I wonder if framing Tom as being a “conservative” academic is fully correct. Can we separate someone’s literary politics from their voting politics? I have many professor friends who are of the political left but who share Tom’s pessimistic views of what the study of literature has become in universities. I am of the political left but I think, in terms of literature, I have become far more of a classical liberal—a sorta libertarian when it comes to artistic vision. But, in this era, having any classical liberal view would mark me as a right winger in English departments.
Interesting distinctions. If Tom were to vote, he'd vote Republican, I'm guessing. But he would be a classical conservative or aesthetic libertarian, in the manner you describe. So there is some interesting common ground between those of the political left with more traditional literary sensibilities and those of the political right who see the canon as a cultural bulwark of sorts (even if that view is deeply flawed, like the notion that the King James Version is somehow holier because it uses quaint English).
It's funny that I was trained on the notion of an expanded canon, and I'm as allergic as can be to the uppity arguments that Leo Strauss and others make from the political right. I like teaching Anne Hutchinson's trial transcript and some of the archival Salem materials as literary texts. At the same time, I think Hawthorne's short stories are unrivaled. So I suppose I might fit your libertarian description, as well. Not a stalwart defender of the old white guy canon, but also someone who believes that Willa Cather's craft qualifies her for greatness. I guess I still believe in such a thing as artistic greatness. But I hate the stuffy versions of it (am more fond of Pearl Jam than Mozart, etc, etc). Perhaps "libertarian" captures all of these contradictions well enough?
I'm still not quite sure how to answer Tom's question about what literature professors are trying to defend or preserve. I think something like the contemporary liberal arts would be my answer, but defining what that means is not as easy as it seems.
Teaching a least-specific compassion weren't you? I look at 20th century lit and i see men and women who with the help of strong misreadings almost none of them argued for the last king to be sttangled in the entrails of the last priest. Suppose with me that Allan Bloom thise charged two words are a strong misreading of Harold Bloom. Alright? Because we all do it. Here we have in Bloom the one good book he had in him. Without knowing his HIV status or his friends in high places we extended the open attn to hear him out. The book is the picaro story of a desperate man who decides in that last chapter about classical rhetoric that he would gladly watch his enemies burn in seven hells.
Compare and contrast with novels like Bellows's about the very man, in which Saul 'Chick' shares his fascination not without love for a dangerously instrumental person. Book Ravelstein but it could have been Zellig. I mean a novelist goes slumming in her and his house clothes for a month to write the central fixation of characters subject to mistaking their own needs and subject to being used and abused. And in real contrast to Closing of the American M , after all only a popularization of a Contract with America in which the classically powerful 'Throw someone under the bus' in Ravelstein we have the tale of the compassion that looks for a strong misreading, sometimes of very clear pronouncements. As in Oleanna the play, the professor both tries to hug Oleanna and advises her to quit the course. By directing 30 days energy to self expression novelists find that they pass through the oversimplifications of a 5 year old, but you donot willingly subscribe to a cult in that lost frame of mind, you look to misappropriate the French Republicans big ideas to preserve just what you need to be not conscripted to mercenary behavior. I think every poem in effect represents a life of at least 30 days too. Don't we feel compassion for Oleanna? Well one project to teach would be the unproven but falsifiable claim that a great world making story contains strong misreadings that show after all is burned bridges and ruins there were humans here who let's say: anybody might have written Kafkas the Country Doctor, but literature makes you more like the drifting Franz intelligence who did?!
I don’t want to be repetitive in my comments, but they have to be grounded in the sense that despite your generous introduction, Josh, you and Tom were engaging two different conversations – yours truly open and exploratory and his off-putting almost from the very start with tendentious ideological resentments. I don’t doubt for a moment that working as a political conservative in a college English department these days is an unhappy experience and that the source of those resentments is real. Speaking from a politically liberal perspective, yet as someone also out of sympathy with so much of what Tom criticizes, I found the atmosphere oppressive, which is one reason I’m glad I’m no longer teaching. But the kind of exchange you were seeking requires some greater effort at disentangling the felt resentment from the ideas.
For instance, Tom writes, “Reading closely is fine, unless reading closely is equated with reading critically, as it now most assuredly is. Why? Because ‘reading critically’ has come to mean ‘uncovering the political unconscious of the text, the narrative buried under and obscured by ideology, which is always the product of the ruling class.’"
Well, yes, reading closely does mean reading critically, and for many scholars and professors of literature it has “come to mean” only what Tom says. But it doesn’t have to mean that at all. I am myself currently in the midst of a series on Substack that I call “The Close Read.” The second in the series appears tomorrow. I am close reading some essays of memoir *by creative writers*, and I am not doing so from the perspective Tom cites at all. Rather, I’m exploring the situatedness of the memoirists as biographers and creative writers at the same time in relation to their subjects – people who may not know themselves as well as they think or wish to be as revealing as they purport. This isn’t to say that it is an error to uncover “the political unconscious of the text, the narrative buried under and obscured by ideology, which is always the product of the ruling class.” (I’ll dissent from the “always.”) For many decades, scholars read texts completely unmindful of those realities. If Tom believes that was good, that they aren’t realities, and we should return to that state of affairs, he can take note that the prevailing critical regime has changed before and can again.
But Tom has been so overwhelmed (it appears, in reading him here) by defeatism that he comes to dismiss not just the tendencies he opposes but the value of the whole educational edifice, not just the humanities, but the whole enterprise of liberal education and teaching. It’s a wonder Socrates didn’t tell all those pests following him around who didn’t know what they were talking about to stop bugging him and go read a book. Tom pays lip service to teaching in the spirit of Mathew Arnold, but it doesn’t seem he really believes in that either. And to a large extent, that seems the result of that frequent strategy, across the ideological spectrum, of arguing that because a practice, policy, or act didn’t succeed completely, it didn’t succeed at all. Because meaning is unstable and truth uncertain, there is no such thing as meaning or truth. Because English departments and the humanities (like every other human endeavor) fail at ridding the world of ignorant assholes, they fail completely and aren’t needed.
I think Tom may be ready to be a recovering academic.
Now, go and misread the human condition no more, said the secular priest.
Thanks, Jay, and as I said in response to Douglas a moment ago, I grant Tom a little latitude with hyperbole here. That said, he is without doubt ready to be a recovering academic. In fact, he already is, to a large degree, though he is one of the most voracious readers I know. We disagree about a lot (he thinks Christopher Rufo is mostly right, and I think Rufo is a bad faith propagandist). But not everything.
So many points in this conversation are framed as false binaries. You're quite right that literature was read uncritically in certain ways for generations. Tom's right that simply replacing one set of reductive critical lenses with another isn't an improvement. And so although I didn't have space to say so above, I quarrel with his idea that Bradstreet's "Contemplations" can be read with no attention to the gender dynamics that are explicitly emphasized in her other works. We don't pretend to be colorblind or gender blind anymore, even if it is difficult to find a more moderate or agnostic position in those conversations.
But here's another point in Tom's defense. I think he's absolutely right that the whole educational edifice is crumbling. The fact that Douglas and Amy and other earnest individuals out there are still teaching in good faith does not mean that they're doing so in a sustainable environment. In fact, those anecdotal counters to Tom's view remind me of one of Foucault's unforgettable descriptions of death in THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC. He recounts what 19th-century physicians were learning through autopsy: death does not take place in an instant. The loss of consciousness, the final breath, the stalled heart -- each of these is just one of many stages of death. Long after the heart stops beating, little clusters of cells live on. Which is why I tossed that zombie beetle meme into a post a while back -- the institution really is hollowing out at an alarming pace. And when you really listen to someone like E. Gordon Gee, or even a more polished executive like the short-lived Jason Wingard (president of Temple for less than two years), they are not talking about public education. They're talking about job training. That's it.
See my reply to Amy Letter in this thread. I think Tom's view has a lot to do with the kinds of students he's been teaching and the institutional environment where he's worked for 18 years now. I think he'd gladly leave if he could -- we've talked a good deal about that. But not everyone can make that kind of leap at age 50. And I can understand why he'd weigh the future he knows against the effort required to translate his career into industry terms and choose to stay put and redirect his intellectual energy and creative energy into his personal life.
Josh, I am sympathetic to Tom's experience. For much of my teaching career, I I taught similar student bodies to what you describe for him. And for much of my teaching career, tenured and adjunct, though a political liberal, I was related to as if I were the lovechild of Lionel Trilling and Allan Bloom. I also know it isn't easy to change careers. I didn't. I gave up tenure once I'd earned a full pension and then taught fulltime as an adjunct, at my convenience (if I could accomplish that) to make ends meet. It subjected me to certain indignities once again, but it spared me full immersion in departmental cultures from which I felt increasingly alienated. I also share, I think you know, that sense of American higher education's wrong direction. The Foucault analogy is excellent, but I'd also like my doctors to be able to distinguish between the fatal and deathly ill but recoverable. No one is going to be burying the body of higher ed. It will remain to be resuscitated. Unfortunately, a greater problem than a host of misguided ideas about what higher education is and how it should be delivered can be seen in the political conditions in which education policy is determined. Both left and right bear responsibility there, but most certainly, while liberal democracy hangs in the balance in this country, nothing is going to be improving in the university or anywhere else. Interestingly, the one commonality that Tom shares with the leftist professors he disdains, who'd rather be social scientists than mere literature professors, is that both no longer see the value in teaching literature. And that's one thing I devote my life to believing they're wrong about.
