Budgets for higher education are shrinking in many places. What kinds of cuts draw blood, and which ones have histrionic value?
Many people have noted with dismay the decision by the State University of New York at Albany—or as it prefers to be known, the University at Albany—to respond to reductions in support from the state of New York by eliminating instruction in several areas of the humanities: French, Russian, Italian, theater, and classics. In the article about this plan in Inside Higher Ed, the comments reflect a number of positions, from resistance to resignation. I was struck by one comment in particular, from someone who claims to be a member of the Albany faculty:
We all agree that cutting (for example) three language departments is a slap in the face at the University’s professed motto, that the absence of significant foreign language presence in our curriculum is inappropriate, that faculty in all of the departments confronting closure have made significant contributions to the University. What we are communicating to the outside world is that our financial pain has become so severe that we are having to cut out vital parts of the University in order to survive. It is akin to the young mountain climber in the Rockies who had to cut off his arm in order to survive. Did he not value his arm?
Part of the justification, repeated several times in Inside Higher Ed and elsewhere, is that the university feels it is making a dramatic gesture of self-mutilation to dramatize its condition to the legislature, the governor, and the public. As the announcement by President George Philip puts it, "this action does not reflect the quality of the faculty appointed to these program areas, or the value of these subjects to the liberal arts."
Politicians and the general public do not necessarily draw the lessons that we scholars might think we're communicating. What if the University at Albany has unwittingly made a demonstration of its values--what it's willing to fight for, and what not? What if the cuts are taken not as a tragic choice but as a statement about priorities? In that case, the dial has been reset, probably for good, and the University at Albany has not made a tough decision but changed its nature; it will never again see a reinvestment in these disciplines. In a word, it's no longer a research university.
Now imagine a different unfolding: faced with an impossible budget and determined to make a gesture that would get the attention of its various stakeholders, the University at Albany eliminates intercollegiate athletics. What would be the reaction in Albany and New York? What would this decision say about the value of a liberal arts education? (Imagine the president's statement: "this action does not reflect the value of football to the university.") Poking around on the web, I seem to find that while the cuts in question will account for about $12 million, the budget for the Albany athletic department was $13 million in 2009, before a reduction of 10%.
Which choice would make the financial crisis vivid to legislators, the press, and the public?
It's cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I couldn't agree more. Reading through the comments on the article you pointed us to, I discovered that SUNY Albany's motto (referred to in the faculty comment you cited) is, ironically enough, "The World Within Reach." Another commenter posted a link to an Onion article. Headline: "Struggling High School Cuts Football—Nah, Just Kidding, Art It Is."
The choice for cutting seems horribly close to the reasons given for cutting Middlesex U's philosophy dept. in the UK: it doesn't have the "impact" of a utilitarian discipline. When was the last time you used a key designed in Plato's Greece?
Being from UC, I happen to know these don't do much, but there's a petition protesting the cuts, which I've signed.
For a few semesters, I read The Picture of Dorian Gray in my Intro. to Lit. class, proposing to find the novel's central concern in the tension between "art and life." To my surprise, I came to note that talks about "art" almost always gives rise to certain "suspicion" on the students' part, the kind of suspicion Adorno nailed down as follows (in Minima Moralia):
Just being thoughtful (okay, "very" thoughtful) invites the suspicion of being all the three things. What's sad and troubling is that students raise these suspicions almost in spite of themselves. That is, what Adorno called the "socialization of mind," or modeling it in advance to suit the needs of society, is clearly at work.
As Adorno himself may say, education is becoming the ideology of its own absence.
(*This in reference to SUNY Albany president's response to a question regarding the school motto. That "The World Within Reach" is meant to be taken as "The World of Opportunity Within Reach").
I just recalled what Eagleton said of literary critics' "dread" in How to Read a Poem.
Isn't it, "if only"?
No. Not that. Rather, isn't he doing something that is beneath any literary critic (or just critic, an intellectual) worth its name? An act of demagoguery? Trying to talk people into something by way of (falsely) assuring that what they suspect is true? He does seem to suggest, if not throughout the whole book then at least in the vicinity of the passage, that literature is for personal pleasure, which is why people with no time for pleasure should find it questionable.
