And now, let me tell you a story.
*****
Once upon a time, I went to grad school.
I went to grad school because I thought I wanted to become an English professor. Then I found out, by actually going to grad school, that I didn’t want to become an English professor.
Let me back up a little. What I really wanted to do after graduating college was to become a *cough* creative writer, but even I knew, back when I was a naïve, wide-eyed 21-year-old, that this was not an enterprise connected to the generating of income. I wasn’t entirely untethered from reality. In essence, I needed a day job.
And so, I figured the best kind of day job would be one that would be somewhat related to my passions and interests. I figured that, as an English professor, I could read books, write about the books (and possibly films) that I loved, find some sort of audience for my eminently worthwhile observations, and teach curious and receptive students on the side. To my slight surprise, in my last couple of years as an undergrad, I had found myself enjoying essay writing more and more, to the point where I began viewing it not as a chore or “homework,” but as a means for expressing my unique reactions to well-known works of art in an articulate and creative way. So if I could get paid to do that, then hey, that would be a pretty nice job, right?
What I found out, very quickly, is that what English professors actually do is something much more insular.
What do English professors do? As with establishing the number of licks it might take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie pop, the world may never know.
It seems to me that being an English professor is more like joining a specialized club for hobbyists. It’s like joining a butterfly collectors’ association, or a Civil War re-enactment society. English professors do a lot of writing, but they don’t pitch their writing toward a general audience. They write papers to each other. They act as if the arts are like the sciences, and so they call their writing “research,” and they take it rather seriously, but, for the most part, I have never found this research terribly compelling.
If you’re an English professor who wants to write about, say, Charles Dickens, your goal is to find some sort of new “angle” or “take” on a previously unexplored aspect of Dickens’ work. Your goal is not to talk about what that work actually has to offer a human being in the present day. Oh no, you don’t worry about crap like that.
For instance, when I was writing a paper on Great Expectations in grad school, one of the essays I came across was an analysis of its “hidden sexual symbolism.” The author described one scene where Pip secretly slips some “bread and butter” into his trousers during dinner, presumably so he could eat it later. This, the author claimed, was a hidden reference to Pip masturbating.
OK, sure. I could kinda sorta see the author of this paper making an interesting point, which is that, because novelists in the Victorian era were barely allowed to reference sex, they had to be rather sneaky in describing it. But isn’t this a game that one could play all day? What did Dickens mean really? Maybe, by “A Tale of Two Cities,” Dickens actually meant that the cities were nipples, and so really the book was a tale of two titties. “It was the breast of times, it was the worst of times.” Granted, I didn’t find this essay entirely uninteresting. It certainly was entertaining, although perhaps not in the way the author might have intended. I suppose if I squint my eyes and stare really hard, that sort of analysis of Great Expectations is not without merit. But is it the main message that people should take away from the work? I would say not.
At the time I was writing this paper, about six or seven months into grad school, I decided to visit my professor in her office and raise a few of my concerns. I suppose one of my goals that day was to try to figure out what the hell the purpose of academic writing was. I said to her, “Personally, what I love about a book like Great Expectations is … what it has to say about life, or the philosophy that it contains, and how I can apply that philosophy to my own struggles, that sort of thing.”
My professor nodded politely, and answered, “Well, if that’s what interests you about literature, there is a place where people view books in terms of ‘life lessons’ and ‘morality’ and through that sort of lens, which is high school. So, if that’s the sort of thing you’re really interested in, then you might consider being a high school teacher. But that’s not what we do at a university.”
Now, at that point in the conversation, I was about to respond, “So then … what you do at a university … is a waste of time.” But I paused in reflection, realized that this woman had dedicated many, many years of her life to this particular vocation, she probably felt that it was a very valuable vocation, and that me telling her she was wasting her time would not achieve any sort of positive outcome for either her or me. So … I didn’t tell her that.
But I thought it.
I ultimately did finish earning my Master’s in English (spare me your applause), although it did not, as far as I could tell, assist me with finding suitable employment. Alas, my dream of being an English professor turned out to be merely that: a dream. A sweet, sweet dream.