Jay, I love your idea about the university remaining to be resuscitated no matter what slings and arrows assail it now. This is similar to the view I've heard from indigenous friends, who believe that the land is more powerful than human-caused climate change, that humans aren't strong enough to truly destroy the earth.
I do want to gently suggest that you misunderstand Tom. He doesn't feel that he's given up on literature at all. He's making that argument about those who subordinate the text to a political pretext. And whatever malaise might come through in his tone I think ought to be understood as a kind of bruised idealism (perhaps the very thing that Crévecoeur expresses through Farmer James, as John Pistelli suggested in a thoughtful comment on that post). I don't think he's given up at all on literature -- he's a prolific poet, a voracious reader. I think he has erected some boundaries for himself in the classroom, where it's often clear that his idealism isn't welcome or effective. This is true of many younger faculty, too, that I've interviewed for The Chronicle. They've chosen to lean out from work to some degree as a proactive wellness strategy. The fact that an English professor must protect himself from teaching is a sad fact that I believe says more about the state of higher ed than it does about Tom.
All of this to say that I honor your undying idealism -- and I see teachers like Amy Letter, who simply can't uncouple that romantic ethos from their pedagogy. But I am also compassionate for those who have been bloodied while beating themselves against brick walls and who have chosen to protect themselves from that.
Josh, Tom's lucky to have a friend like you. I hear all that you're saying. I recognize those classroom experiences very well. When I have more to say, you may find me as idealistic but, realistically, not so optimistic. :)
From my limited experience, I would say that Tom - who certainly speaks my language in more than a few instances here - is right about professors just not being into literature anymore. That's been my experience, though while many no doubt are in it for the reasons he mentions I think some of them view it as simply a job of the bureaucratic sort. While the conditions were unique in that it was covid, when I felt my interest in an academic career crumble to dust I had to ask myself: 1) do I want to be the passionate lover of literature that I am, or a bureaucrat? and 2) do I want to surround myself with people who hate me even if they don't know it yet? And who, as Tom points out, only seem to care about literature so that they can yap endlessly about how it's racist and bigoted and so on. If not every professor and doctoral student I encountered was like this, it was only because I was not in America. Apart from maybe one or two exceptions, every American I encountered was a dyed in the cloth ideologue, including straight up Commies, while others were maybe less ideological but no less devoted to the same talking points. Perhaps if I ever change my mind about that academic career I'll apply to WVU and ask you for a reference. :P
One can disagree with the political perspective, but I think Tom has intuited (or observed) the same thing I have. Namely: that literature, once an independent art, needs to reassert both its independence and its multitudinous value. I think people would read the classics a lot more if these theoretical applications of race and race and race didn't hinder them from appreciating stories that, ultimately, follow their own destiny and eventually sail to Valinor like the Elves. I see this with Western civ to a small degree: when podcasters and influencers discuss these ideas and make them relevant to today, they become a lot more interesting. It's much more motivating to read, say, Thucydides while watching America's decline and wondering if America will find itself caught in Thucydides Trap because someone online gave an acute geopolitical analysis. And of all the increasing number of young people joining the Church, I have no doubt that when the time is right they will very eagerly read St. Augustine's Confessions. If anything, it's more worthwhile to read a book like that in that context because it has direct applicability to spirituality. And it is not only religious literature that is spiritual.
The other thing with the critical lenses is that the issues they fixate upon are past issues even if the lefty professors will rush to deny it, and linking them to those things automatically ages literature in the eyes of students whose life experiences just don't correspond with the race narrative. (I can tell you for a fact that mine certainly don't, and I'm definitely not the only one; this is why many in GenZ have been rebelling against their Woke teachers in high school) European colonialism has been over for decades now; America is nowhere near as racist as it used to be, certainly not enough to compare to, say, the KKK marching through DC in the 20s; and women live whatever life they choose to live. That's a fact.
This is why my approach at Timeless is to unshackle literature from these original sources of inspiration and tie it to today, albeit not to deny those original conditions. It is not uncommon for writers to view their works of art as their children, meaning they have to be treated like living, breathing things. They are born of us, but eventually, like children, they have to pursue their own lives; this Heraclitean approach contrasts with the static academic view of literature as documents of history
and little more than products of their time. If I was to review Crevecoeur, I would do what I could to present it as a book as relevant to today and timelessness in general as the latest bestseller, but without the bestseller vibe. Because if Tom is wrong about one thing, it's this: while I am just one guy, and while Crevecoeur might not be the most readily engrossing author in the world, I would count myself as one who doesn't feel like the book is a slog and who wasn't pressured or coerced into reading it, although my advisor did recommend it.
Though good to know, I ultimately don't care if Crevecoeur "lied" about anything any more than I care if Gandalf was real or not because Letters isn't a rigid attestation of farm life but a story of aspiration. I think presenting Crevecoeur as an aspiration of what America once symbolized and what was, to a certain extent, attainable will endear people a lot more to Crevecoeur than presenting him as a romantic sophist; if anything, a professor emphasizing that side of him is begging their students not to read him. I think of all the people in my generation, for instance, who can't afford to buy a home and don't even know what that's like but who, deep down, want peace of some sort in life, even if they also want justice. When I read Crevecoeur, I also read what could have been for my generation.
I could write more, but this is enough I think. Great post! Both of you held up well and had a lot of insight. While the political divide is no longer bridgable in the macro sense, I hope you and everyone else can hang onto their disagreeable friends.
Good stuff, Felix. Your reading of Crévecoeur as aspirational is interesting -- and as a fellow idealist, I do think it's worth imagining beyond our grasp. It's also true that cynical takedowns of artists (deconstruction) do not inspire joyful reading. I like John Pistell's comment on the original post about how Crévecoeur closes the narrative with a bruised idealism -- not denial exactly, but a sorrowful prayer for what might yet be. I will admit that I can't quite read the text in this way, and I still think that idealistic impulse has a tendency to elide uncomfortable truths and to silence dissent. But I hear what you're saying. I think I read Gatsby that way as an undergraduate, too, really wishing that he was not what he actually was. Because Nick Carraway is really not very interesting. However, this is how great literature speaks to us throughout our lives. The young person who yearns for Crévecoeur's farm idyll can find that there, and the older person who has weathered many reality checks can squint at what the author knew but chose to suppress in that narrative. The difference between those two readings makes for interesting conversation.
Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal
Josh,
I find you incredibly eloquent about literature/humanities and its discontents in this piece. Unfortunately "Tom" is rather reductive and full of simplistic right-wing slogans. Though I am an English professor with decided left-wing sympathies, I do not reduce the literature I ask my students to read to political discourse, and I do not think I am all that exceptional.
And I would add that the supply/demand argument, as I think Josh points out, is flawed insofar as the "market" is not free; the economically and politically powerful have always had their finger on the scales. At my own institution, for instance, students earn significant grants if, and only if, they major in a STEM discipline.
Thanks, Douglas. I wouldn't have shared my exchange with Tom if I didn't respect him. See my reply to Amy below for a few more nuances about his experience, which has assuredly shaped his view. I should add that he is an award-winning teacher, a mentor who has led many study abroad experiences, a volunteer at a prison (where he teaches yoga, among other things), and a widely published scholar and poet. I suppose I grant him some license for hyperbole in an opinionated exchange like this. And I think there is more than a kernel of truth to his claims (see again my replies to Amy and Jason). But I also take your points.
Curious if you might share an example or two of how you teach literature beyond the narrow parameters that Tom describes?
As for market demand, I expect that at your institution (as is still true at mine -- which I suppose I can say in the present tense as an emeritus professor) some of those grant monies are donor-driven. This is a clear way that institutional leaders can show their support for programs with fewer wealthy alums and less public visibility. Sure, some donors earmark their funds very strictly. It was always somewhat galling that several faculty awards each year at my school were earmarked for faculty in the maths or sciences. But there were other awards that had once been defined generally as "excellence in teaching" or "excellence in professional development." If you published a book, you were sure to get the latter, etc. But a new dean changed all of this to match the donor's intent exactly, so that what once had been multiple awards were now reduced to one with very restrictive criteria. This created more work for department chairs or colleagues who might have formerly nominated deserving candidates, because the nomination letter had to be meticulously crafted. So there were fewer nominations, which led to inequitable recognition, and a completely avoidable drain on morale. I'm on a soapbox now, but I think when an institutional leader recognizes those inequities in resources, there is an opportunity to have a conversation with donors about how flexibly their funds might be distributed, and how this might benefit the institution. A good leader might also recognize that instead of standing back and allowing programs to wither on the vine, it might be possible to throw some fundraising energy their way, or provide faculty with some training in grant writing, or something to communicate that programs aren't truly on their own. When leaders imply that it's every program for itself, this leads to toxic in-house dynamics, because it truly feels like the Hunger Games: one program's gain is another's loss.
