Harkin Response to "Latest Forecast"

David Laurence’s delineation of the problems that English departments face in the 21st century is exacting and eloquent. His many years at MLA have given him a perspective on these problems that none of us can hope to match—and that few of us, I suspect, would envy. I agree with David’s account of what the problems look like. More importantly, I concur that, to address them, we need to concentrate on what we actually DO—and how those “do-ings”—along with whatever agency they entail—fit into history in 2003 and beyond.

My disagreements with David—no surprise—are ideological. But in these bad times, nothing is to be gained by internecine nastiness or gratuitous gloom. I offer the remarks that follow, then, simply as a view from the “loyal” left.

It seems to me that, implicit in David’s argument is a cause/effect logic, with an assumption that if you can isolate and remove a cause, you can consequently remove an effect. From my perspective, the unhappy situation in which we find ourselves is not a result of single, disparate causes but rather of multiple, overdetermined explanations that are embedded in capitalism and therefore far beyond the control of English departments, even if they were, by some miracle, to decide to act in unison.

Under the heading “English department staffing practices,” for example, David observes that “the corps of non-tenure-track instructors hired to teach and only teach bulks so large . . . that the scholarly and teaching functions have effectively been severed, [precipitating] a qualitative change in the . . . character of the faculty as a power in the institution.” No doubt about it. But the unargued implication is that English department staffing practices have caused teaching and scholarly functions to be severed, and therefore that we can simply change those practices and all will be well.

Much as I’d like to, sometimes, I just can’t blame the current ratios of full- to part-time teachers in my department on my colleagues’ “practices.” I think the issues are much larger, as David suggests in his later references to John Guillory. The massification that Guillory describes, coupled with the tendency in global capitalism to see the “degree as a benefit primarily to the individuals who receive it rather than to the society that confers it” (Laurence), makes for a change in relations between professors of English and the rest of the economy that cannot easily—in fact, I think, cannot ever—be reversed.

With respect to our relations with students, David “wants to say of students what one wants to say of the society they live in: that it is to a considerable degree severed from history—marooned in a temporally undifferentiated contemporaneity.” Yes. But what might extricate the people on Leno’s “Jaywalk” from this contemporaneity? David thinks that a new self-consciously literary English department can produce a culture for whom “the literary chronology, the basic time line that has so clearly and perdurably served as the string on which the beads of curriculum and professorial positions have been strung,” can do it.

That would not be my expectation. I’ve argued elsewhere that many contemporary students tend to see their required English courses as a commodity that the culture forces them to purchase—rather like automobile insurance. It’s not that the course itself confers some benefit, but rather that all further benefits are contingent on the course. Students therefore shop for the “most economical” kind of “English” they can find. And they don’t want some slick salesperson to talk them into a top of the line comprehensive policy when all they need is liability. If all they need is to write a coherent memo, why should they read Milton?

With respect to our relations with our employers, construed sometimes as students but more often, on the pulse, as hiring committees, deans, legislators, parents, and the public at large, David points to the depressed job market and enormous opportunity costs for the doctorate in English, urging us to curtail PhD programs. I agree.

As I write, yet another job cycle is in full swing. Just before the MLA Convention, one of my graduate students alerted me to expect a phone call from a member of the search committee from a university where she had already survived several cuts. When the call came, I was astonished to find myself speaking to a geologist! He identified himself as an “outside” member of the search committee, whose job, he said, was to “keep everyone honest.”

In the course of answering fairly routine questions (he said that he was reading them from a list) about my student’s ability to direct writing programs and otherwise serve the university, with not a word about her feminist historical research, I referred to my letter of recommendation. At this point my interlocutor informed me that he hadn’t read the letters, and in fact, had been particularly enjoined from doing so. Unwilling to spoil my student’s chances by raising impertinent questions, I politely repeated what I had already said in my letter.

But later I began to speculate about the assumptions behind these recruitment (or perhaps more correctly, winnowing) practices. I’m guessing that somebody, far above the English Department in this midwestern state university, thought that a geologist (of very good will, let it be said) would be impartial—by virtue of being outside the discourse—by virtue of being a scientist, by virtue of being a user of the “service”—to judge the candidates better than the members of the Department of English.