What I was going to do with my life instead was hard to say. I often quote the story about Thomas Edison and the light bulb. To paraphrase, a reporter snidely remarked, “So you’ve tried to invent the light bulb 10,000 times, and you’ve failed.” And Thomas Edison replied, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Well, that was me and grad school. It was a critical piece of my intellectual and philosophical development in that it gave me such a clear idea of what I did not want to do – like the time I tried eating KFC.
In summary: I did not feel that, as an English professor, I could reach large groups of humans and increase their level of happiness. Contrary to popular rumor, those are my goals. Well, I might have been able to do that … after I’d spent twenty years writing essays I really didn’t want to write, gained some clout, influence, and independence, and then wrote what I really wanted to write. To hell with that. I thought I would honestly be better off working a generic office job and writing exactly what I wanted to write on the side – before I became eligible for the senior citizen’s discount. I should probably mention another factor that made this decision fairly easy for me: the job market for English professors was, and presumably still is, virtually non-existent.
At any rate, while I felt that something was “off” about grad school, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what, precisely, it was. I was too close to the experience. I wanted, nay, needed, to move on. Indeed, I set out, in my free time, to hone a writing style and attitude of my own. I think I spent a couple of years merely unlearning the style of writing I’d been asked to adopt in grad school. I had to clean the gunk out. Besides, it wasn’t really my duty, at that financially (and mentally?) unstable period of my life, to “solve” the problem of college English departments; I was too preoccupied basking in the fine array of temp jobs that were suddenly being presented to me. Instead, I decided to simply do my best to forget about the whole thing, and keep myself as far away from academia as possible.
Until about five years later, when a friend sent me an article published in The American Scholar called “The Decline Of The English Department: How It Happened and What Could Be Done to Reverse It.”
First of all, although I was unaware that the English department had officially been “declining,” upon hearing this news, I was not particularly surprised. I did not know much about the author, one William M. Chace, who, according to the riveting bio at the bottom, was a “professor of English emeritus at Stanford University” and “president of Wesleyan University from 1988 to 1994 and of Emory University from 1994 to 2003.” Fine institutions all, but clearly I wasn’t going to get much of an outsider perspective from this guy.
Suffice to say, I found the article rather compelling.
Now allow me, if I may, to discuss Mr. Chace’s article in tremendous depth. You’re probably asking yourself, “With all the urgent problems going on in the world today, is this blogger really about to spend ten pages analyzing a 13-year-old article published in some obscure academic journal discussing the decline of English departments at American universities? Is this really his highest priority?”
Why yes. Yes it is.
Also, allow me to liberally cut and paste large sections of his article, and add my snarky comments to the discussion. In graduate school, I was taught to quote from the text judiciously, and only do so when I was prepared to offer a close analysis of the quote. But since this my blog, not a graduate school paper … I can do whatever the fuck I want!
*****
Chace begins:
During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history.
Right, because those kids’ parents are all scared shitless that they’re about the throw their life savings into an enterprise that is merely going to land their precious offspring right back into their own residence. Although I have to say that, during the era of its supposed decline, I still remember English being a quite popular major at my undergraduate university; while attending my graduation ceremony, I observed that the “English” portion of seats was larger than almost all the others. It was quite the thing. But hey, this guy has the statistics, not me, so I’ll take his word for it.
Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):
English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent
What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.
Hmmmmm. I think Mr. Chace might be on to something here. He’s almost starting to sound … dare I say it … part-time Buddhist? Is he about to save me the effort of writing this very essay by making my points for me?
What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.
Whoa, whoa, whoa William. You totally had me until you started to dismiss film and popular culture. Because I like those things! Hell, I might even like those things more than I like books. “Get off my lawn” a bit much? (Side note: what does “abstruse” mean?) I also fear that his robust army of “young people interested in good books” may not be as vast as he imagines it to be; my guess is that nine out of ten teenagers would rather “watch the movie” than “read the book.” However, having been in that mythical “one out of ten” myself, and having sat through several college English courses that induced within me the thought, “What does this topic have to do with classic literature again?,” I’m halfway in his corner. Well, let’s see where he goes with this thing.
