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Tuesday, February 06, 2007
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Instant Messaging Classes Catharine R. Stimpson, once head of the Modern Language Association, now a prisoner at Riker's Island (just kidding: now a dean at NYU), responds, in today's Inside Higher Ed, to the recent MLA report arguing against what UD has called bookolatry in humanities departments: ...[T]he MLA report urges us to ask why the monograph has become the pinnacle of scholarly achievement, “the gold standard.” Why not the essay, or a series of linked essays? Why not other forms of scholarly achievement? And why must the dissertation be a “proto-book?” Why indeed? The bookolatry thing is at a curious cultural moment: Virtually everyone willing to write about it agrees that it's absurd to demand one two three eleven books out of people up for tenure; yet virtually no research-university English departments, I suspect, have pulled themselves together to act on their belief that it's absurd. Stimpson's writing style is a tad oracular for UD, but she says a couple of other important things, like: ...Despite all the national studies, including this report, about the oversupply of doctorates in the humanities, self-interested, faculty-controlled graduate programs are still too reluctant to limit admissions, still suspicious about doing regional coordination of graduate curricula and courses, and still petitioning for more financial aid and more students to teach. It is vulgar to call this a case of “Bring in the clones,” but the phenomenon yet again reveals, I have sadly concluded, how much easier it is to act on behalf of one’s self and one’s family, here the department or program, than on behalf of more abstract and psychologically distant goods, here the well-being of potential graduate students and of the profession as a whole. This is well put, and points starkly to the moral failure at the heart of many departments. Again, as with the tenure monograph business, you could probably get many thoughtful people in departments to agree with Stimpson. Actually changing the situation is more difficult. Finally, Stimpson sketches a classroom scenario all too familiar to anyone who (like UD) has read with care many of the comments students make on sites like Rate My Professors: I miss in the report a passionate yet logical definition and defense of tenure that I might use for several audiences —- the tuition-paying students who quickly turn to instant messaging in a class taught by a member of the Dead Wood Society, the trustees who wonder why academics should have job security when almost no one else does. I can make such a defense, and have, but if tenure matters — and an implicit conviction of the MLA task force is that it does — then the defense must emanate from all of us who believe in it. What Stimpson doesn't say is that it's hard to defend tenure. Even after you've done your intellectual freedom number, your audience probably remains skeptical. The price of intellectual freedom should never be the scandal of American families paying a fortune for their kids to fiddle online while a slab of granite, tenured into place, blocks their education. Any defense of tenure has to come with guarantees that the tenured dead will be quarried some distance from the classroom. |