The Work of Schooling
William M. Chace, in “The Decline of the English Department,” The American Scholar:
First the facts: while the study of English has become less popular among undergraduates, the study of business has risen to become the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities. With more than twice the majors of any other course of study, business has become the concentration of more than one in five American undergraduates. 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 percentIn one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.
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. 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.
Note that the main “cause” of the “decline” is a “failure.” What is the cause of this “failure”? Answer comes there none. But we do learn more about these negligent champions, the professors of English:
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.
1986 called, Professor Chace, and it wants its copy of Glas back.
There is no sense in Chace’s article of how this dire anarchy might have been loosed. This is unsurprising, given that Chace, a former president of Emory and Wesleyan, avers with countenance grim that today’s English departments “shuck aside,” of all things, history—especially strange since at one point he cites Stephen Greenblatt. John Guillory, in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, has some ideas on the subject that go a bit beyond the usual buck-stops-at-vampiric-onanism-theory “great books” rhetoric:
The moment of theory is determined by a certain defunctioning of the literary curriculum, a crisis in the market value of its cultural capital occasioned by the emergence of a professional-managerial class which no longer requires the (primarily literary) cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie. The crisis calls forth a redefinition of literature itself, a redefinition which incorporates as a new aspect of literary study the “technical” quality of the knowledge valued by the professional-managerial class. Needless to say, the emergence of theory is the symptom of a problem which theory itself could not solve.
This is what is missing from Chace’s article—a sense that the function of educational institutions is not, has never been, “to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of … post-adolescent minds,” but to reproduce social relations. Insofar as teaching literature enabled such reproduction, inchoate impulses and confusions could come along for the ride. But as soon as successful incorporation into the social imaginary no longer requires a knowledge of the canon, there is no more class justification for the humanities. I end with an eloquent passage from Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction, which well-meaning nostalgics like Chace would do well to peruse:
The condemnation which prophets and creators, and, with them, all would-be prophets and creators, have levelled through the ages at professorial or priestly ritualization of the original prophecy or original work (cf. the anathemas, themselves doomed to become classic, against the “fossilizing” or “embalming” of the classics) draw their inspiration from the artificialist illusion that the Work of Schooling could escape bearing the mark of the institutional conditions of its exercise. All school culture is necessarily standardized and ritualized, i.e. “routinized” by and for the routine of the Work of Schooling, i.e. by and for exercises of repetition and reconstitution which must be sufficiently stereotyped to be repeated ad infinitum.
Well, yes and no. Diagnostically, sure, if we’re looking for an explanation of the decline, I’d much rather stand with you and Bourdieu and Guillory than Chace. But go too far down that road and you risk accepting what capitalism wants to insist is basic truth: that there is only one value system to rule them all, and that its currency is cash. But isn’t the reason that you and me and Chace are eyebrow-deep in the humanities is because don’t accept that? Or do you think the notion of alternate value systems is another instance of well-meaning nostalgia?
By the way, did you read Mark Slouka on the same subject? A lot of bemoaning there, too, but I think he understands the shift better than Chace. He also makes a positive case for the humanities as a training ground/crucible for democracy, which I think is admirable if not quite watertight.
Certainly, Bobby, but that’s not a question that comes up in this post. I assumed that everyone would know that I’m not endorsing this state of affairs. But before we can talk about what is to be done, we must see the problem clearly. Guillory ends his book by calling for truly equal access to cultural capital for everyone (which would redefine it as something other than “capital” in the Marxian sense).
Yeah, I gave one cheer for Slouka’s essay. But I don’t know why everyone who writes about this for a national publication has to sound like Emerson.
Gotcha, thanks for clarifying. The question did come up for me in your last graf, when you spoke of the “sense that the function of educational institutions is…to reproduce social relations.” It wasn’t clear from what you wrote whether you took that for a permanent matter of fact or a mutable one.
Well, I don’t know that that function is mutable. But I believe that social relations are.
“that there is only one value system to rule them all, and that its currency is cash. But isn’t the reason that you and me and Chace are eyebrow-deep in the humanities is because [we] don’t accept that?”
is it that a disparate, distinct value system rules humanities? and that an english dept ought champion this system? Or, is it that the role of humanities at this juncture is merely oppositional: break the one ring and take it from there?
Well, no, the whole point is that the value system that rules the institution as a whole necessarily rules the humanities, which are increasingly irrelevant for that reason. Plenty of scholars in the humanities delude themselves that they play an oppositional role, but they can hardly step outside institutional conditions. Far from offering an alternative to dominant culture, the humanities have always served as a site for the ideological reproduction of dominant social relations.
I’m not trying to be snippy here, but why then are you knee-deep in the humanities?
And if humanities are increasingly irrelevant, are they really doing a good job of reproducing dominant social relations? Is there something innate to humanities which makes that reproduction fundamentally impossible?