But were [the humanities] ever at the center? The notion that the literary humanities in particular have been at the heart of American higher education is, I think, a mirage. I once thought so because of the great popularity of the study of literature during my undergraduate and graduate years. Yet the “glory years” of English and American literature turn out to have been brief. Before we regret the decline of the literary humanities, then, we must acknowledge how fleeting their place in the sun was.
“I come to bury the English department, not to praise it.” Wait. Why pass judgment on something over which one has no control? Couldn’t one simply observe that the literary humanities are “declining” without stating that this is something to “regret”? Maybe it just “is.” I do like, however, that Chace is trying to take a broader perspective and acknowledge that he may have experienced the humanities in an uncharacteristic period of dominance and that things weren’t “always” that way. (Believe me, as academic writing goes, I have seen worse sins than this guy’s.)
What was the appeal of English during those now long-ago days? For me, English as a way of understanding the world began at Haverford College, where I was an undergraduate in the late 1950s. The place was small, the classrooms plain, the students all intimidated boys, and the curriculum both straightforward and challenging. What we read forced us to think about the words on the page, their meaning, their ethical and psychological implications, and what we could contrive (in 500-word essays each week) to write about them. With the books in front of us, we were taught the skills of interpretation. Our tasks were difficult, the books (Emerson’s essays, David Copperfield, Shaw’s Major Barbara, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and a dozen other works) were masterly, and our teacher possessed an authority it would have been “bootless” (his word) to question.
I have yet to read a John Irving novel, but I’m thinking they’re kind of like this?
Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.
Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English, was a declaration at the time that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with the pre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of American undergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of the time was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.
Well yeah, because it was the late 1950s and they were handing out jobs like candy! Never worked at a law firm before? Who cares, Uncle Eddie says he’s got an opening. Come on in, kid, pull up a chair, we’ll show you the ropes. “Self-reflection” and “innocence”? Fine. But when did “casual irresponsibility” become something to boast about?
Perhaps it’s possible that universities may not be the best environment in which one should experience “self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.” Like he says, students are worried about how they’re going to make some damn money once they graduate.
I suppose this brings into the discussion the potentially dual purpose of the modern university education. Is it to A) provide students with the various skills and tools they might need in order to ostensibly succeed in the workforce, or to B) provide students with a more mature understanding of their own purpose in life and the society in which they live? A little from column A and a little from column B?
And this all makes me want to ask a bunch of other questions, like “What sort of major is really going to help you get a job when you graduate anyway?” It’s the “education inflation” syndrome.
In my experience, no particular major is more helpful than another. How many misguided American youths have decided to major in, say, computer science, thinking that a computer science degree will give them a convenient leg up in the job market, only to graduate and discover that a whole bunch of other people also have brand new computer science degrees, and now they have to compete with all these other graduates? Not to mention the fact that they’re stuck having to work in computer science – which they don’t even like! (I suppose there is that precious 5% that genuinely enjoys computer science, so, good for them.) Or what about the kids who major in business, where I suppose you learn a little bit of everything, but arguably don’t learn much of anything at all?
I remain unconvinced that any one major is truly giving a particular subset of graduates an “advantage.” It’s just that if graduates don’t have a Bachelor’s degree at all, they’re at an even bigger disadvantage. So now the question I want to ask is “What the hell is our society doing? Where are we going with all this? People have kids so that their kids can go to college and get a good job and then have kids who can go to college and get a good job?” My God!
Sorry, where was I?
Oh, right. Before Chace slips into more cliches about “the good old days,” let me just state the obvious and point out that perhaps few of today’s college students are coming from the place he was coming from as an undergraduate male at Haverford College in the late 1950s. I mean, not to be one of “those” people, but I would hazard to guess that this was an all boys school, with, I assume, a student population of a generally Caucasian hue?
I think he’s on the right track, though, in proposing that the goal of education is at least partly to steer young people toward some sort of life philosophy, or some notion of deeper, lasting happiness. I can truly sense that Chace wants to give the desperate, hungry students of today the intellectual nourishment that he feels he was given, which is, if I may say so, an honorably part-time Buddhist place to be coming from. So what else is on his mind?
In addition to the long-term consequences, today there are stunning changes in the student population: there are more and more gifted and enterprising students coming from immigrant backgrounds, students with only slender connections to Western culture and to the assumption that the “great books” of England and the United States should enjoy a fixed centrality in the world. What was once the heart of the matter now seems provincial. Why throw yourself into a study of something not emblematic of the world but representative of a special national interest? As the campus reflects the cultural, racial, and religious complexities of the world around it, reading British and American literature looks more and more marginal. From a global perspective, the books look smaller.
I’m picturing a set of those little toy books one might find in a Barbie doll house. I think I know where Chace is going with this … but I’m partially inclined to … share his taste in books? I mean, because my own cultural background is more or less Anglo-American, I might somewhat share his opinion that even though Anglo-American literature may only be “representative of a special national interest,” there is undeniably something there in that little artistic mini-narrative that speaks to me in the way that the literature of other cultures doesn’t necessarily.
But then again, how familiar am I with the literature of other cultures? I think Chace and I have got to be careful here. I’m not about to say that English and American authors are intrinsically “better” than other authors, like Chace is probably itching to say. What he should probably say is that these particular authors spoke more to him – because once you try to speak for other people, you may very quickly start to sound like an idiot. Again, I don’t think it’s the specific works of art themselves that are important, but what those specific works say to a person at a certain moment in one’s life that is important. But let’s resume:
The faculty decline is, in particular, in the humanities, which bring in almost no outside income. Economists, chemists, biologists, psychologists, computer scientists, and almost everyone in the medical sciences win sponsored research, grants, and federal dollars. By and large, humanists don’t, and so they find themselves as direct employees of the institution, consuming money in salaries, pensions, and operating needs—not external money but institutional money.
The English department has one sturdy lifeline, however: it is responsible for teaching composition. While this duty is always advertised as an activity central to higher education, it is one devoid of dignity. Its instructors are among the lowest paid of any who hold forth in a classroom; most, though possessing doctoral degrees, are ineligible for tenure or promotion; their offices are often small and crowded; their scholarship is rarely considered worthy of comparison with “literary” scholarship. Their work, while crucial, is demeaned.
Interesting. But nobody majors in “Composition,” and why in God’s name would they? This reminds me of the numerous instances where I’ve mentioned, to a new acquaintance, that I was an English major, and they’ve jokingly responded, “Oh, you’ll probably correct my spelling and grammar!” Newsflash: students who major in English actually don’t ever study spelling or grammar. In fact, the general public might be amazed at how many English majors possess piss-poor spelling and grammar skills. English is closer to “Art History, but with books” than it is to the study of spelling and grammar. Now that I’ve cleared that up …
English has become less and less coherent as a discipline and, worse, has come near exhaustion as a scholarly pursuit. English departments have not responded energetically and resourcefully to the situation surrounding them. While aware of their increasing marginality, English professors do not, on the whole, accept it. Reluctant to take a clear view of their circumstances—some of which are not under their control—they react by asserting grandiose claims while pursuing self-centered ends.
In other words, they’re being obnoxious.
Two decades later, in 2004, looking back over his shoulder, the intellectual historian and literary journalist Louis Menand told his fellow professors at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association something they already knew: while student enrollment in the humanities peaked around 1970, “it has been downhill” ever since. His verdict: “It may be that what has happened to the profession is not the consequence of social or philosophical changes, but simply the consequence of a tank now empty.” His homely metaphor pointed to the absence of genuinely new frontiers of knowledge and understanding for English professors to explore. This is exactly the opposite, he implied, of the prospects that natural scientists face: many frontiers to cross, much knowledge to be gained, real work to do.
