I'd like to first thank Joshua Landy for his post on Stanley Fish's provocative blog/column in the NYTimes. I'd like to comment just on one passage from his piece. Fish writes:
"And indeed, if your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities — which do not earn their keep and often draw the ire of a public suspicious of what humanities teachers do in the classroom — and leave standing programs that have a more obvious relationship to a state’s economic prosperity and produce results the man or woman in the street can recognize and appreciate. (What can you say to the tax-payer who asks, “What good does a program in Byzantine art do me?” Nothing.)"
We've heard this before. Here is Mark Yudof, President of the University of California, on the budget crisis at UC:
"Many of our, if I can put it this way, businesses are in good shape. We're doing very well there. Our hospitals are full, our medical business, our medical research, the patient care. So, we have this core problem: Who is going to pay the salary of the English department? We have to have it. Who's going to pay it in sociology, in the humanities? And that's where we're running into trouble."
This is how the humanities are usually portrayed by certain university administrators (not all, of course) who adamantly insistent that the humanities are a net loss to the university, since they don't rake in the big grants. Yudof's belief that the university's "businesses are in good shape" is a telling statement, since it's clear that he sees the university as a corporation with bottom lines and budgetary efficiencies. But his assumptions are not borne out by the facts. Here is Robert Watson, from a column in "The Chronicle of Higher Education," on the true "costs" of the humanities:
"But, according to spreadsheet calculations done at my request by Reem Hanna-Harwell, assistant dean of the humanities at the University of California at Los Angeles, based on the latest annual student-credit hours, fee levels, and total general-fund expenditures, the humanities there generate over $59-million in student fees, while spending only $53.5-million (unlike the physical sciences, which came up several million dollars short in that category)."
You can also read Watson's piece here. And Watson notes that this UCLA finding is matched by similar findings at the University of Washington and at the University of Illinois. (Say, wasn't that where a certain Stanley Fish was once dean?)
It's a shame that Mr. Yudof feels this way, but to be somewhat fair, his statements were made as part of a radio interview -- so perhaps he wasn't as careful as he should have been. But Fish, one would presume, spent some time in thinking about what to write and how best to express it. So the question becomes, what exactly is the basis for Fish's assertion that the humanities "do not earn their keep"? Does he have the numbers to back that up? I'm reminded here of something else that Fish once wrote: "Researchers should not falsify their credentials, or make things up, or fudge the evidence, or ignore data that go against their preferred conclusions. Those who publish should acknowledge predecessors and contributors, provide citations to their sources, and strive always to give an accurate account of the materials they present." I've provided an accounting here of the sources cited, and I'm not expert on university budgets. But Fish doesn't cite evidence for his claims, much less acknowledge the serious work done on the question of how the university functions by people like Cary Nelson, Chris Newfield (and here), Charles Schwartz, Marc Bousquet, Jeffrey Bergamini, and Bob Samuels, among others. Sure, it's a blog, and blogs don't have to be as citation-heavy as academic pieces. But in this case, being uninformed -- or willfully provocative -- can be extraordinarily harmful, particularly when the writer is a public intellectual as prominent as Mr. Fish is.
Thanks for this post, Jack. Martha Nell Smith's recent talk (of the above title) also cites Watson to good effect. Smith parses the framing of the humanities--as desirable but dispensable, and expensive; in short, as a luxury--and refutes it beautifully. The key connection she made for me was that the reason the notion that the humanities are a budget drain won't die has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with a broader perception of the humanities as by definition a luxury.
Today's Wall Street Journal has a piece called "Putting a Price on Professors." an accompanying chart offers these "controversial numbers about Texas A&M (I let the typo in my comment title stand):
Chemistry: $17,451,040 (funds generated) - $12,262,038 (Faculty salaries and benefits) = +5,189,002
History: 8,681,072 - 4,042,470 = +4,638,602
English: 9,258,566 - 7,580,395 = +1,678,171
Oceanography: 3,431,130 - 4,260,442 = -829,312
Physics and Astronomy: 10,039,564 - 11,299,763 = -1,260,199
Aerospace Engineering: 4,208,388 - 5,608,744 = -1,400,386
These numbers don't include costs of labs (for the sciences) or blackboards (for the humanities).
I agree with the comments above that assert that the Humanities are fundamental. But as a member of (West) Texas A & M - or A $ M (your choice), I would also point out a few details for your consideration:
1) At my school, we teach a 4/4 load. One-half of our courses are taught in college-level composition, required of all students. Writing and communication are, after all, something that the general public does esteem. It is -- as I know from having to sell composition to my students -- the number one expectation of any employer, in any profession. Schools that have gutted other aspects of the humanities preserve their composition programs, regardless of whether they work, and even though many of us -- I for one -- did not get our PhDs to become writing teachers. Understand as well that we are not allowed to incorporate "literature" into our composition courses. The kind of argumentation style required by the administration has nothing to do -- we are told -- how to write about literature, and we are not to confuse the two. We are arguably less an English department than we are a service department, and by this means, are able to make a profit.