At the risk of asking too many questions at a time, I wonder what you mean by dominant social relations? Most people live out a contradiction between their professional and their personal lives. Not all the relations which obtain at work/the marketplace obtain at home, or vice versa. Is an english dept then reproducing “private” social relations but not the public or professional ones? and humanities’ existence within the university reflects that same public/private contradiction? I do think that for many students, walking into english class feels like going home, compared to a business class which feels like going to work.
In that case, longer work weeks and shrinking private lives are tied up in the “increasing irrelevance” of humanities. But that is only given the public/private contradiction in the first place (dwindling pivate = failure of humanities).
Not quite sure what you’re asking. Twentieth-century critical theory, from the British Cultural Marxists to the Frankfurt School to Gramsci & Althusser, has been concerned to demonstrate the ways in which hegemonic relations shape private life. Ideology doesn’t stop when you get home from work—& I’m not clear how you got the sense that what was at stake was “home” vs. “work.” Going home is going to work, insofar as one has internalized the legitimacy of existing social conditions.
And as Raymond Williams notes, “private life” is “the ultimate generalized privilege, however abstract in practice, of seclusion & protection from others (the public); of lack of accountability to ‘them.’” I don’t see how my post leads to the private/public distinction anyway.
You seem to have a vision of what the humanities are supposed to do (cultivate private life?) that is not supported by the evidence—which is to say, you seem to have confused the institution’s own justifications for its existence with its actual practice.
Perhaps all I really want to ask is the first question: why are you knee-deep in humanities, given what you write in this thread. But I know it is a personal question, so there’s no further call for you to answer it.
It was your phrase “social relations” which brought to my mnd the private/public distinction.
Personally, I don’t know what humanities are supposed to do. I dropped out. I’m asking (as always, with pathetic earnestness). I do though smile at the idea of english depts advertising themselves”will make you rich in your private life; professional life . . . not so much.”
And I don’t like to speak about internalized legitimacy of existing social conditions as though there’s only one set of conditions. If I had to invoke an academic discipline, I’d go with game theory more than marxism. There are different games, different rules. Human beings are adept at playing multiple games. We’re all “split personalities.”
This may be too easy and glib of an answer but one thing that English Departments can teach is the ability to pierce through the rhetorical smokescreen of people like Chace. I haven’t read Chace’s essay (and judging by the excerpted passages here, I’m frankly not going to take the time to do so), but his logic seems completely spurious (or at least badly misinformed), and you nicely point this out in your analysis, Michael.
Chace bemoans the lack of attention paid to “the books themselves” (because of the rise of “identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture”) but, at the same time, he criticizes the academy for teaching students that literary works “bear no relationship at all to the world beyond the text.” It seems like HE is the one who wants the text itself (with a sprinkling of history thrown in.) One of the simple reasons for the existence of “identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality” et al is precisely to engage the world beyond the text! What a monstrous and incoherent straw man he has created!
I hope that English Departments can at least teach us how to put together better arguments…
The replacement of literature with abstruse (and often undisciplined) theory as well as by replacing ordered study with random books certainly hurts English departments. For one, English Depts. are not providing students with a broad background in English language literature to even begin to think about it critically, intelligently, or skeptically; second, a random assortment of books is not an education. In terms of theory, while it can be interesting, I find it often to be a bunch of assertions without discipline, being read by students neither trained in philosophy, nor even familiar with the literature being references. Contemporary theory reflects the academic tenure rat race, not intelligent thought.
However, as English Depts. get weaker, they also lose clout because this field is simply not connected to any sort of career. English Depts. cannot feed into journalism–or what is left of it–or professorships–or what is left of it. It can breed good public school teachers. Yes, reading makes one’s life enriched. I think English departments need to prepare students for the real world too (beyond waiting tables), and this at minimum could be extensive education in grammar, composition, maybe senior-year teaching internships in secondary education. In a competitive world, students simply may be more survival-conscious these days (not a bad idea, really).
The replacement of literature with abstruse (and often undisciplined) theory as well as by replacing ordered study with random books certainly hurts English departments.
Then is doomsday near! But your news is not true. I know a little something about English departments, & I can assure you they continue to teach literature—like, Shakespeare & everything. What a class the U. of Chicago’s “Introduction to Poetry” course would be if its syllabus consisted of de Man & Foucault! Or if it replaced “ordered study” with “random books”—& I wonder how you imagine this process takes place. Professors sit around with a pile of “random books”—engineering treatises, self-help manuals, astrology predictions, Living with Lupus—&, blindfolded, choose a number to teach from.
I find it often to be a bunch of assertions without discipline
Yes, Foucault & de Man, for instance, are closer to Glenn Beck than Wittgenstein. Those guys just spouted off all the time—no sense of rhetoric! Which is to say, just how “often” do you “find it”?
I think English departments need to prepare students for the real world too (beyond waiting tables), and this at minimum could be extensive education in grammar, composition, maybe senior-year teaching internships in secondary education.
This is closer to Guillory’s point, but I don’t see why you don’t extend its logic to the rise of theory.