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[litcrittr82]

From The American Scholar via aldailly:

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html

Deresiewicz's article touches on a number of discussions in constant circulation on the fora, namely those about the purpose and mission of the university, the preparation that a college education provides, and the class issues at work in admissions and learning processes.  There's really a lot of discussion fodder here, but I want to start with what Deresiewicz's thesis--that an elite education is about reproducing elites, rather than shaping innovative minds--means for those oversaturated disciplines at the low end of the funding spectrum (the humanities).  I'm also curious about what those in the sciences would say about the state of innovation in their fields; i.e., whether structural trends that inhibit innovation are less inhibiting in the sciences, where research is more lucrative and funding more plentiful.

I suspect that part of the reason for the humanities 'crisis' is the conspicuous absence of any real earth-shakers since, for example, the French post-structuralists in literary study and philosophy, people like Hayden White in (sort of) history, Judith Butler in gender studies, David Halperin in classics, etc.  I'm not trying to form a comprehensive list here, nor am I commenting on the quality of this scholarship; but it seems to me like the '70s-'80s was the last really big boom of radical humanities scholarship.  I suspect that we're not innovating much these days in part because of what Deresiewicz argues in this article: students aren't being conditioned to take intellectual risks, or to be searchers.  We're writing the same theses and dissertations over and over again.  We're professionalized too early, scared into achieving success in the narrowest of terms, and penalized by the system when we transgress its narrow (and classist) parameters.     

[fiona]

This is a vast topic, but I'll take a stab at one small part of your posting.

You say that there haven't been "earth-shakers" in the humanities lately. I agree, but I think it doesn't have to do with the quality of minds in the humanities, but with some other things:

1. There are fewer and fewer tenure-track slots. If you're an adjunct, you don't have time or energy or encouragement to write breakthrough stuff.

2. No one much cares about what humanities people "discover." Intellectual breakthroughs (outside the sciences, where there's still coverage) used to be front-page news, and the latest literary novels were discussed by everyone. Not many people care now.

3. Hate to say it, but I don't think the best and the brightest go to grad school in the humanities anymore, if they ever did. The slog is too long and the rewards are too vague. It's the less bright who either don't know how bad the job market is, or they don't care. I think the brightest undergrads are more apt to go to business school or go right into jobs.

The Fiona

[litcrittr82]

This is a vast topic, but I'll take a stab at one small part of your posting.

You say that there haven't been "earth-shakers" in the humanities lately. I agree, but I think it doesn't have to do with the quality of minds in the humanities, but with some other things:

1. There are fewer and fewer tenure-track slots. If you're an adjunct, you don't have time or energy or encouragement to write breakthrough stuff.

2. No one much cares about what humanities people "discover." Intellectual breakthroughs (outside the sciences, where there's still coverage) used to be front-page news, and the latest literary novels were discussed by everyone. Not many people care now.

3. Hate to say it, but I don't think the best and the brightest go to grad school in the humanities anymore, if they ever did. The slog is too long and the rewards are too vague. It's the less bright who either don't know how bad the job market is, or they don't care. I think the brightest undergrads are more apt to go to business school or go right into jobs.

The Fiona

Glad you picked this bit, because it's exactly what I hoped to discuss.  I left the topic too broad in my original post for fear of shortchanging the article.


I want to comment on your third point, because I see things a slightly different way.  It's true that a lot of top humanities students seek more lucrative jobs right after college, but quite a few seem to apply to grad. school in the humanities a couple years later after working on other things.  I'm at the age where a lot of people I know who took corporate jobs or nonprofit jobs or did Teach for America right out of college are starting to apply to grad. school now. 

As the article suggests (and I agree), the way we define 'brightest and best' is really part of the problem.  If 'brightest' means overacheiving, career-oriented, resume-padders, then surely many of the 'brightest' are going into lucrative jobs or business school.  But I think the best 'searchers' do opt for grad. school because they aren't content in 'office' jobs; and they find themselves sharing space with the grade-oriented overacheivers in grad. school as well.  Once in grad. school, it seems, the 'searchers' become conditioned to fall in line and strive for narrow definitions of success; they're (over)professionalized, just like the overacheivers; and they cease to be searchers by the time the program is over.

[kedves]

litcrittr82, I'm responding to the article by Deresiewicz, which does not include of all the topics that you discuss.  Your focus is on the future of the humanities in universities;  his goal seems to be to explain his own feeling of class discomfort.  The issues you raise are interesting; the claims he makes are suspect. 

