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Wednesday, December 20, 2006
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In Today's Inside Higher Ed... ...my lunch pal (must make another date when he gets back from the MLA) Scott McLemee asks Lindsay Waters, who has written so well of the absurd book imperative in the humanities, what Waters thinks of the recent MLA report which calls for the recognition of its absurdity, and the adoption of a range of standards for promotion: "My fear for the MLA report,” he wrote by e-mail, “ is that it will be shelved like the report of the Iraq Study Group. And there may be another similarity: The ISG made a mistake with Bush. They gave him 79 recommendations, not one. This report runs that risk, too. ...[T]he report offers up ideas that it will suit many to ignore.... Churchill said it so well — the Americans will do the right thing only after they have exhausted all the other possibilities. The problem is that this relatively frail creature, the university, has survived so well for so long in the US because for the most part it was located in a place where, like poetry (to cite the immortal Auden) executives would never want to tamper. But they are tampering now. And they are using the same management techniques on the university that they used on General Motors, and they may have the same deadly effect." The latter part of this remark resonates strongly with me, as those who've been reading this blog for a long time know. Universities need to be left alone. To some extent they need to be ivory towers that, as Waters suggests, hold no attraction -- no reality, really -- for the managers among us. Yet the Powerpoint brigade, to take one instance, has already stormed the tower, its pedagogical weapon deadly boredom... And more and more university presidents are justifying outrageous personal compensation by telling everyone they're managers, not... what's it called... intellectuals... Managers, as Waters here suggests, understand widgets, and books are the widgets of what's left of the humanities in managerial universities. If only, like corporate managers, university managers cared whether their widgets sold, or at least aroused a little interest. But, in the bizarre economy of the university, it doesn't matter whether the widgets exist in any actual sense. Most are inventoried and put away. |