Michael Bérubé

Higher Education under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities.

The contributors to this collection explore why--and how--higher education in America under attack.

The Utility of the Arts and Humanities

Artists and humanists who work in universities are generally ambivalent about the idea of defending their enterprises in terms of social utility: on the one hand they do not want to claim that the Arts and Humanities are such exalted and selfjustifying endeavors that no one need bother explainingwhy such things are worth pursuing, yet on the other hand they are rightly skeptical that cost-benefit analyses of academic labor will do justice to disciplines devoted to the varieties of human cultural expression rather than to the research and development of patentable forms of knowledge. This essay explores this ambivalence and suggests an alternative way of thinking about the ‘utility’ of cultural work.

Teaching to the Six

1. The timing could not be better for such a journal. It not only allows professors of English to write about teaching in an intellectually rigorous and reflective way (and, for me, serves as an incentive to do so) but establishes a forum for discussion on teaching unlike any other in the profession. This is important for many reasons, some of which have to do with the fact that the profession is so routinely critiqued—not only by know-nothing legislators and feeding-frenzy journalists but by leading figures in the profession, whose essays and books on the state of English studies mystify pedagogical matters at least as often as they clarify them. For my part, I have written about the state of English studies on a regular basis, but I have not, so far, attempted to say anything useful about how it inflects my pedagogical practices.

American Studies without Exceptions

Scholars in American studies are generally skeptical of the notion of working within or for the nation-state, for three primary reasons: the alleged eclipse of the nation-state by multinational capitalism, the undesirability of limiting American studies parochially to the study of the United States, and the history of collusion between United States intellectuals and the Central Intelligence Agency during the cold war. This essay argues that although contemporary American studies has done well to reject the American exceptionalism that once defined the field and is rightly averse to engaging in covert international propaganda operations, scholars in American studies need to ask whether the field’s rejection of the nation-state might not coincide with rather than resist the movements of global capital and thus to reconsider the importance of the state (in the United States and elsewhere) as a site of intellectual engagement and activism.

Abandon All Hope

This commentary is an afterword and response to a cluster of essays on graduate education edited by Leonard Cassuto. Arguing for reform of the academic job system in which most PhDs will become contingent faculty members, the commentary engages principally with the work of David Downing and Marc Bousquet.

At Penn State, a Bitter Reckoning:

The essay looks at the Sandusky scandal from the perspective of Penn State faculty members, and places it in the context of the erosion of shared governance and faculty oversight of athletic programs at Penn State and elsewhere.

On the Rails

The national leaders in the fight for contingent faculty rights are not well known. This is no surprise: we are talking about the leaders of loose coalitions of (mostly) unorganized and invisible faculty members, people unseen and unacknowledged even (or especially) by their own nominal departmental colleagues in the tenured ranks. It is only in the last two or three years that they have begun to become visible—and audible— as advocates for reform in higher education. Only rarely does the mainstream media (that is, outside the confines of the higher-ed press) feature the perspective of adjunct faculty: we can point to a New York Times story on J. D. Hoff of CUNY, a pair of PBS stories by (now former) adjunct professor Joe Fruscione, a searing Washington Post editorial (“Adjunct Professors Fight for Crumbs on Campus”) by Colman McCarthy, and of course the coverage of the life and death of Margaret Mary Vojtko.1 But we are counting on the fingers of one hand here. Very few people outside the precincts of academe know of the work of Joe Berry, president of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) and author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower; or Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority (NFM); or Robert Samuels, president of the University of California-American Federation of Teachers and author of Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free; or Robin Sowards (also on the board of the NFM), who helped lead the fight to organize adjunct faculty at Duquesne as part of the Adjunct Faculty Association, affiliated (as is appropriate for Pittsburgh) with the United Steelworkers of America.

Introduction: This is Not the Crisis You’re Looking For

It has become an iron law of American journalism that no one is permitted to write the word “humanities” in a sentence that does not also include the word “decline.” Case in point: in the summer of 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences released a report, The Heart of the Matter, that sought to promote the humanities and social sciences as important objects of study alongside the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), and more generally as part of a kind of American civic nationalism. What followed the release of that rather mild report was an almost surreal series of newspaper articles about the decline of the humanities, as if that had been the subject of the report. The general consensus was this: undergraduates have voted with their feet. Humanities professors have killed interest in their own disciplines, and declining student enrollments are the proof. In the words of David Brooks, New York Times columnist and member of the committee that produced the AAAS report, “the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise.”1

From Professionalism to Patronage

In this chapter, I tell a story about differential teaching loads and foreclosed paths to promotion, followed by an analysis of why academic freedom is indispensable for any faculty member who wants to participate in university governance. The story goes some way toward explaining why we must insist on a teaching-intensive tenure track—and the analysis, I hope, finishes the job. Too many people have either given up on restoring a majority tenure-line professoriate or don’t think that academic freedom is central to the issues raised by hiring off the tenure track. Understandably, those commentators have decided that we need to focus on improving salaries and ensuring benefits. But we argue that the tenure component is essential for a couple of reasons: faculty need the protections of tenure to participate actively in shared governance, and relatedly, when faculty without academic freedom participate in governance, it tends to accelerate the erosion of tenure. So in the course of this chapter, I will be doing something at once wonky-detailed and ambitious. I hope to explain, even to people who don’t know how academic hiring processes work, why hiring legions of faculty off the tenure track leads to the creation of fiefdoms and patronage systems; and I hope to show that academic freedom matters not only in research and teaching but in the grainy details of how departments and colleges are run.

Value and Values

In February 2009, as the magnitude of the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008 was becoming chillingly clear, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” It remains one of my favorites in the “crisis of the humanities” genre, and I think it deserves a separate treatment here, for three reasons. One, the first quote (in paragraph five) is from Andrew Delbanco, sounding very much the way he did in 1999: “although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant.”1 Two, the article includes conservative critic Arthur Kronman who, also reading from the 1990s playbook, insists that “the need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” on the grounds that the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address” what reporter Patricia Cohen calls “the greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown” (presumably this would entail mandatory seminars on Greek and Roman theories of civic virtue for all Wall Street traders). And three, the article saves the nut graf for paragraph 17: The humanities continue to thrive in elite liberal arts schools. But the divide between these private schools and others is widening. Some large state universities routinely turn away students who want to sign up for courses in the humanities, Francis C. Oakley, president emeritus and a professor of the history of ideas at Williams College, reported. At the University of Washington, for example, in recent years, as many as one-quarter of the students found they were unable to get into a humanities course.