The Humanistic Pretense of Not
Knowing
Despite its eloquence (or perhaps because of it), Marc
Bousquet’s essay for the Chronicle of
Higher Education will fail to
persuade people who discover bliss in orgasms of “moral panic” that they are in
denial of time and actuality. Most of
them have never heard of or read The
English Coalition Conference: Democracy
through Language (Urbana: NCTE, 1989) edited by Richard Lloyd-Jones and
Andrea A. Lunsford. Unless they happen to be English faculty members at the University
of Memphis, they have never heard and pondered over Professor Reginald Martin’s
strong, surgical argument about why the study of language and writing
(comp-rhet) is more compelling and pragmatic than the elitist playing that
marks traditional literary studies. While Martin’s almost three decade long argument
focuses on student needs, teaching as labor, and capitalist imperatives of job
markets, the recommendations that emerged from the 1987 conference promoted the
ideals of education (kindergarten to doctoral programs), the importance of
training American citizens to become critical thinkers, and the shared
authority of those who profess the language arts. In the years since the English Coalition
Conference, I have wondered when the Dream of the conference would explode like
a raisin into the Nightmare of global realities. Now I know.
-------------------
April
7, 2014
The Moral Panic in
Literary Studies
By
Marc Bousquet
Over the past two decades, most academic
disciplines have maintained the numbers of their tenure-track faculty members
or added minimally, while hiring a lot more non-tenure-track faculty members,
causing the percentage of tenurable professors to fall. But English literary
studies is one of the few disciplines to lose actual tenure-track positions,
not just as a percentage but in real numbers.
According to the most recent comprehensive report on staffing by the Modern Language Association and the Association of Departments of English, published in 2008, English lost 3,000 tenure-track positions from 1993 to 2004, roughly 10 percent of the total. Even that understates the case, since more than a third of the new tenurable hires have not been in traditional literary fields but in composition, rhetoric, theory, cultural studies, new media, and digital humanities. Combined with evidence of lowered public interest in reading traditional literature and plummeting enrollment in traditional English majors, many faculty members in traditional literary studies have engaged in a backlash discourse against the new or renascent fields, a "moral panic" in defense of traditional literary studies.
By far the most intense anxiety involves composition and rhetoric, which account for most of the new tenure-track hires. When the term "moral panic" emerged as a keyword of British cultural studies, in the 1960s, it was initially applied to individual outbreaks of irrational mass anxiety, such as those induced by youth culture, drug use, crime, immigration, sexual behavior, and so on. By the end of the last century, however, the sociologist Kenneth Thompson had argued that manipulative talk of crises was the defining feature of the era, which he dubbed "the age of moral panics."
Normally, panic discourse involves real or perceived threats to a group identified with some aspect of the dominant social order (such as literature faculty members facing the declining cultural capital of their work). Reacting with a disproportionate degree of hostility and resentment, the group generates scapegoats and fake solutions intended to maintain its power and influence in the status quo (such as literature faculty members’ embracing "alternate careers" for their doctoral students). As Jock Young and the late Stuart Hall put it, claims of crisis usually aim to whip up support for policing the perceived cause—often in expensive and draconian fashion, as in the "war on drugs."
Last year, at my institution, Emory University, the traditionally trained lit students typically received zero or one invitation to an MLA interview. Most didn’t even come close to winning campus interviews—much less tenure-track jobs—even coming from a top-25 program with support packages that rival those at Yale, Duke, and Stanford.
Some of the Emory students who eventually get tenure-track jobs do so after years of on-the-job retraining in comp-rhet, pedagogy, and new media, commonly in the Brittain Fellowship postdoctoral program, down the road at Georgia Tech. But since 2005, only two in five of those who graduated from Emory with Ph.D.’s in English have landed tenure-track jobs. The research university employing the most English Ph.D.’s from Emory is Emory itself—in staff positions.
One senior member of our English faculty took a look at this situation and published a response in the moral-panic genre, representing feelings widely held by his colleagues. By his account, literary studies is being "devalued and dismissed" as a result of English departments’ being "reconceived as being primarily
in
the business of teaching expository writing." Furthermore, he wrote,
there’s an insidious rush "to make literary studies an outpost of ‘digital
scholarship.’ "
Don’t ask me what that last part means, but it’s clear that the villains of the piece have spent their careers in rhetoric, composition, comparative media studies, and digital publication. The amazing thing about the panic at Emory? Most colleges like it have three to five graduate faculty members in those areas; Emory went a decade without even one, and it grudgingly broke that tradition only on the eve of accreditation and program review.
