Did Conservatives Kill the Liberal Arts?

In a recent Salon article, Katie Billotte, a classics scholar based in Berlin, answers the rhetorical question of my title with an emphatic “yes!” “The conservative movement killed the liberal arts,” she writes, “Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch, William F. Buckley and their latter-day heirs.” How? “They have done so through a combination of decreasing access to education and demonizing academic culture and academics. Make no mistake about it: The death of the humanities is an ideologically motivated murder, more like a massacre.”

There are elements of truth in Billotte’s argument. For example, higher education is more expensive, and the liberal arts are underfunded, in part because of an environment of austerity that conservatives have done much to foster. But the good parts of Billotte’s article are lost in a haze of reductionism.

1) Conservatives, or at least Republicans, have not acted alone in implementing economic policies that have made higher education more expensive. Since Clinton, Democrats (albeit, not the same thing as liberals) have been the party of austerity.Austerity limits public subsidies to higher education, one of the main reasons the cost of tuition has risen exponentially. As the cost of college increases, more and more students who do not hail from economically privileged backgrounds opt for vocational or trade majors that they think are more likely to provide them with a job after graduation. It’s not for nothing that “business” (the antithesis of the liberal arts) has been the fastest growing degree since the 1970s and is currently the most popular major in American universities.

2) The cost of education is also rising because of decisions being made by university administrators who might or might not be conservative (chances are the majority of them vote Democratic, for what that’s worth). As Marc Bousquet, among others, has shown, universities operate by the logic of capital. They’re every bit as interested in capital accumulation as are corporations, even though shareholders don’t reap the profits from university accumulation, as with corporations. Capital accumulation in the university works as such: presidents and assorted higher ups make obscene salaries; high-profile football and basketball coaches make even more, and are usually a state’s top paid employee, as the university operates as a sports spectacle; the president uses capital for power and prestige, by funding pet projects; and perhaps most nefariously, capital accumulation in the university has allowed for the growth of a large administrative class. University administration is a career path of its own now. All of this is to say that operating by the logic of capital is bad news for the liberal arts (and also bad news, more central to Bousquet’s point, for the army of adjuncts who are forced to work for little pay and benefits and no job security). I’m not exactly sure how the “conservative movement” is specifically to blame for these developments. Sure, conservatives have a hand in it, but, again, they did not act alone. If the liberal arts were massacred we can’t single out conservatives as the culprits.

3) My last point goes directly to the heart of my research on the culture wars. Has the conservative demonization of professors, which Billotte ritualistically dates to Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, created a context for the death of the liberal arts? It is tough to answer this question one way or the other in empirical fashion. There is little doubt that conservative critics of the academy in the late 1980s and early 1990s succeeded in reorienting many people’s opinions regarding the nation’s institutions of higher learning, reconceptualized as a leftist redoubt, where standards were destroyed and the best of Western Civilization had been replaced by a “politically correct” mish-mash of multicultural nonsense. But to what degree did this create a context for the death of the liberal arts?

In the academic culture wars of the 80s and 90s, the debate often focused on the humanities, specifically the teaching of literature and history. Both sides tended to argue that the humanities were important, though the reasons given for their importance were dramatically at odds. Left-leaning academics argued that learning how to interpret texts would make people better able to think critically about the world around them and to make better political choices. Conservatives argued that the humanities—in Matthew Arnold’s words, “the best which has been thought and said”—were the repository of the values that made America a free nation and thus crucial for young Americans to study. Both sides blamed the other for the diminishing prominence of the humanities. Conservatives like William Bennett, who kick-started the humanities wars with his 1984 report as chairman of the NEH, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education, contended that students were turned off by the humanities by professors who “present their subjects in a tendentious, ideological manner.” Left-leaning academics, on the other hand, made the same move that Billotte makes in her Salon piece: they blamed conservatives for poisoning the wells, often, they argued, done in bad faith.

The question to you, dear reader, is this: to what extent do you think conservative culture warriors are to blame for the sad state of the liberal arts? I tend to think that my first two points are much more determinative, but I am genuinely curious about what you think.

An Overheard Conversation: Loving History, a Sixteenth Birthday, Blogging, and Youth against the Youth Culture

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Yesterday, I suddenly found myself in the position of a fly on the wall in a conversation

between a graduate student in her late twenties and someone who was just about to

turn sixteen--today. It made me think of a different side of the subject of my recent posts

here regarding the drastically increased role of electronics technologies in early twentyfirst-

century life. While I've been voicing my concerns, of necessity, given my focus on

the fate of letter writing, in the more somber registers, I want to sound a different note

here. It's a rather simple one, and hardly new. I just want to add my own hope and

enthusiasm to that of others who see true benefit in some uses of the new medium.

