Play The Game & Wear The Suit: Reflections on The Humanities and Academia
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 9:03AM | by Otter When I was in graduate school, now and then professors would smile indulgently over a paper and say, "You should get that ready for publication."
I didn't fully understand at the time that it was a little bit like smiling indulgently and saying, "You should think about not grasping a fork and shoving it into an electrical socket." New Ph.D.'s are common, but universities with strained budgets have very small numbers of "lines" to fill.
"Publish or perish, an academic slogan, seems like a distant problem when you're in graduate school. Those of us who got into academics because we love teaching or love poetry or history or whatever sometimes have a hard time understanding why we should be made to publish in order to do what we do really well. And without due diligence we find ourselves teaching grammar in the community colleges, our love of poetry or history or whatever a kind of dim candle that only rarely gets to light a fire in the way that we always dreamed.
There are good reasons for the system, or were: being allowed to wrangle with ideas in a university requires that one be committed not merely to one's own perception of the truth but to the intellectual violence of peer review, of being called out for foolishness. There are obligations to the profession.
It would be a lot easier if our "peers" were not so often manifest fools, tenured and secure, but the more demonstrable problem is that publication now has so little relevance to what we end up doing. Graduate students fresh into the job-market are much more likely to become (and often remain) low-level, low-paid instructors. A colleague recently told me that his department's attempt to hire an assistant professor in Victorian Literature turned up more than three hundred candidates, all trying to stand out on the basis of graduate school publications, all trying to impress the hiring committee with their publications, which are the gold-standard in this crowded field. Whoever gets that position will likely end up teaching two or three sections of Freshman Composition, a section of World Literature, and one of Victorian Literature.
Seriously? Come on.
Many universities evaluate that situation, balance it against their budgets, and conclude that they can hire an instructor at half the price and (if you package the job right) no benefits. But there are so many candidates with Ph.D.'s jostling for positions that the universities can hire their pick of qualified, desperate candidates as instructors. Result: they get the same candidate, teaching for half the price, grading close to 500 essays a year or more. (I calculated that I grade more than a thousand every year, but I no longer teach literature courses.)
We who teach in the humanities are not professionals. Teaching English is not a "profession": you can't make a living doing it very easily. My own income is below the poverty line (though my student loan corporation does not think so, and declines to give me a hardship deferral on the enormous debt I took on to get my doctorate). If you scan The Chronicle of Higher Education frequently, you can detect sometimes a growing anxiety that the "profession" has morphed into a bloated, fiscally unsustainable glut of Ph.D.'s competing desperately for a shrinking number of decent jobs that will allow them to survive in a tight economy.
Sustainable teaching jobs in the humanities elude anybody who does not "create knowledge," but often the kinds of things that find their way into peer-reviewed publications simply don't need to exist in the human community. They are part of a conversation, of course, but there are conversations that exist for no other reason than that people wish to hear themselves talk. I've read papers by colleagues in my own departments for years, wanting to know the shape of their thoughts; and I know that it's quite common to gin up papers on easily-researched topics during the years leading up to tenure, to abandon those conversations once the thing sees print in a reasonably reputable journal.
Teaching the humanities is a vocation. I'm tempted to call it a ministry. One launches on it with faith in God or government or the friendliness of the universe, all of which tend to disappoint when it comes to living the American dream.
But then, the American dream never had much to do with the humanities, not since the great humanists Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died and the dream turned from reason and learning to materialism and power, from Melville and Hawthorne to Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
Reader Comments (2)
I know, and worry about, a few bright young things who will be wrapping up their doctoral studies in the next 18 months or go. One is a brother-in-law we are particularly fond of and we are always joking that he should take a position at the community college two blocks over (so he'll live nearby), and every now and then I think, "Hmmm, the day may come when that joke's not so funny. . . ."
Would you elaborate on the contrast between Melville/Hawthorne and Fitzgerald/Hemingway?
Susan, a good intelligent Americanist could persuade me otherwise: I tend to say these things like a fortune cookie with only a vague idea of what I mean. (The Oracle at Delphi was the same, but then so is Glenn Beck. Alas. Confusion and obscurity are no guarantee of intelligence.)
But it seems to me that Melville and Hawthorne, while less entertaining or emotionally relevant to us, had some faith in something Americanishly spiritual. Hemingway by contrast is a romancer of American masculinity and pragmatism: if he has any belief in anything beyond that peculiar fetish, I haven't the equipment to detect it. He writes brilliantly and beautifully about very little.
Fitzgerald romances by remembering a faith he can't feel in America's ultimate meanings. The famous green light at the end of the pier is as distant as it is disappointing. But it remains, regardless of its emptiness, as a full-throated siren, a static beacon of empty hope.
At least the white whale is still out there, however monstrous and elusive it might be. You can still take your chances with it.