2) At my school, we also teach at least one sophomore CORE course in the humanities (which is one course required of several possible courses taught by History, English and Communications) every semester. In English, each of these courses (British Literature; American Literature; World Literature) has a shared textbook, and generally involves selections from the canon. While parents of our middle-America slice of the country wonder about the value of literature courses over authors they've never heard of, they do not really question the value of their sons and daughters learning about Shakespeare. And one need only look at the list of MLA paper titles, designed to titillate and posted for fun in the New York Times, to recognize why these same parents see our discipline as decadent.
3) As Marjorie Perloff notes in her recent post, literature academics liken their work to "labor." I love both teaching and research. But as someone who works primarily with first-generation, working-class and non-traditional students, I have no illusions about the work I do as anything less than privileged. It is not a privileged position in the scope of schools across the country, but it is certainly not the kind of labor my students have done and do.
4) In Texas public schools, we do not receive sabbaticals. Wealthier Texas schools do offer their faculty "Research Development Grants," but these are limited, competitive, and often times programs are so understaffed that even when such grants are available, their faculty cannot participate. Texas citizens believe that such leisured time off, or perks for professorial spouses/children in terms of college tuition costs, unfairly privilege faculty over everyday people. Though I am grateful that we have not yet faced the furloughs that other states have (these are expected in the coming year), my personal experience teaching in the A & M system is not what I expected as a graduate student. Many academics with humanities PhDs might not enjoy the kind of work I do.
5) Depending slightly on rank, we are paid at about the lowest 20% of all teachers in all schools. Of course, as we live in a very poor part of the country, we do fairly well for our area; but it makes Texas a hard place to leave, financially.
I would not be doing what I am doing if I didn't believe sincerely in the value of the humanities, and I am grieved for the families of my friends who have lost their positions in California schools. But I do believe there are reasons, some of them valid, that people are suspicious about what we do for a living. While I take issue with many of the administrative and legislative meddling in our Texas curriculum, they do force me (usually unwillingly) to think about how my course will look to a conservative business employer -- the same ones who do, effectively, pay my Texas state salary.
I also think that you're showing how and why humanities faculty are exploited, by which I mean: are being seriously underpaid for the value they bring in. I don't know that I'm underpaid at Brandeis, year by year (though having looked at the budgets very carefully I can't see that I cost nearly as much as I bring in), but I do know that the anti-humanities rhetoric is highly misleading.
For example, it's always fun to cite and complain about the salaries of the most privileged members of the professoriat. But we go to grad school, working hard at sustenance wages till we're at least 28; the median junior faculty member probably starts teaching at 30 or 32. Half of us don't teach at all, so we give up six or seven years of wages to the other half. So we should be being compared, at least, to people in our own age cohort, not to people in the larger cohort that starts at 18 or 22. More fair still would be averaging our income over our careers, so that our pathetic graduate school stipends would contribute to giving an indication of how low our salaries are, especially considering our advanced degrees. And more fair still would be factoring in the wasted time of those who drop out of the profession, since it takes two grad or three beginning grad students to get one full time job, and four or five beginning grad students to get, eventually, one tenured job.
It's also the case (though I grant that this argument might be undercut by the fact that grad student teachers also seem to be net profits for the institutions that employ them) -- it's also the case that the hundred or so grad schools that supply the vast majority of faculty positions in the humanities in the U.S. end up spending a fair amount of money to educate students whose expertise is then exploited by institutions that have not invested in them.
I'm not complaining either, except when I'm told that I'm a parasite rather than an asset. This isn't for me mainly an economic issue: I think literature makes people's lives better, directly and indirectly. I think that thinking carefully about literature makes people's lives better, short-term and long. Not everyone's, but a whole lot of people's.
But when the economic argument is on our side, we should insist on that as well. And what I was objecting to in the WSJ article was that even on its own showing History and English were profit centers, without considering the costs of labs vs. the costs of blackboards, which would give the Humanities a slam dunk. But anyonw skimming the article would think it was about the Humanities as a money sink.
As for compensation: some of the compensation we get comes as salary, some as time off (for some of us). Without the hope that we would get time off, without the hope that we would get some job security, without the hope that we could teach something we love, a lot of us wouldn't go into this business. The "system" partly depends on the idealism of undergrads with a sense of vocation. The purely rational calculation of the system ought to induce it to reward that sense of vocation to a degree that makes it seem not irrational to go to grad school. But in the last decade or so, the system has put the vocation of young people under increasing stress. The result will be that fewer and fewer talented people will go into the profession, and teaching will suffer because of it and the very thing that the conservative business employers want will suffer.