Right, I don't mean to impugn "Tom" personally; often times online exchanges oblige us to boil things down a bit and subtlety gets lost in the process, and there are things he says with which I am in sympathy. One reason your blog is valuable is it takes its time.
As for teaching literature without reducing it to political discourse or assertion, just a couple brief points. What English professors are best at--close reading, as others in this forum have noted--is what preserves great literature of various genres from reductionists of various political stripes. Second, I often put books on my syllabi that challenge this or that liberal or progressive orthodoxy, such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, A. Clockwork Orange, etc. As I tell my students, good literature doesn't give us answers, but it does point out the enduringly important questions.
This is a pretty bummer view of things. According to Friend Tom, " 'reading critically' has come to mean [. . .] showing how the text is racist, classist, and sexist. Always. Always and only those things. [ . . . ] The job of the professor [. . . ] is to teach students that racism and classism and sexism are everywhere, even when it's not apparent." I mean, yeah, if that's what's happening in classrooms, that's horrible. But I don't think that's what's happening in classrooms.
Do students " read . . . begrudgingly to pass some damn test or write some damn paper and then move on." Or "read to get their ticket punched and that's it. And now students are increasingly unwilling to do that." I mean that's just such a sad, pessimistic view of things. I encounter vital intellectual curiosity among my students every day that I teach. Everyone's had the experience of reading something uncertain it would be worth their time, and discovering something precious there -- I see it happen among my students all the time. And the things they find precious are not necessarily what I would. The text is a mirror in which they see themselves reflected through the minds of the past.
I find it hard to believe that "Left-wing professors are just secular priests, preaching to a flock of vulnerable, hormonal kids who have yet to develop a frontal lobe." (Yeowch, that's just mean. All of our frontal lobes are works-in-progress, dude!) "If you are going to be saved" (from what?) "you’ve got to study at the feet of the learned class; they will disabuse you of any notion of individual responsibility" (how can any individually-graded class possibly communicate a message *against* individual responsibility?) and baptize you into the cult of victimhood" (I mean this is like, cartoonish?) "Liberated from the shackles of the Great Books and Schools of the Ages, you will join the School of Resentment and be given your marching orders: 'Burn it all down.' What a strange perspective! My students are still reading Great Books -- some of which, I should note, have a pretty "burn it all down" attitude. So maybe we selectively object to *what* authors want to "burn down"? What feels "okay" to the reader when the author rails against it, and what does it offend us to see targeted in aging print?
But I agree with Friend Tom here: "The best argument for saving literature departments is to argue that literature is art, and great art needs to be preserved and transmitted to the next generation. That’s it. It needs to be outside the market economy — like faith and love and family and friendship."
It's an art AND its a conversation -- the past in communion with the present, inviting the present to speak to the future.
Thanks for this, Amy -- especially for your good faith efforts to engage. I actually think you and Tom would really enjoy each other in person. I agree with much of what you've said, as I pointed out in a reply to Jason. But it's clear to me that my experience at a private liberal arts college was very different from Tom's at a regional public university. I enjoyed a close-knit community -- students who babysat my children, whose athletic contests and recitals and theatre performances I loved to support. I think you enjoy something similar at an even more selective private university, where both aptitude and intellectual curiosity run high. Tom's students are less academically prepared and less engaged, and his department has a pretty dysfunctional culture. Let's not pretend that there aren't some truths in what he's saying. There would be no audience for The Chair and Lucky Hank if the problems he describes weren't fairly pervasive.
Since Tom can't speak for himself in this forum beyond what's published above, I'll say a few other things in his defense. You're right that some of his language here is cartoonish. But the phony papers that Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian were able to sneak past peer review (about things like rape culture in dog parks) expose a pretty cartoonish side to even highly curated academic discourse. As you know from my earlier post on labor-based grading, I also see the rhetoric of some these movements as caricaturing itself.
The debacle at Hamline University, the student revolt against Maitland Jones, and similar absurdities like book bans and curriculum policing, show that we're living in an incredibly censorious time. Questions about academic freedom and open discourse are serious, and the extent to which both professors and students feel they must self-censor is alarming.
I appreciate your voice so much because you stand apart from all that. And you make a really good point about the revolutionary thrust of many Great Books, which are not necessarily a staid row of tweedy narratives on the shelf. Which, in particular, did you have in mind? I'm thinking of Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, and Whitman -- radicals, all. There's almost no squaring "Civil Disobedience" or "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" or "Self-Reliance" with the culture of assessment and standardization in higher ed today. And I think Tom is right that serious literature has quite often operated outside the university and that the notion that English departments must save literature is historically inaccurate and incorrect.
I hope you'll remember that I was a high-school dropout who attended community college and then the local commuter college for 8 years while working various jobs before I went to grad school and got an MFA. :) I hope you'll also remember that before I started teaching at Drake, I taught at Florida Atlantic University, whose students were a lot like I was at that age: working-class, working hard, married, sometimes with kids, mostly "under-prepared" and often very skeptical about what a LIT class was doing on their path to becoming a nurse or an accountant. And based in my experience, this is what I would say: thank God that my teachers taught like it mattered, without requiring evidence that it did. Thank God that my teachers entrusted us with Chaucer in Middle English, entrusted us with Dryden and Swift, believed that Alexander Pope was worth leading us to, without questioning whether or not we were ready to drink. And when I was teaching at FAU, I paid that forward: I always assumed that if my students *could* find something profound in Candide, it was worth acting as though they *would* find something profound in Candide, and whether they did or not doesn't matter. I heard colleagues lament that the kids don't care, but imo that was *them* giving up, not the kids. Humans are hungry for connections to the past and shared cultural history, and college kids are humans. If you go into the classroom, the professor, convinced that your students are mentally insufficient and just looking to check a box, you're cultivating that very prophesy.
Josh was very gracious, but Tom's language is very indicative of contemporary right wing discourse. Straw man, cherry picking, overt hostility etc.
But Tom's core is right: humanities academics have pervasively been twisted by a performative politique. It's just not accurately depicted here.
Josh, I am not convinced that cutting those programs is a bad thing. There is a knee jerk reaction that rarely asks questions of enrollment or economics. It's a great example of how I became disillusioned with academia: it reveals the instrumental use of reason, of treating our intellectual tools as something we take up and put down rather than who we are. I am not of course speaking of you, as I know not your argument, but in general.
Thanks, Jason. Curious what you might correct in the exchange above? It sounds like you agree with Tom more than not, especially on the question of supply/demand. My point is mainly that the more college leaders proclaim that no one wants the humanities, the more self-fulfilling that message becomes. I think it's possible to double down on the liberal arts without being too naive about economic matters. Certainly college leaders are not consistent when it comes to resource allocation. They'll hire consultants freely, invest heavily in athletic programs that (on average) show multi-million dollar losses, and pad their administrative staff with no thought to the economic consequences. So I think it's unfair to single out the humanities as an economic albatross. There's quite a lot of that to go around.
A friend of mine told me that my college paid tens of thousands for an educational work product to do what we profs are mandated to do for free, and it only took a week to complete. It was brought up just so we could roll our eyes together. It illustrated that work done "by a professional" who is not a professor was valued incalculably more than professor's work. That activity was common, and I suspect that the case generalizes.
Yup, so let's not talk about resource allocation in higher ed purely as a question of demand. It's also a question of values. I've seen the demand for the humanities wane, but I also know that at my former institution, much of that was driven by internal factors, such as advising and strategic planning, and by outward-facing factors, such as marketing. In fact, the engineering program that required so many resources to launch has still not, to my knowledge, paid for itself. But it has the whole shoulder of the institution behind it because it's a signature program for the president. It draws some students, who realize they can't hack it and then either transfer or move into other majors. But that kind of bait and switch is a poor model for economic sustainability. Lure them in the door with engineering and football and then hope they stick? At the same time, I recognize that it's hard. It's not as simple as saying, "We're going to recruit a flute player for every football player," as our president once said, and then making that come to pass.
I am woefully ignorant of the budget models for higher ed that predated the G.I. Bill, but without a doubt the idea of liberal arts for the masses is a new concept and one that has always required buy-in at the state and federal levels. I suppose even before the G.I. Bill, there was enough respect for historical and cultural knowledge to protect some level of public funding for the humanities. I realize those days are over. But that doesn't mean what's happening at universities is objectively good (not implying that you are suggesting it is).
Same problem my own college with the automotive and other technical programs. They lost lots of money but the liberal arts made them lots of money. And yet we liberal arts folk were treated as second class citizens.
To illustrate the point you could walk around my old campus and just look who had a new building who had fresh landscaping, fresh interiors. Who didn't?.