Technology's role is all in how we use it and today some people are using it to

undermine illegitimate hierarchies and unfair limits on aspiration that are placed by the

dominant culture. While there are other examples, I'm thinking of the truly remarkable

blogs--the USIH blog is at the forefront of my mind, of course--that have arisen, outside

of the usual corridors of cultural power and influence. Some of these represent a true

alternative to prevailing practices and, because an alternative is so badly needed, in our

profession as in many others, I want to acknowledge this most emphatically. For all of

the drawbacks, there are heartening developments. One of them is the way in which the

art of blogging can allow people to move forward to fruition of their creative powers even

when the powers that be may never grant them permission or entrance to the club. As

the autodidacts inside and outside of professions prove again and again, industry and

true passion for a subject can constitute their own invitation to the table.

First, the conversation; then just a hint of one of the many reasons why some of the

more penetrating blogs out there today can be so inspiring to someone probably

basically a Luddite at heart (my preference will always be for the real, no matter how

you spin it).

The near sixteen-year-old began by expressing her passion for the liberal arts,

especially history. While to date she had done well at the full range of subjects taught in

school, and cultivated an interest in all aspects of the curriculum, which worked well in

accordance with her aims of doing well, she admitted to being less than excited about

what was on offer in her eleventh-grade science and math classes. She revealed this in

a set of questions revolving around a two-pronged issue for her: what difference there

might be, if any, between the pursuit of science and math, which she saw as lying on

one part of the spectrum, and another part involving history and literature, where she

confessed her greatest interests lay; and whether it was acceptable, at her level, to feel

a strong preference for the history, in particular, over science. Of vital importance in

understanding her tentativeness, perhaps, and the rather turgid response her inquiry

drew, in turn, was that her interlocutor declared herself to be pursuing a doctorate in

chemistry.

The graduate student began with a dubious claim, which maybe you have heard before,

or even hold to be the case. The 15-year old had not heard it before, and, in fact, I too

had been previously spared. It is the idea that the liberal arts has to do with people

whereas science concerns "the world." (The latter words even seemed to be uttered

with a kind of breathlessness that seemed to underscore the limited horizons of the

former, but I could have been hearing things.)

Well, this dichotomy did not sit well with the teenager and I must say, more power to her.

With the utmost respect and even deference, she begged to differ, mostly by means of a

quiet yet persistent line of inquiry. She got across her sense that history, her favorite

subject, also has to do with the world, just as science can have rather a lot to do with

people; in fact, people and the world are so closely entwined as to be difficult to

extricate from one another. The graduate student, conceding nothing, pulled out all the

stops, including referring to the great many people she knew who thought as she did.

The teenager's argument, for it really was one, however cloaked in query, continued to

be conveyed in this deft manner until the topic changed somewhat, along with the tenor

of the conversation, into a question of whether it is really possible to know, at such an

early age, whether one's main interests lay in history and literature or the hard sciences.

The youngster momentarily sought the firmer grounding, usually a sure-fire argument

winner in this age of personal preference, the emotivism Alasdair MacIntyre criticizes,

by reiterating and underscoring the depth of her interest in matters of interpretation over

scientific empiricism, but this was a no go and she soon returned to her style of goodnatured

yet relentless questioning. It was a formidable modus operandi. Her stealth

would have put many a trained rhetorician to shame.

The 15-year-old unfurled a line of reasoning qua inquiry that ran something like this (I'm

paraphrasing for brevity's sake): if she herself already knew that this was where her

greatest passion lay, and that the subject was simply pregnant with potential illumination

and exciting beyond one's wildest imagination, wasn't it okay to go ahead and choose

now, before her own inner judge and jury, securing a verdict that it was fine to cultivate a

vision of a future for herself that involved the liberal arts somehow and did not

necessarily involve math and science? Was it normal and healthy to have this

inclination? It seems to me she was wondering, as teenagers are wont to do, though

often regarding matters less academic, whether her desires were natural and legitimate.

She seemed to be referring to the allowances we tend either to allow or deprive

ourselves regarding the hopes and dreams that populate our hours and days; in the

case of the young, as we desperately await the chance to grow up and enter into adult

work life as equal partners.

The graduate student's response interested and, I admit, surprised me by its certainty.

The years separating the conversation partners couldn't have been much more than

eight or ten. Yet they didn't seem close to seeing eye to eye on this, at least in that

sitting. For the older person, who had clearly now opted for role of advisor, insisted that

the advisee was way too young to cast her lot--that it was premature to bestow her

scholarly affections in this way. Look at me, she said. At your age I thought I would be a

nurse and "now I am a chemist." When asked by her companion whether being a nurse

wasn't also a profession, she was told it is "more of a trade."

