satisfying some baroque diversity requirement) surely few will ever need these credentials for employment.
For those who wish to write, or create art or music or other works, well, just how many writers, artists, musicians/composers do you think have learned their craft in colleges or universities? It’s not as if you’re likely to actually find working authors, artists or musicians among the professoriate; most are far too busy applying theory to the creative works of others. Then they can then insist that these works really contained no meaning anyway, prior to being illuminated by the brilliance of academic critics.
I wouldn’t say it’s impossible that academic humanities may reform and be reborn, but for now a college or university seems a poor place to look for education in the humanities. Fortunately, those who have an interest should be able to educate themselves elsewhere.
The first generation of tenured radicals at least knew the fields that they purported to teach. The current generation, those hired in the past 10-15 years, don’t.
One can only teach that which one knows — and all they know is the political stuff.
It’s our version of the “Cultural Revolution” and the humanities themselves are at risk.