I don't see any evidence for the widespread phenomenon of inter-class linguistic or cognitive incompetence that he says exists.  As evidence, he provides himself.  He sounds like a participant in Monty Python's "Twit of the Year" race:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSqkdcT25ss
Perhaps "twit" is harsh, but he says that he is incapable of chatting with a skilled laborer about anything at all (making small talk with a plumber).  I don't know what other word to use.

He's generalizing from an N=1, assuming that his experience and his problems are shared by everyone in his group.  He doesn't well support this claim.  He claims that he sees his problem in other people, but I don't trust his observations to be systematic or accurate.  His class-panic social impairment might be a rare condition.  I did not see the phenomenon he describes when I taught at an Ivy.  I met very smart, very driven, in some cases extremely anxious students who were interested in and knew about a much wider world than the one he describes.  Yes, there is grade inflation throughout undergraduate education, more at elite universities than elsewhere, but I found that it produces the opposite effect from the one he describes.  Instead of making students feel entitled, it makes them stressed.  When your undergraduate experience is a competitive prelude to professional school, every A- is devastating.  This grade anxiety is just about the only thing that makes this group less than lovely to teach.

He's concerned that the students he observes on a walk across campus dress alike; he assumes that if they do, they are alike.  This reasoning is flawed in many ways, but let's start with:  You're 35, Deresiewicz.  Before heading out to gather observations, wouldn't it be a good idea to learn the subtle ways that "kids these days" claim and present their identities?  He's also overlooking the increasingly international undergraduate composition of elite (very expensive) universities.  I don't follow his reasoning about the relevance of this supposed homegeneity.  I have found Ivy students to be more knowledgable about many types of social difference, if that's his point, than students farther down the social ladder (and with different experiences) who seem to feel more need to draw boundaries between their group and others. 

There's also a problem of correlation vs. causation with his argument.  He's a twit; he went to Yale.  Therefore, going to Yale causing twitdom.  Could it not be that he was always a twit and Yale had no effect on him? 

On a larger scale, let's assume that higher education is a machine that maintains the class system.  We could agree that it performs this social function at every level of the higher education-social class complex, from community college to the Ivy League.  It does not necessarily follow that if higher education were missing from or different in our society, the social class system would fall apart.  Something would replace it--something less valuable to the individual and to our society, in my opinion.  Yes, elite universities give intellectual and social advantages to those who already possess those advantages.  The result might be intensified advantage in terms of status or power, but in economic terms, it's not there.  The percentage difference in future earnings following an elite B.A./B.S. vs. a less expensive degree is less than the percentage difference in tuition costs. 

At the same time, saying that higher education functions to perpetuate social class does not imply that it does so perfectly or that this is its only function. Undergraduate students sit in classroom seats for four or five long years.  We--faculty, departments, colleges, universities--have some power to determine what their experience will contain, and so do the students.  That's what worries people who are concerned about "the liberal faculty."

litcrittr82, as I understand it, you and fiona are discussing the production of knowledge by members of humanities departments and the process by which graduate education creates new scholars.  I'm in the social sciences and not competent to comment on that.  However, independent of intellectual discovery, the preservation and communication of existing knowledge are important parts of the mission of universities.  At the graduate and faculty levels of elite universities, I see some of the preciousness or social distance that concerns him, but some of this might be caused as much by their urban location as by the other  characteristics of department members.

I'm sorry to write at such length.  I wanted to respond to your good ideas--and he just annoys me.

[eumaios]

Well, I'll have to read the article again, if I can bear to, but my first impression is that Deresiewicz seems to have learned that

a) snobbery begets snobbery;
b) rich people aren't necessarily smart;
c) people who are book-smart can be stupid in lots of other ways;
d) people like to keep to their own kind;
e) many privileged people are neither creative nor inclined to take risks; and
f) Ivy League humanities professors don't know how to have conversations with plumbers.

Huh. I'm not an intellectual and I didn't have an elite education, but it seems to me that if a person works checkout in the right supermarket, pumps gas at the right service station, or waits tables in the dining room of the right resort hotel, he'll probably know those things by the age of seventeen. By "right" I mean patronized by well-heeled folk.

Next item. Deresiewicz seems to think that an elite education should produce people who constitute a genuine intellectual, artistic, moral, and ethical elite, an elite in the best sense of the term. Maybe it should and maybe it shouldn't. But when has it, particularly in the United States? How many of our--America's--best writers, thinkers, leaders, inventors had elite educations? Ben Franklin, George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Thomas Edison, John Browning, Samuel Morse, Frederick Douglass, Ernest Hemingway, H. L. Mencken--how many elite educations in that bunch?

When someone majors in English at a good university, he studies the work of authors who for the most part had third-rate (or worse) formal educations. That has always struck me as funny; it seems not to strike some people at all.