To simplify my objections, his account is totalizing and simplistic, and written the the familiar diction of right-wing politics. But I find that most contemporary discourse won't let me say things like that and take it on faith that I'm not bloviating, so let's be scholarly and go through some points.
Students don't have access to the humanities.
Tom contests this, but having access to texts, I would argue, is of limited value without the analytic tools and habits that require training and performance and objective standards. For instance, I cannot tell you how many times I run into people who are well-read, but lack the intellectual tools to do anything with that reading, or lack the background to understand it properly. It reminds me of the common student behavior of Googling information the night before, submitting an essay rehashing what they found, and not seeming to understand that the work product needs to demonstrate weeks or months of skill development, e.g., rehashing is step 2 and not the final step.
Academics do over-estimate the power of literature.
Reading, and appreciating, literature does little for one's development per se. In fact, this was the core of much of my doctoral work, as I wanted to know *why* and how to correct it. (I was motivated by how so many fellow scholars, who I once admired and thought could do no ill, demonstrated appalling moral behavior despite incredible scholarly accomplishment even on the topic of ethics.) To be specific, I focused on "moral imagination."
"Reading critically or closely" does not necessarily mean "read to a progressive ideology"
There, Tom is being unfair. Yes, there's a lot of profs that do that, but the claim is totalizing. Implicit in it is that almost all humanities academics are pure charlatans who seek only to convert people to their ideology. That's such a totalizing claim ... I really don't need to say more in criticism.
That said, it is true that political ideology have become an incredibly pervasive and toxic force in the humanities. It's often performance even among those who fervently true to be genuine. In my experience, the problem is that people are performing moralistic political ideas as ideologies (networks of ideas held despite evidence or reason) as opposed to moral reasoning (ideas held only through rational justification and thus must change in light of new evidece, etc.). So, any complains about de facto thought or speech codes are true in much of the US, because too many progressive adherents practice their social justice as ideologies (which corrupts any good idea).
Final point there. I'd read "critical or closely" as study in hermeneutics and development of metacognitive ability. E.g., correctly interpret a sentence in light of the other sentence, and not in light of what happens to come to mind (avoiding availability bias). Gee, I wish my medical doctors could do that more reliably...
Identity politics is bad.
I agree on that point. A politic built on individual identity, especially given what "identity" means in popular discourse (narrative self-identity to us scholars) guarantees that the political starting point is going to be divisive, fluid when stability is needed, easy to weaponize, etc. One of the roots of these problems of identity is that fact that most of identity is a social construct, and most people both don't admit that or acknowledge the implications (and most don't have the education to do so, but the new identities trade on this).
Few students are intellectuals
Tom is right. One problem of humanities academics is that they want all their students to be like themselves, and many seem to be affronted when it fails. Yeah, if students could come to greater moral understanding through literature (a key part of studies in moral imagination), it'd be great. But that rarely happens ... though it does happen big when it does.
"If you are going to be saved, you’ve got to study at the feet of the learned class; they will disabuse you of any notion of individual responsibility and baptize you into the cult of victimhood."
Here's an example of what I mean by "contemporary right-wing political diction" and "straw man."
Side note. Most people's understanding of freedom and choice (agency) is horribly wrong and unscientific. So when students are taught basic sociology and psychology, they're now being "baptized into victimhood?" Tom doesn't write that, but that is what's actually happening.
To be fair, again, lefties usually go to far. They're really good at self-parody and "is this satire or ... are they serious?" I think this latter point is what motivates people like Boghossian, who I used to correspond with. Ah, the early days of the philosophical blogoverse...
Lots to dig into here, Jason -- and thanks for clarifying. You're right that sweeping claims aren't helpful.
I do want to gently challenge the notion that only a few students will engage deeply with these texts. Sure, it's a stretch for many of them to read even excerpts of Crévecoeur, but this is the work of a good teacher -- to assist with that struggle and to demonstrate that it's worthwhile. I taught at a private liberal arts college where the bulk of my students in first-year and sophomore-level courses were non-majors. It's true that I often began the semester in the hole, in terms of student buy-in. But I was able to win the majority of students over. My evaluations reflected this, as did the quality of our discussions. Some of it came from encouraging a kind of intellectual play. One student came into class after reading "Young Goodman Brown" and said, "Hawthorne was Emo!" Loved that kind of thing. Often the glib response shows engagement that can be redirected back to the text. And I think the discipline of marshaling evidence, of doing that good work of close reading (considering context, not cherry picking evidence), generates its own satisfaction over time. I've seen it in Business majors and Athletic Training majors, as well as in students from less applied programs.
Maybe I sound like a curmudgeon here, but I really think that the standards for academic authority -- the critical and analytical skills that must be learned, as you say, and that aren't obvious to the autodidact -- are the foundation for a stable society. An informed citizenry that knows the difference between a fact and an alternative fact is still a worthy goal.
You challenge the notion that few will engage deeply.
In my experience, and in that of my colleagues of the last 15 years, few delve deeply. About the only basis for challenge you have is to reinterpret the numbers, as they come not from personal feelings. Also, I know what the reading comprehension statistics are in general and for my typical cohort. Please note that I'm talking about long or even book-length treatments, and not passages.
So, I say to you that all such claims are highly dependent upon exactly what population one is talking about. I made my claim on several bases, and here are some. First, the overall literacy rate in the US. Second, the college entrance and completion rate. Third, my and my colleague's experiences over a decade in two states in community colleges, which serve the majority of American students. Fourth, over a decade of study in pedagogy and education statistics.
Yes, the instructor can play a role. But I'm not talking about what an individual instructor can do. Tom's point was a general one, and not what a dedicated and well-supported educator with the right student mix can do. Most students are not interested in hard or archaic texts, and this is revealed in statistics in literacy rates, general reading rates, entry into various majors, etc.
In my experience, the talented professor is more likely doing a good job keeping them engaged *despite* lack of student reading. This became even more stark when we moved to online teaching during the height of the pandemic, and faculty started using etexts.... some of which tell the instructor whether material was accessed at all, for how long, etc. I would insist on that level of evidence, Josh, to take you claim seriously as a general claim given the current counter-vailing evidence.
We agree on the point about the autodidact. I've met way too many "college is useless" and "teach yourself anything from the internet!" people who just don't realize that massive, massive gaps in skill that result. It's not a linear difference, and too often we get truly inspiring individuals given as examples of how it's done ... with no recognition at their statistical insignificance.
Excellent point and I completely agree: "In my experience, the talented professor is more likely doing a good job keeping them engaged *despite* lack of student reading. This became even more stark when we moved to online teaching during the height of the pandemic, and faculty started using etexts.... some of which tell the instructor whether material was accessed at all, for how long, etc. I would insist on that level of evidence, Josh, to take you claim seriously as a general claim given the current counter-vailing evidence."
This goes to some of your angst about what passes for academic assessment. If this were the kind of thing that academic assessment were trying to measure and leverage for quality improvement, it would make so much more sense.
I used to interview scholarship candidates during an admissions event at my college that was really just a big PR campaign disguised as a rigorous competition. We were allowed to ask some original questions, and I'd often ask students to describe a book they'd read recently and why it had impacted them. The number of students who said that they not only couldn't think of a book, but that they couldn't remember the last time they had even read an entire book, was completely appalling. These were candidates for academic scholarships, not C students! That's anecdotal, and so it does not pass your sniff test as evidence. But I quite take your point that I might have been fooling myself about how much my students were really learning, even if the group experience felt meaningful and enjoyable to me.
Replying to Sherman Alexie I went over why i think the 20th century shows authors refuse to attack ad hominem. Despite being catty. What if the students really are visual literates by preference to older time consuming chores? Then in that case it is a strong misreading to treat them as if they have a strong foot in the canon. But as John Fowles implies in his synoptic education in the Aristos, maybe in visual literacy you can stay abreast of 'good' turning into Michael Jackson "badness". But we pity the Oleannas because all that is so damnably fast and writers showed pity for themselves by not publicly participating in character assasinations. I sympathise with pain i do. My sstack landed on e plaining for the first 10 months the uses practical of poetry. I had a minor stroke i believe in the course of that. But my arguments exactly correspond with an author who wrote a book"why Poetry?" So that if there is something there after all 6te burned bridges, couldnt students b3 enlisted to academicaly disprove or prove the strong misreading. I mean it is an open question but rock and roll songs are regularly misheard, and the kids would show 20 other instances. They could be enlisted to show how generous it was to publish at all, they could supply examples the literatii will not think of. Whether it is camoflouge to skip over a misunderstanding, or cowardice? The point is you ise your own embodied self to paper over these human differences, and it is worth the life of a JgBallard or a Kafka to encourage these clesrly traumatized persons to pretend to have it together on paper. The alternative being being a prisoner of fashion.
I wonder if framing Tom as being a “conservative” academic is fully correct. Can we separate someone’s literary politics from their voting politics? I have many professor friends who are of the political left but who share Tom’s pessimistic views of what the study of literature has become in universities. I am of the political left but I think, in terms of literature, I have become far more of a classical liberal—a sorta libertarian when it comes to artistic vision. But, in this era, having any classical liberal view would mark me as a right winger in English departments.
