Mar 21, 2021 04:40 AM
(This post was last modified: Mar 21, 2021 06:16 PM by C C.)
sub-category: Academic Community
https://www.chronicle.com/article/social...en_sign_in
EXCERPT: . . . This incident reveals two convergent trends that will continue to shape the future of the humanities and social sciences. The first is an increasing emphasis on social justice as the raison d’être of scholarship and teaching. The second is a further ratcheting up of austerity in an area of higher ed that has been decimated by budget cuts ever since the 2008 recession.
[...] since almost all U.S. universities have lately declared their commitment to righting historical wrongs, departments that focus on this goal might be well-positioned to pressure administrators to support their efforts with faculty lines, curriculum grants, and so on. ... But it’s not difficult to see how political goals and the new austerity might be on a collision course.
The radical renovation of the field that the Chicago English faculty calls for would involve transforming curricula, reorienting scholarship, and redressing the underrepresentation of minorities on the faculty. This will require considerable resources. In the latter case, in particular, it will likely necessitate both new faculty positions and Ph.D. programs dedicating greater effort and funding to expanding the pools from which they recruit potential students. Given the bleak financial panorama universities are currently contemplating, this looks increasingly improbable...
[...] How are humanities disciplines pushing back against the existential threats they face? Obviously, one can find a variety of arguments against cutbacks and the devaluation of humanistic study. On the other hand, faculty members within these fields sometimes make what looks like a case against their own value. For example, the Chicago announcement states that “English as a discipline has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction, and anti-Blackness.” Those who make funding decisions might well ask why such a discipline deserves to continue existing.
In another contracting discipline, anthropology, a celebrated paper published in the field’s flagship journal last year offered “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn.” Like the Chicago English faculty, the author faults his discipline for a multitude of injustices. Meanwhile, without noting any contradiction, he denounces the “university bureaucrats” who “cancel tenure-track faculty lines, defund graduate programs, and shutter anthropology departments as cost-saving measures driven by the marketization of higher education.” Why shouldn’t they, if the field’s own brightest young minds want to “let it burn?” (The author helpfully explains that “the case for letting anthropology burn entails a call to abandon its liberal suppositions,” but a title expressing this rather more modest aim would surely have received less attention.)
Such attacks on their own disciplinary foundations have been valorized within humanities and some social-sciences fields for some time. (Already in 1993, a tenured literature professor published a disciplinary manifesto entitled Against Literature.) Yet when these disciplines argue publicly against cuts, they revert to far more tepid rhetoric. Last August, an open letter entitled “Covid-19 and the Key Role of the Humanities and Social Sciences in the United States” was posted online, with signatures from the heads of all of the relevant learned societies and professional associations. The letter proclaims “the vital contribution made by the humanities and social sciences to the public good.” The authors are evidently not referring to a radically transformed future version of these disciplines: they describe themselves as “stewards of humanistic scholarship” and cite the need to “sustain the centrality of humanistic studies.”
This disjunction between inward-facing and outward-facing rhetoric is also not new, as Bill Readings describes in his 1996 book The University in Ruins. For Readings, an uncertainty about both the place of humanistic scholarship within the university and the university’s place within society has led to an “impasse between militant radicalism and cynical despair” that afflicts humanities scholars like himself. In “militant” mode, they may propose radical overhauls of their own fields of study; but in “despairing” mode, holding onto what they have is paramount, so they pay lip service to the traditional humanistic values they might otherwise denounce, not out of any conviction but for lack of any other available justification that might be seen as valid in external contexts.
[...] The moral emphasis on social justice in humanistic scholarship might be viewed as an effort to reassert substantive values against the “corporate bureaucracy” that the university has become. But this contestation will ultimately prove illusory. The faculty members and departments pursuing these causes are also obligated to operate as market actors procuring resources in a hypercompetitive environment. As a result, their rhetoric is still subject to neutralization by the corporate university. This is even more obviously the case now that many presidents, provosts, and deans have embraced the discourse of social-justice. Full-throated commitment to political causes is now a means by which colleges compete for publicity, prestige, and grants. And if support for these causes is integrated into the university’s proclaimed mission, departments that emphasize them lose their distinct value proposition.
Some years back, the journalist Jon Schwarz proposed what he called the “Iron Law of Institutions.” This law states that “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.” As a result, “they would rather the institution ‘fail’ while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to ‘succeed’ if that requires them to lose power within the institution.”
Political radicalism, up to and including the apparent repudiation of one’s own field of study, functions as a market signal within the reigning value system of the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, in hypercompetitive academic fields whose material resources are vanishing, anti-institutional rhetoric has become one of the most successful stratagems for individual advancement. Such rhetoric, however, also tends to weaken the fields’ public and institutional standing. This is why, as anyone familiar with them has likely observed, bomb-throwing radicals turn into humdrum humanists when they need to make the case for why their departments should still be funded. But the conjunction of the pandemic’s fallout with the longer-term trajectory of decline may push this contradiction past the point where it can be sustained... (MORE - details)
https://www.chronicle.com/article/social...en_sign_in
EXCERPT: . . . This incident reveals two convergent trends that will continue to shape the future of the humanities and social sciences. The first is an increasing emphasis on social justice as the raison d’être of scholarship and teaching. The second is a further ratcheting up of austerity in an area of higher ed that has been decimated by budget cuts ever since the 2008 recession.
