Do English professors think of themselves as priests?

A dialogue with one of my readers

From Aleteia

Each week I enjoy private conversations with readers in addition to the conversations that unfold in the public comments thread. Some of those emails turn into more robust exchanges, and I’m sharing one of those today as a coda to my essay on Crévecoeur last Tuesday. 

This particular reader, whom I’ll call Tom to maintain his privacy, is a full professor of English at a regional university in the Northeast. We met each other when we were both graduate students, and we’ve remained friends even as our ideological commitments have changed. Tom is now a proud conservative, a rarity among English professors these days. Less than 2% of English professors identified as conservative in 1999, and a 2015 study reported 97 Democrats for every 3 Republicans among English teachers at all levels. You’d think that such a gap could scarcely widen, and yet it undoubtedly has. So that’s one reason I asked Tom if we might share this more broadly. 

Another reason I’m sharing our exchange is that it’s rare to see civil disagreement in a comments thread. Many online exchanges swing between fans shouting amens and trolls lobbing grenades. Tom and I have some sharp disagreements here, but neither of us is angling for the gotcha comeback or the choke hold. We’ll live to spar another day. Since it seems the polite thing to do, I’ll give him the last word even though I have plenty more to say.

I need more conversations like this in my life. Sometimes disagreement changes me and sometimes it just clarifies my original position. Either way, I think I benefit. I’ll be curious to hear what this dialogue opens up for you. Let me know in the comments or, as is always just as welcome, by simply replying to this message.

Tom:

As always, I enjoyed your Substack post on Crévecoeur. At the end of the essay, you ask what place, if any, LAF [Letters from an American Farmer] should have in secondary or post-secondary education. You ask if it's an essential text. You ask the question within the context of WVU making major cuts to their humanities programs, a decision you obviously take issue with. The objection is that students won't have access to the humanities now unless they can afford to attend a private institution. (This assumes, incidentally, that that imaginary private institution will have a strong humanities program.)

Towards the end of his Literary Theory, the inveterate Marxist Terry Eagleton claims humanists overestimate the transformative power of literature, and he's right. There's a collective delusion among literary professors that reading literature will blow students' minds, that, after slogging through Gravity's Rainbow, they'll volunteer at soup kitchens, give to the Democrat or Green Party, glue themselves to interstates to save the planet, and, more generally, just be fine citizens. The best people are well read, in other words. Anyone who has sat through an English department faculty meeting knows this is far from the truth. It’s worth remembering that Stalin was extremely well read. When he wasn’t planning a mass famine in Ukraine or designing Gulags, he was, according to Geoffrey Roberts, in Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books, “devour[ing] the classics of Russian and western fiction – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller, Heine, Hugo, Thackeray, and Balzac.” College professors can be as petty, arrogant, intemperate and shockingly provincial as anyone. This isn’t a criticism of literature. Literature has no need of English professors. In fact, I’d argue great literature won’t survive the modern university, if adherents to the School of Resentment have their way, and they clearly are getting their way. Sadly, Crévecoeur’s fate is likely tied to the guillotine. 

Josh:

You make a fair point about the logical gaps in my argument. English isn’t being axed at WVU, so those cuts aren’t directly threatening the traditional American literature survey. Letters wasn’t taught, so far as I know, in Modern Languages or creative writing courses at WVU, and so one might say that Crévecoeur is theoretically safe, so far, in Morgantown. 

But the rationale for these cuts is the same as those used to scale back humanities courses everywhere. It’s a business proposition rather than a cultural one. At the beginning of the post I reference the op-ed that Gordon Gee coauthored with two other colleagues in Inside Higher Ed, which proposes remaking the university, via branding, in the image of what the average person wants. That vision poses a direct threat to literature programs. And a softer version of it, represented by flipped priorities in gen-ed requirements, also replaces academic depth or breadth with skills-based outcomes. So I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that what’s happening at WVU is representative of a larger debate about what is essential to a university. But you’re quite right that this debate carries over into private institutions, where Crévecoeur might be no more central to the curriculum for other reasons that we’ll get into.

While I agree with you that many English professors are poor exemplars of empathy, humility, or generosity — and thus challenge the notion that studying literature makes us better people — I think you misunderstand my point about citizenship. Letters poses questions about American identity that I think every citizen ought to answer in some way. Many people parrot the melting pot metaphor without knowing its origin. Tracing those tropes back to the source and wrestling with the ambiguity of primary documents makes us less vulnerable to slogans and helps us think more independently. That kind of critical thinking is what the liberal arts have always tried to teach, and it is one of the historical pillars of the college or university that is presently under attack.

Tom: 

Books are available to everyone in the U.S. We have libraries. Books can be found at Savers and Goodwill and the Salvation Army. The intellectually curious reader can find a copy of Middlemarch for almost nothing almost anywhere, and there’s been a copy of Letters to an American Farmer on the bargain shelves at my local Barnes & Noble for more than a year. It’s $5. 

