Higher education’s crisis of confidence
William Deresiewicz has called literary criticism “a profession that is losing its will to live.” Faculties are shrinking, professors are warning students away from graduate school, and the twenty-first century has yet to produce a public intellectual of Harold Bloom or George Steiner’s stature. In short, university English departments are in crisis. It must be Tuesday.
Whether English departments are teaching the right books is, as always, up for debate, but the fact that they are emptying is not. Anthony Kronman, author of Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up On the Meaning of Life, has seconded Deresiewicz’s observation that universities are teaching undergraduates with more of an eye to future employability than to the meaning of life, a set of priorities that has been unkind to humanities departments. The canon wars have cooled down, but the question is not “Who won?” but “Who cares?”
The Blame Relativism First choir has good instincts—political correctness is destructive, novelty is an idle pursuit—but setting conservatism’s rhetorical sights on moral and cultural relativism only returns attention to a topic with which liberals in academia are, for the most part, bored. The battles of Closing of the American Mind have faded and new ones arisen, and in this round of the fight apologists like Kronman pose a greater danger to their side than overzealous multiculturalists. To spend so much energy explaining why literature and philosophy are worth four years’ study indicates some anxiety about the answer. After all, business and engineering professors rarely take the time to justify their departments; they assume their students understand that a high salary is directly correlated with ability to purchase goods and services. The benefits of literature and philosophy are less material, but men no more need to be convinced that wisdom is desirable than that love is, or power, or happiness. To presume that students need to be talked into believing literature matters supposes that this is an open question, when really neither side of the canon wars ever doubted that literature was important enough to be worth the fight.
If the problem with literature and philosophy departments is that they no longer occupy themselves with big questions, better that Deresiewicz and Kronman should use their expertise in the humanities to offer new and compelling answers than that they should reinforce their profession’s crisis of confidence by addressing their arguments to a small, skeptical minority. As any writing seminar will teach you, “Show, don’t tell.”
Comments
“As any writing seminar will teach you, “Show, don’t tell.’” I couldn’t agree more. I’ve become exasperated by conservatives who complain about Hollywood/Academia being liberal and then think they’re going to change things by moving to DC and forming an organization dedicated to complaining about Hollywood/Academia etc. being liberal. Academic freedom is a real issue on campus; however, conservatives should spend less time worrying about this and more time doing good work—baiting hooks that will attract the smart minds.
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College education has been sold as a way to increase your lifetime income significantly.
So college students respond accordingly and major in business and other non-academic
majors. The Humanities have not sold themselves on legitimate grounds; this is the
fault of their professors and administrators.
Many middle-class parents start explaining to their kids as they enter primary school
that making money is the purpose of it all.
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Basil Bunting said in a 1970 lecture:
Poetry is no use whatever. The whole notion of usefulness is irrelevant to what are called the fine arts, as it is to many other things, perhaps to most of the things that really matter. We who call ourselves “The West,” now that we’ve stopped calling ourselves Christians, are so imbued with the zeal for usefulness that was left us by Jeremy Benthem that we find it difficult to escape from utilitarianism into a real world.
I think replacing ‘humanities’ with ‘poetry’ and the quote still rings true. The study of the humanities either appeals to people or it doesn’t. As Bunting says, ‘usefulness is irrelevant to the fine arts’. To try and form some sort of defense of the humanities is near impossible (tho’ that’s not to say it shouldn’t be attempted...)
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I do believe that humanities departments have become more politicized, the literature worse, and the forest of theory impenetrable. I don’t believe we are in particularly anti-intellectual age. Americans have always had a commercial spirit, and the expansion of college to people of sub-par IQs in the post-war era did much to expand offerings in business and even such lame majors as communications and “packaging.”
That said, my understanding is that some other theory-laden nonsense like sociology has declined, while interest in history and philosophy is expanding. This is a sign, to me at least, that rigor and grappling with the big question of life remains appealing, as it always will, to sharp minds seeking wisdom and answers, viz.:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/education/06philosophy.html?_r=1&em;&ex;=1207&oref=slogin
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Schools cut music and arts programs as too expensive and then we complain that our parishes can’t sing and architects like Frank Gehry can run amok. Churches are gutted by charlatans claiming that modernization has been ordered as a good end.
People seem defenseless and I don’t think its because they lack convictions but have the tyranny of arbiters imposing their will on people unwilling to fight back because the tyranny is “for our own good” or it’s “what people want” regardless of the nagging voice in the back of our heads saying we are being sold a bill of goods.
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A humanities degree has much less financial value for a graduate than a professional one, yet the cost is the same to the potential student. Which one will he pick? There may be more interest if the degree were more affordable.
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