The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom

Three Necessary Arguments

Michael Bérubé, J. Ruth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137506122
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This book is a lively, passionate defence of contemporary work in the humanities, and, beyond that, of the university system that makes such work possible. The book's stark accounts of academic labour, and its proposals for reform of the tenure system, are novel, controversial, timely, and very necessary.

1 Value and Values

Michael Bérubé

In February 2009, as the magnitude of the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008 was becoming chillingly clear, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” It remains one of my favorites in the “crisis of the humanities” genre, and I think it deserves a separate treatment here, for three reasons. One, the first quote (in paragraph five) is from Andrew Delbanco, sounding very much the way he did in 1999: “although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant.”¹ Two, the article includes conservative critic Arthur Kronman who, also reading from the 1990s playbook, insists that “the need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” on the grounds that the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address” what reporter Patricia Cohen calls “the greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown” (presumably this would entail mandatory seminars on Greek and Roman theories of civic virtue for all Wall Street traders). And three, the article saves the nut graf for paragraph 17:

The humanities continue to thrive in elite liberal arts schools. But the divide between these private schools and others is widening. Some large state universities routinely turn away students who want to sign up for courses in the humanities, Francis C. Oakley, president emeritus and a professor of the history of ideas at Williams College, reported. At the University of Washington, for example, in recent years, as many as one-quarter of the students found they were unable to get into a humanities course.

So it turns out that on one hand, the humanities continue to thrive in liberal arts schools. I suspect that 24 February 2009 was the slowest news day in the history of the planet, a day on which no men bit dogs and no dogs bit men. For might this not be the reason students go to liberal arts schools in the first place? Isn’t this a little like publishing an exclusive report on how the sciences continue to thrive at MIT? But it’s the other hand that matters here. The humanities apparently must “justify their worth” in large universities where demand for humanities courses exceeds faculty capacity, where students are turned away from the courses they wanted.

The really funny thing about that 2009 article, however, is that it was also published ten years earlier, and may even have quoted Andrew Delbanco. In that earlier version, the article’s headline was, “In Flush Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” Because in 1999 we were in the middle of a robustly globalizing economy and a vertiginous dot com boom—who in their right mind would choose to major in humanities in times like those? And let us look more closely at the argument that a global financial crisis signals trouble for the humanities. By 2008, thanks to the financial deregulation of the 1990s and the credit default swap and subprime loan shenanigans of the 2000s, the people in the advanced financial sector of that robustly globalizing economy plunged us all into a Great Recession; now, somehow, this means that the humanities have to justify their worth? Surely this theme is going to be a permanent feature of the landscape in American higher education. Twenty years from now, when we are living in utopia, with 100 percent employment, with limitless clean renewable energy, with a world at peace and a children’s theme park located at the symbolic (and cheerful) border of Israel and the Republic of Palestine, we will still be asking ourselves—can the humanities be justified in times like these?

In this chapter, I’m going to try to justify the worth of the humanities in tough and in flush times. Most of my remarks will center (justifiably, I hope) on my own discipline of literary studies—which has so often served as both the clearinghouse for interdisciplinarity in the humanities and as one of the softest targets in the academic version of the culture wars. And I’ll start by citing the language of the letter I received a few years ago as part of an invitation to an event devoted to the future of the liberal arts, because I think it crystallizes just why we have found it so hard to make a compelling public case for the vital importance of the humanities:

A traditional liberal arts education has theoretically affirmed the belief in the existence of a certain kind of knowledge or wisdom—as opposed to information, or content—that is timeless and universally valuable to the human spirit.

The dean who sent me the letter made it clear that this was emphatically not her own position: she was instead paraphrasing a traditional, Kronman-esque view of the humanities from which she took her distance. But I think she had it just about right: traditionally, this is very much the kind of thing we used to say. There is a certain kind of knowledge or wisdom that is timeless and universally valuable to the human spirit, and we humanists have access to it. Come take our classes, and you can have access to it as well. That was a good sales pitch: timeless, universally valuable knowledge and wisdom R us. The problem is, that dean was also right that we don’t make this pitch anymore. We can’t, in good conscience. We don’t believe that knowledge is timeless, for one thing. And we don’t believe that anything is universally valuable, either. We still believe in wisdom, I think. But you’re not going to catch us saying anything about “the human spirit,” because that would be homogenizing and essentializing and also mystifying, and who wants that?