We have the set of people who accomplish big things and think big thoughts. And we have the set of people who had elite educations at elite institutions. In literature, the sets intersect a wee bit, but not much. In other fields in the humanities, they intersect a little more. In the social sciences, the sets probably intersect still more. In the hard sciences, I suspect that the sets have considerable overlap.

Formal education--classes, professors, exams, papers, degrees--has and always has had little to do with the qualities of which Deresiewicz speaks. People learn wisdom, virtue, judgment, and taste on their own. Most people outside university humanities departments seem to know this. Plumbers know it, in my experience.

litcrittr82's original post asks some interesting questions about the state of the humanities, and the Fiona gives some good answers. Here's another possibility, at least in English and perhaps in other disciplines: The field is just plain worn out. The soil is exhausted. What people in English departments do is not like what chemists, biologists, and physicists do. Every day, biologists learn how much more there is to learn. Biologists deal with realities that exist independently of them, and they are forever learning new things about smaller and smaller--yet astonishingly complex--pieces of those realities. Literature and composition scholars pretend to split hairs that they pretend exist. The English discipline has been self-referential twaddle for generations, a self-perpetuating employment agency. Maybe there just isn't anything left to say.

[kmellendorf]

eumaios-
Excellent observations.  Another factor to consider is the function of FILTER.  One of the major functions of higher education, at least in hard science, is to filter out those that don't have the needed stamina and creativity.  Only an undergraduate education in hard science will get you into graduate school, but not much else.  Getting into, through, and then out of graduate school will give you permission to apply for positions.  Getting the part-time positions will give you permission to try something more.

Another comment:
I cannot speak for all fields, but I do understand the physics side of education.  I now teach physics at a community college.  One thing I learned in college (University of Chicago) was to appreciate an ability to serve in ways only a good education allows.  I was not trained to be greedy or to want it all.  My college taught me to lead others to where they might not yet know how to reach.  A person who has been run through the ringer many times is much better prepared to help others get ready for such an experience.  You may not be the great thinker, but you will be able to recognize the great thinker and point him in the "right direction".  Whether you appreciate such abilities is part of whether you actually made it through the filter.

[daurousseau]

Elites aggregate around common cultures. Alexander Cockburn and the British politicians he attacks can both quote from the classics. People who used to call the shots in America knew their Wallace Stephens and Hemingway. The counter-culture rallied around rock n roll, drugs and sex. John Brockman tries to catalyse a culture with edge.org.

The communications industries seem to have succeeded in atomizing the cultures of the elites. Technology may someday newly aggregate them.

Let's say you walked into a party in some elite place like Manhattan, up there overlooking Central Park in a living room the size of your house back in Urbandale. Around you are the leaders from science, business, academe, the literary world, musicians and artists, politicians and media. Is there any subject in the world you could broach with confidence that an interesting conversation would ensue?

[pyshnov]

Didn't "innovation" in humanities already reach an apogee? How much of further "innovation" the society can support? How much of this crap, of the meaningless definitions, of the fraudulent inventions of new terms etc., etc.. etc. that even a plumber sees as crap, can be sustained? Ask this plumber if he knows what "gender" (this absolutely universally adopted word) is. He doesn't know, and humanities don't know.
The book was recently published: "Why Women Must Rule The World." I watched the interview with the author: clearly humanities have completed the process of abandoning any pretence of having a connection with facts or science and have adopted the unchallenged freedom to preach crap. Clearly, all the moneys that could be swindled for peddling crap have been swindled. Every bit of culture and every bit of civilization has been deconstructed. I am afraid to ask this question - What else is now contemplated? A 9/11 and the war on terrorism in the departments with the waterboarding of the dead white men?

[robert_smithson]

Didn't "innovation" in humanities already reach an apogee? How much of further "innovation" the society can support? How much of this crap, of the meaningless definitions, of the fraudulent inventions of new terms etc., etc.. etc. that even a plumber sees as crap, can be sustained? Ask this plumber if he knows what "gender" (this absolutely universally adopted word) is. He doesn't know, and humanities don't know.

Doesn't the same thing apply to the sciences? The "plumbers" often think that studying fruit flies is an exercise in state-funded welfare as well. There are monies at stake!

The book was recently published: "Why Women Must Rule The World." I watched the interview with the author: clearly humanities have completed the process of abandoning any pretence of having a connection with facts or science

The humanities have never been about facts in the way you seem to think. The humanities are about interpretation.

[pyshnov]

robert_smithson:

The "plumbers" often think that studying fruit flies is an exercise in state-funded welfare as well.

