"Any which way you care to look at them, the humanities in the United
States are in radical, sharp decline. The number of history students is
down about 45 per cent since 2007, the number of English students has
halved since the late 1990s." . . .
"The most common response to the humanities crisis at the MLA was lament.
At the many, many panels devoted to decline that I attended, many, many
academics bemoaned their state, confessing to profound spasms of guilt
and despair, and exploring 'the larger cultural devaluation of the
humanities'." . . .
"As the humanities decline in the United States, the country is losing
the craft of understanding, losing its capacity for citizenship. Even
educated people are increasingly unable and unwilling to distinguish
between fake and real information, becoming a community that cannot
understand itself as anything more than a circulation of figures.
Self-righteousness takes the place of substantive discussion. Narcissism
and outrage become the dominant techniques of self-definition. And the
cure for all these problems is the same: read widely, read deeply, read."
The full article, "Back in the MLA" by Stephen Marche, is at the TLS website here.
"Outsiders tend to believe the cliché about humanities professors, that they indoctrinate students in cultural Marxism and multiculturalism and radical feminism. They are not entirely wrong."
ReplyDeleteAs someone who was a tenured English professor for many years, and took a buyout in 2016, I can assure readers that the "outsiders" are, indeed, "not entirely wrong."
The article continues, "Self-righteousness takes the place of substantive discussion. Narcissism and outrage become the dominant techniques of self-definition. And the cure for all these problems is the same: read widely, read deeply, read."
Self-righteousness and narcissism are *acquired* by many who enroll in humanities courses. Take recent high school graduates who want to read great books and, instead,indoctrinate them in the so-called "lenses" of literary theory (which are always leftist), so that they are compelled to read (a few) old books not for the wisdom and beauty that just might be there, but as specimens to be subjected to the "hermeneutic of suspicion," and make the students carry with them, into their reading, the notions of Marx, Lacan, &c. -- and they are indeed likely to become political narcissists rather than people truly enriched by the legacy.
A year before I took my buyout, I had an instructive conversation with a recent MA who had joined our little English faculty. She dismissed a list of classic works that I distributed, at the beginning of the semester, to my literature students: "white male patriarchy."
Well, you can look at this deplorable list for yourself here:
http://www.wcdrutgers.net/complist.pdf
The academy has been criticized for years for this kind of politicization and it has not repented, so people who care about literature need to just walk away. Let the English departments starve to death, if that's what it takes. The books are still there. Good editions are available for a few dollars. You don't absolutely have to have a professor. Find, or start, a community reading group, as I did, and read the books. We went 11 years and read a lot of the English classics -- outside of class, bypassing politics and credits. This group was more stimulating than the classroom.
As C. S. Lewis said in a somewhat different context, "The establishment must die and rot."
Dale Nelson