There are all sorts of points latent in this rich (for someone in hearing range) exchange,

and you will take from it what you will. But the one that stands out for my purposes is

that here I saw a young person, poised right on the brink of the birthday we often think

of as a kind of landmark or turning point, the onset of adulthood, asking piercing

questions of herself and others about her present and future.

It was impressive.

What was she getting at, really, with this line of questioning? Did she really think she

needed someone else's permission to like some subjects and not others in high school?

Probably not. Did she want confirmation that it was okay not to like science? I doubt it,

as she seemed well aware the graduate student, given her own evident passion for her

own subject, would not provide anything of the sort. What were they arguing over and

why would neither budge?

Maybe it was just an obvious case of love of history coming head to head with love of

science. And the subtext might have been each subject's relative merits in representing

and illuminating "the world."

But also at stake seemed to be the meaning of childhood and adulthood and when and

where the one was to phase into the next. Unconsciously perhaps the fifteen-year-old

was thinking about what it meant to turn sixteen and the twenty-something

unconsciously reminding her that sixteen is not twenty something. We won't know the

inner workings of the unconscious and conscious minds of these incredibly bright and

thoughtful individuals.

It reminded me of the Cat Stevens song from 1970, "Father and Son," that non-duet duet in which the singer-songwriter sings both parts, expressing the tension in the intimate

generational bond, the father's primordial instinct to protect coming up against the son's

desire to be free--to get away from authority, yes, in the sixties' generation gap sort of

way but also to be free to enter full adulthood in that small "r" republican way we study

so much in our field. The song seems to be suggesting that the son wants to be freed

up so he can follow his own dreams in order to find out what unique contribution he can

make. The father counsels patience and conformity:

"It's not time to make a change,

Just relax, take it easy.

You're still young, that's your fault,

There's so much you have to know.

Find a girl, settle down,

If you want you can marry.

Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy.

I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy,

To be calm when you've found something going on.

But take your time, think a lot,

Why, think of everything you've got.

For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not."

It seems to me that the conversation to which I was privy had elements of this same

tension. The dominant culture we have inherited, charted in too-painful detail by recent

historians and social critics, is one that supposedly holds youth in high regard. Yet, as

we know well, by placing youth on a pedestal for people of all ages, as the most

desirable state, it fosters a basic defeatism or nihilism, since our nature, the fortunate

ones among us, is to grow and to age. If we cannot muster enthusiasm for those things,

the very definition of what it is to be alive, can we about anything?

One of the things that is so glorious about bløgging, as I've spelled it elsewhere in order

to distinguish the elegant, deep, worthwhile, and meaningful variety from the not-so, is

that it is, in some cases anyway, turning the mainstream cult of youth on its head, and

along with it some other cultish practices such as a kind of professionalism that

discourages free thought and speech until such time as a person has all of the proper

passports, visas, degrees, tenure and promotion votes--until all of the working papers

are in order. At the foundation of today's culture rests an unquestioned assumption--that

the longer we delay the onset of adulthood the better. This might be partially true

enough when we have an adult world of such dreary predictability as so much of ours

today, which is protected from any serious questioning by elephantine bureaucracies,

protracted credentialing systems, and narrow notions of professionalism that really

mean gatekeeping and homogenization. But it is sure to cut us off from the sustainable

practices and renewable intellectual energies we so badly need in order to marshal

forces against just such stultifying realities. Continually depleting the influx of the sorely

needed powers of new energy and fresh perspectives, all in the name of the protection

and extension of youth, has become a way of life. It never makes sense, but is

especially useless when there aren't even very many credentialized, overprofessionalized

jobs to speak of.

I think high-quality blogging is one of the more exciting things to appear on the

intellectual horizon in recent years. In the case of the contribution of newer scholars,

especially in a time in which the terrible outlook for the future of our field and the

humanities generally is a given, this public intellectual activity has potentially farreaching

ramifications for the prospects of our field and profession--and, to a certain

degree, the state of intellectual, social, and political life more broadly.

I think a lot about that line, the father's charge that you are young and it's your fault. Of

course, that charge is unfair; it goes without saying. How young we are is precisely one

of the only things for which we cannot possibly be held responsible. Then I remember

the wisdom and yearning of that remarkable conversationalist, who turns sixteen this

very day, and I am forced to ask...or can we?

She was quietly insistent on winning the case for at least a hypothetical acceptance that

her scholarly passions and goals might be real ones in the long-term, as if presciently

aware that if she does not press and even win the case now in behalf of her visions of

contribution and fulfillment she might be here tomorrow but her dreams may not. It was

as if she couldn't rest her case until the question was answered in the affirmative.

Happy Birthday, passionate young scholar, wherever you are. I have a feeling your

dreams will still be there with you, wherever you choose to go.

