Humanities for All, or None?

Sharon O'Dair
University of Alabama
 

The title of this session--Humanities Futures--calls to mind the speculation that goes on in Chicago's commodity exchanges. To speculate on the humanities--or on pork bellies or live cattle--is far riskier than to speculate on corporations at, say, the New York Stock Exchange. Unlike at the NYSE, the speculation that goes on at the commodity exchanges affects the lives of individual producers, just as speculation about the humanities affects--or might affect--the lives of individual producers of knowledge, humanists.

Not wishing to belabor the analogy, I'll speak no more of the bellies of hogs. Still, in making the analogy I have invoked another that is made much more regularly these days in talk about "humanities futures": that is, the "corporatization of the university." Just to cite the most recent in my reading, Cary Nelson writes in the minnesota review (12/98) that "as UPS workers in the summer of 1997 took up the struggle to gain some control over their segment of American work, a number of us in higher education realized it could be a story about us as well" (249). Perhaps, and yet "could be" is not much of a claim; almost anything "could be" and thinking so is precisely the mistake Wendy Darling made when Peter Pan appeared at her window. Indeed, as we try to comprehend the social pressures affecting our institutions and ourselves, I cannot help but wonder how accurate it is to conceptualize the issue by invoking this analogy.

To address this question, it is necessary to describe the most pressing structural problem for higher education: its expansion to the point of universality. Almost 30 years ago, Martin Trow published some "Reflections on the Transition from Mass to Universal Higher Education." Almost 30 years ago, I began to reflect on that transition, as I sat in a lecture hall at Reed College and listened to John Pock profess sociology. Revered and beloved, Pock was also an intimidating presence in the classroom: sporting a crew-cut was as significant as the Parsonian functionalism he espoused, and he looked generally as if he could take out an opponent physically as well as intellectually. "He was intellectually tough and demanded the same of students," says one ex-student, now a professional demographer, who knows as well that this "tough-mindedness [has lost] its appeal in the context of today's changed, if not correct, sensibilities." I was a mere freshman and was surprised and discomfited when one day Pock concluded a lecture by mocking our pretensions and aspirations: "after all," he bellowed, "the Bachelor's Degree you seek is now the functional equivalent of your parents' high school diploma. It means just about as much."

Not much later, I recognized the validity of Pock's assertion. And now as a tenured Professor of English, I recognize and verify it every day through anecdote or statistics, e.g., percentages of students who require remedial instruction in basic skills upon matriculation; reports of students who receive degrees but cannot write an intelligible essay; the fact that both my mother (who left school at 16 in 1927) and her daughter (who left school at 18 in 1947) write and think better, with more fluency, than do most of the students in my junior-level courses at a flagship state university.

All of this--and more--is well-known or should be, and though it is part of my subject here, I want to approach it by turning Pock's assertion on him or, more sadly and accurately, on us: if the bachelor's degree is the functional equivalent of the high school diploma, then what does that make us?

Although promoted in the name of democracy and equal opportunity, the post-war expansion of higher education was not implemented in ways that might actually achieve either of those goals. It has produced the credential inflation described by Pock in his lecture or by Randall Collins in The Credential Society (1979) and has resulted in a system of higher education that is vastly more unfair and unequal than ever before. Furthermore, it threatens to make us--or a lot of us--into the functional equivalent of high school teachers.

If we must invoke a metaphor to describe the state of the humanities or of higher education generally, then "highschoolification" is as appropriate and perhaps more appropriate than "corporatization"--although I will admit it is less sexy and elegant. "Highschoolification" explains many of the problems we face better than does "corporatization." For example,

1) the pre-packaging or commodification of knowledge in standardized syllabi, textbooks, and other teaching tools such as video, cd-roms, and software programs.

2) the inclusion of courses in pedagogy as part of study for the doctorate.

3) grade inflation.

4) so-called "downsizing" or the turn toward employing adjunct professors and part-timers to staff lower division courses. If lower division courses are effectively remedial, offering instruction in algebra or the workings of the subordinate clause, then the instructor need not, and probably should not, be a person who holds a Ph.D. from Yale or Stanford. Those who teach such material are in fact highly substitutable, like high school teachers.

5) bored students who, in Mark Edmundson's words, think a liberal education is useful as, at best, "lite entertainment." Trow predicted this situation in his essay, cited above: to the extent that higher education becomes increasingly mandatory, "colleges begin to resemble elementary and secondary schools, where it has long been recognized that compulsory attendance increases problems of student motivation, boredom, and the maintenance of order."

6) the transformation of the curriculum into a series of electives in an attempt to counteract the boredom described above. In my department, reform of the curriculum in the direction of Edmundson's (or Edward Said's) ahistorical smorgasbord was initiated not by "corporate administrators" intent on pleasing "customers" nor by students demanding their rights as "consumers" but by faculty intent on pleasing themselves--e.g., to demonstrate their hipness or their correctness, to indulge their own intellectual preferences, or to avoid the hordes of bored students.

7) increased calls for unionization. By far, most union members in this country operate in the public not the private sector. Only 9.7% of workers in the private sector belong to unions; in the public sector the number is 37.2%, which includes, of course, the major teachers' unions. Nelson's invocation of UPS, cited above, is absurd as well as misleading.

Analogies are imperfect comparisons and always potentially misleading, always potentially ideologically loaded. I have sketched out a number of reasons why I think "highschoolification" speculates better about "humanities futures" than does "corporatization." In concluding my paper, I will speculate about why Left humanists prefer the latter analogy and why doing so is a serious mistake for those who wish to insure a future for the humanities and for humanists.