From Public Books:
It’s no news that the university is in crisis. Foreign-language departments have perhaps been the most affected, but few humanities programs have gone unscathed. English departments form the subject of two new attempts to provide a backstory to our present disorder: Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University by Andy Hines and Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Studies by John Guillory. Both depict literary study within universities as something strange and recent. And both situate the university in longer stories of racial capitalism and class distinction. Taken together, they provide a sobering analysis of the limited political potential of today’s English departments.
At the same time, amid this morass of dysfunction, both books soothe themselves with the fact that the university has no monopoly on reading. Students are never confined to the official syllabus. Some part of literature and literary study has always been eccentric to the university curriculum, and accounts of the “outside” of university-based practices, like the one Hines finds in a Black radical tradition that emphasized literature’s political potentials, could proliferate in many directions. Disciplinary outsides and eccentricities have tended to negatively inform professional literature scholars’ assertions that study of “their” objects requires specialist training in unique methods, or that university-based study of literature is the most inherently humanizing or importantly political reading practice. Guillory and Hines flip the script. By treating the professional literary academic as only one kind of reader, they suggest that attention to the varieties of reading practice ongoing outside the university may be an optimism appropriate to our contemporary moment.
Both books part ways with what Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell describe as a liberal “crisis consensus” that envisions universities as inherently progressive institutions that need only be saved from the recent ravages of neoliberal privatization. Hines depicts the English department as having been an “institutionalized cultural space governed by whiteness and anticommunism.” In his telling, the postwar establishment of the new criticism, which foregrounded close reading of the text as a self-contained aesthetic object, helped ground the emerging postwar hegemony of US liberal capitalism, which imagined itself as an apolitical unity-amid-diversity in opposition to mandated Soviet conformity. None of this could have happened without demonizing left and communist Black intellectuals who treated culture as an engine of revolutionary transformation.
In turn, Guillory’s historical breadth—encompassing the rise and fall of rhetoric, belle lettres, philology, and more—supplements some of Hines’s archival work on the late 1940s and 1950s. Guillory understands the new criticism as just one piece of a massive sociological and methodological shift that made the literary object a “verbal work of art” and, built around it, the English department as a site of disciplinary expertise. By subordinating documentary or political aspects of the text to “an aesthetic ontology,” English professors granted themselves jurisdiction over literary inquiry, and thus a role within the university in servicing the expanding professional-managerial class.
In Hines’s account, the new criticism enabled the racialized exploitation and exclusion of some people to secure the freedom of others within the “state-academic apparatus.” “Black writers, Black leftists, and communist affiliates who sought to build institutions around the critical study of Black literature,” among them Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Melvin B. Tolson, fought the new criticism’s consolidation with US institutions, seeking instead an interracial coalition that would challenge American capitalism and “the ills of racial liberalism.” Their radical vision of future possibility was undermined by a “racist interpretation complex” that made “the imagining of such efforts, and the efforts themselves, appear improbable.” The causal claim is important here: it is the racist interpretation complex, backed by and embodied within the new criticism, that undermined the work of those committed to using the study of literature and culture in service of radical social transformation.
Link to the rest at Public Books
Items like the OP make PG very happy that he’s not in college today.
The ivory tower appears to have been taken over by crazy people in more than a few instances.
In past lives, PG has interviewed recent college graduates who had submitted applications to the Personnel Department at a large company (Human Resources hadn’t been invented yet.). He mostly looked for a reasonable level of general intelligence and looked for signs that the individual was not a crazy person.
As a youth, PG had learned that it’s a bad idea to have any commercial or personal relationship with a crazy person. Regardless of any other redeeming personality traits, it was best to steer very clear of crazy people.
The problem is that crazy people can be quite ingenious about a variety of things, including cloaking their craziness behind a non-threatening façade.
Of course, PG is not a crazy person, just someone with a few charming quirks.
Speaking of modern universities, the economic case has been under study recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aj8XB76kKA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZvxnk1boAE
I wonder if the University managers have bothered to anslyze their own economies.
Thomas Sowell said the whole notion that zillions of people should go to college is a big Fallacy of Composition. A small number of people get high paying jobs because they went to college. Therefore everyone will get high paying jobs if they also go to college.
The problem isn’t the level of education itself, but rather the subject.
There is a millions deep shortage of STEM workers, jobs that *start* at upper middle class levels. (2.4M in 2018, likely much higher as the last boomers retire.)
There are similar gaps in the technical skills learned at two year colleges or technical universities, and even bigger gaps in the trades and crafts, many of which aren’t even trained formally.
On the other hand, there is no shortage of graduates of other, non-vocational disciplines serving as baristas,mixologists,and serving staff. Skills acquirable in, shall we say a week? Often as on-the-job training. Some pay reasonably (especially away from NYC) and some are the pathway to better paying jobs.
I fall back on my standard explanation: a failure of career counseling at tbe High School level. Yes, college graduates do earn an *average* of 40% more than non-graduates. But that is meaningless and misleading since it lumps in doctors, engineers, and programmers, with performing arts and puppetry graduates. Yeah, that rxpensive, debt-ridden diploma is equally useful for all majors. Riiight.