OK, so maybe the world doesn’t need English departments and their homely metaphors. The earth will go on spinning. People can do something else with their time. Especially English professors. (Side note: the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association? Imagine the debauched nightlife at that convention.)
“Hold on a minute, Part-time Buddhist Pop Culture Guru. Are you really suggesting that English departments serve no valuable purpose in the universe and should simply be abolished?” Here I am, mocking Chace for trying to “save” the English department; does that mean I’m in favor of … destroying it?
Naw, that doesn’t sit right with me either. I’m glad I chose English as my major in college. I got something out of majoring in English. It sure beat majoring in any of those other boring majors. You see me writing all these complicated blog posts? No way would I have been able to learn how to conjure up this kind of linguistic magic if I’d majored in Engineering, you feel me? So then what am I whining about? Let me allow Chace to continue:
Such silence strongly suggests a complicity of understanding, with the practitioners in agreement that to teach English today is to do, intellectually, what one pleases. No sense of duty remains toward works of English or American literature; amateur sociology or anthropology or philosophy or comic books or studies of trauma among soldiers or survivors of the Holocaust will do. You need not even believe that works of literature have intelligible meaning; you can announce that they bear no relationship at all to the world beyond the text. Nor do you need to believe that literary history is helpful in understanding the books you teach; history itself can be shucked aside as misleading, irrelevant, or even unknowable. In short, there are few, if any, fixed rules or operating principles to which those teaching English and American literature are obliged to conform. With everything on the table, and with foundational principles abandoned, everyone is free, in the classroom or in prose, to exercise intellectual laissez-faire in the largest possible way—I won’t interfere with what you do and am happy to see that you will return the favor. Yet all around them a rich literature exists, extraordinary books to be taught to younger minds.
Oh the tragedy! Dickinson and Shaw are just sitting there in the dark, waiting to speak to these children and these children are dying! I might even agree with Chace that the children are probably “dying” AKA “desperately in need of some sort of ethical and philosophical guidance,” but I’m not so certain that Dickinson and Shaw are quite what the doctor ordered. A study of trauma among soldiers or a comic book may say more to these children than Dickinson and Shaw ever would.
Look, I understand this guy’s frustration. All these newfangled approaches certainly don’t make English seem like an academic discipline. Well, maybe we shouldn’t call it “English” anymore. Maybe we should call it something like “Values” or “Story Analysis” or “Art and Philosophy Studies,” I really don’t know. But on some level it should ultimately result in making people happier. That’s what I don’t think this guy quite understands. Well, he seems to understand it in his gut, but he hasn’t quite put it all together on the page. I feel like I’m agreeing with his diagnosis, but disagreeing with his prescription.
For me, this turn of events has proven anything but happy or liberating. I have long wanted to believe that I am a member of a profession, a discipline to which I could, if fortunate, add my knowledge and skill. I have wanted to believe that this discipline had certain borders and limitations and that there were essential things to know, to preserve, and to pass on. But it turns out that everything now is porous, hazy, and open to never-ending improvisation, cancellation, and rupture; the “clean slates” are endlessly forthcoming. Fads come and go; theories appear with immense fanfare only soon to be jettisoned as bankrupt and déclassé. The caravan, always moving on, travels light because of what it leaves behind.
Well look, buddy, everything changes. And the changing (or possibly disappearing) nature of English departments is something so big and grand and complex you’ll drive yourself mad trying to fight it. My issue with all the critical fads and theories is not that they’re “scrambling the sacred tradition of English as a discipline,” but that, in my view, most of them hardly bother to address the ever-present struggle with suffering and impermanence that is my part-time Buddhist bread and butter. “Porous” and “hazy” I can deal with; “cancellation” and “rupture” … eh, not so much.
The point is, Billy – if I may call you that – I think you can still do what you want to do, but you may not be able to do it in an official “English department” with a big official seal on it. You want to reach young people and make them happier? You can do that in a number of ways. It doesn’t have to be as an “English professor.” Maybe it could be – gasp – as an internet blogger!