Over the next few pages, I’ll try to explain how things got this way. I’ll breeze over the last couple of decades of literary and cultural theory, and though I will be brief I will try to be judicious. Then I’ll suggest what kind of sales pitch we might want to make instead, and how we might go about justifying an enterprise that offers a form of knowledge and wisdom that is neither timeless nor universally valuable.

The shortest explanation for our aversion to talk about timelessness and universality is that We Are All Heracliteans Now. Heraclitus, for those of you who don’t use the word “Heraclitean” in conversation, was the pre-Socratic gadfly who went about Ephesus telling people that everything changes except the law that everything changes, and that you cannot step in the same river twice. Over the past three or four decades, humanists are more likely to have been influenced by Barbara Herrnstein Smith on the “contingencies of value” or Fredric Jameson on the imperative to historicize, but it’s more or less the same ever-changing river we’re talking about: nothing is timeless or universal about human knowledge; all is time-bound, contingent, partial. And the contemporary critique of timelessness and universality goes further, arguing that any attempt to represent a form of knowledge as timeless or universal is inevitably an ideological move, an attempt to represent a part for the whole, to claim that the intellectual folkways of one tribe are in fact models for the entire species, everywhere on the globe. It’s that imperializing gesture—the very claim to universality—that makes the Enlightenment look bad in retrospect. Because it is what allowed some very bright white guys to talk about universal principles while denying that those universal principles apply to (say) women or Africans.

That critique of the Enlightenment, I believe, had to happen— for pretty much the same reason that Thurgood Marshall’s critique of the Constitution as a flawed document had to happen. This is no coincidence, for the founding documents of the United States are very much products of the Enlightenment, and the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that all men are created equal cannot be reconciled with the Constitution’s protection of slavery. In 1987, therefore, Justice Marshall delivered a searing speech that (predictably) drew heavy fire from conservatives for whom the bicentennial of the Constitution was supposed to be an occasion for the celebration of American exceptionalism and the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. “This is unfortunate,” Marshall wrote,

not the patriotism itself, but the tendency for the celebration to oversimplify and overlook the many other events that have been instrumental to our achievements as a nation. The focus of this celebration invites a complacent belief that the vision of those who debated and compromised in Philadelphia yielded the “more perfect Union” it is said we now enjoy.

I cannot accept this invitation, for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite “The Constitution,” they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.²

Marshall was not speaking the language of literary theory, but the broadly historicizing claim is the same: the Constitution, as a concept, is vastly different than it was when it was written. Likewise, the meaning of “human rights”—and indeed “all men are created equal”—has changed dramatically over the course of two centuries and more: “‘We the People,’” Marshall wrote, “no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality,’ and who strived to better them.” One does not want to paper over the contradiction between Enlightenment universalism and actual Enlightenment practice, or to dismiss the question of how a slaveholder could write that all men are created equal and are endowed with inalienable rights by saying well, everybody did that back then. Far better to face the past honestly, however discomfiting that may be.

As Marshall concluded:

We must be careful, when focusing on the events which took place in Philadelphia two centuries ago, that we not overlook the momentous events which followed, and thereby lose our proper sense of perspective. Otherwise, the odds are that for many Americans the bicentennial celebration will be little more than a blind pilgrimage to the shrine of the original document now stored in a vault in the National Archives. If we seek, instead, a sensitive understanding of the Constitution’s inherent defects, and its promising evolution through 200 years of history, the celebration of the “Miracle at Philadelphia” will, in my view, be a far more meaningful and humbling experience.