Yes, but the plumber can seek education that will give him an explanation. The explanation (for example, of "gender"), that you think is the business of humanities, cannot be given in "radical humanities", contrary to the situation in hard science.

The humanities have never been about facts in the way you seem to think. The humanities are about interpretation.

Interpretation of what? Of facts, of course? So, the facts should be stated correctly, first. And when you innovate, so to speak, a new term, it should be a finding of a new fact existing in nature or, more precisely, in the interpretation of nature which we call science. And, how about the effort to propel social "studies" into "social sciences"?
You cannot bypass science in universities. Well, it appears you actually can.

[robert_smithson]

Interpretation of what? Of facts, of course? So, the facts should be stated correctly, first. And when you innovate, so to speak, a new term, it should be a finding of a new fact existing in nature or, more precisely, in the interpretation of nature which we call science. And, how about the effort to propel social "studies" into "social sciences"?
You cannot bypass science in universities. Well, it appears you actually can.

Conjecture is allowed in the humanities. Some areas call the process "art" or "poetry," some call it "philosophy" or "theory." I'm not saying there are no fact(s) involved, but reducing the process to observed fact alone is a good way to turn it into...science.

Like those who demand creationism be taught in science class, you seem to be demanding that the humanities can only be legitimate when they are science.

[frenchdoctor]

interpretation ? Why ? The humanities are about knowing interesting stuff, that's all. A specialist of Shakespeare who knows everything about Shakespeare's life and works doesn't have to "interpret" anything to be an oustanding, fascinating scholar.

On the other hand, anybody can write sentences like "the heterodiegetic nature of pluri-focalised, metacritical analysis (Foucault, 1984) subsumes the inter-relational network of epistemic references, within the boundaries of the discourses (Derrida, 1997), provided said discourses aren't obliviated by the transgendered serendipity of metacognitive difference/differance, and as far as the fragmented infradiegetic-semiotical nodes (Irigaray, 1991) obey the topological nature of Gödel's theorem (Virilio 2004)".

In other words, the humanities are dying mostly because they are darn boring.

However, money also matters. The famous historian Gaston Maspero, specialist of ancient Egypt, was given a boat, a crew, money aplenty, complete freedom, and all the time he required to pursue his works. Without any administrator on his tail. Without having to prostitute himself for good teaching evals. Without struggling to get an elusive tenure. It was in the late 19th century, early 20th. As a result, he wrote the most splendid books you can imagine about ancient Egypt (for he also was a splendid, stylish, crystal-clear writer). No historian today would dream of such lavish working conditions.

This said, the big question : are we, humanists, poor because we are boring, or are we boring because we are poor ?


edit : I wrote this post before pyshnov's reply about facts. I completely agree, event though I am an humanist. Buzzwords aren't new facts. They're only new, meaningless words. Words, words, words.      

[robert_smithson]

The humanities are about knowing interesting stuff, that's all. A specialist of Shakespeare who knows everything about Shakespeare's life and works doesn't have to "interpret" anything to be an oustanding, fascinating scholar.
 

Isn't this what you are lamenting here:

In other words, the humanities are dying mostly because they are darn boring.
 

Not sure I understand how the first example is not party to the complaint. Simple discovery of facts without context (otherwise known as "trivia") is not equal to good scholarship, IMHO.

[frenchdoctor]

I guess the definition of "boring" and "not boring" is different for everyone of us.

I'll take the same example. A scholar like Maspero, who explains to me how people used to live 5000 years ago near the banks of the Nile River, who explains this to me in practical terms, in a language of incredible beauty, will make me weep of pleasure. He doesn't interpret anything. He just says how things used to be for our predecessors on this beloved earth.

On the other hand, some guy who does nothing but pile up buzzwords, all of them meaning "hey, look how smart I am !  I can interpret anything ! I use words that you don't know !", will only bore me to death. The narcissistic stance of the thinker thinking about his own thoughts drives me crazy.

I see the humanities as a tribute paid to our fellow humans for what they did, for what they wrote and sang, for the music they played, for the gods they believed in, for the lives they lived and the deaths they died. They are important. They matter.

But my own, petty, selfish "interpretation" ? Why ? Who cares ?

Not even me.

Boring.

[robert_smithson]

I guess the definition of "boring" and "not boring" is different for everyone of us.

But my own, petty, selfish "interpretation" ? Why ? Who cares ?

Your description of Maspero's work sounds as though it would be appropriate for a lovely coffee table book.

The point is that, even in your example, Maspero has to explain to us why we should care, which is one of the models of interpretation I was speaking of earlier. I would agree with you that buzzwords thrown about for their own sake are meaningless-- just as historical facts thrown about without context are trivial.