Meanwhile, undergraduates have become aware of this turmoil surrounding them in classrooms, hallways, and coffee lounges. They see what is happening to students only a few years older than themselves—the graduate students they encounter as teaching assistants, freshman instructors, or “acting assistant professors.” These older students reveal to them a desolate scene of high career hopes soon withered, much study, little money, and heavy indebtedness. In English, the average number of years spent earning a doctoral degree is almost 11. After passing that milestone, only half of new Ph.D.’s find teaching jobs, the number of new positions having declined over the last year by more than 20 percent; many of those jobs are part-time or come with no possibility of tenure. News like that, moving through student networks, can be matched against, at least until recently, the reputed earning power of recent graduates of business schools, law schools, and medical schools. The comparison is akin to what young people growing up in Rust Belt cities are forced to see: the work isn’t here anymore; our technology is obsolete.
And to think that this article is 13 years old; I’d hate to see what the stats are like now. So maybe the work isn’t there anymore. Well so what? Move on to something that’s not obsolete. I do recall being surprised to discover that “the average number of years spent earning a doctoral degree is almost 11.” Yeah, you know why? Not because it’s hard, or because the schools demand it, but because PhD students are (at least based on what I witnessed in grad school) sitting around, living off a stipend, killing time, terrified of what their life will become once they finally graduate. If they wanted to, they could get their PhD in 4 years. But who wants to do that?
I still teach, and do so with a veteran’s pride in what I know and what I hope I can give. My classrooms are, I hope, bright and sunny places where we can spend good time with Joyce’s Ulysses or Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
Yikes. No wonder why this guy is so frustrated. Not even I would want to take his class. All right, all right, I’m just playin.’
It would be a pleasure to map a way out of this academic dead end. First, several of my colleagues around the country have called for a return to the aesthetic wellsprings of literature, the rock-solid fact, often neglected, that it can indeed amuse, delight, and educate. They urge the teaching of English, or French, or Russian literature, and the like, in terms of the intrinsic value of the works themselves, in all their range and multiplicity, as well-crafted and appealing artifacts of human wisdom.
Whoa. What a concept. I’m teasing him, but I mostly agree.
Second, we should redefine our own standards for granting tenure, placing more emphasis on the classroom and less on published research, and we should prepare to contest our decisions with administrators whose science-based model is not an appropriate means of evaluation. Released from the obligation to deliver research results in the form of little-read monographs and articles, humanists could then resolve to spend their time teaching what they love to students glad to learn. If they wanted to publish, they could do so—at almost no cost—on the Internet, and like-minded colleagues could rapidly share the results of such research and speculation.
Now this is the best idea I’ve heard all day.
Perhaps they, the youngest generation, can labor with their teachers in putting together the house that has forfeited its sense of order. If they do, they can graduate with the knowledge that they possess something: a fundamental awareness of how a certain powerful literature was created over time, how its parts fit together, and how the process of creation has been renewed and changed through the centuries.
Well, I guess they could do that. But again, what seems particularly valuable to me isn’t “the story of Western literature” per se, but what that literature, and that particular “story,” might have to say about their lives in the here and now. Like Frankenstein’s monster, or Kiss, you’ve got to make it come alive.
But the good news is that certain forms of intellectual history will still be written and will still be accessible to ordinary readers. Shakespeare’s plays will still be performed, even if largely unsponsored by departments of English. Literary biography will still command an appreciative readership. The better private institutions, aware of noblesse oblige, will prove kinder than large public institutions to the literary humanities, but even this solicitude will have its limits.
The study of literature will then take on the profile now held, with moderate dignity, by the study of the classics, Greek and Latin. For those of us who care about literature and teaching, this is a depressing prospect, but not everyone will share the sense of loss. As the Auden poem about another failure has it, “the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
But we can, we must, do better. At stake are the books themselves and what they can mean to the young. Yes, it is just a literary tradition. That’s all. But without such traditions, civil societies have no compass to guide them. That boy falling out of the sky is not to be neglected.
