Defund the Humanities
I’ve written elsewhere about the gut-wrenching smugness of Stanley Fish, who after having spent a career destroying the study of the humanities at major American universities (especially Duke), has now established himself as an avuncular observer of the education scene at the New York Times. And he wears a different mask; emulating the studied “objectivity” of the Times, he now makes a show of standing aloof from the grim conflicts that dominate classrooms and faculty lounges, and in the frequently grim (and always ridiculous) conflicts between the academic establishment Left and occasional conservative or libertarian dissenters, Fish poses as an impartial spectator. To the centrists or rightists who complain about what we can only call the “hyperpower” of the academic left he even tosses, betimes, a Fish bone. But it always sticks in one’s throat.
This week, Fish reflects on the attempt of the University of Colorado to recover its reputation from the slow-motion train wreck involving Ward Churchill—the cigar-store Indian who crassly and cruelly compared the victims of 9/11 to Adolph Eichmann, because you see the workers in the Towers were complicit in the power-structure which.... No, it doesn’t bear analysis, or even repetition. Churchill’s rantings contained as much intellectual content as the stuff some poor schizophrenic might scrawl on the walls of a state mental hospital—or the racist/ anti-Semitic drivel some losers insist on posting at otherwise thoughtful conservative Web sites. Mind you, Churchill’s comments were only a teensy tad more outrageous than the stuff that passes almost unnoticed at other universities. For instance, a deeply untalented poet at my alma mater named Rodger Kamenetz once told a reporter that “the history of Western civilization is the history of murder.” (Had he left out “Western” he might have had a kind of Augustinian point.) Kamenetz also briefly made a mark by proposing, with a straight face, an entirely new basis for morality in our times. Now, you might think this was overreaching for somebody with just an MFA in English, but that’s what tenure will do to people. So Kamenetz proposed that since we can no longer believe in God, we have no grounds for holding to an absolute notion of the Good. But we do know the Absolute Evil, in the form of the Holocaust. So we should construct a post-modern morality by a kind of via negativa—approving or disapproving of things based on whether or not they would help bring on another Holocaust. (This struck me as rather parochial, as if an Irish poet proposed constructing future moral codes around preventing potato famines. But let’s leave that aside.)
This is the level of thinking which prevails in graduate schools at state universities—even in conservative states in the old Confederacy. I shudder to think what things might be like down the road from me at U.Mass. In fact, the humanities at nearly every major university in America have been, it’s a sad but truthful cliché, taken over by “tenured radicals.” The departments which once were a fair mix of suburban Marxists, Kennedy liberals, and occasional Southern reactionaries, are now dominated by the children of the 60s and 70s, whose own education and pursuit of intellectual fashion have shaped them to hate the very Western civilization and humanistic values on which the modern university is predicated.
Let’s forget, for the moment, the fact that universities in the West were the daughters of the Church, originally centered on theology and philosophy, and accept the sad reality that in most cases the best we can expect from secular (and from many “religious”) schools is kind of melancholy, Matthew Arnold respect for the “best that has been said and thought.” It’s true that in the absence of Faith, such a humane secularism is doomed in the end to bankruptcy, once it consumes the sentimental capital stored up by centuries of Christianity, and stands face to face with the “fact” that man is only a clever primate.
Nevertheless, in such an environment, about which the young William Buckley complained so bitterly in God and Man at Yale, a religious believer could navigate perfectly well, learn to hone his arguments against learned unbelievers in an atmosphere of high-minded mutual tolerance, and emerge with his degree. He might even go on to pursue his Ph.D., and someday teach about Shakespeare or Racine or Schiller—careful not to infuse his classes with catechesis, just as his teachers had not gone out of their way to promote agnosticism. Such a peaceful coexistence among the intellectually incompatible was not as rich or fruitful, I’m sure, as the Paris of Thomas Aquinas—but it wasn’t half bad. I enjoyed the last flickering rays of this Victorian sunset in my own undergraduate years.