[...] since almost all U.S. universities have lately declared their commitment to righting historical wrongs, departments that focus on this goal might be well-positioned to pressure administrators to support their efforts with faculty lines, curriculum grants, and so on. ... But it’s not difficult to see how political goals and the new austerity might be on a collision course.
The radical renovation of the field that the Chicago English faculty calls for would involve transforming curricula, reorienting scholarship, and redressing the underrepresentation of minorities on the faculty. This will require considerable resources. In the latter case, in particular, it will likely necessitate both new faculty positions and Ph.D. programs dedicating greater effort and funding to expanding the pools from which they recruit potential students. Given the bleak financial panorama universities are currently contemplating, this looks increasingly improbable...
[...] How are humanities disciplines pushing back against the existential threats they face? Obviously, one can find a variety of arguments against cutbacks and the devaluation of humanistic study. On the other hand, faculty members within these fields sometimes make what looks like a case against their own value. For example, the Chicago announcement states that “English as a discipline has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction, and anti-Blackness.” Those who make funding decisions might well ask why such a discipline deserves to continue existing.
In another contracting discipline, anthropology, a celebrated paper published in the field’s flagship journal last year offered “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn.” Like the Chicago English faculty, the author faults his discipline for a multitude of injustices. Meanwhile, without noting any contradiction, he denounces the “university bureaucrats” who “cancel tenure-track faculty lines, defund graduate programs, and shutter anthropology departments as cost-saving measures driven by the marketization of higher education.” Why shouldn’t they, if the field’s own brightest young minds want to “let it burn?” (The author helpfully explains that “the case for letting anthropology burn entails a call to abandon its liberal suppositions,” but a title expressing this rather more modest aim would surely have received less attention.)
Such attacks on their own disciplinary foundations have been valorized within humanities and some social-sciences fields for some time. (Already in 1993, a tenured literature professor published a disciplinary manifesto entitled Against Literature.) Yet when these disciplines argue publicly against cuts, they revert to far more tepid rhetoric. Last August, an open letter entitled “Covid-19 and the Key Role of the Humanities and Social Sciences in the United States” was posted online, with signatures from the heads of all of the relevant learned societies and professional associations. The letter proclaims “the vital contribution made by the humanities and social sciences to the public good.” The authors are evidently not referring to a radically transformed future version of these disciplines: they describe themselves as “stewards of humanistic scholarship” and cite the need to “sustain the centrality of humanistic studies.”
This disjunction between inward-facing and outward-facing rhetoric is also not new, as Bill Readings describes in his 1996 book The University in Ruins. For Readings, an uncertainty about both the place of humanistic scholarship within the university and the university’s place within society has led to an “impasse between militant radicalism and cynical despair” that afflicts humanities scholars like himself. In “militant” mode, they may propose radical overhauls of their own fields of study; but in “despairing” mode, holding onto what they have is paramount, so they pay lip service to the traditional humanistic values they might otherwise denounce, not out of any conviction but for lack of any other available justification that might be seen as valid in external contexts.
[...] The moral emphasis on social justice in humanistic scholarship might be viewed as an effort to reassert substantive values against the “corporate bureaucracy” that the university has become. But this contestation will ultimately prove illusory. The faculty members and departments pursuing these causes are also obligated to operate as market actors procuring resources in a hypercompetitive environment. As a result, their rhetoric is still subject to neutralization by the corporate university. This is even more obviously the case now that many presidents, provosts, and deans have embraced the discourse of social-justice. Full-throated commitment to political causes is now a means by which colleges compete for publicity, prestige, and grants. And if support for these causes is integrated into the university’s proclaimed mission, departments that emphasize them lose their distinct value proposition.
Some years back, the journalist Jon Schwarz proposed what he called the “Iron Law of Institutions.” This law states that “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.” As a result, “they would rather the institution ‘fail’ while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to ‘succeed’ if that requires them to lose power within the institution.”
Political radicalism, up to and including the apparent repudiation of one’s own field of study, functions as a market signal within the reigning value system of the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, in hypercompetitive academic fields whose material resources are vanishing, anti-institutional rhetoric has become one of the most successful stratagems for individual advancement. Such rhetoric, however, also tends to weaken the fields’ public and institutional standing. This is why, as anyone familiar with them has likely observed, bomb-throwing radicals turn into humdrum humanists when they need to make the case for why their departments should still be funded. But the conjunction of the pandemic’s fallout with the longer-term trajectory of decline may push this contradiction past the point where it can be sustained... (MORE - details)