The critical question, therefore—both for contemporary theory and for political practice—is whether the ideals of the Enlightenment, one of which was the belief in the universal rights of humankind, were fundamentally sound and merely needed revision over the past two centuries, or whether they were rotten root and branch, and will always lead to fatal contradictions and pernicious exclusions. Clearly, Marshall’s position is far closer to the former, and as such, very much in the tradition of Western liberal progressive thought: the ideals of the Enlightenment were betrayed by the very people who formulated them, but they set us on a path that allowed for the constant reinterpretation of “liberty,” “justice,” and “equality.” The main strands of recent theory in the humanities have tended toward the latter, seeing the tradition of Western liberal progressive thought as mostly Whiggish polyannaism that will always be blind to its own inevitable failings. And though I will endorse Marshall’s version of this historical narrative in this chapter, I want to make the case as strongly as possible that work in the humanities can and must challenge that narrative’s potential for complacency and self-congratulation. Scholars in the humanities would be irresponsible—they would be defaulting on a profound moral obligation—if they did not seriously entertain the possibility that the Enlightenment project is not simply a process whereby human society gradually becomes better, fairer, and more inclusive.

In order to get to that very large question, though, I need to go over some more recent history, and explain what I mean by contingency—which does not have at all the same connotations here as it does in the phrase “contingent faculty.” Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Contingencies of Value was widely misinterpreted in the public press and in general intellectual journals when it was published in 1988. Commentators accused her of “relativism,” of arguing basically that the process of evaluation (whether in aesthetics, morals, or any other realm) is completely arbitrary. Poet and critic David Lehman complained that Smith’s book jettisoned two centuries of aesthetic theory—as if that were some kind of capital offense.³ Really, only two centuries of aesthetic theory? What’s the big deal? Why not take the long view about such matters? It’s true, Smith’s was an anti-Kantian book, but she did not argue that evaluation is arbitrary and therefore pointless; on the contrary, she argued that evaluation is contingent and therefore inescapable. “Contingent” is not the same thing as “arbitrary”: it suggests nothing more than the uncontroversial claim that value is dependent on context. Value is not intrinsic; it is always value toward an end, for some purpose or goal.

I say this is uncontroversial, because we all know that it is part of folk wisdom: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there is no accounting for taste, to each his own. But it does have some unsettling corollaries, including the claim that human rights are neither intrinsic nor inalienable. They too are contingent, they too will change, along with everything else we humans do. We have largely stopped talking about the great chain of being and the divine right of kings; we speak instead of the universal rights enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of 1948. But today, some of us also speak of the rights of animals, which we didn’t do until relatively recently in our history, because our understanding of what a rights-bearing entity is, and what a “right” is, is also subject to the unchanging law that everything changes.

Smith’s book was not the only thing that stirred the pot in what has since come to be known as the “political correctness” kerfuffle of the early 1990s. There was also Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which caused all kinds of trouble, and Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, in queer theory’s annus mirabilis of 1990. And anyone who thinks that the conservative backlash against so-called “PC” didn’t have a great deal to do with what Michael Warner called “the fear of a queer planet” is fooling herself. One need only point to New Criterion editor Roger Kimball’s insistence, in response to the 1990 MLA convention, that “homosexual themes” are not “appropriate subjects for a public scholarly discussion of literature.”⁴ I pointed to this at the time, and it’s one of those remarks that just gets more revealing with each passing year. I could also direct your attention to U.S. News and World Report columnist John Leo’s mockery of the “transgender dorm” and the “queer prom” at Wesleyan University—15 years later, in 2005.⁵ But you get the point. These boys had issues.

Queer theorists had—and still have—good reason to suspect that much resistance to their work is grounded in rank homophobia. And the need to defend queer theory from rank homophobes obscured, for some years, another kind of useful trouble with the queer pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: This is Not the Crisis You’re Looking For
• 1 Value and Values
• 2 Slow Death and Painful Labors
• 3 From Professionalism to Patronage
• 4 On the Rails
• Appendix: Implementing a Teaching-Intensive Tenure Track at Portland State University
• Bibliography
• Index