After the fine posts by E Hayot, C Bush, and S Shirazi on Mallon's unfortunate list, I feel a little like the last guy on line at the Kiwanis dunk-tank booth at the local fair--the clown inside is already pretty soaked. Still, I've paid my dollar, so to speak, and it's fun to send Mallon down into the cold water again. And it's for a good cause. So to speak.
As C Bush and others noted, this question rests on a false premise (and is fact a pseudo-question), but it (like most of Mallon's questions) also embodies the False Nostalgia common to conservative laments about universities. Anyone who reads loads of academic prose for business or (gasp) pleasure knows that a lot of what clogs journals and university presses doesn’t readily trigger Whitehead’s romance stage of learning. Fair enough, but when exactly were the good 'ol days? Difficult and bad writing has been with us for something like forever. Okay, post-modernism may have licensed and even encouraged stacks of dreck (largely in pursuit of tenure, no doubt), but complaints about writing, professorial or otherwise, have themselves grown rather stale. Orwell published his incisive polemic in 1946, and the Sokal hoax is now nearly old enough to start prepping for the SAT. The Bad Writing Wars did make the Wall Street Journal but eventually ran out of good humor in 1998. (Sorry to “festoon” this paragraph with links, a question #5 violation. BTW: The author takes no responsibility for any ADD induced in the reading of this post. So there.)
Revisiting Denis Dutton’s now defunct Bad Writing Contest also helps us wither another of Mallon’s central assumptions, namely that he's worried about and for all of us. The Bad Writing Wars always provided an easy fix of humanist-on-humanist action, for those into that sort of thing. Dutton himself teaches philosophy, as does Martha Nussbaum, one of the major public critics of academic obscurantism in the late nineties (in The New Republic, no less). Many American professors, in other words, are and have been concerned about clarity and the state of academic prose. Analytic philosophers--the species dominating American departments--in fact obsess over it. Mallon claims to be worried about the state of the humanities as a whole, but he’s obviously just concerned with literary studies. Circa 1990.
More than enough has been said about #2 (for the moment); how about #3:
Here Mallon risks being interesting, but he trades (if I understand him correctly) on the creaky assumption that accessibility defines ownership. The reasoning just doesn't hold up, though. Simply because I make my stuff easier to steal doesn't necessarily mean that I no longer own it. (Some interesting puzzles about ownership of ideas do need some more thought, though. Malcolm Gladwell worried about such things in a typically shallow but suggestive piece in the New Yorker. If I steal your lawnmower, I have it and you don't; if I steal your idea for a lawnmower, we both have it. Odd.)
Though I do think it’s essential to discuss the ownership of ideas with students, the more important and difficult task is to teach students how to own their ideas. Do that and the Web becomes just a different kind of library full of odd-shaped books. If anything, Web-raised students might more easily slough off the presumption that published sources are automatically capital-'A' Authorities, understanding instead that authority is something earned. (I'm looking at you, Mallon.) And if that doesn’t work, there’s always Google. Plagiarism may be easier to commit now, what with the Web and the Cut and Paste, but it was certainly much easier to pull off before Google got verbified. As Paul Collins noted in Slate a little while back, this Electronic Age of ours makes ferreting out literary piracy almost effortless--even when the guilty are Dead White Men. Good old days indeed.
For what it's worth, I do believe that we face a very real crisis in the humanities, but one that makes Mallon’s list at best obliquely and no doubt unintentionally. Take #2, remove the tired qualifier about political faddishness, and it strikes me as getting at something downright pressing. Those interested in the future of the humanities in America should devote “a few moments of quiet bafflement” (see #5) to the minting and hiring of new humanists. It’s like the alternative minimum tax of academia: We produce too many PhD’s for too few traditional academic positions. I’ve become intimately acquainted with the results of this glut, having been on the business end of the academic job market for four years now. I’ve taught at universities that most people have heard of (and some that most people haven’t); I’ve got a few publications and presentations on my CV; I even have those glasses that make me look like I read Hegel or Heidegger. Still, I've had little success, and I'm not quite sure why. This year I did apply to only a few positions, but they didn’t even bother drop me a rejection, presumably because of the crushing number of manilla envelopes their listing generated this year.
If failure were just my own experience, I’d only be bitter and not worried as well. My data may be largely anecdotal, but my stock of stories grows exponentially each year. I know of too many new PhD’s who take tenure-track positions while leaving their husbands or wives in jobs states away. An even greater number languish on the job market, often with spouses and children waiting in the car, chasing across the US after even a far-flung tenure-track through a series of one-year contracts or post-docs. Many long-term positions simply flatten people under laughable teaching loads, effectively precluding escape from such student mills by leaving little time to publish and to advance. Limiting a search to a particular geographical area more or less reduces your chances of success to zero. Add to this unusual mechanics of a high-stakes yearly hiring cycle shaped largely by luck. No interviews in October, November, or December, and it’s “Better luck next year.” I know already of one promising PhD who defended his dissertation last fall only to start business school at the start of the new year. Why spend 8-10 years preparing yourself for a career path that barely exists? And given the salaries, why not go to business school or into TV production? The prize no longer matches the promise.
(I should note: two Printculture folks just landed academic jobs--congrats!--which is to say that success can be found in academia, though theirs is certainly long overdue.)
The forecast for the humanities is dreary all right, not because of politics or lousy writers or even a carefree attitude toward Islamofascism (#7), but because of the difficulty of simply making one’s way in the humanities.
Now if you’ll excuse me, no more time for silly questions. I have to go work on my résumé.
Nice work, R Meeks! Much to respond to here, but the thing that really jumps out at me is this last point. I think that a lot of the confusion and even anger that is directed at the humanities is based on the incorrect sense that the majority of people in the humanities sit around smoking pipes in their Volvos whilst casting aspersions on a benighted world whose revolutionary overthrow they will plot later that day, over sherry at the faculty club.
No doubt such people have existed and do exist here or there, but a considerable percentage of academics are not at all to the manor born (academia is precisely their way into the middle class), spend their 20s going into debt instead of earning money, and then spend their 30s moving around the country, usually from one underpayed job to the other. Sometimes the hard work and self-sacrifice pays off, but often it doesn't and the results are anything but fair.
The fact that most humanities scholars have to struggle with their careers doesn't mean that their ideas are all good, of course, but I think that the popular image of academia would look a lot different if people had a more precise sense of what most of our lives are like. We all know about wannabe rock bands and minor league ball players riding buses and eating in their motel rooms, but no one has an image of the Professor that is anything other than an elbow-patched, usually smug success.
One of the ironies that attends most culturally conservative critiques of academia is that they attack “elitism” from the perspective of an era when a lot fewer people could go to college and when it was a lot easier for academics to get jobs. Enough of that elitist German philosophy and feminist theory! Talk to us in a language that any human being understands: little bits of Virgil in untranslated Latin, names of London neighborhoods, opera . . .
I know how bitter it is to not-even-get-rejected from my days writing short stories. One paradox is that you often get treated better at the top because they have the resources to let you down easy, i.e. a dedicated staff. And they also have the motivation of guilt at their good fortune, like a beauty pageant winner trying to ward off envy with a gracious show of kindness.
I imagined that once I had my foot in the door, editors would start asking me for stories and I could spent less time collating and mailing. Instead what happened is that many of the places that had responded with nice notes subsequently went out of business, like Story magazine.
I suspect that the short story is in the process of becoming a little like poetry, in that young people will have to band together to publish each other in order to keep it alive. I wish them the best of luck.
Thanks for the comments. I agree, C Bush, that public perception of academics (and academia) is skewed, in no small part because of conservative opportunism that usually takes the shape of head-shaking nostalgia--man, weren't things great back when literature and art were just aesthetic and not political, when folks just wrote pellucidly about Shakespeare or whatever? Damn liberal elite.
As you note, C Bush, the Good Old Days don't usually have that much to recommend them when you look back at them in a less wistful moment. You're also correct that there actually was a Good Old Days when it came to careers in the humanities. I didn't include this in my post because I thought I sounded petulant enough as it is, but it wasn't as hard to land a position just a generation ago as it is these days. And those people often advise current grad students and sit on hiring committees. A fundamental disconnect exists: many tenured faculty generally (again from what I've heard) don't communicate what you're getting yourself into in choosing an academic career because they didn't have a similar experience.
If critics are gonna wax nostalgic, they should at least get in touch with The True. Might do everyone some good.
Perhaps the time is right for an academia-based reality show. Hey, perhaps I should go into TV production.
I beg to differ. The job outlook was just as bleak a generation ago as today. I was there (as an undergrad), watching my favorite graduate students consistently batting .000 at the MLA. (Saussy was the prominent exception.) Goheen and his colleagues at the Mellon Foundation were fond of saying, in 1989-1990, that there would be a great influx of jobs in the coming twenty years. In hindsight, they were as out of touch as Bush's war planners. What actually happened is that job creation either didn't happen, as when retiring professors were not replaced, or happened only in non tenure-track, adjunct positions. It's actually easier to get a short-term contract today than twenty years ago — the difference is that you know the year or two is all you'll get. But then, as now, it is still close to impossible to snare the real thing.
jkcohen,
No disagreement about the late 80s and 90s, but I wasn't thinking of that period as the one that produced a generation nostalgic for the time before Theory --and certainly not coming out of your esteemed institution!
I can't speak for R Meeks (although I'm pretty sure we meant the same thing), but I was referring to job prospects for people who were, say, in their fifties when I was in grad school in the 90s, and are in their sixties or seventies now. I've had any number of these more senior professors tell me how much easier it used to be to get a job, how they wouldn't be able to compete in today's market . . . I have one friend who's prof who called out of a grad seminar, told that a certain Ivy needed someone in his field and that he'd been recommended . . . and there he remains to this day.
So, I don't think the job market was significantly better 15-20 years ago, but I do think it was better during the period that cultural conservatives look back on as a time when literary studies were done right, i.e. the generations before then.
Perhaps some disciplinary differences exist here as to when the sun set on the Good Old Days. When I started grad school in the early 90's, those on the market largely found tenure-track positions, some at research powerhouses and others at student mills, but few left altogether if memory serves. I also remember hearing horror stories at that time from friends in English about job listings generating several hundred apps apiece. (Someone even mentioned one English position, I don't remember where, that received 1,000 applications. I didn't believe it then and still don't, but the story captured the general pessimism of the time.)
Philosophy positions seemed to take a little longer to thin out and go term. I admit, though, that I may have become more cognizant of the crisis long after it started. In any event, you're right, jkcohen, that a job balloon was routinely promised but never arrived--such articles used to be tacked up to the corkboard in my program's head office. In the end, universities found it too easy to cut rising costs by closing or splitting lines following deaths and retirements, pushing more of the teaching burden onto adjuncts. And that's apparently where we're mired.
But I'm not bitter or anything.
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