A game programmer at ACTIVISION, the biggest most poorly run developer in the US earns $71K a year in their late 20’s–the same category earns $10K at XBOX Studios, the best run developer. Even non-tech QA testers (paid to play the games) start at $22 an hour.
Engineers, start north of $50k easy and some disciplines start much higher. $100K salaries are reachable by the early 30’s.
And salaries in the trades may start lower, but they don’t start with a big debt load, either.
The rewards are available, unclaimed.
Yet the young are steered away from the best jobs with a load of generic misinformstion.
And of course, winter is coming for all professions now. LIFO style.
It won’t be pretty.
There would be far less confusion if the kids were told, “You will get a good job if you succeed in a major that the market values. For example, engineering, accounting, or computer science. You will work at Starbucks and have a huge debt if you major in something nobody cares about. You can work at Starbucks, and have zero debt without going to college. Remember, nobody really cares about you, your feelings, or how you want to self-actualize.”
“But we’re special!”
“The world owes us!”
This “has* to be made up:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/students-expensive-new-york-university-occupy-campus-demand-grades-everyone#&_intcmp=hp1r_7,hp1r
It would be much more productive to hear the Assistant Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs say, “They have all been expelled, and our legal department has initiated trespass actions against all of them forbidding them to enter university property.”
Those student loans wouldn’t look so good.
“According to The New School’s “about” page, the university is committed to “developing students who will have an impact on the world and address the most pressing social issues of our time.”
It adds that “this effort is bolstered by the university’s Office of Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice, which is committed to fostering an equitable, inclusive, and socially just environment for our community.” ”
They’re getting what they promoted. After all, what is more “just” than A’s for all, including dropouts.
My first thought at seeing the headline was to check and see if they were quoting THE ONION.
Once upon a time, in a prior professional life and capacity, this shark had responsibility for both screening candidates and reporting the results of those screenings to superiors, who were frequently political appointees (some Senate-confirmed) and on more than one occasion questioned this shark’s recommendations concerning certain apparently-favored candidates. In more than one Administration, concerning more than one party in control of the Executive Branch.
Unfortunately, in both aspects of the reviews this shark was utterly unable to avoid having a “commercial or personal relationship with a crazy person” and utterly unable to “steer very clear” of them. Indeed, this shark was obligated to be respectful and polite — even subservient — to these… persons. What this shark did note, however, is that the proportion of those persons who came to his attention (in this context) from “finishing/credentialist” schools was considerably higher than among those whose paper resumés demonstrated that they had worked hard to obtain their respective degrees, often at institutions of equal academic rigor/quality but in programs less familiar to the public (specific example: a math degree — bachelor’s or above — from MIT, CalTech, Columbia, or Cornell was far less likely to be… credentialized… than one from Yale or UChicago; why this shark, without a math degree of his own, was evaluating candidates with math degrees falls inside this shark’s pre-cartilaginous-ichthyoidist NDA).
Some universities have always been primarily status symbols while others are primarily “vocational” as they sneer at Yale at the (dying) Engineering School. To each their own; some folks attend to become something useful while others go to show what they are.
One of my (thankfully) remote ancestors was involved in the founding of Yale. The objective of the founders was to provide a first rate “Christian” education to the “better classes” that would be the future leaders of their communities.
As part of her research, my mother got hold of a fair amount of his writings. One of his advocated solutions to better society was capital punishment for children who spoke back to their parents (one can assume he actually meant “father,” as he was an excellent example of a real patriarch).
They’ve not become any better, they’ve just changed the targets.
The OP never gets to the reason WHY universities is in crisis: because of the move to politicization (including critical theory) and away from common sense.
If the universities follow the OP’s desires, their crisis will get even worse.
And using “the arts” for politics goes back to at least Lenin on a large scale, and in a smaller scale, much, much longer (think of authors/artists who created works to suck up to the rulers).
In 1975, at the heady age of 21, I remember vividly one incident. It was my senior year final semester at Yale, and I was contemplating whether I should hit up my long-suffering father for more academia. I had enjoyed the largely excellent professors I had encountered and was ready for more but…
It was partly the knowledge that getting an advanced degree in a sui generis major (Comparative Mythology) was only pursuable at two institutions, and mostly the knowledge that my demographic location in the baby boom ensured that I would never receive tenure, that kept me from naval-gazing and sent me in a business direction.
However… there I was standing in a hall of the English department listening to casual grad school chitchat and looking at the Blue Book (the course catalogue) for the next year. Shopping, as it were… Neither the conversations I was overhearing nor the curriculum offerings made any sense to me. In retrospect, it was all about deconstruction and the other infestations that were the first overt infections of the death of the university, but I could hear the plague bell ringing already, even though I didn’t understand what was coming, and boogied the hell out of there and into the real world.
Lucky escape. At least you avoided a bunch of texts any randomly selected page of which would have qualified for the list of long and difficult books PG recently featured.