You say that professors teach students how to "read closely and critically." But what does this mean? 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." Thus, reading critically means showing how the text is racist, classist, and sexist. Always. Always and only those things. And because literature is meant to represent reality — even when the form of the novel is fragmented and disjunctive (like Woolf's, Joyce's, and Burrough's work) — reality is racist, classist, and sexist. Reading is a way to critique culture, then, because books reflect culture — and the ideological framework that underwrites it. The job of the professor — and this is why they're so necessary, so the argument goes — is to teach students that racism and classism and sexism are everywhere, even when it's not apparent. 

Josh:

You and I are both readers of Mark Lilla, and so we agree that the laser focus on identity politics, both in Democratic political strategy and in the humanities, is reductive and self-defeating. It’s sad that each of the theoretical approaches that you cite began as an exercise in exactly the kind of critical analysis that I think Letters teaches. And there’s value in looking at American literature in all three of those ways. There’s no way to understand Anne Bradstreet without understanding the power dynamics she negotiated as a female poet in the 1600s. That’s not the only story to tell about colonial America, but it’s an important one. Similarly, I enjoyed grappling with the racist overtones of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative with students, particularly as a window into the Puritan mind (which foreshadowed much of the later history in the American West). 

I don’t think you are in favor of eliding all that or discouraging critical analysis of any particular topic, but you’re right that making it the *only* story is harmful. When discussions turn into a rehearsed consensus, rather than free inquiry, they produce a myopia that invites parody, such as the hoax that Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian pulled off at a truly impressive scale.

But to return to your point about books… I used to ask my first-year students whether a college degree was the only way to acquire the 10 qualities of liberally educated people that William Cronon outlines in his famous essay, “Only Connect.” We all knew friends or loved ones who embodied those qualities without ever completing a single college course. And it’s theoretically true that anyone can be self-taught, like Will in Good Will Hunting. But it’s also true that we’re likely to see more growth if we surround ourselves with people who have the same goals. That used to be the rationale for a residential liberal arts experience, and I think it still can be. The analogy I often used with students was that I could push myself really hard on training runs, but I could never run as fast alone as I could on race day. If even a crowd of strangers brought out more in me than I could manage on my own, how much greater is the influence of trusted friends and colleagues? I think that’s true of studying someone like Crévecoeur, too — the group experience yields a richness that just isn’t there for the solitary seeker.

Tom:

The students you imagine really digging into Crévecoeur can be counted on one hand. Sure, millions of students will read his letters, but they'll do so under duress. They'll read them begrudgingly to pass some damn test or write some damn paper and then move on. It's true that one or two students — students like you and like me — will deeply engage the text, will try to understand the nuances of the letters, as you do so beautifully in your essay. But this is rare. The rest will read to get their ticket punched and that's it. And now students are increasingly unwilling to do that. I would add, quickly, that Bradstreet’s work can be read and understood on its own. While knowledge of gender dynamics in colonial America is of value, it’s not, in my view, essential to understanding her great poem, “Contemplations.” 

Back to university enrollments. Fewer and fewer students are going to college, and even fewer are majoring in the humanities. We can blame governors for cuts to academic programs, but it's worth asking if pumping millions of dollars into dying programs is a good use of limited funds. Why save what few want? Students are voting with their feet. It's an issue of supply and demand. Literature professors just can't understand why no one wants what they're selling, but, I'd argue, fewer and fewer students want what smells like bullshit — the ravings of activist professors who think the most important thing is to convince students that life in America is hell and that, if they're anything other than white, they are doomed to a life of penury. Why read Dubliners when you can read The Hate U Give or Gender Queer?

Josh:

I can’t deny the plummeting enrollments in the humanities. But let’s be honest about why that’s happening. I think you’re right that the activist-scholar is part of the reason. Humanities departments are increasingly putting more eggs in fewer — and more polarizing — baskets. The demographics of the English major at my former school were always slanted toward female students because many of our students were also Education majors. But when I began teaching around 2005, the split was maybe 60/40. English was a common second major for students interested in medicine and law. By the time I resigned in 2021, the split was more like 90/10 or 95/5. If a program or a discipline becomes an in-group with clear outsiders, it’s sealing its own fate, to some extent. 

But let’s be honest — market demand doesn’t generate itself. Humanities professors can’t win over the public if their own institutional leaders are siding with the public. This is a vicious loop, and English professors can’t counter it all on their own. It’s like family values or manners; they are impossible to instill in children if parents are divided. You need a unified front. In fact, I wonder if the stridency of the activist-scholar might be rooted in this feeling of abandonment by the institution — whether some rhetoric about justice is driven, in part, by that nagging feeling of needing to justify the existence of a discipline or articulate its value to those in power, and then this comes out in more extreme forms than it did when we were graduate students. I don’t think I was saying this in my piece about Crévecoeur, but you are right that many of the arguments for preserving the humanities are driven by moral outrage. 