But try to go to graduate school in the humanities almost anywhere today, and you’ll breathe quite a different atmosphere—the chemical smell of openly anti-human ideologies. You think I exaggerate? In my first year of Ph.D. study at LSU, I was taught that the “current consensus” in literary theory was “anti-humanism,” a rejection and outright attempt to purge from the study of literature the last traces of Matthew Arnold’s “elitist”, “nostalgic” regard for so-called “higher values.” In their stead, we must study, in a promiscuous selection of works, all the political implications of the unholy trinity of “race, class, and gender.” In other words, to quote the 80s rap band Niggaz With Attitude, “Life ain’t nothin but bitches and money.”
This meant that dour, paisley-frocked Baptist girls from Shreveport and red-faced Irish-Americans from New Orleans would be trained to study literature for grimly ideological purposes. Go through every chapter of ... (fill in the blank) a Jane Austen novel, a Shakespeare play, or a memoir by a transvestite crack whore. Find every incident where poor people, non-whites, or women get a raw deal. Deplore these incidents, cite some incomprehensible French homosexual theorist in a dozen or so footnotes… and get your guaranteed A- or B+. Then move on to the next work, feeding everything through the same meat-grinder, producing reams of academic chopped meat. This Stakhanovite approach to literary study has reached the point of self-parody by now. One brilliant academic who survived the slog toward a Ph.D. with his wits intact has created a Web-based “Postmodernism Generator,” which will on demand produce an entirely persuasive, utterly meaningless tissue of jargon—and one which would certainly have gotten a decent grade in most of the English Ph.D. classes which I took. One professor, may God bless him and keep him, Alan Sokal, produced such a willfully meaningless paper on purpose, and got it accepted in an academic journal, Social Text—generating a lengthy and self-important debate among the drones who fill faculty lounges across America.
Of course, if one is a graduate student of right-ish views attempting to get a degree under such a conditions, it’s extremely tempting to hide or even give up his dissenting views—for fear of the likely bad grades, the ugly ostracism peculiar to lifelong dweebs who finally have the whip-hand over someone, and the blackballing that will probably make it impossible for him ever to get a job.
Now, to rectify the grim situation at their school, and cozy up to the taxpayers who fund it, the University of Colorado has proposed a $9 million program to attract some conservative faculty members to its campus. This sounds like one of the less pernicious uses of taxpayer funds I’ve heard this year—and of course, since it appalls Stanley Fish, one is tempted to support it. Certainly, if conservatives can use some leverage in their state legislature to counteract indoctrination on public campuses, they should do so. But I question whether it really does much good to try to locate and hire the occasional conservative who somehow squeaked through grad school without going native or insane—then set him up in a special chair designed to “counterbalance” the mainstream opinions in his department.
First of all, it’s dead-bang certain that most such jobs will be nabbed by neocons, who are simply better at soaking up money, seizing cozy sinecures, and generally getting by in the world than those of us with real conservative principles. (“The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.”) Which means that the best we can expect from initiatives such as Colorado’s will be Fox News in tweed with elbow patches. I for one, would rather have Ward Churchill to kick around than find myself “represented” by Professor Dinesh D’Souza, or Dean David Frum.
More importantly, as someone who pursued and completed a Ph.D. in English at such a university, and who now teaches the liberal arts at a college, I have really come to question the usefulness, in our cultural situation, of advanced studies in the humanities. For every scholar who turns up something genuinely new to say about Faulkner, or Shakespeare, or even The Matrix, there are dozens who spend their careers training young people to view literature (or painting or religious studies) through a jaundiced ideological lens—essentially spoiling “the best that has been written and thought” for these people, perhaps for life. Much better if, in universities where the faculty have been so thoroughly corrupted—which is to say, most of them—we didn’t offer any literary study at all. I’d much rather take my chances that my kids would read Metaphysical poetry for fun than have the works of Donne and Crashaw forever poisoned for them by some grim, embittered feminist. So here’s my proposal, stark and simple:
Defund the humanities. State legislatures should cut off the money required to support higher level classes, and force the tenured radicals to offer the grimly pragmatic courses they really hate (and usually fob off on starving grad students): Freshman comp, business writing, and technical writing. As for courses in literature, art history, and the like—we should simply stop offering them. If young people want to learn about art or literature, they can go to a tiny liberal arts college where they are properly taught—and I know of one or two. Or they can do what people did in the 19th century, before any literature aside from Latin and Greek was taught at universities: They can take out books from the library. (They’d do best to stick to studies published before, say, 1975.) Or else they can use the Web. Form book clubs in their spare time, and pursue the rare beauty, complex considerations of reality, and extraordinary range of human experience that literature offers free of the methane cloud which has descended upon American academia.
I think this would lead to a rebirth of love for literature and the arts. And that would be wonderful. But mostly, I just want to see creeps like Stanley Fish reduced to teaching Freshman Comp. Hey Stanley, remember how to diagram a sentence?
Comments
The history of the West is murder, and then feeling bad about it. The history of the rest of the world (including the preChristian “West") is mostly just murder, without the feeling bad.
I got an D in literature once. I argued that Hamlet could have been a comedy. My sally was not well received.
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Great post, John. My undergraduate experience (at a small liberal arts college in Mass.) in the late ‘80’s wasn’t nearly this bad but already had hints of what you describe, and it appears things have just gotten worse.
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Yes, our modern university is where so much evil of the modern world stems. For most people who go to college the majority of what they read comes from what’s assigned to them. With the crap that’s taught today its amazing our civilization survives at all.
I hope “Defund the Humanities” becomes the new battle cry of the new right that emerges after the NeoCon clubbing in November.
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This is why you should send your kids to conservative Christian colleges. Turning an 18 year old mind over to this nonsense is foolish.
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@ Kilted:
Too true, too true.
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As a CU-Boulder alum and Denver resident, I’ve followed this story in the local papers. Recommended professors included people like Condi Rice or Bill Kristol. By “conservative thinker” they mean “GOP hack.”
Globalist market apologists and foreign policy hawks were the only ones considered. I would love to see an outspoken social conservative given a benefice there. It’d help counteract the LGBT scholarship CU is instituting to attract obnoxious activists from out of state.
The best way to reform the humanities on campus would be to promote instruction in classical languages. Grammar, rhetoric, history, philosophy, and literature are all synthesized into a single field of study.
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A “Postmodernism Generator,” which will on demand produce an entirely persuasive, utterly meaningless tissue of jargon… Alan Sokal, produced such ...—generating a lengthy and self-important debate among the drones “
Holy Bolano, John--Heaven forfend that any writing here should confuse the histrionics of a bloody minded Yale undergraduate with the grand guignol of Stan Fish in full cry.
It could signify the sort of intellectual potato famine that sees West Wing rustics and sycophants gnawing on The National Medal of the Humanities while mold grows on the works of McLuhan,or that rich and fruitful son of the Paris of Thomas Aquinas, Roland Barthes.
If the Sixties had never happened,the Seventies would have come around anyway- where is Hugh Kenner now that we need him ?
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God save us from the “beneficiaries” of post-modern higher education: Dispatch archaic morality, revere the unapparent and counterintuitive wisdom of Marx, and, by all means, reconfigure all opposition to be air-burning incarnations of Freud’s threadbare totem, “neurotic”.
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As seems to happen regularly to me at this site, I read the words Mr. Seitz has typed. I string them together into sentences that appear to follow English grammar. But I can’t make head or tail of them. I know what his comment needed… a CHART!
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Why defund the humanities? Better they should get an enema.
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John-my apologies- I gather you were abroad when the PoMo Generator made its debut here --
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2008/04/god-and-taliban.html
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I went to Hillsdale College and the English Department was actually great. The political science and economics departments were full of neo-conservatives and Austrian economists, though.