Save the children! Somebody save the children!
*****
OK. Here’s my thought at Chace’s stirring conclusion. I might suggest that my half-baked philosophy of part-time Buddhism would be more valuable to a civil society than the “literary tradition,” but that’s just me. I might suggest that part-time Buddhism would serve as a better “compass” than Auden or Woolf, but honestly, it’s not particularly important that I win this sort of battle with English professors. What is important is that people have a compass, or at least access to one. And I think it’s a problem when the “elders” who should supposedly be providing that compass might actually be badly in need of a compass themselves. Whoops!
The thing is, I still understand why I was so terribly drawn to the study of English as an aspiring young scholar. Here’s a line that I used to tell people, while I was a graduate student, and even while I was an undergraduate student. I used to tell people that English, as a discipline, basically was doing what Philosophy, as a discipline, was trying to do, but was doing it better. Why? Because English dealt with issues of morality, values, and the search for purpose, but dealt with those issues in an actual “real world” framework, rather than as part of some sort of pseudo-scientific, verbal imitation of mathematical proofs. I would venture to say that, to most people, philosophy books are just about unreadable. People don’t want to get bogged down in abstractions. They want to go on a mental and emotional journey. That’s what sticks with them – or at least that’s what sticks with me.
Clearly, the “great” novelists, playwrights, and poets stuck with Chace; he wasn’t the first, and he won’t be the last. Honestly, I was with him all the way – until he started dismissing film studies. For Chace, it seems like the only kind of works of art that really “matter” are the works that happened to stir his boundless imagination when he was a young whippersnapper. But I tend to believe that worthwhile stories come in all shapes and sizes. Do they have to resemble Chaucer and Milton? I mean, if a professor could teach a class on sports literature and use it to illustrate the same philosophical truths as Chace could using Wordsworth and Coleridge, then frankly, I don’t really have a problem with that.
But if I were trying to design a standardized course plan for a university degree, then yeah, I might have a problem with that.
Here’s my entirely unsolicited suggestion: English departments at universities should confine themselves to teaching classes about works of literature (but predominantly novels) that were initially published in the English language and are at least 50 years old. That seems to me like as good of a boundary as any. If you want to offer a class that covers something else, call it cultural studies, film, comparative literature, sociology – get creative.
Oh, and scrap the critical theory. I have been amazed at how rarely, since leaving the three-ring circus known as academia, I have ever come across the names of all those supposedly groundbreaking (and mostly French) theorists everyone else around me was treating with such reverence, and you know why? Because their work didn’t help ordinary human beings transform the various forms of suffering they’ve endured into something resembling joy. Go ahead, convince me otherwise.
One day, toward the end of my studies, a shocking thought entered my brain. I concluded that, compared to the Buddha, all these renowned “thinkers” who I was being instructed to treat as if they somehow “knew more about life” than I did, suddenly came across like confused ants drowning in a puddle of sewage. I found it rather remarkable that the Buddha, despite having supposedly existed 2,500 years ago, and despite never having had the chance to read Hegel, Marx, Freud, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, or Foucault, seemed to do all right for himself.
All right. Let’s start from scratch. Here is my proposal for a new kind of English department.
The Part-Time Buddhist English Department
A board of directors would ask each professor to step into the board room for examination. The board would ask each professor to describe how the intended curriculum would do the following:
- Help students be happier
- Help students appreciate the impermanence of all things
- Help students learn to appreciate the present moment as it is and not how they might hope it would be
- Help students become more compassionate and increase their sense of connection to humanity.
BOOM. There it is. All I need is a rich benefactor to get behind me on this sucker.
The thing is, if, as I suggested earlier, a university education might potentially serve the dual purpose of A) training students for the workplace and B) giving them insight into the human condition, and if majoring in English isn’t going to bother to help them out at all with A), then it should at least bother to help them out with B), right? Instead of veering off, as I fear it has done, into some unconscionably grotesque, mutant C)?