Interesting distinctions. If Tom were to vote, he'd vote Republican, I'm guessing. But he would be a classical conservative or aesthetic libertarian, in the manner you describe. So there is some interesting common ground between those of the political left with more traditional literary sensibilities and those of the political right who see the canon as a cultural bulwark of sorts (even if that view is deeply flawed, like the notion that the King James Version is somehow holier because it uses quaint English).
It's funny that I was trained on the notion of an expanded canon, and I'm as allergic as can be to the uppity arguments that Leo Strauss and others make from the political right. I like teaching Anne Hutchinson's trial transcript and some of the archival Salem materials as literary texts. At the same time, I think Hawthorne's short stories are unrivaled. So I suppose I might fit your libertarian description, as well. Not a stalwart defender of the old white guy canon, but also someone who believes that Willa Cather's craft qualifies her for greatness. I guess I still believe in such a thing as artistic greatness. But I hate the stuffy versions of it (am more fond of Pearl Jam than Mozart, etc, etc). Perhaps "libertarian" captures all of these contradictions well enough?
I'm still not quite sure how to answer Tom's question about what literature professors are trying to defend or preserve. I think something like the contemporary liberal arts would be my answer, but defining what that means is not as easy as it seems.
I think maybe we are in the "libertarian" literary camp, though our use of the quotes means we need a better descriptor!
Teaching a least-specific compassion weren't you? I look at 20th century lit and i see men and women who with the help of strong misreadings almost none of them argued for the last king to be sttangled in the entrails of the last priest. Suppose with me that Allan Bloom thise charged two words are a strong misreading of Harold Bloom. Alright? Because we all do it. Here we have in Bloom the one good book he had in him. Without knowing his HIV status or his friends in high places we extended the open attn to hear him out. The book is the picaro story of a desperate man who decides in that last chapter about classical rhetoric that he would gladly watch his enemies burn in seven hells.
Compare and contrast with novels like Bellows's about the very man, in which Saul 'Chick' shares his fascination not without love for a dangerously instrumental person. Book Ravelstein but it could have been Zellig. I mean a novelist goes slumming in her and his house clothes for a month to write the central fixation of characters subject to mistaking their own needs and subject to being used and abused. And in real contrast to Closing of the American M , after all only a popularization of a Contract with America in which the classically powerful 'Throw someone under the bus' in Ravelstein we have the tale of the compassion that looks for a strong misreading, sometimes of very clear pronouncements. As in Oleanna the play, the professor both tries to hug Oleanna and advises her to quit the course. By directing 30 days energy to self expression novelists find that they pass through the oversimplifications of a 5 year old, but you donot willingly subscribe to a cult in that lost frame of mind, you look to misappropriate the French Republicans big ideas to preserve just what you need to be not conscripted to mercenary behavior. I think every poem in effect represents a life of at least 30 days too. Don't we feel compassion for Oleanna? Well one project to teach would be the unproven but falsifiable claim that a great world making story contains strong misreadings that show after all is burned bridges and ruins there were humans here who let's say: anybody might have written Kafkas the Country Doctor, but literature makes you more like the drifting Franz intelligence who did?!
I don’t want to be repetitive in my comments, but they have to be grounded in the sense that despite your generous introduction, Josh, you and Tom were engaging two different conversations – yours truly open and exploratory and his off-putting almost from the very start with tendentious ideological resentments. I don’t doubt for a moment that working as a political conservative in a college English department these days is an unhappy experience and that the source of those resentments is real. Speaking from a politically liberal perspective, yet as someone also out of sympathy with so much of what Tom criticizes, I found the atmosphere oppressive, which is one reason I’m glad I’m no longer teaching. But the kind of exchange you were seeking requires some greater effort at disentangling the felt resentment from the ideas.
For instance, Tom writes, “Reading closely is fine, unless reading closely is equated with reading critically, as it now most assuredly is. Why? Because ‘reading critically’ has come to mean ‘uncovering the political unconscious of the text, the narrative buried under and obscured by ideology, which is always the product of the ruling class.’"
Well, yes, reading closely does mean reading critically, and for many scholars and professors of literature it has “come to mean” only what Tom says. But it doesn’t have to mean that at all. I am myself currently in the midst of a series on Substack that I call “The Close Read.” The second in the series appears tomorrow. I am close reading some essays of memoir *by creative writers*, and I am not doing so from the perspective Tom cites at all. Rather, I’m exploring the situatedness of the memoirists as biographers and creative writers at the same time in relation to their subjects – people who may not know themselves as well as they think or wish to be as revealing as they purport. This isn’t to say that it is an error to uncover “the political unconscious of the text, the narrative buried under and obscured by ideology, which is always the product of the ruling class.” (I’ll dissent from the “always.”) For many decades, scholars read texts completely unmindful of those realities. If Tom believes that was good, that they aren’t realities, and we should return to that state of affairs, he can take note that the prevailing critical regime has changed before and can again.
But Tom has been so overwhelmed (it appears, in reading him here) by defeatism that he comes to dismiss not just the tendencies he opposes but the value of the whole educational edifice, not just the humanities, but the whole enterprise of liberal education and teaching. It’s a wonder Socrates didn’t tell all those pests following him around who didn’t know what they were talking about to stop bugging him and go read a book. Tom pays lip service to teaching in the spirit of Mathew Arnold, but it doesn’t seem he really believes in that either. And to a large extent, that seems the result of that frequent strategy, across the ideological spectrum, of arguing that because a practice, policy, or act didn’t succeed completely, it didn’t succeed at all. Because meaning is unstable and truth uncertain, there is no such thing as meaning or truth. Because English departments and the humanities (like every other human endeavor) fail at ridding the world of ignorant assholes, they fail completely and aren’t needed.
I think Tom may be ready to be a recovering academic.
Now, go and misread the human condition no more, said the secular priest.
Thanks, Jay, and as I said in response to Douglas a moment ago, I grant Tom a little latitude with hyperbole here. That said, he is without doubt ready to be a recovering academic. In fact, he already is, to a large degree, though he is one of the most voracious readers I know. We disagree about a lot (he thinks Christopher Rufo is mostly right, and I think Rufo is a bad faith propagandist). But not everything.
So many points in this conversation are framed as false binaries. You're quite right that literature was read uncritically in certain ways for generations. Tom's right that simply replacing one set of reductive critical lenses with another isn't an improvement. And so although I didn't have space to say so above, I quarrel with his idea that Bradstreet's "Contemplations" can be read with no attention to the gender dynamics that are explicitly emphasized in her other works. We don't pretend to be colorblind or gender blind anymore, even if it is difficult to find a more moderate or agnostic position in those conversations.
But here's another point in Tom's defense. I think he's absolutely right that the whole educational edifice is crumbling. The fact that Douglas and Amy and other earnest individuals out there are still teaching in good faith does not mean that they're doing so in a sustainable environment. In fact, those anecdotal counters to Tom's view remind me of one of Foucault's unforgettable descriptions of death in THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC. He recounts what 19th-century physicians were learning through autopsy: death does not take place in an instant. The loss of consciousness, the final breath, the stalled heart -- each of these is just one of many stages of death. Long after the heart stops beating, little clusters of cells live on. Which is why I tossed that zombie beetle meme into a post a while back -- the institution really is hollowing out at an alarming pace. And when you really listen to someone like E. Gordon Gee, or even a more polished executive like the short-lived Jason Wingard (president of Temple for less than two years), they are not talking about public education. They're talking about job training. That's it.
See my reply to Amy Letter in this thread. I think Tom's view has a lot to do with the kinds of students he's been teaching and the institutional environment where he's worked for 18 years now. I think he'd gladly leave if he could -- we've talked a good deal about that. But not everyone can make that kind of leap at age 50. And I can understand why he'd weigh the future he knows against the effort required to translate his career into industry terms and choose to stay put and redirect his intellectual energy and creative energy into his personal life.
Josh, I am sympathetic to Tom's experience. For much of my teaching career, I I taught similar student bodies to what you describe for him. And for much of my teaching career, tenured and adjunct, though a political liberal, I was related to as if I were the lovechild of Lionel Trilling and Allan Bloom. I also know it isn't easy to change careers. I didn't. I gave up tenure once I'd earned a full pension and then taught fulltime as an adjunct, at my convenience (if I could accomplish that) to make ends meet. It subjected me to certain indignities once again, but it spared me full immersion in departmental cultures from which I felt increasingly alienated. I also share, I think you know, that sense of American higher education's wrong direction. The Foucault analogy is excellent, but I'd also like my doctors to be able to distinguish between the fatal and deathly ill but recoverable. No one is going to be burying the body of higher ed. It will remain to be resuscitated. Unfortunately, a greater problem than a host of misguided ideas about what higher education is and how it should be delivered can be seen in the political conditions in which education policy is determined. Both left and right bear responsibility there, but most certainly, while liberal democracy hangs in the balance in this country, nothing is going to be improving in the university or anywhere else. Interestingly, the one commonality that Tom shares with the leftist professors he disdains, who'd rather be social scientists than mere literature professors, is that both no longer see the value in teaching literature. And that's one thing I devote my life to believing they're wrong about.
Jay, I love your idea about the university remaining to be resuscitated no matter what slings and arrows assail it now. This is similar to the view I've heard from indigenous friends, who believe that the land is more powerful than human-caused climate change, that humans aren't strong enough to truly destroy the earth.
I do want to gently suggest that you misunderstand Tom. He doesn't feel that he's given up on literature at all. He's making that argument about those who subordinate the text to a political pretext. And whatever malaise might come through in his tone I think ought to be understood as a kind of bruised idealism (perhaps the very thing that Crévecoeur expresses through Farmer James, as John Pistelli suggested in a thoughtful comment on that post). I don't think he's given up at all on literature -- he's a prolific poet, a voracious reader. I think he has erected some boundaries for himself in the classroom, where it's often clear that his idealism isn't welcome or effective. This is true of many younger faculty, too, that I've interviewed for The Chronicle. They've chosen to lean out from work to some degree as a proactive wellness strategy. The fact that an English professor must protect himself from teaching is a sad fact that I believe says more about the state of higher ed than it does about Tom.
All of this to say that I honor your undying idealism -- and I see teachers like Amy Letter, who simply can't uncouple that romantic ethos from their pedagogy. But I am also compassionate for those who have been bloodied while beating themselves against brick walls and who have chosen to protect themselves from that.
Josh, Tom's lucky to have a friend like you. I hear all that you're saying. I recognize those classroom experiences very well. When I have more to say, you may find me as idealistic but, realistically, not so optimistic. :)
From my limited experience, I would say that Tom - who certainly speaks my language in more than a few instances here - is right about professors just not being into literature anymore. That's been my experience, though while many no doubt are in it for the reasons he mentions I think some of them view it as simply a job of the bureaucratic sort. While the conditions were unique in that it was covid, when I felt my interest in an academic career crumble to dust I had to ask myself: 1) do I want to be the passionate lover of literature that I am, or a bureaucrat? and 2) do I want to surround myself with people who hate me even if they don't know it yet? And who, as Tom points out, only seem to care about literature so that they can yap endlessly about how it's racist and bigoted and so on. If not every professor and doctoral student I encountered was like this, it was only because I was not in America. Apart from maybe one or two exceptions, every American I encountered was a dyed in the cloth ideologue, including straight up Commies, while others were maybe less ideological but no less devoted to the same talking points. Perhaps if I ever change my mind about that academic career I'll apply to WVU and ask you for a reference. :P
One can disagree with the political perspective, but I think Tom has intuited (or observed) the same thing I have. Namely: that literature, once an independent art, needs to reassert both its independence and its multitudinous value. I think people would read the classics a lot more if these theoretical applications of race and race and race didn't hinder them from appreciating stories that, ultimately, follow their own destiny and eventually sail to Valinor like the Elves. I see this with Western civ to a small degree: when podcasters and influencers discuss these ideas and make them relevant to today, they become a lot more interesting. It's much more motivating to read, say, Thucydides while watching America's decline and wondering if America will find itself caught in Thucydides Trap because someone online gave an acute geopolitical analysis. And of all the increasing number of young people joining the Church, I have no doubt that when the time is right they will very eagerly read St. Augustine's Confessions. If anything, it's more worthwhile to read a book like that in that context because it has direct applicability to spirituality. And it is not only religious literature that is spiritual.
The other thing with the critical lenses is that the issues they fixate upon are past issues even if the lefty professors will rush to deny it, and linking them to those things automatically ages literature in the eyes of students whose life experiences just don't correspond with the race narrative. (I can tell you for a fact that mine certainly don't, and I'm definitely not the only one; this is why many in GenZ have been rebelling against their Woke teachers in high school) European colonialism has been over for decades now; America is nowhere near as racist as it used to be, certainly not enough to compare to, say, the KKK marching through DC in the 20s; and women live whatever life they choose to live. That's a fact.
This is why my approach at Timeless is to unshackle literature from these original sources of inspiration and tie it to today, albeit not to deny those original conditions. It is not uncommon for writers to view their works of art as their children, meaning they have to be treated like living, breathing things. They are born of us, but eventually, like children, they have to pursue their own lives; this Heraclitean approach contrasts with the static academic view of literature as documents of history
and little more than products of their time. If I was to review Crevecoeur, I would do what I could to present it as a book as relevant to today and timelessness in general as the latest bestseller, but without the bestseller vibe. Because if Tom is wrong about one thing, it's this: while I am just one guy, and while Crevecoeur might not be the most readily engrossing author in the world, I would count myself as one who doesn't feel like the book is a slog and who wasn't pressured or coerced into reading it, although my advisor did recommend it.
Though good to know, I ultimately don't care if Crevecoeur "lied" about anything any more than I care if Gandalf was real or not because Letters isn't a rigid attestation of farm life but a story of aspiration. I think presenting Crevecoeur as an aspiration of what America once symbolized and what was, to a certain extent, attainable will endear people a lot more to Crevecoeur than presenting him as a romantic sophist; if anything, a professor emphasizing that side of him is begging their students not to read him. I think of all the people in my generation, for instance, who can't afford to buy a home and don't even know what that's like but who, deep down, want peace of some sort in life, even if they also want justice. When I read Crevecoeur, I also read what could have been for my generation.
I could write more, but this is enough I think. Great post! Both of you held up well and had a lot of insight. While the political divide is no longer bridgable in the macro sense, I hope you and everyone else can hang onto their disagreeable friends.
Good stuff, Felix. Your reading of Crévecoeur as aspirational is interesting -- and as a fellow idealist, I do think it's worth imagining beyond our grasp. It's also true that cynical takedowns of artists (deconstruction) do not inspire joyful reading. I like John Pistell's comment on the original post about how Crévecoeur closes the narrative with a bruised idealism -- not denial exactly, but a sorrowful prayer for what might yet be. I will admit that I can't quite read the text in this way, and I still think that idealistic impulse has a tendency to elide uncomfortable truths and to silence dissent. But I hear what you're saying. I think I read Gatsby that way as an undergraduate, too, really wishing that he was not what he actually was. Because Nick Carraway is really not very interesting. However, this is how great literature speaks to us throughout our lives. The young person who yearns for Crévecoeur's farm idyll can find that there, and the older person who has weathered many reality checks can squint at what the author knew but chose to suppress in that narrative. The difference between those two readings makes for interesting conversation.
Josh,
I find you incredibly eloquent about literature/humanities and its discontents in this piece. Unfortunately "Tom" is rather reductive and full of simplistic right-wing slogans. Though I am an English professor with decided left-wing sympathies, I do not reduce the literature I ask my students to read to political discourse, and I do not think I am all that exceptional.
And I would add that the supply/demand argument, as I think Josh points out, is flawed insofar as the "market" is not free; the economically and politically powerful have always had their finger on the scales. At my own institution, for instance, students earn significant grants if, and only if, they major in a STEM discipline.
Thanks, Douglas. I wouldn't have shared my exchange with Tom if I didn't respect him. See my reply to Amy below for a few more nuances about his experience, which has assuredly shaped his view. I should add that he is an award-winning teacher, a mentor who has led many study abroad experiences, a volunteer at a prison (where he teaches yoga, among other things), and a widely published scholar and poet. I suppose I grant him some license for hyperbole in an opinionated exchange like this. And I think there is more than a kernel of truth to his claims (see again my replies to Amy and Jason). But I also take your points.
Curious if you might share an example or two of how you teach literature beyond the narrow parameters that Tom describes?
As for market demand, I expect that at your institution (as is still true at mine -- which I suppose I can say in the present tense as an emeritus professor) some of those grant monies are donor-driven. This is a clear way that institutional leaders can show their support for programs with fewer wealthy alums and less public visibility. Sure, some donors earmark their funds very strictly. It was always somewhat galling that several faculty awards each year at my school were earmarked for faculty in the maths or sciences. But there were other awards that had once been defined generally as "excellence in teaching" or "excellence in professional development." If you published a book, you were sure to get the latter, etc. But a new dean changed all of this to match the donor's intent exactly, so that what once had been multiple awards were now reduced to one with very restrictive criteria. This created more work for department chairs or colleagues who might have formerly nominated deserving candidates, because the nomination letter had to be meticulously crafted. So there were fewer nominations, which led to inequitable recognition, and a completely avoidable drain on morale. I'm on a soapbox now, but I think when an institutional leader recognizes those inequities in resources, there is an opportunity to have a conversation with donors about how flexibly their funds might be distributed, and how this might benefit the institution. A good leader might also recognize that instead of standing back and allowing programs to wither on the vine, it might be possible to throw some fundraising energy their way, or provide faculty with some training in grant writing, or something to communicate that programs aren't truly on their own. When leaders imply that it's every program for itself, this leads to toxic in-house dynamics, because it truly feels like the Hunger Games: one program's gain is another's loss.