I would just buy the books for all the classes that looked interesting and read those as well as study history and theology in my spare time. Of course, I had skipped the classes of neo-conservative indoctrination (which were incredibly boring), an option repeatedly indulged and always spiritually rewarding.
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John, I just want to say how glad I am to have read this. I can confirm that anyone (especially heterosexual middle-class white males)attracted to humanities in the traditional sense, who have a love for preternaturally strong personalities and ‘the best that has been thought and written’, are either converted or (more likely) ostracized by departments of Literature-- even in the South, even at lesser schools, where it isn’t some Old Guard that still naively presides, but where the faculty is stuffed with the shabbiest radicals unfit for more prestigious institutions.
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Perhaps we shouldn’t abandon all hope of the study of literature in universities. I may just be lucky, but I am an English major at a none-too-prestigious public university, and as of my freshman year I have yet to encounter the absurdities described here. My first semester English class was delightful. The professor was an older semi-retired gentleman who was sympathetic to Ron Paul and apparently had no intention of imposing the “unholy trinity” of race/class/gender issues on the works we read and wrote about. We read ‘Othello’, a work which it would seem would be likely fodder for postmodernist nonsense. The focus of the class seemed to always be on either what made the works effective and appealing or on how they dealt with important questions of the human experience. My second semester English course was not quite so stellar, but was a solid overview of British literature before 1800. The professor did often bring up the issue of gender relations, but it seemed he merely wanted to provide a legitimate perspective rather than cram some radical feminist notion down our throats. Mostly though, he focused on such themes as heroism, romantic love, divine justice, and free will, while providing a broad background in literary forms and styles such as the heroic epic, medieval romance, fabliau, elegy, parody, satire, and more. With works like King Lear and Paradise Lost in the mix, the potential for claptrap would seem high, but once again it didn’t materialize. Hopefully this trend will continue.
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When one means Foucault, one should say Foucault.
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Why defund the Humanties? It would be better to regain the field with a new generation of scholars. The Left dominates the Humanities only because “conservatives” believed it is more important to
make money. Nobody cared for “ideas” and the lefties could quietly ruin the academia. Now it pays
off for them, and the rightwingers are reduced to uttering primitive cries like this. How would this
proposal help conservative undergrads or graduates who are still pursuing, undercover, a scholarly path?
Should we all go work on Wall Street? This article is the equivalent of a declaration of
surrender. It’s pathetic.
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“History999” should learn the difference between “scorched earth” and “surrender.” Perhaps if he studied the subject from which he takes his sobriquet.
If he thinks that the only two alternatives in life are financial speculation on the one hand, and pursuing the fine arts in a massive state institution funded by confiscation from the taxpayers… he certainly does need to broaden his horizons. The arts really did exist before state universities and A&Ms;, I am happy to inform him. Indeed, what is left of the arts and of literature survives entirely outside them. The only question is whether we admit that, and turn off the spigot of cash to entrenched ideologues who hate us, our culture, and our children--the people they’re meant to teach.
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I was going to say “What conservative humanities students?” Having abandoned the field
to the Left to go into economics or politics or business, to turn around and say
“burn baby burn” to the humanities simply reinforces a philistinism within the
conservative mindset that may have been once a chic populism among the cosmo conservative crowd but now is just
embarassing when you consider the state of conservative mind today. It reminds me of
state legislator in Wisconsin who proposed shutting down all the law schools in state
because he thought we had too many lawyers. Maybe we do, I do not know, but
lawyers, like the poor, we always will have with us and better that we find a way to make
good ones before we tear the whole house down because of a leaky fawcett we can easily repair. I thought
conservatism was supposed to defend the legitimacy of institutions as Austin Bramwell
put it, not plan for their demise.