Farm to Market: Can the Stanford Humanities PhD "Remain Relevant"?

Earlier this week, my Twitter feed lit up with news from the Farm -- tweeted and retweeted links (most to this Inside Higher Ed story) and lots of chatter about a proposal put forward by a group of senior faculty at Stanford to make significant changes to the structure and funding of humanities PhDs there.

You can download the four-page proposal here.  It is a provoking and thought-provoking document, and I would like to invite our readers to help me think through its implications.  Overall, I find its rationale problematic, but I would be glad to hear other views.  Indeed, I would be glad to know there is some other way.

The proposed changes outlined in the document include -- among other things -- requiring grad students to select an academic or non-academic career goal early in their studies, offering alternatives to the dissertation where appropriate to meet those goals, and drastically reducing the total time to degree to (ideally) five years.  "Currently," the report notes, "Stanford culture encourages students to take longer than five years with the help of prestigious dissertation fellowship competitions.  We believe that financial support should be structured as an incentive to finish earlier, not later."  The plan proposes to speed the time to degree by fully funding students during summers; it will also require departments to set benchmarks that students must achieve in order to remain in the PhD program. 

The reference to "Stanford culture" is telling. Those two words no doubt evoke a whole host of associations for the immediate audience to whom this document is addressed:  professional identities, personal relationships, institutional structures and social norms, disciplinary traditions and academic expectations, genealogies of teaching and learning, all inflected and instantiated in particular ways unique to this university.  Invoking "Stanford culture" here suggests that the issue at hand is first of all a matter of local concern.  And of course that suggestion is correct:  these are, at bottom, proposals for an intra-institutional policy change.  Change the institution's policies, change the institutional culture.

However, Stanford is part of the larger culture of academe.  And within that larger culture, Stanford is a heavy hitter.  Flagship university, marquee institution, cachet school -- call it what you will, Stanford is one of a select group of institutions whose internal business -- even when that business is undertaken with the view/hope of keeping things "in house"-- often receives extensive attention and can be enormously influential in defining or redefining the idea of what a university is or should be, both within academic culture and beyond it.  Moreover, this particular proposal seems to be part of an effort to broadly influence academic culture.  The Inside Higher Ed news story frames the proposal as a follow-up to Russell Berman's 2011 admonition to the MLA membership to "reform" doctoral programs by providing alternatives to the dissertation, teaching transferrable skills, and reducing the time to degree.

The shorter time to degree does not strike me as a terrible idea.  It might sound draconian to Stanford students, but it sounds familiar -- and possible -- to me. I'm pursuing my degree at a public university that caps my funding at five years and requires that I carry a full course load and teach or TA every semester in order to receive funding.  Relatively few classes at Stanford are taught by graduate students, and I presume that would not change under this proposal.  So shortening the time to degree, without requiring additional teaching duties of the humanities PhD students, might save some money -- though presumably it would only speed up the rate at which the university turns out PhDs for which there are no jobs.  If educational reform is about anything these days, it's about "efficiency." But, as Leonard Cassuto has suggested, perhaps it's better to figure out your (lack of) options sooner rather than later.

So table the question of time to degree; my biggest initial objection to the Stanford plan is the proposal for an alternate dissertation.

In the twitterverse (my handle is @LDBurnett -- follow at your own risk!), I expressed some of my concerns and reservations: 

Might Stanford reforms foster a two-tier system, problematizing [the] value of [a] PhD in either market?

Here I was referring specifically to the measure calling for PhD students to choose between academic and non-academic professional aims and shape their degree plan accordingly.  Presumably, the dissertation would continue to be the chief "capstone" for those pursuing a traditional academic career.  I wondered, would this path come to be perceived as the "real" PhD within academe and beyond it?  Or, as the university graduates more students whose doctoral work does not involve the writing of a dissertation -- a "more easily attainable" degree, as Rob Townsend put it -- will that contribute to the oversupply of PhDs while diluting the (perceived?) rigor of the degree within academe? 

My long-standing concern about standards and requirements for the PhD makes the conversation I had with Rosemary Feal about the Stanford proposal especially ironic.  She invoked the fact that people complained of a decline in standards when Latin ceased to be a requirement for a university degree to imply, I think, that those who view the Stanford plan with reservations are simply being reactionary.  This was my response:

Interesting question, Rosemary. Brings up the issue of foreign language req[uirements]: "learn it before you apply"

Or will the foreign language requirement be dropped for "non academic" plans?  Sigh.

