Links
Archives
Sunday, January 04, 2004
|
Must We Be Milquetoasts?
Must We Be Toast? Part Two Here’s something Kingman Brewster, a former president of Yale, said many decades ago: “Faculty members, once they have proved their potential during a period of junior probation, should not feel beholden to anyone, especially Department Chairmen, Deans, Provosts, or Presidents, for favor, let alone for survival. In David Riesman’s phrase, teachers and scholars should, insofar as possible, be truly ‘inner directed’ - guided by their own intellectual curiosity, insight, and conscience. In the development of their ideas they should not be looking over their shoulders either in hope of favor or in fear of disfavor from anyone other than the judgment of an informed and critical posterity.” People talk about various dire effects of the corporatization of the American university, but they rarely look at one in particular, crucial though it is. The corporate ethos of constant anxiety about performance (have you generated enough business? have you been responsive to customers?), constant thought about how you look to the boss, how you look relative to other go-getters, what rewards and punishments you’re eligible to be getting, has now infested the university. Ever more legalistic and frequent annual review, post-tenure review, teaching evaluation, performance evaluation via interview with the department chair, and so forth, has meant the inescapable intrusion of The Dean’s World into the world of ideas. Professors who used to embody the autonomy, the risk-taking, the focus upon ideas for their own sake, that Brewster is articulating are now largely obsolete, and in their place, what one professor posting to an academic website recently called “middle management” (he used the term in a positive sense, to identify himself) has come to the fore. Just as humanities professors have become a “herd of displaced social workers,” in Harold Bloom’s words, by thinking of their students not as adventurous intellects in search of lucidity but as fragile souls to be made happy, so these same humanities professors think of themselves as mendicants meaning to be made happy by the corporate powers that control their salary, benefits, equipment, grants, course load, and sabbaticals. In particular, more and more humanities professors, disenchanted with the spiritless, grade-inflated, anti-intellectual classroom, and eager to buy the status items that will assuage their feelings of inferiority relative to better-paid white-collar professionals, relentlessly seek fewer courses and more money; they become corporate players rather than intellectuals or teachers. And the saddest part of this process is that the very argument and attitude of the Foucauldian cultural theory they embrace, what Richard Rorty calls its posture of “dry knowingness,” is one and the same with the corporate attitude of arid savvy, of passionless competitiveness for its own sake, of crass worldliness. This, then, is the peculiar nature of academic cowardice: Having striven to enter a world modeled not on the values of the market but on the values of generosity, curiosity, lucidity, passion, experimentation, and the sort of moral and intellectual freedom you can enjoy only when material and self-serving considerations are to a large extent put aside, humanities professors now turn against that world and regard it as a naive delusion. Rather than asking themselves why that world dissolved, what moral compromises and intellectual conformities of their own contributed to its dissolution, professors assume the inevitability of the dissolution and simply muck about in what’s left over from the flood. As leading academics in the humanities like Terry Eagleton begin to perceive what English departments have lost to the bizarre alliance of hebephrenic professionalism and dead on arrival theorizing, they begin, as he has lately done, to say good riddance to all that. They attempt to resuscitate humane thought. It will be difficult. It will be a personal, institutional, and intellectual battle. It will call for courage. |