It's false that teaching literature and teaching writing are not connected, but even if it were true, the fact is that part of what you have to offer people to get good teachers of writing is the opportunity to teach it through teaching literature as well.
The system wants dedicated, compliant, cheap teachers. It used to recognize that it could only expect to get two out of three for very long, and it (rationally) went for dedicated and cheap. Revisiting that settlement is only going to do great harm to the very education that the conservative business employers want, and that I want my students to have as well.
It's absurd how Yudof got away with that. English brings in the bacon, big time.
That Richard Linklater is a Texan was often a great consolation for me.
His Slacker ends with an "epilogue" of sort, said by an old man, very likely a retired college professor, which goes:
The first hurdle for a true warrior:
"To those humans in whom I have faith,
I wish suffering, being forsaken, sickness, maltreatment, humiliation.
I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt,
the torture of self-mistrust, and the misery of the vanquished. I have no pity for them
because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not: that one endures."
He says this to a young man, very likely a cash-strapped college student (very likely in the humanities), who was trying to burglarize his home while he was out, but got distracted by his 'awesome' collection of books, and caught by him when he returns. With this young man, the old man starts a long conversation about various topics, such as: how one may 'change' the world, whether anarchism is a way to 'change' the world, etc. Then before they part, the old man tells the young man the above.
That one endures.
The whole thing, except for the opening "The first hurdle for a true warrior," seems to be a quotation (the Criterion collection subtitle has it within quotation marks). Whether it is a quotation from somewhere or Linklater's own writing, that the film ends on that note seemed brilliant. Too brilliant. And it helped me endure a lot. Indeed.
And he was only 30 when he made this film!
He's quoting Nietzsche. He's the philosopher Louis Mackey in the U.T. Austin Phil Department (d. 2004).
Also, have you seen Waking Life? The late philosopher Robert Solomon (also U.T. Austin) features big in that.
I saw Slacker some years ago, and the quotation struck me. So I wrote it down and composed a post with it at my blog (I have blogs where I write in Korean). "That one endures": this has been something like a mantra for me since then. Mumble the three words slowly, and life could become a little more endurable.
I looked it up in my blog last night and wondered: doesn't this sound like something Nietzsche would say? And, indeed, it was something he said! But where?
Anyhow, Richard Linklater can be an argument (reproof?) against Texas-bashing.
His works (and the idea of him?!) certainly made my life here more bearable. So perhaps I may have to send many thanks to him.
*And the old man I took to be a retired professor was a professor in philosophy! I haven't heard of his name before. He was brilliant in the film. I saw it only once, but his tone, his demeanor, everything about him is still quite vivid. To know that he was a philosophy professor makes me feel better.
Section 910
OK, so my last post ended up rushed, and was more disorganized than I meant it to be.
Let me say that I am appalled by the comments Fish made with his statements to the press. But if we're going to understand how to fight his perception -- which, let us admit, is not an unusual one -- we need to have a realistic sense of how the humanities are funded, and what the general public (and in my case, I mean conservative, Christian, insular, working-class people) expects from us. In my view, this means a brutally hard self-assessment.
In the case of West Texas A & M, and I suspect that it is not an unusual case, the Humanities do not pay for themselves in the way we would like, regardless of our use of blackboards over more expensive laboratories. That is, in my department, we do not have enough majors to viably support the salaries of the full-time tenure track employees who work here. Our money comes primarily from CORE courses: every student who enters WTAMU must take 2 composition courses and may take one additional sophomore-survey English course. The same is true for our History, Philosophy and language courses. Significantly -- and again I don't think we're alone here -- our professors do not teach these courses. More precisely, even though I am required, as are all other faculty in our department, to teach two composition courses per semester, I know that in our department of 9 English professors, we are not personally teaching composition to the ~8000 students who attend our school. Instead, this work is left to full-time and part-time instructors. While I know my position is not cushy, I do not feel overly exploited for teaching my 4/4 load, with 3/4 spent in the CORE, twice a week: I know the really exploited folks are the ones supporting the other three days of my workweek when I'm trying to cram in a little research between office hours. (One of my former grad students has 8 -- 8! -- composition courses he's teaching this semester, part-time with us and part-time at our local community college). What such examples suggest to me is that neither writing programs, nor a smattering of literature survey courses are objectionable to the general public; in fact, they see them as essential to a well-rounded liberal arts education. But consider what our MLA conference panel titles suggest about us: "Queer Gothic: The Space Time of Sedgwick's Nineteenth Century"; "Sanctity and Pornography: On the Verge"; "The Sick Female Body as Text: Claiming the Forbidden Self."