Right, I don't mean to impugn "Tom" personally; often times online exchanges oblige us to boil things down a bit and subtlety gets lost in the process, and there are things he says with which I am in sympathy. One reason your blog is valuable is it takes its time.
As for teaching literature without reducing it to political discourse or assertion, just a couple brief points. What English professors are best at--close reading, as others in this forum have noted--is what preserves great literature of various genres from reductionists of various political stripes. Second, I often put books on my syllabi that challenge this or that liberal or progressive orthodoxy, such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, A. Clockwork Orange, etc. As I tell my students, good literature doesn't give us answers, but it does point out the enduringly important questions.
This is a pretty bummer view of things. According to Friend Tom, " 'reading critically' has come to mean [. . .] showing how the text is racist, classist, and sexist. Always. Always and only those things. [ . . . ] The job of the professor [. . . ] is to teach students that racism and classism and sexism are everywhere, even when it's not apparent." I mean, yeah, if that's what's happening in classrooms, that's horrible. But I don't think that's what's happening in classrooms.
Do students " read . . . begrudgingly to pass some damn test or write some damn paper and then move on." Or "read to get their ticket punched and that's it. And now students are increasingly unwilling to do that." I mean that's just such a sad, pessimistic view of things. I encounter vital intellectual curiosity among my students every day that I teach. Everyone's had the experience of reading something uncertain it would be worth their time, and discovering something precious there -- I see it happen among my students all the time. And the things they find precious are not necessarily what I would. The text is a mirror in which they see themselves reflected through the minds of the past.
I find it hard to believe that "Left-wing professors are just secular priests, preaching to a flock of vulnerable, hormonal kids who have yet to develop a frontal lobe." (Yeowch, that's just mean. All of our frontal lobes are works-in-progress, dude!) "If you are going to be saved" (from what?) "you’ve got to study at the feet of the learned class; they will disabuse you of any notion of individual responsibility" (how can any individually-graded class possibly communicate a message *against* individual responsibility?) and baptize you into the cult of victimhood" (I mean this is like, cartoonish?) "Liberated from the shackles of the Great Books and Schools of the Ages, you will join the School of Resentment and be given your marching orders: 'Burn it all down.' What a strange perspective! My students are still reading Great Books -- some of which, I should note, have a pretty "burn it all down" attitude. So maybe we selectively object to *what* authors want to "burn down"? What feels "okay" to the reader when the author rails against it, and what does it offend us to see targeted in aging print?
But I agree with Friend Tom here: "The best argument for saving literature departments is to argue that literature is art, and great art needs to be preserved and transmitted to the next generation. That’s it. It needs to be outside the market economy — like faith and love and family and friendship."
It's an art AND its a conversation -- the past in communion with the present, inviting the present to speak to the future.
Thanks for this, Amy -- especially for your good faith efforts to engage. I actually think you and Tom would really enjoy each other in person. I agree with much of what you've said, as I pointed out in a reply to Jason. But it's clear to me that my experience at a private liberal arts college was very different from Tom's at a regional public university. I enjoyed a close-knit community -- students who babysat my children, whose athletic contests and recitals and theatre performances I loved to support. I think you enjoy something similar at an even more selective private university, where both aptitude and intellectual curiosity run high. Tom's students are less academically prepared and less engaged, and his department has a pretty dysfunctional culture. Let's not pretend that there aren't some truths in what he's saying. There would be no audience for The Chair and Lucky Hank if the problems he describes weren't fairly pervasive.
Since Tom can't speak for himself in this forum beyond what's published above, I'll say a few other things in his defense. You're right that some of his language here is cartoonish. But the phony papers that Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian were able to sneak past peer review (about things like rape culture in dog parks) expose a pretty cartoonish side to even highly curated academic discourse. As you know from my earlier post on labor-based grading, I also see the rhetoric of some these movements as caricaturing itself.
The debacle at Hamline University, the student revolt against Maitland Jones, and similar absurdities like book bans and curriculum policing, show that we're living in an incredibly censorious time. Questions about academic freedom and open discourse are serious, and the extent to which both professors and students feel they must self-censor is alarming.
I appreciate your voice so much because you stand apart from all that. And you make a really good point about the revolutionary thrust of many Great Books, which are not necessarily a staid row of tweedy narratives on the shelf. Which, in particular, did you have in mind? I'm thinking of Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, and Whitman -- radicals, all. There's almost no squaring "Civil Disobedience" or "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" or "Self-Reliance" with the culture of assessment and standardization in higher ed today. And I think Tom is right that serious literature has quite often operated outside the university and that the notion that English departments must save literature is historically inaccurate and incorrect.
I hope you'll remember that I was a high-school dropout who attended community college and then the local commuter college for 8 years while working various jobs before I went to grad school and got an MFA. :) I hope you'll also remember that before I started teaching at Drake, I taught at Florida Atlantic University, whose students were a lot like I was at that age: working-class, working hard, married, sometimes with kids, mostly "under-prepared" and often very skeptical about what a LIT class was doing on their path to becoming a nurse or an accountant. And based in my experience, this is what I would say: thank God that my teachers taught like it mattered, without requiring evidence that it did. Thank God that my teachers entrusted us with Chaucer in Middle English, entrusted us with Dryden and Swift, believed that Alexander Pope was worth leading us to, without questioning whether or not we were ready to drink. And when I was teaching at FAU, I paid that forward: I always assumed that if my students *could* find something profound in Candide, it was worth acting as though they *would* find something profound in Candide, and whether they did or not doesn't matter. I heard colleagues lament that the kids don't care, but imo that was *them* giving up, not the kids. Humans are hungry for connections to the past and shared cultural history, and college kids are humans. If you go into the classroom, the professor, convinced that your students are mentally insufficient and just looking to check a box, you're cultivating that very prophesy.
Josh was very gracious, but Tom's language is very indicative of contemporary right wing discourse. Straw man, cherry picking, overt hostility etc.
But Tom's core is right: humanities academics have pervasively been twisted by a performative politique. It's just not accurately depicted here.
Josh, I am not convinced that cutting those programs is a bad thing. There is a knee jerk reaction that rarely asks questions of enrollment or economics. It's a great example of how I became disillusioned with academia: it reveals the instrumental use of reason, of treating our intellectual tools as something we take up and put down rather than who we are. I am not of course speaking of you, as I know not your argument, but in general.
Thanks, Jason. Curious what you might correct in the exchange above? It sounds like you agree with Tom more than not, especially on the question of supply/demand. My point is mainly that the more college leaders proclaim that no one wants the humanities, the more self-fulfilling that message becomes. I think it's possible to double down on the liberal arts without being too naive about economic matters. Certainly college leaders are not consistent when it comes to resource allocation. They'll hire consultants freely, invest heavily in athletic programs that (on average) show multi-million dollar losses, and pad their administrative staff with no thought to the economic consequences. So I think it's unfair to single out the humanities as an economic albatross. There's quite a lot of that to go around.
Example of consultants.
A friend of mine told me that my college paid tens of thousands for an educational work product to do what we profs are mandated to do for free, and it only took a week to complete. It was brought up just so we could roll our eyes together. It illustrated that work done "by a professional" who is not a professor was valued incalculably more than professor's work. That activity was common, and I suspect that the case generalizes.
Yup, so let's not talk about resource allocation in higher ed purely as a question of demand. It's also a question of values. I've seen the demand for the humanities wane, but I also know that at my former institution, much of that was driven by internal factors, such as advising and strategic planning, and by outward-facing factors, such as marketing. In fact, the engineering program that required so many resources to launch has still not, to my knowledge, paid for itself. But it has the whole shoulder of the institution behind it because it's a signature program for the president. It draws some students, who realize they can't hack it and then either transfer or move into other majors. But that kind of bait and switch is a poor model for economic sustainability. Lure them in the door with engineering and football and then hope they stick? At the same time, I recognize that it's hard. It's not as simple as saying, "We're going to recruit a flute player for every football player," as our president once said, and then making that come to pass.
I am woefully ignorant of the budget models for higher ed that predated the G.I. Bill, but without a doubt the idea of liberal arts for the masses is a new concept and one that has always required buy-in at the state and federal levels. I suppose even before the G.I. Bill, there was enough respect for historical and cultural knowledge to protect some level of public funding for the humanities. I realize those days are over. But that doesn't mean what's happening at universities is objectively good (not implying that you are suggesting it is).
Same problem my own college with the automotive and other technical programs. They lost lots of money but the liberal arts made them lots of money. And yet we liberal arts folk were treated as second class citizens.
To illustrate the point you could walk around my old campus and just look who had a new building who had fresh landscaping, fresh interiors. Who didn't?.
Josh,
I do agree with Tom more than not.
To simplify my objections, his account is totalizing and simplistic, and written the the familiar diction of right-wing politics. But I find that most contemporary discourse won't let me say things like that and take it on faith that I'm not bloviating, so let's be scholarly and go through some points.