Does he believe it himself? (He probably does, but I came to think that he made it a rule to separate what he believes or thinks and what he writes. There are many passages in How to Read a Poem where writing seems to have happened entirely on its own.) In any case, I wish he didn't say that and knew better. About the nature of "work" for literary critics, he could have sought help from (who else) Adorno. "Joy and mind have been expelled equally from both [work and pleasure/amusement]": this is among the many o-so-true things he says in Minima Moralia.
Where everything is under pressure to resemble business, any trace of "joy and mind" would readily arouse suspicions of "asocial self-gratification." Duh. (*I really only wanted to write something before I begin to hear the sound of Sunday afternoon coming to its end. A comment for comment's sake.)
I've not read much of anything by Eagleton (or Adorno for that matter), and certainly not that book. The passage you quote seems awfully cute and clever to me, so much so that I don't believe Eagleton intends it as a dispassionate report on the nature of the the profession. He's playing some kind of rhetorical game.
But the sentiment at the center of that game does seem to me widespread within and around and about the profession. In the past few years, for example, I've encountered people complaining that they went to graduate school in literature so that they could commune with the great writers and they found, much to their displeasure, that graduate study isn't like that. There are all these ideas and theories you have to cope with and they all seem to get in the way of communing with the Great Ones (and now, of course, I'm on the edge of cuteness myself).
I don't have anything approaching a fine-grained sense of just how interpretation became the central focus of literary studies -- the practice was well in place by the time I went to college. But I have this vague sense that, once that happened, this business of personal communion with the great ones has exerted a constant tug on the discipline's imagination and self-image, as though the reading of texts, in the sense of offering up interpretations, is ever threatening to collapse into mere pleasurable communion, and thus to take the discipline down with it. Whatever the intellectual justification of reader response criticism and of notions of textual indeterminacy, such ideas also serve as rationalizations for a critic's desire to have (and publish) their own personal and individual reading of a text. "It's mine, all mine!"
At the same time, I've noticed a comment or two here at Arcade to the effect that, "gee, maybe we should oughta think about trying intellectual collaboration," as though collaboration were exotic and potentially dangerous and therefore to be approached with care and caution. Yet, if the core of one's interest is some desire to establish a fundamentally personal connection with texts through writing about them, then how can one possibly collaborate in such an endeavor?
Could it be that one element in the current malaise is that we've finally run out the string on ways to rationalize the desire for a personal connection with texts, of ways to cloak such desire in readings and unmaskings pretending to general truths, and so are stuck with having either to come clean on what we really want to do (just read)* or having to reground the discipline on something else? But what?
*And why has the meaning of "to read" evolved so as to elide the distinction between simply reading a text, and little more, and offering up a formal written interpretation? Why do we wish to pretend that they are the same thing when, in fact, quite a bit of training is necessary if one is to undertake reading-as-interpretation.
Eagleton is often very funny. Here's one of his passages I liked a lot. About George Steiner, from Figures of Dissent:
To which the only honest answer is: Who? (hahaha).
Before reading this review, I had bought a few titles by Steiner, since he seemed like a literary and philosophical writer in the likes of Walter Kaufmann and Erich Heller (people who are not read or mentioned in graduate seminars, but are surprisingly fun to read and helpful?). Unlike Kaufmann or Heller, it was painful to read Steiner and I couldn't go very far in each title I tried. And Eagleton in this review, I think, captures something of the source of the pain (of reading Steiner). Which also is the peculiar stodginess of clearly right-wing writers? (I'm not absolutely sure about this, but isn't Steiner clearly on the right? In any case, I think I experienced the same stodginess as I did reading Allan Bloom.)
*This can't be a response to your comment. I'll try to write more later!
*It occurred to me 'conservative' is the word, and not 'right wing' or 'on the right'. And I read through the Wikipedia entry on George Steiner: he didn't really seem conservative. Whence that impression?
