The New Criterion has an excellent essay this month that serves as an update from the front of the humanities culture wars. The author, Mark Bauerlein, points out something that surprised me when I recently spent a few years as a junior faculty member of a college English department: Among those teaching the humanities in American universities, a weird truce has descended over the cultural battlefield.
Says Bauerlein:
Nobody who has paid attention to the deterioration of the humanities should be surprised at this evolution from principled objection to the canon in the 1980s to informal disregard in the 2010s. The process has unfolded through a deceptive dialectic of hard radicalism and soft liberalism among the professorate. The first group denounced the standard literature course as racist, sexist, and imperialist, assailing Eurocentrism, Western Civ, Great Books, and the Canon as gross political formations. Their in-your-face accusations demanded vast multiculturalist adjustments in syllabi, the major, and humanities research, and they wore the "tenured radicals" label with pride. Seeing them exposed and ridiculed in the public sphere, however, another faculty contingent arose, moderate and broad-minded, who claimed that multiculturalist revisions weren’t hostile or negative at all. They marked an opening, an enrichment, so they said: Shakespeare and Alice Walker. These learned liberals objected merely to the hegemony of Dead White Males, not to literary-historical tradition and great art. When challenged by conservative critics for having filled the syllabus with second-rate minority and female authors, these temperate professors retorted that they had done no such thing. The Modern Language Association surveyed English department chairs and reported in 1992 that "authors such as William Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne, thought by some to be in danger of being displaced by the rise of multicultural studies, in fact continue to dominate the so-called ‘meat-and-potatoes’ survey course." ...
A mere diversification of the curriculum, without dishonoring traditional authors, is the result, a reform which pacifies almost every one. This is the new dispensation in literary studies, a turn from the Canon Wars of the 1990s to today’s bountiful inclusivity. Twenty-five years ago we had an ideological battle over the tradition, but professors learned that no skirmishes had to happen, only an expansion of the domain. Indeed, from this vantage point, it looks as if the radical critique was only a provisional offensive, a middle-stage before a liberal modulation arrived to accommodate both sides. It’s a workable compromise that retains the old and recognizes the new, and it has the rhetorical advantage of stamping both those who decree, "You must require more Shakespeare!" and those who complain, "You’re teaching too much Shakespeare!" as extremists.
Bauerlein emphasizes that this shift is driven by a response to external pressure. Wily department chairmen realized that they could establish a prophylactic to conservative and populist criticism in the press by making sure that a few Dead White Males stayed on the curriculum along with the latest in Inuit lit. He also points out that another reason for the shift—in my view, the primary reason—was the internal peace that it brokered within the departments themselves. Why fight a war over each other's reading lists when simply letting everyone teach whatever they want ensures that faculty can research and lecture in an atmosphere of live-and-let-live comity?
The peace has its costs, however. Surrendering the role of making "value" judgements about the relative worth of Milton versus Amy Tan—or worse, the worth of reading Milton for what he has to say, versus reading him through a lens self-consciously determined by contemporary political concerns—means that the humanities can no longer make a case for anything's value, including that of the humanities themselves.
The parallel with literature professors who underscore the identity elements in Whitman and Millay and overlook poetic language and moral depths (unrelated to identity) is clear. Did they realize, however, that as they did so an analogous redistribution would happen in the curriculum, one that would damage their departments? The evidence comes from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s "What Will They Learn?" project, a survey of general education requirements at 1,091 schools. In the past, languages and literatures stood at the center of liberal arts education, but at the present time, ACTA finds 674 of those colleges have no strict requirement for a literature course and 939 have none for a foreign language course at the intermediate level or higher. This is a catastrophic shift. General education requirements represent the breadth of knowledge a college demands of every graduate, and they ensure enrollments in a department’s courses, which in turn guarantee resources for the department—if enrollments go down, the dean sees no need to replace retiring faculty members. Through general education requirements, departments jockey for status, especially humanities departments now that budget tightening and the drift of students to career-based fields have turned the campus into a habitat of scarcity. English and foreign languages used to take their centrality for granted, but currently they must compete with other departments.
The claim of humanities professors that they provide critical value to a college education fails to impress either the students faced with choosing courses and majors or the parasitical class of college administrators who apportion resources. The professors have arguments for their position, of course. They just aren't persuading anyone.
One of my collateral tasks while teaching in my department was to chair a prize committee for an award given each year to the undergraduate who had done the most for the institution in furthering the cause of the humanities. With each student my committee interviewed, I asked the nominee to describe how they would explain the value of the humanities to a future employer who thought English and philosophy and the rest were bunk.
For exemplary students graduating as history and English majors, their answers were uniformly underwhelming. While I was complaining about this to the other members of the committee during our subsequent deliberations, a colleague of mine—an intelligent, widely read professor accomplished both in research and in the classroom—said to me, in the students' defense, "I'm not sure I could answer that question!"
When the priests don't believe in their own religion, it's no surprise that nobody is coming to church.