It's not an idle question.  Barely a month has passed since Feal gave an approving nod to my post defending the foreign language requirement for PhDs, a requirement many would like to abandon.  One reason people give for abandoning the foreign language requirement echoes some of the reasoning behind the changes envisioned in the Stanford proposal: graduates need a different skill set for the current employment market.  Feal's response to such arguments, linked above, did not take up the instrumentalist discourse of vocational training and lay out the case for foreign language study as a crucial job skill.  Instead, she made explicit what the MLA statement on the issue assumes: a "utilitarian function should not be the primary factor in determining whether PhDs in English would do well to invest time in second-language proficiency." This is an argument for intrinsic value, not market value.

However, if the entire idea of a PhD in English is recast in primarily utilitarian terms, the question of a foreign language requirement becomes moot.  Or extinct.

Indeed, more than the specifics of the plan, the utilitarian rationale of the Stanford proposal bothers me the most.  I grumbled:

Why not just admit fewer PhDs?  Why fund PhDs for [the] private sector? Stanford PhD as Voc Ed for Silicon Valley? 

Yeah, I got a little snarky at the end there.  But the snark is a signpost for a sombre lament.  University education at the undergraduate level has, by and large, become nothing more, nothing other, than a way of training workers to meet the labor needs of corporate capital.  Whatever higher education used to be -- or whatever we think education used to be, or ought to be, or against all odds somehow sometimes once managed to be -- it is now primarily a certification for and acculturation to wage labor in the professional-managerial class.

That certification role has long been the domain of professional graduate programs and degrees.  But now, it seems, the humanities PhD will be subsumed into that project as well.  This might be a real gain for students looking for transferrable skills in an uncertain job market.  But it seems to be a real loss for the University -- not to Stanford perhaps, but to the modern American University with a capital "U," now entirely (as opposed to mostly?) subservient to the demands of corporate capital.  The hegemony of the market is complete.

So, as I said, I find the Stanford proposal problematic.  But that statement as it stands is unfair to the professors who wrote this report and advanced these suggestions. 

Look at the opening paragraph.  Look at the compound question this faculty work group met to consider:  "Can and should the humanities PhD remain centrally relevant -- at Stanford, in the academy, and in an increasingly global and cosmopolitan 21st century society?" 

Is Russell Berman, the recent past president of the Modern Language Association, really wondering if the training of literary scholars is still an appropriate task of the academy?  Is Caroline Winterer,  a preeminent intellectual and cultural historian of early America, really wondering if the Stanford history department should still train scholars for the professoriate?  I doubt that these committed humanists have begun to question the place of the humanities at the heart -- as the heart -- of the modern university.

I think these professors and their colleagues are responding to two main external pressures.

First, and most admirably, the six professors who prepared this report are expressing and addressing a genuine concern for the future of their students.  These profs see the realities of the academic job market.  Not all of their students will find placement in tenure-track jobs; some of them won't even find work as adjuncts.  This is a wrenching reality.  You spend years mentoring young people to take a place as fellow scholars in the academy, all the while concerned that there is no room for them.  Most professors must find this distressing, and I don't think there's a shred of insincerity in these scholars' expressions of concern for the future employment of their students.

However, it's not a new concern in academe.  In a paper presented at the 1977 Wingspread Conference on New Directions in Intellectual History, Henry F. May expressed a similar worry:  "It may be that the irreducible independence of the historian explains in part what I find a poignant phenomenon: that able people still throng to graduate study in history even though they know that there are few jobs."[1]  While it may be the case that students enter PhD programs today with a less realistic view of the academic job market than they did -- or that May assumed they did -- in 1977, it is clear that the phenomenon of humanities PhDs who can't find jobs is not a new crisis.  The authors of the Stanford proposal no doubt hope their suggested changes will address this long-standing problem.  Nevertheless, I think they are responding primarily to a more immediate pressure.

Even at one of the most elite, prestigious, well-endowed research universities in the world, scholars in the humanities have to contend for and defend the "relevance" of their profession.  The word "relevant" appears several times in the opening paragraphs of this document, but the idea to which it refers is not explicitly articulated or defined.   Relevant to whom?  Relevant in what context?  Relevant according to what criterion? 

Relevant according to the criterion of immediate financial cost.  This document is addressing the question, How can we justify the "massive investment of time, effort, and money" that it takes to train PhD students in the humanities?  And the document's answer is, in effect, "We can't."  As currently configured, the document implies, a humanities PhD at Stanford is not worth the cost.  The only way to "remain relevant" -- for in today's higher education landscape, relevance is translatable into a dollar figure, with no remainder -- is to cut costs.

It is difficult to say whether this document has been prepared in response to or in anticipation of a request from the University's administration or the Board of Trustees to address the bottom-line costs of a humanities PhD.  This proposal might very well be an attempt to "get out in front" on the issue before it is formally raised.  That's the approach Berman suggested:  "I call upon the profession to recognize the need to make our doctoral programs affordable and accessible. If we do not change them, we may lose them."

