occupied with consumerism.
Doing some learning this week about economics and intellectual history from James Livingston over at his Politics and Letters blog.
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Archive for October, 2011
#502 – Dr. Livingston, They Presume
Saturday, October 29th, 2011#501 – Goodman Theater
Thursday, October 13th, 2011#500 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011harris m. berger on the meaning of meaning.
Meaning is the fungible currency in the economy of our lifeworld, constantly crossing borders between one phenomenon and its neighbors, one location and the next in experience. …
Valences and meanings move among phenomena, stance, and mood; this movement exists within a temporal space that evolves forward in an iterative fashion, expands in accretion, and even rewrites its own history in retrospection.
— Harris M. Berger, Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture, 39, 52
#499 – Train In Vain
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011crisis in the humanities, part two: a response to cathy davidson’s “strangers on a train: a chance encounter provides a lesson in complicity and the never-ending crisis in the humanities.”
Continued from Crisis in the Humanities, Part One.
Cathy Davidson has written a typically incisive and clever essay on the crisis in the humanities. She urges scholars in universities who believe in the humanities to confront administrators who are hacking away unnecessarily at departments and programs of study; but, like Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman in their AHA column, she also takes humanists to task for two contrary tendencies: not connecting humanistic education to job training more decisively and, at the same time, not being independent enough from larger neoliberal economic ideologies. Complicity and independence—these are the competing forces in Davidson’s view of how higher education.
Much like Grafton and Grossman in their thinking about graduate education, Davidson calls for more introspection among humanities scholars: what kinds of curricular designs and research foci, she asks, might move the humanities to more engaged, interdisciplinary models? How might these link age-old humanistic modes (reading, writing, and, going way back in time to a humanistic skill once again relevant in the age of computers, arithmetic) to contemporary skills required for the digital epoch? She warns, “If humanists can’t make what we do central in an information age, we never can.”
The central problem is only whispered in the essay (psst…”neoliberal policy”). But it does make an appearance. And it does so in terms of one of Davidson’s keen historical insights: the structure of the university was transformed during the twentieth century from medieval institution to modern research machine, and now must be reformed again to meet the needs of the twenty-first century.
Davidson’s point here seems to be twofold: first, the university should be radically reformed in terms of what it can offer students in their training, with humanities taking the lead to cross what in the end is a false divide between the world on campus and beyond its gates; second, the university should be altered in terms of the actual topics, methods, and divisions among disciplines themselves, the stale false dichotomy between so-called “hard skill” scientists and “soft skill” humanists.
It’s this last point that is the trickiest. Is Davidson calling for less specialization or more when it comes to advanced research? Or is she calling for a new kind of specialization in the academy? What should the relationship be between specialization and interdisciplinary study, between radical critique and practical job training for employment? Can universities be places of research and teaching that reject larger systems of power in the world and, at the same time, train students for that very same larger world? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the core challenge that Davidson seems to be asking of herself and others in the humanities.
What’s intriguing here is that the kind of innovation that Davidson calls for has often emerged from the margins. It has often done so both in terms of research and in terms of structural change to the university. At the edges, in the margins, from the sides, from below, among the outsiders—these have often been places where the kind of knowledge and approaches Davidson calls for have emerged. What she seems to call for is an effort to move those margins more to the center.
That’s a noble democratic goal, an essential one in fact, but it’s also a difficult task. What would it look like to move the margins to the center, institutionally and intellectually? Could one still talk about margins and center then?
Institutionally, who in the university with power really wants to give up on a system that has given them their position, status, and security? But even more confoundingly, intellectually, what would it mean for marginal spaces of creativity to move to the center of the university? Is their marginality essential to their creativity? Would those spaces themselves become complicit and compromised?
It is this notion of complicity—in a flawed university system, in neoliberal policy, in centers of power—that is the real topic of Davidson’s essay. Davidson calls for humanists (and scientists, and administrators too) to establish a more “independent” spirit to reform the university, to “break the cycle” of the ongoing crisis in the humanities. Yet, as she also points out, “Whether you are a vulgar Marxist or a raging capitalist, you have to support yourself somehow, and you have to do so in a given historical moment and cultural context.” Therein lies the rub.
How do hobos of the neoliberal age get off this runaway train? For that matter, how do the conductors and engineers and paying passengers get off? How do they escape this leftover behemoth from the industrial age still driving madly down the main line run? Do they jump? Slow it down? Derail it? Change the tracks? Toot the whistle? Decouple the cars? Take over the driver wheel? Are there other models besides complicity and independence, other ways to conceptualize the democratic workplace both within the university and beyond campus that we need to imagine? Is it independence alone those complicit strangers on a train need, or is it some other kind of training, some different train of thought?
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#498 – Don’t Know Much About History
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011crisis in the humanities, part one: a response to anthony t. grafton and jim grossman on graduate history programs.
The October 2011 issue of the American Historical Association’s newsletter, Perspectives on History, has a column by the president of the AHA and the organizations executive director. It’s a noble piece that once again notes the extreme oversupply of PhD’s in history compared to actual history jobs in the academy. It makes the usual points: that departments need to rethink the privileging of academic jobs over other professional opportunities for historians, that history is relevant to a wide range of fields, and other “modest proposals” (is that title supposed to be a Swiftian joke? Or is it an unintended one about their recommendations?).
In a way, this is a very sad column. It’s a kind of giving up and giving in. Rather than think of graduate historical education as a way to study the past in order to improve the present and future, or at least try to do so, Grafton and Grossman simply call on departments to acquiesce to the world as it is. They write of the declining tenure-track job market:
As many observers have noted, this is not a transient “crisis.” It’s the situation we have lived with for two generations. And it’s not likely to change for the better, unless someone figures out how to work magic on the university budgets that lead administrators to opt for flexible, contingent positions rather than tenure-track jobs. AHA supports and joins in efforts to convert contingent to tenure-track jobs—but it’s unrealistic to expect these to pay off on a large scale. We owe it to our students and to our profession to think more broadly.
“How to work magic.” “It’s unrealistic to expect these to pay off on a large scale.” There is a lack of engagement here with the deeper inequities and inequalities both in our society as a whole and within the university. Yes, we need to think more broadly about history’s applicability, but the first place that the AHA might apply historical skills is to the university itself: what are the ideals of this institution? If universities are no longer meeting those ideals, why is this so? How did this happen? What kinds of alternatives might we imagine to a world in which only “magic” solves the actual problem? Grafton and Grossman offer a band-aid for a gaping wound. The bandage might be decorated with historical figures and pictures of famous events, but it doesn’t even cover, nevermind cure, the deeper political and economic malady.
Perhaps the answer is not only for departments to level the playing field between work within and beyond the academy in graduate training (an important goal to be sure), but also to recognize the very real desires that I suspect push many students toward doctoral work in the first place. Grafton and Grossman seem to want to make the university more like the rest of the world; what about rethinking how the rest of the world might draw upon the best aspects of the university while jettisoning the worst parts?
Which is to say that their column largely misses the point. My hunch is that graduate students do not only aspire to tenure-line positions at universities because they “internalize” the attitudes of advisers and departments and seek the approval of their mentors and institutions. Sure, that’s part of it. But graduate students also long for careers that produce the kind of life that tenure-line positions make possible. They hunger, in short, for a taste, just a taste, of unalienated labor.
Yes, I know this is an ideal. But Grafton and Grossman’s column refuses to engage—indeed they seem almost cruelly to want to crush—the desire that I think many graduate students possess, which is to do what a professor ideally does: to have a modicum of autonomy over her or his labor (yes, again, I know this is an ideal); to have an opportunity to help others acquire knowledge; to have the chance to explore new, specialized kinds of knowledge and produce new ideas as an expert in a particular topic; to be able to work in institutional settings that have, at some level, a democratic component of debate, deliberation, and collective agreement rather than the hierarchical and solely-profit-oriented rule of the corporation (and yes, once again, I know this is an ideal).
Graduate students may not know much about history, fools that they are according to Grafton and Grossman’s piece, but I think they do long to love their work and be loved back by it. That’s the wonderful world they seek: impractical and idealistic, yes; driven as much by desire and utopianism as by pseudo-realist approaches to the profession, yes; a bit of a pipe dream to change the world rather than acquiesce to its profound imperfections, yes. But for many graduate students, I suspect, this dream of a more beloved future world is at the core of their interest in studying past failures to achieve it.
As history departments aspire to train students for a broader range of careers, they must not lose sight of why it is so many students long to become tenure-line historians. The AHA should be working to make those other professions more like the best parts of the tenure-track position, not giving up on those kind of working conditions.
Without seeking to make good on the hopes among graduate students to become fully-fledged faculty members, why not simply dismantle PhD programs entirely? Just have students earn their MBA’s and JD’s, hone their “soft skills” and “hard skills,” professionalize for the world as it is, become happy team members, and work in their cubicles without all the effort.
If, at some basic level, we don’t maintain the ideal of seeking out historical knowledge as academics do, in the way they do, is there anything left to graduate historical training at all?
Next—Crisis in the Humanities, Part Two: a Response to Cathy Davidson’s “Strangers on a Train: A chance encounter provides a lesson in complicity and the never-ending crisis in the humanities.”
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