Tom:

The notion that West Virginians are going to suffer because WVU closed its humanities programs makes sense only if you believe, as noted above, that the only place books and ideas can be found is in what used to be called "institutions of higher learning.” Universities are now one of the few places where terrible ideas persist. 

The vast majority of professors in the U.S. identify as left of center, politically, and they are true believers. Left-wing professors are just secular priests, preaching to a flock of vulnerable, hormonal kids who have yet to develop a frontal lobe. 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. 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.” I am reminded here of Marlon Brando’s character, Johnny, in The Wild One. Johnny is asked by Mildred, “What are you rebelling against?” Johnny answers, “Whaddaya got?” It’s childish.

The European Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation would have been unimaginable without Gutenberg’s printing press. Literacy rates shot up, and ideas spread. Ordinary citizens had access to the Bible. Priests no longer had a stranglehold on Truth. American citizens have caught on to what is going on in American universities. They see the dangers of Left-wing indoctrination, of what Thomas Sowell, in A Conflict of Visions, calls the “unconstrained vision.” Great books are being replaced by what Nabokov called “topical trash.” Standards, because racist, have been abandoned in the name of equity (equal outcomes).

To save literature, we need to forget about universities. Book clubs will do more to bolster citizenship than any university classroom. These "little platoons" (as Edmund Burke would call them) give people an opportunity to sit with one another in fellowship and talk about what they've read, not under duress but because they care about books. These are the people who will keep Crévecoeur alive. 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. But here’s the problem. Too many literature professors have given up on great literature. 

I am reminded of one of the final scenes in DeLillo’s White Noise. In the hospital emergency room, Jack Gladney speaks with a German nun:

I said to the nun, “What does the Church say about heaven today? Is it still the same old heaven, like that, in the sky?”

She turned to glance at the picture.

“Do you think we are stupid?” she said.

[. . .]

“But you’re a nun. Nuns believe these things. When we see a nun, it cheers us up, it’s cute and amusing, being reminded that someone still believes in angels, in saints, all the traditional things.”

“You would have a head so dumb to believe this?”

“It’s not what I believe that counts. It’s what you believe.”

“This is true,” she said. “The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe. But show me a saint. Give me one hair from the body of the saint.”

Like the nuns, too many literature professors no longer believe in Literature. If they do teach canonical texts, it’s to show how they either uphold the power structure or challenge it. That’s it. What is it, then, that Left-wing professors are trying to save? What exactly are they fighting for? Is it any wonder that professors are having trouble convincing their fellow citizens that their work is necessary?    

Josh: 

Certainly there are examples of literature thriving outside the university in earlier periods of American literary history. Ben Franklin was largely self-taught, and I don’t think Nathaniel Hawthorne had much truck with universities (though he was college-educated). I haven’t fully examined this answer, but from 1600-1800, literature was often a private pleasure or a byproduct of the ministry. Journalism was more of a pipeline for literary artists after 1800. That was true for Willa Cather, who enjoyed some speaking gigs at universities later in her career, but came of age as a journalist and then moved to novel writing without needing a faculty position to subsidize her craft. But I’d say that after the G.I. Bill writers often depended either on university posts or on writing works that were canonized by being widely taught in university courses. Maybe that was always a bubble that was destined to burst. 

Perhaps it’s also true that the kinds of literature that were traditionally taught in university classrooms (before 1940, say) were older — Western European, Greek, or Roman. And the seven traditional liberal arts — Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Music, Geometry, Arithmetic, and Astronomy — didn’t include literature as it is now taught. Cather worried in the 1920s that the University of Nebraska was going to turn into a giant trade school. So perhaps there is nothing new about any of this.

But the thing I can’t let go is that you and I had a university experience just 20-30 years ago that is fundamentally gone now. The institution that we were trained to serve is either a shell of what it was supposed to be or simply doesn’t exist any longer. Maybe literature is now just going the way of Latin and Classics, which we didn’t shed many tears for when we were young(er). But I’d like to think that there was a reason that most universities founded before 1900 had Latin words etched into their crests. It was a commitment to history, a symbol of continuity across generations. Now the crest has given way to the logo, the streamlined standard of the brand, to which history is only valuable as a veneer of prestige. I still think that is something to mourn. 

Tom:

What is sad is that we have lost a sense of shared history, so it is difficult to talk about continuity across generations now. Identity politics has led to the worst kind of tribalism. E pluribus unum doesn’t mean anything anymore, and that is to be mourned. But here’s the good news. There will always be deep readers. Like a reader post-Gutenberg, the high priest of literature is no longer necessary, especially if all she is ever going to tell you is that you are in hell and deserve to be there, even if you have wings and claim to be a saint. This attitude isn’t going to attract the best minds, the intellectually curious. Universities are putting themselves out of business, if you ask me. It’d be one thing if professors were introducing students to what Matthew Arnold referred to as the “best that has been thought and said,” to the great traditions of art and the history of ideas, but that’s not what is happening. Literature professors will likely go the way of Latin but great literature will be perfectly fine.