Honestly, English departments would probably be fine if they just jettisoned the “research.” In the Part-Time Buddhist English Department, professors would focus on teaching students and giving lectures. I’m not even sure they would assign papers. If they did, they would grade them based on how passionately, intensely, and articulately the students could express the ways in which the subject matter applied to the four goals listed above. Grading would probably be a mess.
As Chace suggests, I feel like 95% of English department “research” is useless for society as a whole. Maybe 5% is useful. I mean, having a few people around who are extremely knowledgeable about Shakespeare is kind of useful, right? These are the scholars who can draw on their knowledge to explain, to the curious layperson, how and why the Bard used certain puns, phrases, pentameter, rhyming schemes, and rhetorical flourishes to better convey the themes and ideas contained in his works. I guess someone could say, “Well who cares about all that shit?” But someone else could say, “Well who cares about plant biology?” Some people do, right? Shouldn’t we have at least a few Shakespearian anoraks handy?
And yet: How many Shakespearian anoraks does society genuinely need? English graduate departments have been acting like they’re law schools – like they’re churning out potential young judges who will all be establishing their own new law firms, but … society may not be clamoring for Shakespearian experts in quite the same way. And a Shakespearian expert who has a hard time explaining to the general public how Shakespeare’s plays can contribute to the general public’s happiness is not a Shakespearian expert I can get behind anyway.
When professors write those little introductions to Penguin Literary Classics, that is useful. When they write 300 page books on “linguistic play” in Henry James, that is not useful. When they write masturbatory essays on Dickens (literally!), that is not useful. I think most of this “research” is a way for professors to hide from the world. Do not let them hide.
The bottom line is that a good part-time Buddhist professor should be able to communicate to their students how a work of literature could help them in their lives at this very moment. Otherwise, why are their students reading it? A bad part-time Buddhist professor would be a professor who says, “You should read ____ because it’s ‘important’ or ‘because other people have been reading it for a long, long time.’ Those are, in my opinion, poor reasons to be doing something.
*****
I should probably mention at this point that The Part-Time Buddhist Pop Culture Guru isn’t even going to be a blog about literature.
But it’s going to be a blog about life, damn it, and life was something I felt virtually forbidden to write about in academia. I just couldn’t go along with the program any further. Like Malcolm X leaving the Nation of Islam, or George Michael leaving Wham!, although the separation was painful, I needed to move on from the organization that had done so much for me, and yet was never going to allow me to fulfill my ultimate part-time Buddhist destiny.
Perhaps you’re wondering why I didn’t take that professor of mine up on her suggestion and become a high school English teacher. What, and sit in some dingy old room with a bunch of teenagers all day? Euch.
Instead, I’ve decided to do something even better. Nearly two decades after abandoning my potential calling, I suppose you might say I’m hiring myself as a professor of part-time Buddhism at the online “university” I’ve spontaneously founded. I ask no tuition; I confer no degree. The campus is on the small side. The Greek scene is nothing to write home about.
But in the virtual classroom that is my blog, when the surly, apathetic students stumble bleary-eyed into the first day of class, stare at this giant list of old films and old albums that I’m trying to present to them as the “curriculum,” and mumble, “So freaking what?,” I am going to do my absolute, sweat-inducing best to advocate for the “what.”
Unlike the typical modern-day English professor, I plan to focus on what qualities within my favorite works of art have actually helped get me through the freaking day. And unlike William Chace, I don’t feel like pointing my finger at my imaginary students and barking, “You should like this old stuff because … I liked it when I was your age! And … and … lots of other people liked it before I did! And … and … because it’s appeared on a bunch of other lists!” Hell hath no fury like a ‘Greatest Movies” or “Greatest Albums” list scorned (or so I’ve heard).
I cannot command other people to care about the same works of music and film that I care about. I merely intend to use every trick in my part-time Buddhist book to persuade those people as to why I personally think they should care, and then I must leave the rest into the fickle hands of fate.
Just look at it this way: unlike most academic programs, at least I’m not luring anyone in with the false promise of being able to assist them with the finding of proper employment once they get the hell out of here.