I believe these ideas are really important. But I am not who we must convince. Consider, truthfully, how academia appears to people who work full time at their difficult jobs: As a professor, I am perceived (however incorrectly) to be very highly paid; I teach two days a week and complain about my courseload; I complain about (or refuse) to teach composition courses even though I am trained to teach English (same thing, right?) and paid for it; I already get my summers off, but I expect a sabbatical -- 6 months to a year off on top of my summer! -- every seven years, (and more often if I can manage it) even though I don't bring in the kind of $$ that scientists or business professors do through my research; I write about subjects not only objectionable to many people, but in language they cannot understand and that we ourselves sometimes have difficulty understanding.
My point is that if we want to address public and administrative perceptions about waste in the humanities, we need to do so with awareness of what allows the administration to consider us expendable. We LOOK lazy, ungrateful, and decadent.
So how do we fix this perception? I think we begin by making sure that we are accessible. We can make a point of visibly teaching in the core, and putting as much into teaching these courses well as we do with the ones that are more closely connected to our areas of research. The administration uses instructors and graduate students because it assumes well-paid professors are interchangeable with overloaded, undercompensated labor. Are they right? We seem to think so, since we don't teach these courses. But we could. And if there were demonstrable positive differences between professors who taught them and underpaid, part-time faculty, we might have the basis for an argument about having only paid professors teach them. We could publish professor salaries in all areas. If such a publication would make us uncomfortable and would lead to inter-departmental squabbling (it would), it might also lead to a leveling of the playing field and greater public awareness about the differential between salaries in the disciplines. Finally, we could start focusing less on teaching each other, and more on teaching our students with our research. We can view every book we write as something that any smart person could pick up and read. We can also aim to speak to a common language in our research -- not that it must be in the canon, but that it must be responsive in some manner to the canon -- so that people who are interested can situate our work within a generally recognized and (even to Tea-party members) accepted sphere of influence. In every course, we must do a better job of helping our students see the relevance of the humanities by better preparing our students to succeed in a vast array of careers -- not only as future college professors, but as journalists, editors, lawyers, doctors, critics, artists, teachers, preachers, politicians, speech writers, etc. We might also consider (save me, please, from advocating a horrible Texas policy!) foregoing sabbaticals.
I am not trying to dismiss the importance of what we do. I am passionate about teaching, and I am passionate about research (doing and reading); I do recognize that such things take time. But in order to address the kinds of problems we face, we need an honest assessment of why we are a current target.
Hi -- I agree with almost all of this. One thing I don't agree with is that we should teach more comp. My experience is that teaching comp is like Vista or the Peace Corps -- you burn out incredibly quickly and the best comp teachers are the ones that haven't burned out.
I think that Perloff was making the same point about the list of MLA talks. Internally we can say (John Guillory has more or less said) that being able to give those talks is what passes as a reward for the people working in insecure and difficult and isolated circumstances. A lot of the convention is a cheap feel-good reward for us, which also serves to pay our way to interviews and to some professional contact. But really it's like a frequent flyer award: a tiny but vivid rebate for the huge amount of work we get under-compensated for (as a class -- I'm not complaining about my life. I mean undercompensated in an economic sense: anyone teaching at the college level had talents and skills that historically are in pretty great demand, at least based on salaries in other fields. But we went to grad school, not law or business or med school, so we end up selling our skills pretty cheaply, and even donating them. We get these quasi-ff awards, and tend to use them on the professional version of magazine subscriptions.)
Since you bring up our long summers, I think it would be better to note that we (most of us? a lot of us anyhow) get paid for nine months of work. Scientists and administrators frequently get summer salaries. We don't. True, a lot of us get our nine-months of pay distributed over twelve months -- which also tends to be a way we lend our instutitions money: I don't get my May paycheck till the end of August. They don't call it my May paycheck, but it is. (In May I'm really getting some of my March money.)
So we would do a lot better to make it clear that mainly we have seasonal, 3/4 time jobs, but through accounting tricks and divergent descriptions aren't allowed unemployment benefits over the summer, as we would be if the accounting were more honest. But of course that would cost our employers. So we're subsidizing them there too.
When I worked in the dining halls in college, the full time staff there got unemployment compensation over the summers. (They were UAW unionized.) I'm not saying that we should as well. I am saying that given the unfair attacks being made against us, we should point out that we don't have long vacations, but long spells of unpaid unemployment, and yet even then we are expected to be working for our institutions, just because they are cutting us checks to pay back the money they borrowed from us and which they don't fully pay back till the end of the summer.
/rant