Spending nine million for an affirmative action program to hire “conservatives” for
colleges and universities is silly idea as well. As Mr. Zmirak is right to point out, the
persons who will take advantage of this are the already well-connected neocons, since
anyone else outisde their little circle will be deemed inappropriate for young minds and
therefore must be blackballed as Paul Gottfried and M.E. Bradford have both been. Do you
honestly want to be taught anything by William Kristol? They tried Doug Feith at Georgetown
and needless to say they found out Tommy Franks wasn’t lying in his description of him.
The first thing that needs to be done is to try a move public universities towards segregated
funding of their coffers so that their funding does not become a political football by
liberals who want to lavish them with dollars as one would lavish a political constitutency
and conservatives who want to use such schools as ideological whipping boys. The next and
final thing to be done is for conservatives to quit whining and get back in the ring to
fight against the idiocies one finds in humanities departments. If you wish to see persons
like the Mel Bradford and Russell Kirk back at colleges and universities, then it can only
happen if such persons continue their study of the humanities, even at small conservative
colleges and are supported by foundations with grants and so forth. This will produce a
cadre of teachers that can be a part of humanities departments again (after all, the 60s
and 70s tenured radicals aren’t going to live forever). Conservatives don’t go into the
field of humanities because most conservatives have contempt for the field, and steer their
young towards business and law and politics. Articles like this one do not help in this
regard. But you’re not going to solve the problem either by complaining about something
you normally ignore, or destroying something you don’t like because you ignore and then
complain about it. See how this works? Perhaps its time for some action rather than more
“Did you hear the latest outrage?” articles.
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Well, Sean, I actually TEACH at one of those small liberal arts colleges I mentioned, and edit a college guide which recommends them. I stand by my suggestion that we de-fund, wherever we can, the humanities at leftist institutions (through withholding alumni or government money) until the swamp is drained. I do NOT recommend conservatives waste their careers trying to slip through the cracks of totalitarian institutions such as humanities departments at state or elite universities. You only have one life; spending it as an adjunct hiding his views from his colleagues for fear of losing his job is a futile waste. Better to teach catechism in grammar in school in your spare time, write essays one weekends, and work at Starbucks. At least the coffee you’re serving isn’t poisoned.
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It seems tragic that a Writer In Residence like John should devote his weekdays to expounding grammar school catechism here instead of evangelizing benighted humanists.
The sight of him waving a copy of
Kenner’s ‘A Rhetoric Of Motives’ ought to send his LSU nemesis fleeing into the bayou.
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If the liberal arts are even more defunded, only ideologues who get a religious kick out of siring brainchildren will remain in academia. The cut will drive anyone with real-life family concerns even farther away from the profession.
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How did Russell know that Kenneth Burke is one of my favorite literary critics? But his “Rhetoric of Religion” is particularly interesting--although of course, I disagree with his implied conclusions.
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Well if you feel that way John, then there’s no point to conservative thinking or
intellecutal persuit, other than as a mere expression of politics. If you wish to leave the
conservative intellectual tradition in the hands of the “EIB Network’s Advanced Institute
of Conservative Studies”, which is to leave it in the hands of people who have no clue as
to what they’re talking about and simply mouth other person’s rhetoric spoon fed to them rather than
original thought, then again all of this becomes pointless, because that’s exactly what
has happened. Conservatism has become intellectually exhausted and bankrupt BECAUSE the
humanities have been abandoned. I don’t see how conservatives can survive in the
economic departments (even flourish) of major universities and colleges and yet feel
like the early Christians in the humanities department. Would not all “conservatives” be
in the same corner in the faculty lounge? You may very well feel your job is on the line
Mr. Zmirak, but your solution is not “draining the swamp”. It’s throwing the baby out
with the bathwater.
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Dear Thomas More,
I am one of three teachers in the College’s Writing Workshop class. I hold conferences with all students about their writing. I lecture and grade papers. That’s teaching. One of the things I try to teach people is to get their facts straight before making fools of themselves in a public forum. Clearly, you’ve never attended my class.
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