On Twitter, I raised the question, "Why are the humanists the ones wielding the ax?"  Now I see that the ax has already been laid to the root of the tree.  What these professors are trying to do, I think, is to deflect the blow as well as they can. But if the only way we humanists can manage to do that is to surrender to the logic of the market, master the language of austerity, and embrace the ethos of efficiency as our bedrock value, then I'm afraid we may have sold the farm and bought the ranch already.


----------
[1]Henry F. May, "Intellectual History and Religious History," in New Directions in American Intellectual History, edited by John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979), 105.

The Foreign Language Requirement

Last week, while I was busy procrastinating revising my conference paper, I became tangentially involved in a minor kerfuffle on Twitter regarding the foreign language requirement for doctoral students in the humanities -- specifically, for PhD students in U.S. history and/or English/American literature. 

The chief interlocutors in the debate were Rosemary Feal of the MLA, Rob Townsend of the AHA, and Erik Loomis, an environmental historian who writes for the blog "Lawyers, Guns & Money."  (Loomis is an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island.)

Feal was touting the MLA's latest recommendation calling for "advanced competence" in a single foreign language for students pursuing PhDs in English, and Townsend seemed to think the same requirement would be a good idea for U.S. history PhDs.  Loomis, on the other hand, decried any foreign language requirement for U.S. history PhDs as an unnecessary bit of academic gatekeeping that smacked of elitism and would alienate students from working-class backgrounds.  He suggested that it would be more useful and valuable for students to learn a programming language.  I will respond to (some of) Loomis's ideas about the needs of working-class students below. 

First, though, I'd like to say a brief word about Twitter -- what it is, and what it ain't.  Twitter is a great medium for making quick synaptic connections -- promoting links, bloggers, blogs, news articles, finding interesting people doing interesting work.  It's a great place for starting conversations, but an infelicitous forum for carrying on a sustained argument.  Generally speaking, a Tweet is less a fully-articulated thought than a place-holder or pointer indicating that one has some Ideas Worth Discussing that Ought to Be Explored in More Depth Elsewhere.  Happily, Erik Loomis has elaborated his ideas on the language requirement in a blog post here. 

Loomis, Feal and Townsend are not the first academics to publicly disagree about the worth or utility of a foreign language requirement.  Indeed, this is a Very Worn Argument.  If you want to have a little fun with JSTOR, do a search for "foreign language requirement" (in quotes) and "history."  Here are the search results, ranked by relevance, and here they are ranked by date (newest to oldest). As you can see, the earliest salvos in this debate are pretty dang old.

Doug Steward's 2006 article, "The Foreign Language Requirement in English Doctoral Programs" (Profession: 203-218), is especially helpful in sketching out a historiography of the debate about the foreign language requirement for literature PhDs.  Steward's assessment of the issue offers a far more nuanced and nicely argued version of the basic idea that informed my incredulous tweet accusing Erik Loomis of advocating provincialism.  Steward writes:

Our linguistic and research biases in the English profession are as "US-centric" as biases usually are in the United States, and that includes a kind of obeisance to the definition of science that obtains here.  Two consequences of such a deference to the scientific research model are narrow specialization...and the utilitarian devaluation of any skill, such as knowing a foreign language, that does not yield quickly tangible research benefits.  These biases also include an unconscionable, if unconscious, complicity in the English language's global hegemony and in the views that language is a transparent medium of communication and that English is the language of the United States....Culturally, English monlingualism means national isolationism and a parochial self-regard.  If this is a problem in the United States English-language population at large, I can think of no good reason to condone such isolationism among the most educated Americans -- those with research degrees... (213-214)

Now, Steward is talking about English (including, of course, American Literature).  Simply substituting "the U.S. history profession" for "the English profession" here would probably represent a wildly inappropriate conflation of one discipline's history and character for another.  So I would be grateful if my colleagues and/or readers who are historians of higher education or have an especially good command of the history of the profession would offer some insights here on whether or not Steward's assessment "in the abstract" might be aptly applied to the particular situation of U.S. history or U.S. historians.  Narrow specialization, complicity in the English language's global hegemony, parochial self-regard -- is this us?  Alternately, if someone can point us to an article that lays out the history of the foreign language requirement (or lack thereof) for U.S. history -- something I was not able to find -- that would be helpful.  Perhaps U.S. history has been less monolingual as a profession or discipline than English or American lit.  And perhaps not.

In the meantime, though, I would like to address one aspect of Loomis's argument.  He writes:

History should be a tool for work. It should be a tool for the work of many of us. And our students are in fact leaving the history major because they don’t see it as valuable for their future. Holding onto the belief that people should major in humanities because they will be smart has its own value, but it’s also not enough to compete in the reality of the 21st century university marketplace, particularly among students with working-class backgrounds. We need to show our students that history does have concrete value for their future, including BUT NOT ONLY, that it will make them more educated and interesting.