That a large percentage of tenure-track hires in English is consistently allocated to composition and rhetoric reflects the rational, reasonable, and growing interest in fields specializing in the conditions of textual production at a moment when textual production is undergoing the greatest shift since Gutenberg. More people are doing more kinds of composition than ever before, and they want to learn to do it better.
Scholars of composition and rhetoric generally teach graduate and upper-division courses packed with students who are passionate about the digital publication and media composition now inevitable in every walk of academic, professional, creative, and community-engaged communication. Comp-rhet scholarship and teaching have revived English studies, not diminished it. Programs featuring advanced writing and digital-publication curricula have soaring enrollments, often rescuing undergraduate and graduate English programs from extinction. Over the border in South Carolina, Clemson University has an active, interdisciplinary, but English-studies-based graduate program in rhetoric, communication, and information design. Its job-placement record: 100 percent.
In the past year or two, in meetings with English graduate faculty members and students at would-be top programs similar to ours, I’ve had innumerable conversations with otherwise rational but anxious people who consider those involved in the renaissance of comp-rhet or digital publication as dullards not good enough to read poetry, as lowbrow opportunists, or—worse—as saintly philanthropists who "should be appreciated for their love of teaching first-year writing."
Sometimes the discourse seems paranoid. Not long ago, a department administrator explained to me why he had declined to cooperate in a search that would have recruited some of the best young scholars in composition: "We just don’t want to hire any of those people who hate literature, who want to come here and tear everything down." Telling him that I’ve never met an actual comp-rhet scholar who hated literature—that most enjoy literature and sometimes teach it—wouldn’t shake his determination.
The odd thing is that one hears little informed discussion from the Modern Language Association or most of its elected leadership about the role of comp-rhet research faculty members in the revival of English majors, minors, and graduate programs.
The moral panic doesn’t exist in the hundreds of programs that have kept up with the changing conditions of textual production.
It has its home in programs that have had enough institutional power to keep themselves insulated from epochal change, the handful of graduate programs that have retained enough prestige and maintained their old-boy network sufficiently to keep placing most of their students. It also survives in places that, like Emory, had that kind of placement muscle a couple of decades ago.
If universities like mine are still offering doctorates in English 10 years from now, the programs won’t resemble the lit-only degrees at Yale or Columbia. They’ll emulate those at lower-ranked institutions that have more success in placing their students, like Clemson or the University of Pittsburgh, where English has tracks in media and comp-rhet, together with top research faculty members selected only for expertise in their fields, not loyalty to a pedagogy from the 1950s.
Marc Bousquet is an associate professor of
English at Emory University
-----------------
Bousquet’s blending of empirical and narrative forms of
evidence persuades me to value Martin’s prescience more highly than I did
before the coming of the 21st century and to thank Bousquet for his
wake-up call. Truth be told, there are hidden contradictions in the position I
embrace. I am a retired teacher of
English/American literature and composition, although I do still teach
literature at least two months each year in China. During my 42 years of
teaching at HBCUs, I never had the luxury of ignoring the centrality of
comp-rhet in my work. Now, I have the
luxury of enjoying literary studies with my Chinese students, of being
liberated from American nightmares by Chinese dreams. The contradictions are
located in my championing literary and cultural studies abroad and my nurturing
increasing disdain for elitist colleagues in the United States who engage in “moral
panic” as they complain that teaching the “underprepared” to write competently
is beneath their dignity. There is little that I can discern in their alleged
panic that is genuinely moral. On the contrary, the panic is virtually immoral.
It is really a selfish gesture of homo
rhetoricus rather than the anguished gesture homo seriosus would make.
The so-called panic
is an enterprise of ego, of fear of unemployment, of scorn for students who
reject the myths of “civilization.” It is pathetic that few Ph.D. programs tell
students bluntly that they are “The Help” in the global arena. I displace sympathy for those who are
discovering they are “The Help” with laughter. If that
makes me a bad cold-blooded person, I frankly do not give a damn. Now run and
deconstruct that!
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