Maybe it’s naive to talk, as I did in the previous post, about a concerted effort by humanities faculty to reverse the trend toward adjuncting. Let’s be honest. The big shrug of the comfortable ones has an interest behind it. As long as adjuncts are around, tenured professors don’t have to handle the younger, non-major students. Instead of teaching 20 first-year students to conjugate French verbs, they can steer four graduate students through The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Postmodern Condition. Instead of facing a sea of 18-year-old countenances that express a blank disagreement — “I don’ wanna read the books, I don’ wanna talk about ‘em, and I sure don’ wanna write about ‘em” — they can enter a senior seminar with motivated ephebes heading to grad school and hanging on their every word.
This teaching ladder bears upon the humanities, of course, and I’m not sure how the system plays out across the quad. Here, though, the adjunct clearly plays an essential role in the hierarchy, which is to say, in keeping the tenured faculty in contact with only the most advanced students and classrooms. Life is easier and hours are shorter with the best and brightest and already-inspired. “A” papers don’t drain you the way “C” papers do.
But the cushy teaching has a cost. The more humanities professors disengage from the freshman and sophomore classroom, the more they lose touch with pressing educational needs of the rising generation. As they sally further into advanced humanities thinking without a regular return to the basics (well-solicited by the recalcitrant pre-business freshman), a disciplinary cloister forms.
Tenured professors like it there, never having to justify the nature and value of humanistic tradition and inquiry to unlikeminded others. And they can labor under the assumption that, like the scientists, they are at the vanguard of thought, that their ever more esoteric discourse marks a form of progress, not a seclusion.
But the humanities aren’t like the sciences. Advanced thinking there periodically needs to come back to fundamental questions: Why study novels? What good is poetry? Why remember the distant past? Why care about Kant? Having to address them keeps the real stakes of humanistic study and teaching in mind, and it also keeps the academic in touch with larger cultural and social trends. Work is harder, yes, but thought is fresher, less parochial.
So, next semester, let’s have humanities professors volunteer one course switch. Give the adjunct an upper-division course in the major, and put the prof in a freshman class.
How’s that for naivete?
