Can we revise?

As Peter has posted emails from previous weeks and a comment on them, it might be worthwhile to think about genre.

Our blog, in effect, works as a genre that is distinct from email or its close relative, the list-serv discussion. While the audience for the list-serve is usually wider than personal email, both tend to inspire back and forth exchanges and impromptu texts. Like conversations, these exchanges are often short; the tone and diction informal; the standards for evidence somewhat more relaxed than in publishable academic writing.

Some bloggers will do the same thing and--in effect--publish emails to the Internet. We're aiming, I think, for a scholarly blog--one that readers beyond our circle will find relevant, current, authoritative, and well written.

I used Fish in the previous post, "Savior or Narcissus," partly because I was interested in the issue he raises and partly because he's using the blog genre in ways that I find useful, both for the humanities generally and for our project particularly.

Regardless of one's opinion of Fish's blog or his sometimes polarizing posts, he writes to a broad audience, states a thesis, frames an issue, and offers evidence. His posts usually begin with a description of some (often recent) source or with a summary of and response to comments from the previous week. Once a week, he produces a professional and reasonably complete bit of discourse.

I think we can accomplish and should expect similar work from our group. Yes, there is the matter of time and the lack of it. Perhaps some English professors of the Golden Age had a more leisurely work life. Certainly, many faculty will recognize the difficulty in managing teaching and administrative responsibilities with scholarly productivity.

The 2007 MLA Task Force Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion notes a 25 percent increase in the work week for faculty between the years 1972 and 1998:

As Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein point out, the weekly work effort of faculty members across institutional types increased from 40 hours per week in 1972 to 48.6 hours in 1998, and it increased most dramatically, to 50.6 hours, at research universities, where the faculty has been subjected to both increasing instructional demands and increasing research demands (79). Across the board the proportion of faculty members working more than 50 hours a week has doubled since 1972, rising from a significant minority (23.2%) in 1972 to nearly 40% in 1998. (17).

The 40-hour work week has disappeared for professionals everywhere, not just faculty. We are a busy culture. Productively busy at times, franticly so at others.

Peter's post concludes with a sort of big picture question: What change do we really want?

That question may be so big that we'll have trouble making headway without breaking it into smaller parts.

For that, here's the small-scale change I'd like:

Can we productively and collaboratively work to revise Peter's comment and post into a thesis-driven post, written in an voice that would find a receptive audience at MLA? That is, there's good stuff in the comment and in the email, but it's still too raw for the genre conventions that we have to work with.

If last week, we had a pretty good and expansive discussion, then maybe this week we can work to revise a single post: fashion the rant into a page or two for our article.

How's that for a manageable task that fits into our 50 + hour work weeks?

Previous Email Thread on Ethos & Scholarship

Frank:

So the scholarly ethos. Interesting to think of this phrase in relation to Peter's course: Contemporary Issues. And we come up with a bunch of issues that at least the three of us don't give a hoot about. We settle, I guess, on the "the field as moved on..." into some sort of scholarly void.

"I guess my point is that it's probably not enough to rehabilitate our ethos. In fact, our ethos might be doing just fine. It's our logos that's all off. Pathetic.

Peter:

Yesterday I sat in on a roundtable about the demise of the humanities, hosted by SBU's Cultural Studies program. General consensus was that the strength/value of the humanities is our teaching, and that we need to make a better case for that institutionally and publicly, etc., as we've all heard many times before. But that's not a particularly scholarly thing to do. So a teaching-focused field like ours continues to lack the kind of ethos we equate with legitimate scholarly disciplines (a tired issue of 100+ years by now), which is why composition studies is pushing for majors, minors, and disciplinarity these days. But the writing major seems to yield mainly "writing about...," "writing for...," or technical courses that either emphasize skills (e.g., grammar) or look a lot like courses in other disciplines (e.g., writing about film) if not for their writing-intensive focus, both of which are pedagogical distinctions. So our distinguishing characteristic, again, comes down to teaching. Scholarship about teaching doesn't seem to impress anyone but ourselves (and we're not too impressed, either, if post-process is already an afterthought). Would it be true to say that the most abiding subject in our scholarship since the fall of poststructuralism has been crisis-proclaiming "university studies"? That is, books and articles about how supposedly empty our work is and/or how poor our working conditions are? It's been more than a dozen years since Bill Readings started leading that parade (longer if you trace its origins back to Berube, or Ohman, etc.), and where has it realistically taken us as a field, in the academy, in the public's eye? If you were pressed to say what our biggest impression on the public ever was, what would you say? Is it freewriting? I mean Writing Without Teachers was a best-seller. What else have you got?

Savior or Narcissus

I take the title of this post from a much-discussed 2008 blog post, "Will the Humanities Save Us?" written by Stanley Fish for the New York Times. In the post, Fish critiques Anthony Kronman's Education's End: Why our College and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. In this book, Kronman argues that great works of art, literature, and philosophy provide the foundation for understanding the human spirit. Without such understanding, we're left with 80-hour work weeks, empty relationships, and Facebook.

For Kronman, the insights gained from the study of great works of art and literature transfers to other domains in one's life. The transfer may be neither immediate nor easily achieved, but it can and does happen. For Fish the study of great works helps one to, well, study more great works. The humanities, he writes, "don’t do anything, if by 'do' is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them."