With the passage I quoted, at first I too thought Eagleton was being clever and cute. (And he often is. Perhaps that's his writing persona.) Then I read more (and more, for I was planning on citing him extensively in the dissertation) of his writings, and it occurred to me that here too is an example where his professed populism is conformism of a disingenuous kind. In the passage, or around the passage in How to Read a Poem, he tacitly affirms the prevalent mentality that work should be painful, that if it's not "unpleasant enough," it can't be work. His point is not that literary criticism may be one of the few professions left now, from which "joy and mind" have not been expelled altogether. Rather, he is really saying that what literary critics do is not work! There is a strange kind of disingenuity here. When he says these things (things that are hard to take literally), he does seem to play a rhetorical game, on the one hand, as you note. But his game doesn't have enough 'room' for play (no place for the reader) and the reader realizes he has been entirely sincere about what he says all the while.
"Think what a labour the first pages of Dalloway were! Each word distilled by a relentless clutch on my brain." These are words from Virginia Woolf's diary. Isn't this (or something like this) how many critics feel about their work? Or, if it's not, don't they want it to be like this? Not always, but as an essential part and process of it? Because real pleasure of work is so often from its hardness, difficulty?
*This is an odd point to end a comment. But there's so much to think about this topic (and another one too, that is: why do people choose this profession to begin with) and it seems I'll have to be done with day's work first. To earn the right to think about them. I'll try come back later.
from two and a half years ago in which he mounts a defense of the humanities:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save...
Here's where he ends up:
To this mock question Fish raises, Adorno's all too serious answer. From Minima Moralia (should I just go with MM from now on?):
Thought liquidates evil!
Isn't this (so contrary to the popularly waged charges against Adorno) optimistic, crazy-optimistic?!
If you haven't seen it, here's Stanley Fish in his NY Times blog on SUNY Albany:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/the-crisis-of-the-humanities-officially-arrives/?hp
Of course, Fish is wrong about the humanities needing to be subsidized by other departments. The humanities more than pay for themselves out of tuition.
Hear, hear. And just to provide a link as a counterweight to Fish, here is Christopher Newfield, "Ending the Budget Wars: Funding the Humanities during a Crisis in Higher Education" (Profession, 2009). (Link via Michael Bérubé's blog.)
(That Newfield link is a pdf, by the way.)
If you've not read it, do so, NOW. The basic point is that the humanities may well be subsidizing the sciences and engineering, not vice versa.
in favor of the humanities:
http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-humanities-really-...
The last Q&A from his interview with Harvard Review of Philosophy:
Philosophy (and extended, the humanities) is about a culture's self-understanding. Isn't it? Even this much is in doubt (to some, or many, people)? I admired Rawls for making a case for philosophy so succinctly and indisputably, but it occurred to me, on the other hand, that such a (self-evident) case really need not be made.
(*The interview is collected in Philosophers in Conversation. The quotation is on p. 13.)
Rather than repeat what I said on this subject, I'll refer people to Josh Landy's blog. And inform all that on May 9 we will present a conference on restructuring the humanities, featuring, among others, Gregory Lee (Hong Kong), Regenia Gagnier (U Exeter), Linda Hutcheon (Toronto), plus people from the UC system and Michigan system.
Suny Albany in Le Monde: http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2010/11/01/campus-americains-le-fran...
Also, the AAUP's letter to Suny Albany's President:
https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=1f_wzcWyuM5IKYvBLH7mbYat13F-mqRhyk_e4HvzDZ5OgyF8UdSsJI82rKDiM&hl=en&authkey=CJHrqYIC
And a really good open letter from a colleague of mine who does biochemistry to President Philip:
https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=1vHpFzSWarnDXRf-w4OgPB9cEyj1LEYErjFJZNZ2EXeluIoETJze_KvaV55Qp&hl=en&authkey=CPv7kL0O
Courtesy of a friend who teaches there, here are a couple of exchanges between faculty members and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Albany. The administration there seems, if possible, even more cavalier, reckless, and mendacious than so far reported. Please note Dean Wulfert's admirable resourcefulness in linking to The New York Times's focus on Albany's misdeeds -- The Times's judgment that these misdeeds are truly newsworthy -- in order to argue that these egregious actions are merely part of a national trend (I guess because The Times is a national paper) and not a plain violation of a public trust. (The faculty's letters are open: Winn and Bowles gave my friend permission to circulate them):