I believe we are confronted here with a set of assumptions about English Departments—assumptions in place in university higher administrations, in federal and state legislatures, and in the minds and hearts of voters, parents, and students. These assumptions are that English is not a science, that it is not objective, and that it is not competitive. We hear these assumptions in language that comes unsuspecting from the lips of our students—“my advisor said to ‘get English out of the way’”—and from our colleagues—a dean considers himself to have disposed of a writing-across-the-curriculum proposal by demanding, “you expect chemists to teach punctuation?” (I can’t help wondering if members of the English Department sit on selection committees in astrophysics.)

"Here, I think, we have been complicit in rendering ourselves redundant. The history of the profession is one in which we have striven to ape the sciences, to compete like scientists, to strive for objectivity like them, and, perhaps most importantly, to seek outside funding as they do. But whereas there are good and substantial reasons for both the private and the public sector to support scientific research, it is not so clear that another reading of Lycidas is a worthy competitor for limited public or private funds."

Here, I think, we have been complicit in rendering ourselves redundant. The history of the profession is one in which we have striven to ape the sciences, to compete like scientists, to strive for objectivity like them, and, perhaps most importantly, to seek outside funding as they do. But whereas there are good and substantial reasons for both the private and the public sector to support scientific research, it is not so clear that another reading of Lycidas is a worthy competitor for limited public or private funds. Nonetheless, if we purport to act like a science—or even a discipline—we place ourselves into an uneven competition in which we find that the culture at large has no particular need for the knowledge we produce; we find ourselves face to face with a market that wants us to send them a man who can write a memo.

In fact, English is not a discipline. Nor is it objective. Nor is it competitive in global capitalism, except in the kinds of stratification that John Guillory points to. That is to say, yes, perhaps a Miltonist here or there can command six figures. But for every such person, ten other “Lycidas men and women” will spend three or more years as an adjunct. I do not think that it is within our power substantially to improve the market for Miltonists. There will be “niche markets” for readers such as Judith Shulewitz and Francine Prose, and for writers such as John Updike and Alice Walker, among people who would not for a moment consider majoring in English themselves or permitting their children to do so. Those markets will be supplied by “niche universities,” while the rest of us, in the flyover state universities, will be directing writing programs.

David does seem to grant that, as a profession, we do not currently have a discipline. Instead, we have “a collection or mere accumulation of courses developed out of the uncoordinated private elections of individual faculty members,” and he wonders whether such a collection can stand as a curriculum, however brilliant in conception and however artfully taught the individual courses may be.” My answer, like his, is no. But I don’t think we can “fix” this situation by returning to the “the literary work” as a disciplinary object.

It seems to me that if people study literature during the next century, they will do so for reasons that Richard Ohmann suggested years ago. Those in the higher of Guillory’s strata will do so as a relatively uncomplicated preface to jobs—in publishing, other media, and government—that they’ll get anyway. This will be the case because the kind of moral judgments that David (and I ) find valuable do not logically depend on facility in interpreting literary works.

Thus it seems to me that David’s suggestions do not meet at least one of the criteria he himself stipulates: “to describe the educational goods derived from studies undertaken in our departments in such a way as to make evident how these goods are unmistakably specific to us—to our departments and our subject area.”

Thus the “weakness” that David sees in “accounts that stake their appeals on terms such as ‘critical thinking’ or ‘reading, writing, and literacy’” is for me a strength. For David, the problem is that “it is hard to sustain an argument that [such claims] are true of us only or uniquely.” Well, they’re not. Such an argument is, as he avers, unsustainable.

David Laurence casts his discussion of the problems he sees within a framework wherein the continued existence of English departments is understood as an unquestioned good. For me the question is “what can we do in a situation in which English departments, as we know them, cannot survive?” My answer is that critique of the circumstances that have made our work so apparently irrelevant to the public at large is the only way in which the “morality” that David calls for can be achieved.