It's possible--likely in fact--that Fish is being purposely polemical and playing the foil to Kronman's aspirations for work in the humanities. In any event, the debate is a boring one--particularly for its redundancy. Worse, it leaves humanities scholars with untenable choices: Savior or Narcissus.

FYI - Our Accepted Proposal

Rehabilitating Scholarly Ethos: Theory and Practice In Hard Times

Since Bill Readings’ landmark _The University in Ruins_ (1996), a new area of academic inquiry has flourished, which Thomas Rickert recently termed "university studies” (293). Scholarship about the declining state of the university might be characterized, albeit sardonically, as a growth sector within an otherwise faltering enterprise. However, as Derek Bok points out, the majority of this scholarship comes from humanities disciplines that are “most widely accused of having lost their intellectual moorings” (_Universities in the Marketplace_ 5). For example Stanley Fish's 2008 screed about the effects of humanities study: “‘of what use are the humanities?’”, he asks and retorts, "the only honest answer is none whatsoever” (“Save Us”). Fish’s intentionally provocative point is that “the humanities are their own good" and do not necessarily correlate with positive effects measurable to the general public. In other words, one may (or may not) become a better thinker, writer, or person after sustained humanistic study, but these effects cannot be traced directly to the study of literature and may be achieved by any number of other activities.

Whether or not one agrees with Fish, it’s hard to deny that the humanities are steadily changing and losing support. Consider the following: Stephen Greenblatt’s well-known 2002 presidential letter to MLA members began a series of still-relevant discussions on the publishing crisis. The 2007 _Report of the MLA Task Force_ states that 66 percent of English and modern language PhDs are not awarded tenure in their initial appointments. The MLA also reports that as of 2008, nontenured faculty staff approximately seventy percent of all course sections in English (“Education in the Balance”). Furthermore, the 2004 _Digest of Education Statistics_ reports that since 1970 the number of English majors has dropped by more than half, while college enrollments increased by 101 percent (_Fast Facts_).

Given such conditions, it is understandable that a crisis mentality pervades within our scholarly ethos, such that Catherine Porter made issues of employment the center point of her MLA Presidential administration last year, and books and articles on the subject continue to proliferate. Indeed, university studies, so-called, has made our crisis the *subject* of much scholarly attention, as if it were a text or an author; however, it has not yet become a *catalyst* for changing our work and standards for measuring intellectual achievement. For this, the panelists take crisis as a point of departure for new conversations and new types of humanities work. In other words, said crises are not just the obvious negative effects of past changes, but also the causes of potential positive future developments.

In “A PhD is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Scholarship off the Tenure Track,” Peter H. Khost notes that while English and modern language programs graduate PhDs at a constant rate, the number of tenure-track positions continues to decline, creating a backlog of credentialed contingent appointees. Responses to this crisis from various professional organizations (e.g., AAUP, MLA, New Faculty Majority) focus on employment issues such as tenure, salary, and benefits; and individual scholars (e.g., Bérubé, Bousquet, Nelson) focus on exposing the problem and organizing faculty. Notably lacking in the literature on the jobs crisis are inquiries into the strong suit of the PhDs in jeopardy: their scholarship. After all, a PhD is still a research credential above all and regardless of one's tenure status. So although scholarship will likely adapt in the era of contingency, it isn’t going to disappear. Professor Khost discusses new directions in and reasons for scholarship by off-track PhDs, contending that if motivation exists to research and publish other than earning tenure or promotion, then contingents may want to better understand what to do in this way and how. Collaboration, emerging technologies, going public, and other non-traditional avenues in scholarship are considered.

In “The End of End Studies In Humanistic Writing,” Frank Gaughan suggests “university studies” might more accurately be termed “end studies.” By this term, he refers to scholarly projects–such as this panel–that take perceived crises in the academy (publishing, tenure, relevancy) as their subject. Such projects reflect on the end (or the purpose) of work in the academy, generally, or of a discipline such as English or composition, particularly. In doing so, these projects often suggest that the academy itself or a discipline or a practice within it are at an end. Robert Scholes' 1999 _The Rise and Fall of English_, for instance, does for English what Readings does for the entire university. Likewise, David Smit’s 2004 _The End of Composition Studies_ takes arguments about the so-called abolition of first-year writing to their logical extreme. Professor Gaughan conducts a meta-analysis of key end studies texts in order to identify critical aims and areas of overlap. If there is no end to end studies, the practice risks degenerating to self-defeating narcissism. If there is to be a practical end, reflection and analysis must segue to praxis.

In “‘But I Told the Tenure Committee I Was Creating a New Discourse!’: How Current Scholarship Standards Fail New Academics,” David Hyman argues that the rhetoric of postmodernism masks a regressive approach towards practice: while advocating new discursive approaches, it does so by way of dismissing teaching and scholarship as unworthy of “serious” attention. However, since academics are all required to do this work anyway, the result is not a new practice that lives up to the anti-foundational promise of theory, but an atavistic adherence to the most established conventions, perhaps especially the kind of hyper-specialization and esotericism that has led to the bifurcation of English department faculties into so-called "stars" and contingents. Thus, the paradox of the most radical ideologies clothed in the most conservative formal methodologies of teaching and research. Taking Richard Ohmann’s influential 1976 _English in America_ as a starting point, professor Hyman argues that the “academic humanities” ought to be more useful to “humanity.” In fact, standards for publication and tenure tend to reinforce this unfortunate divide. He argues for revised definitions of “radical” and “radical discourse,” definitions that engage rather than alienate broader publics.