Students don't have access to the humanities.
Tom contests this, but having access to texts, I would argue, is of limited value without the analytic tools and habits that require training and performance and objective standards. For instance, I cannot tell you how many times I run into people who are well-read, but lack the intellectual tools to do anything with that reading, or lack the background to understand it properly. It reminds me of the common student behavior of Googling information the night before, submitting an essay rehashing what they found, and not seeming to understand that the work product needs to demonstrate weeks or months of skill development, e.g., rehashing is step 2 and not the final step.
Academics do over-estimate the power of literature.
Reading, and appreciating, literature does little for one's development per se. In fact, this was the core of much of my doctoral work, as I wanted to know *why* and how to correct it. (I was motivated by how so many fellow scholars, who I once admired and thought could do no ill, demonstrated appalling moral behavior despite incredible scholarly accomplishment even on the topic of ethics.) To be specific, I focused on "moral imagination."
"Reading critically or closely" does not necessarily mean "read to a progressive ideology"
There, Tom is being unfair. Yes, there's a lot of profs that do that, but the claim is totalizing. Implicit in it is that almost all humanities academics are pure charlatans who seek only to convert people to their ideology. That's such a totalizing claim ... I really don't need to say more in criticism.
That said, it is true that political ideology have become an incredibly pervasive and toxic force in the humanities. It's often performance even among those who fervently true to be genuine. In my experience, the problem is that people are performing moralistic political ideas as ideologies (networks of ideas held despite evidence or reason) as opposed to moral reasoning (ideas held only through rational justification and thus must change in light of new evidece, etc.). So, any complains about de facto thought or speech codes are true in much of the US, because too many progressive adherents practice their social justice as ideologies (which corrupts any good idea).
Final point there. I'd read "critical or closely" as study in hermeneutics and development of metacognitive ability. E.g., correctly interpret a sentence in light of the other sentence, and not in light of what happens to come to mind (avoiding availability bias). Gee, I wish my medical doctors could do that more reliably...
Identity politics is bad.
I agree on that point. A politic built on individual identity, especially given what "identity" means in popular discourse (narrative self-identity to us scholars) guarantees that the political starting point is going to be divisive, fluid when stability is needed, easy to weaponize, etc. One of the roots of these problems of identity is that fact that most of identity is a social construct, and most people both don't admit that or acknowledge the implications (and most don't have the education to do so, but the new identities trade on this).
Few students are intellectuals
Tom is right. One problem of humanities academics is that they want all their students to be like themselves, and many seem to be affronted when it fails. Yeah, if students could come to greater moral understanding through literature (a key part of studies in moral imagination), it'd be great. But that rarely happens ... though it does happen big when it does.
"If you are going to be saved, you’ve got to study at the feet of the learned class; they will disabuse you of any notion of individual responsibility and baptize you into the cult of victimhood."
Here's an example of what I mean by "contemporary right-wing political diction" and "straw man."
Side note. Most people's understanding of freedom and choice (agency) is horribly wrong and unscientific. So when students are taught basic sociology and psychology, they're now being "baptized into victimhood?" Tom doesn't write that, but that is what's actually happening.
To be fair, again, lefties usually go to far. They're really good at self-parody and "is this satire or ... are they serious?" I think this latter point is what motivates people like Boghossian, who I used to correspond with. Ah, the early days of the philosophical blogoverse...
I'll stop here....
Lots to dig into here, Jason -- and thanks for clarifying. You're right that sweeping claims aren't helpful.
I do want to gently challenge the notion that only a few students will engage deeply with these texts. Sure, it's a stretch for many of them to read even excerpts of Crévecoeur, but this is the work of a good teacher -- to assist with that struggle and to demonstrate that it's worthwhile. I taught at a private liberal arts college where the bulk of my students in first-year and sophomore-level courses were non-majors. It's true that I often began the semester in the hole, in terms of student buy-in. But I was able to win the majority of students over. My evaluations reflected this, as did the quality of our discussions. Some of it came from encouraging a kind of intellectual play. One student came into class after reading "Young Goodman Brown" and said, "Hawthorne was Emo!" Loved that kind of thing. Often the glib response shows engagement that can be redirected back to the text. And I think the discipline of marshaling evidence, of doing that good work of close reading (considering context, not cherry picking evidence), generates its own satisfaction over time. I've seen it in Business majors and Athletic Training majors, as well as in students from less applied programs.
Maybe I sound like a curmudgeon here, but I really think that the standards for academic authority -- the critical and analytical skills that must be learned, as you say, and that aren't obvious to the autodidact -- are the foundation for a stable society. An informed citizenry that knows the difference between a fact and an alternative fact is still a worthy goal.
Josh,
You challenge the notion that few will engage deeply.
In my experience, and in that of my colleagues of the last 15 years, few delve deeply. About the only basis for challenge you have is to reinterpret the numbers, as they come not from personal feelings. Also, I know what the reading comprehension statistics are in general and for my typical cohort. Please note that I'm talking about long or even book-length treatments, and not passages.
So, I say to you that all such claims are highly dependent upon exactly what population one is talking about. I made my claim on several bases, and here are some. First, the overall literacy rate in the US. Second, the college entrance and completion rate. Third, my and my colleague's experiences over a decade in two states in community colleges, which serve the majority of American students. Fourth, over a decade of study in pedagogy and education statistics.
Yes, the instructor can play a role. But I'm not talking about what an individual instructor can do. Tom's point was a general one, and not what a dedicated and well-supported educator with the right student mix can do. Most students are not interested in hard or archaic texts, and this is revealed in statistics in literacy rates, general reading rates, entry into various majors, etc.
In my experience, the talented professor is more likely doing a good job keeping them engaged *despite* lack of student reading. This became even more stark when we moved to online teaching during the height of the pandemic, and faculty started using etexts.... some of which tell the instructor whether material was accessed at all, for how long, etc. I would insist on that level of evidence, Josh, to take you claim seriously as a general claim given the current counter-vailing evidence.
We agree on the point about the autodidact. I've met way too many "college is useless" and "teach yourself anything from the internet!" people who just don't realize that massive, massive gaps in skill that result. It's not a linear difference, and too often we get truly inspiring individuals given as examples of how it's done ... with no recognition at their statistical insignificance.
Excellent point and I completely agree: "In my experience, the talented professor is more likely doing a good job keeping them engaged *despite* lack of student reading. This became even more stark when we moved to online teaching during the height of the pandemic, and faculty started using etexts.... some of which tell the instructor whether material was accessed at all, for how long, etc. I would insist on that level of evidence, Josh, to take you claim seriously as a general claim given the current counter-vailing evidence."
This goes to some of your angst about what passes for academic assessment. If this were the kind of thing that academic assessment were trying to measure and leverage for quality improvement, it would make so much more sense.
I used to interview scholarship candidates during an admissions event at my college that was really just a big PR campaign disguised as a rigorous competition. We were allowed to ask some original questions, and I'd often ask students to describe a book they'd read recently and why it had impacted them. The number of students who said that they not only couldn't think of a book, but that they couldn't remember the last time they had even read an entire book, was completely appalling. These were candidates for academic scholarships, not C students! That's anecdotal, and so it does not pass your sniff test as evidence. But I quite take your point that I might have been fooling myself about how much my students were really learning, even if the group experience felt meaningful and enjoyable to me.
Josh, I think there's a conflation of the arguments.
My argument is of low student interest largely based on change in culture and low reading comprehension is a large part of evidence.
Also, the evidence must match the claim, so there's nothing wrong with anecdotal.
They could have been learning plenty, and that's what good pedagogy is in that circumstance. But it's not a desire to engage literature.
Replying to Sherman Alexie I went over why i think the 20th century shows authors refuse to attack ad hominem. Despite being catty. What if the students really are visual literates by preference to older time consuming chores? Then in that case it is a strong misreading to treat them as if they have a strong foot in the canon. But as John Fowles implies in his synoptic education in the Aristos, maybe in visual literacy you can stay abreast of 'good' turning into Michael Jackson "badness". But we pity the Oleannas because all that is so damnably fast and writers showed pity for themselves by not publicly participating in character assasinations. I sympathise with pain i do. My sstack landed on e plaining for the first 10 months the uses practical of poetry. I had a minor stroke i believe in the course of that. But my arguments exactly correspond with an author who wrote a book"why Poetry?" So that if there is something there after all 6te burned bridges, couldnt students b3 enlisted to academicaly disprove or prove the strong misreading. I mean it is an open question but rock and roll songs are regularly misheard, and the kids would show 20 other instances. They could be enlisted to show how generous it was to publish at all, they could supply examples the literatii will not think of. Whether it is camoflouge to skip over a misunderstanding, or cowardice? The point is you ise your own embodied self to paper over these human differences, and it is worth the life of a JgBallard or a Kafka to encourage these clesrly traumatized persons to pretend to have it together on paper. The alternative being being a prisoner of fashion.