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?
We're just too danged busy to do the kind of scholarship literature prof.s in the golden age did, which is the standard that we're more or less held to, even though it's fifty years later and we're not literature prof.s. Seriously, not one of us has a second to sit still, and relatively little of the work that keeps us so busy has anything to do with our own scholarship, which regardless of the challenge posed by our agendas is still a depressing enterprise since nobody stands to benefit much from our output if we were able to put something out. Here's something to consider: we're going to be presenting at MLA, arguably the biggest and most prestigious (pseudo-)public forum for work on our field; furthermore, we'll be presenting at a highly publicized special session dedicated to the academy in hard times. If ever there were a chance to make a real impression on our colleagues in relation to professional issues, this may be it. So what REAL contribution could realistically be made under these somewhat favorable circumstances? What could we do to make a genuine difference? Even major figures publishing major books on these subjects don't seem to yield any difference whatsoever. Even the noble MLA has been calling for attention and change over recent years (I know, I know, a little too little a little too late, but still, you get my point...) but what change follows? It reminds me a lot of the Obama administration: we believed in the change we were asked to believe in; we just haven't seen the change. That's not because he's not trying but because the system is broken and there's no changing the system. We have a "new faculty majority" on our hands, which isn't acting very effectively as a majority. That organization (NFM) recently issued a 20-year plan that called fairly timidly for gradual change toward tenure for contingents without attached pay increases (eventually to be fazed in over decades), which didn't make much of a splash. Is that the best we can do? Is it a start? When do we stop starting and start changing? What change do we *really* want? Beyond just better contracts. What the heck do we want?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete