All Culture is Culture War

This here article on the canon wars (slight return) seems to have two fundamental flaws:

1) A disconnect with reality. Three particular claims stood out, the first being:

But Fish thinks humanities professors bear some blame for their diminished standing. He’s at work on a new book, “Save the World on Your Own Time,” which argues that academics should teach, not proselytize. In his view, “the invasion of political agendas” into the classroom in the ’60s and ’70s was “extremely dangerous,” since it meant classrooms could become battlegrounds for political demagoguery.

Yes, and it's not the 60s and 70s anymore. Aside from a few scattered wackos, who does this? My college was so political that in the 60s they changed the grading system so you couldn't get below a C (because if your GPA was below a C you could get drafted), but I was never proselytized to. Professors will try and convince you of things, but mainly those things run along the lines of "the things I study are important and you should care about them." Every professor I had was extremely sensitive to coming off as a libtard, and if anything, this seemed to restrain their capacity to teach effectively. Fish is grandstanding to a wider audience that thinks that somewhere they don't know about there are these hook-nosed (thanks Mallard Fillmore!) profs turning our children into black-hooded anarchists. If there's something that's diminishing the standing of professors, it's more likely to be people like Fish portraying a bunch of quiet, passionate nerds as demogogues.

Second:

For John Guillory, an English professor at New York University and the author of “Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation” (1993), “The major fact that the discipline is confronting today is global English, which is a cultural corollary of economic globalization.” At the same time, postcolonial Anglophone culture is only half a century old. “I’m often impressed by this scholarship, but I’m also concerned that this new field seems to be so disconnected from the history of literature and scholarship that goes before it,” Guillory said. “I see too many scholars in the field who know very little about anything before the 20th century, and that concerns me.”

Really? You see a lot of literature PhDs who know very little about pre-20th century literature? Or is it just that they care very little about pre-20th century literature? (And by "very little" I suspect he means "not as much as I do.") If someone's getting their doctorate without having an understanding of the scope of literature and literary history, I don't think that's the fault of "politics," it's the fault of whatever cut-rate university gave them the degree.

Judt also denounces the balkanization created by interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs. Multiculturalism “created lots and lots of microconstituencies, which universities didn’t have the courage to oppose,” he said. “It’s much more like a supermarket — kids can take pretty much any courses they like: Jewish kids take Jewish studies, gay students gay studies, black students African-American studies. You no longer have a university, but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves.”

Again, where is this? No doubt some students take classes in "me studies," but how many of these kids then go on to major in that field? How many would have majored in English or History or Politics otherwise? If the number is low (and I suspect it is), then why does it matter that they take essentially a focused history, literature, or politics class that can engage them?

These three claims--that professors are political demogogues in the classroom, that a significant portion of English PhDs are ignorant of pre-20th c. literature, and that minority students primarily major in multicultural studies--are quite serious, and I hope they are all backed up with rigorous studies. Of course, none are cited here, but I'm sure that's just an oversight, rather than an attempt to play on stereotypes and lazy thinking to make a normally-functioning system seem frighteningly out-of-control.

2) More importantly than these nits that have been picked, though, it seems absolutely absurd that no one points out the significance of the year they keep citing as a turning point: not only is 1965 twenty years after the G.I. Bill was signed and right when the Baby Boomers were hitting college, it's the year after the Civil Rights Act was signed. In other words, these changes in American academia weren't random, but happened at the same time a whole lot more people were going to college, and that's no accident. More students meant more teachers and more colleges, and that meant the tight focus universities were able to maintain while serving only a small percentage of the population had to dissolve. While the article admits that "humanities departments thrive at elite institutions (at Yale, for example, history has long been the most popular major, with English usually beating out economics for second place)" it's not really followed up on. People like Bloom are comparing apples with oranges here--the university system in their purported golden age is almost entirely different from what it is now. If we looked only at the colleges that existed before the G.I. Bill, would we find the same phenomenons? If our sample was the same kinds of people who went to college pre-WWII and the same colleges they went to, how much differentiation would we actually find? The article claims that "Reading lists, though, are a zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped." But there's not just one reading list for all of academia, and in fact, there are now far more reading lists than there ever were. Academia didn't lose a classics-based education so much as gain a whole bunch of new fields of inquiry. And the idea that higher education should be, in effect, standardized is inimical to the goals of academia, which (you'd think) are to expand knowledge rather than continually pumping out the same ideas over and over again. These arguments, especially when accompanied by this utter lack of historical perspective (which is a little ironic given the participants), serve only to reinforce the phenomenon they seek to oppose. Why would multicutural studies departments stop being oppositional when there's still an enemy within claiming they shouldn't even exist? Why would we step back and examine these new additions to the canon when we apparently still have to battle for them even to be considered? The position taken by Fish et al seems actively anti-intellectual, an argument that we should stop being critical thinkers and continue to accept what's been handed us. (This isn't even getting into the hilarity of including Marx in a canon and then complaining about political activism.) The classics will always be there; there's no chance they'll be lost, and if you think Americans' lack of critical thinking stems from a lack of Plato-reading, then Americans were never critical thinkers.

In the end, though, this is maybe an example of what seems to me to be academia's biggest problem right now: the "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome. This essay is in the books section, after all, and maybe purely from the perspective of literature, this is a problem, especially if you think Faulkner is objectively superior to Toni Morrison. And if you're used to proving things by close readings, then maybe it seems inarguable that the historical changes the academy has undergone must produce these ill effects. But that's simply not true: those are charges that have to be actually proved if you're going to throw them around (and, to be parochial for a second, a classic example of mass society thinking). There are things I agree with here, but I think for different reasons than the proponants would want me to. I do think the Balkanization of academia is a bad thing, but I also recognize that it was necessary since grumpy old men like Bloom wouldn't let people study those things in the departments that currently existed. In other words, they're not failures, but symptoms. Academia's future leads not backwards to some imagined golden era of dons teaching the classics or outwards to a universe of microdisiplines. It leads across, and lies in the synthesis of ideas rather than the partitioning or limiting of them. All culture is culture war because culture is conflict, and not within the bounderies set up by academic departments. Culture is not something that conforms to our expectations--it's continually changing, and continually surprising. We'd all be better off if we recognized that, embraced that, rejoiced in that, rather than desperately scribbling lists to hold at bay the barbarians who have already won.

Labels: academia, culture war, politics, stanley fish

posted by Mike B. @ 9:57 AM