It is not clear what Loomis means here by the "reality of the 21st century university marketplace," but I assume he means the academic job market, since he concludes his post with a discussion of the difficulties of finding a tenure-track job.  However -- and regrettably -- the "marketplace" has come to the university in a multitude of ways that reach well beyond the "job market."  I suppose a resigned acknowledgment that the market has triumphed once and for all, that only those skills that are easily instrumentalized and obviously and immediately lucrative are worth the time and money it takes to teach them or learn them, is a sensible and even defensible position.  But it is a presentism with no future -- no future for the academy, and no future for the working-class students about whom Loomis is rightly concerned.

Whatever the degree requirements for getting a PhD in history, the profession of U.S. history as a whole -- I mean the whole field, broadly construed -- requires that there be scholars who are conversant in languages other than English, not only for archival research but also to critically engage with current scholarship.  If the hegemony of "the market" has done anything, it has helped to undermine the paradigm of the singular nation-state with discrete geographic, economic, cultural and epistemic borders.  The field of U.S. history extends far beyond the borders of the United States, and the contours of the field for practitioners within the U.S. seem to be bending towards something like a transnational turn, if that's not already in our rearview mirror.  So the profession will continue to need trained historians who are skilled in languages other than English, and those scholars who do have such language skills might have a competitive edge in "the market."

Besides, if "the market," rather than the profession, is to dictate the skill set that makes for well-trained historians, how are working-class students served by the suggestion that they forgo language training?  It is hard enough to compete for a tenure-track job against star applicants from top-tier programs that will probably not waive the language requirement.  Why make it harder by choosing to further diminish the kind of training offered to PhD students at non-elite institutions?  You do working-class students no favors by telling them to aspire to be less skilled and less prepared than the top tier of their cohort.  If anything, language training should receive more emphasis and support at non-elite schools.  Instead of clamoring to have this requirement waived, PhD students in U.S. history should clamor for more and better language training for undergraduates at their institutions, and more support for intensive language tutoring in their graduate programs.

As a profession, we don't have to stand by and let "the market" decide that a less skilled, less well-trained academic workforce is beneficial.  It's not beneficial to society, and it's not beneficial to the discipline of history.  It's only beneficial to those who seek to deliver education on the cheap.  Working-class students -- and I have been one, and I guess I still am one -- have been shortchanged in so many ways already.  They don't need to be complicit in the further narrowing of their own horizons.  Instead, they -- we -- ought to collaborate with the other disciplines in the humanities -- and especially with the beleaguered foreign language departments -- to contend for a more robust, more rigorous graduate education for all of us.

The Academy in Peril

As readers of this blog may be aware, I was in Dallas on Saturday where I delivered the keynote address at the 4th annual RAW symposium at the University of Texas at Dallas. Thanks, again to USIH's own L.D. Burnett for inviting to speak on the Future of the Humanities.

Rather than reproduce my entire talk,* I wanted to briefly summarize my main arguments and then re-answer a question from the q&a period, having come to regret the answer I gave at the time (ain't blogging grand!).

I began the talk by suggesting all the hopeful things going on in the humanities these days...and I really think there are many. We're experiencing an explosion of interesting humanistic work beyond the academy. And academic humanities departments are operating in relative internal peace compared to the often nasty divisions found within them well into the 1990s.

But the second half of my talk, sub-titled "The Academy in Peril," focused on what I feel is the biggest challenge facing the humanities today: the threat posed to higher education by both its enemies and many of its supposed friends, who have all embraced a narrow, economist understanding of higher education that sees tenured and tenure-track (TT) faculty as an unconscionable fixed cost that interferes with rationalizing the operation of the university.**

We are already seeing the effects of decades of forced casualization of the academic labor force. Today, two-thirds of the 1.5 million college and university faculty are in non-tenure track (NTT) jobs.  Most of these faculty don't have PhDs, though many of them are pursuing the degree.  Marc Bousquet, one of the most trenchant observers of the current state of the academic labor system, summarizes the situation grimly, but not entirely inaccurately, as one in which PhD recipients are the system's waste products.  Far from preparing them for an academic career, graduate school is, for many PhD candidates, the academic career itself, as they become markedly less employable after they receive their PhDs. But while it makes perfect sense from an administrative perspective focused on the bottom line to replace newly expensive (though pedagogically experienced) recently minted PhDs with cheap (though totally inexperienced) entering graduate students, neither teaching nor scholarship is served by such a management technique.

Unfortunately, rather than thinking comprehensively about this whole labor system, faculty, especially TT faculty, tend to think in terms of a semi-mythical job market, which involves the competition among PhDs for the shrinking number of TT positions.

I concluded my talk not with a solution to these problems (I'm not sure what that would be), but rather with three things we should all do in order to work toward a solution:

1) Analyze.  We need to have a better understanding of the overall labor system of academia.  TT faculty, in particular, need to gain a better understanding of the experiences, needs, and hopes of NTT faculty.  Before we can devise solutions, we need to understand the problem.

2) Organize. Any solution will involve organizing.  Though I'm less convinced than Bousquet that doing so is the solution, unionization is a critical first step...where possible. Unfortunately, many states, including my own, ban faculty unions at public institutions. And the most powerful form of unionization--one that would link TT and NTT faculty in a single bargaining unit--is being bitterly contested even in places in which faculty unionization is well established.***  But even if you can't join a union, you can--and should--join AAUP. And NTT faculty should also join the New Faculty Majority.****  Finally, it is appalling that many faculty still oppose graduate student unionization efforts.

3) Advocate.  For the humanities, on and off campus. And for a new vision of higher education that puts the focus back on education and scholarship broadly understood.

So that's more or less what I had to say.

Let me add here that these things are especially important right now because a lot of people on and off our nation's campuses want to make the lives of faculty--and with them the quality of education and scholarship that goes on in our colleges and universities--immeasurably worse.

If you're a tenured or TT faculty member (or just hope to be one some day), now's a good time to take a look at how the NTT faculty are treated on your campus. Include graduate instructors in your field of vision.  What you'll see won't be pretty. And yet, what you'll see is what your administrators and educational reformers--Democratic and Republican--want your job to look like in the future.*****

The latest example of this sort of thing appeared in the Washington Post on March 23. Opining that faculty don't work hard enough, educational consultant and former New School Chancellor David C. Levy argues that all college and university faculty ought to be teaching 6:6 or 7:7 loads.******

All of which brings me to the audience question from Saturday that I wish to re-answer.

The q&a opened with a faculty member (I think), asking me what my work on Leo Strauss (which L.D. had referenced in her introduction of me) had to do with my "activism" (this word is usually meant as a pejorative in such a context).

My answer was simple: "Nothing," I said.

What I meant by that was that my work on Strauss and the Straussians really isn't informed at all by the sort of things I was discussing in this talk.  I understand--and appreciate--that many humanists understand their activism and scholarship as a kind of seamless web, that their scholarly work is, in a fundamental sense, engagé.  But that ain't me.  I'm kinda old-fashioned that way.

But I think I misunderstood the spirit of the question. Or at least, my very pithy answer didn't cover all it's potential meanings.

Almost immediately after the q&a ended, however, I began to wonder whether this question may have actually been intended as way of asking "Shouldn't you be doing your work instead of this sort of thing?"*******

At any rate, there is, in fact, a very direct relationship between my scholarly work and my "activism": if my conditions of employment significantly deteriorate, I will not be able to do my work on Leo Strauss and the Straussians or much of anything beyond teaching (badly due to the increased load).  Which is, I suppose, also why I object a little to the word "activism" here.  I'm not, after all, choosing to be involved in a political struggle. I'm just thinking about and trying to improve, or at least preserve, my own labor conditions.  And suggesting that if others in a similar position don't do so as well, we will all likely pay a very heavy price for our failure.

_____________________
* I gave the talk off of an extended outline, so reproducing it would either involve reprinting a series of notes to myself or attempting to reproduce the thing ex post facto.

** I've blogged at greater length about these issues on USIH before here, here, and here.

*** Last week, an Illinois State Court prevented such a combined union from gaining recognition at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which is happy to bargain with split unions.

**** Seriously. If you're a faculty member--and that includes grad students who teach--and aren't a part of those organizations, follow those links now!

*****Although my talk at UTD was generally well-received by its majority grad student audience, I heard through the grapevine that some senior faculty felt that I had come across as young and naive.  Though I'll admit that I've reached the age at which being called "young and naive," like being carded, has become more compliment than insult, I really do think that, with the possible exception of those of us lucky enough to be tenured at the best-funded and least sectarian private institutions in this country, all of our jobs are--or will shortly be--under direct, sustained attack.  The naive position at this point is to conclude that, because you have tenure, the bell does not toll for you.

****** Levy's argument is pretty self-refuting. But if you crave refutations, you can visit Paul Krugman at the Grey Lady (for a short one) or Robert Farley at LGM (for a longer version).

******* Though in all fairness to my interlocutor, my own capacity for guilt and self-punishment enables me to translate, say, a desire to grab a second cup of coffee into the question "shouldn't you be doing your work instead of this sort of thing?"