The Job of the Humanities

            Four years into graduate school, I was having coffee with my dissertation advisor when an old friend happened by our table. When Phoebe heard I was pursuing a Ph.D in political science, she let out a big guffaw. “Wait,” I said, “it’s even worse. I’m doing my dissertation in political theory.”

“Well that was smart,” she countered slyly. “To get a job doing what?”

Lucky for me, I already had a job and Phoebe’s laughter was cut deliciously short.  “Phoebe is a labor organizer who hasn’t found Ph.Ds to be particularly helpful,” I explained to my advisor.

“Lots of smart people without a lot of know-how,” she said. “I don’t know why people bother.”

That was ten years ago. Were I on the job market today, Phoebe would be busting a gut. This is particularly true in the humanities (where political theory, an activity closer to philosophy than behavioral science, often resides). Over the past decade, the number of positions in the humanities has dropped precipitously. Undergraduates are pinning their sights on more practical degrees. It’s not just first generation college students who feel compelled to study Methods of Accounting, instead of Problems in Modernism. Anyone looking at a sizeable student loan wants some know-how to pay off those newly acquired smarts.

Yet, even as the classrooms in the Humanities were emptying out, graduate programs haven’t stopped churning out Ph.Ds. “It was plain,” writes Louis Menand in his recent book on American higher education, The Marketplace of Ideas,” that the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life.” Indeed, the backlog of Ph.Ds has become so severe that, even at a small liberal arts college in rural Vermont, it’s not unusual to receive upwards of 400 applications for a tenure-track position in Writing. A hundred applications for a one-year appointment in Philosophy has become commonplace. There are so many smart and capable people out there looking for a classroom in which to practice their hard-won expertise that positions formerly passed over are now eagerly pursued.

It’s easy to blame the research universities and their addiction to cheap labor for encouraging this out of touch supply curve. Anyone who attends a state university knows that graduate students constitute the bulk of the labor force. They come in with their brilliance and confidence, seduced by the glory of the professoriate, eager to do anything they can to win points with dissertation advisors, and to establish authority over undergraduates. They teach for a pittance, grateful for the opportunity to show the world, or at least an entering class of freshman, just how much they know about gender and ethnicity in 19^th century English literature. And while they hear that the job market is bleak, and that even their most promising peers aren’t getting any interviews at the Modern Language Association’s Annual Meeting, they persist on their chosen path. The universities aren’t exploiting these desperate graduate students. On the contrary, counter the administrations, we’re just giving these smart addicts an intellectual fix.

Whatever the cause, the effect of this academic imbalance is tragic.  A lot of very smart people who care deeply about beauty and books, ideas and their consequences, are finding themselves without a community, or at least without their intended community. They expected to be professors, to be just like their dissertation advisors, talking about important ideas in the company of other important thinkers. With no demand for their labor in the college classroom, what can they do? “If I don’t even get an interview at Pomona State,” I hear one say, “I’m throwing in the towel.”

But what does that mean? Is knowledge only useful at the podium or in the presence of undergraduates? I’m not so sure. Indeed, what this lousy job market is finally making perfectly clear is that American higher education needs to broaden its base. No longer can smartness be treated as if it were made of spun glass, as if it could be handled only by professionals wearing white gloves, who never guffaw in its presence. No longer can smartness afford to hide among the initiated and carefully groomed. In order to survive, these refined intellects need to find an audience with the masses. Wisdom needs a public.

As it turns out, wisdom is doing quite well with the public. Consider the popularity of the Teaching Company, a distributor of educational audio-courses, and the frequency which ordinary people visit the TED website, a storehouse for lectures on public issues. Here in Brattleboro, the elderly public pursues wisdom through the Osher Institute, the Episcopal public pursues knowledge at the church forum at St. Michael’s and the general public is informed through Wednesday night lectures at Brooks Memorial Library.

All around me, I see a demand to know more about the humanities, an abiding interest in what some would call “the soul of our culture.” People with time on their hands want to know where we’ve come from, who we’ve been, and what counts as good. The problem with the Ph.D. factories is that they took those human concerns and dressed them up in such technical garb that nobody could recognize the wisdom for the jargon.

So perhaps these lovers of books and beauty and ideas and their consequences will start to see other landing spots besides the undergraduate classroom, other places to build communities of wisdom. Perhaps the nightshift in a residential treatment center is a perfect place to teach Teresa of Avila. Maybe the local savings and loan is an ideal venue to talk about Kant’s categorical imperative. In order for this to seem possible, however, graduate schools need to spend less time on professionalization and more time thinking about the public. The public wants smartness as well. We intellectuals just need to be more creative at meeting that demand.

Do Tell

            This past weekend a momentous thing occurred in the history of war. The lame duck session of the United States Senate repealed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military. No longer would the curious and the queer have their conversations curtailed by formal repression. Now a service person might talk about his beloved using gender-specific terms.

Human rights activists saw DADT’s repeal as a “steppingstone to increase the civil rights of gays and lesbians.” Supporting senators justified the repeal of DADT as “enhancing national security and military readiness.” I found myself wondering, “What would Freud say?” 

According to Freud’s theory of war, people need “ideal motives” to mask our destructive urges. Idealism provides us with the justification for wide-scale destruction. We can’t say we’re going off to Afghanistan or Iraq because we want to kill people; that would be uncivilized. We can say we are fighting to protect national security. With the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, we can also say our military is open and affirming. Gay rights have joined the ranks of ideal motives.

Freud articulated this hypothesis in response to a letter from Albert Einstein in 1932. “Why war?” asked the brilliant physicist and Freud, not surprisingly, went straight to the unconscious. The destructive instinct, wrote Freud, “functions in every living being, striving to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter.” We cannot eradicate this instinct, says Freud. Either it turns inwards and we destroy ourselves or it is diverted elsewhere onto an external enemy.

Nations do this all the time, but we shouldn’t think they have a monopoly on the externalization of aggression. Social movements are equally at risk of being controlled by destructive forces. The Bolsheviks, observed Freud, claim they can eliminate human aggression by “insuring the satisfaction of material needs and enforcing equality between man and man.” But while they speak about universal brotherhood, “they busily perfect their armaments.” “Hatred of outsiders,” notes Freud, “is not the least of the factors of cohesion among themselves.”

Up until last weekend, hatred of gays was an official factor in military cohesion. You would think that hatred of the Bad Guys would be enough, but that has never been the case. Armies, like other groups of human beings, are rife with all sorts of anxieties. Members worry, Am I strong enough? Am I brave enough? Am I smart enough? Perhaps now, the officer won’t have to worry whether or not he appears straight enough, but I could imagine a new anxiety, “Am I tolerant enough?” Indeed, tolerance appears to be the most recent ideal motive for going in and blowing the Bad Guys to smithereens. I, myself, justified U.S. troops in Afghanistan because of Taliban cruelties towards women.

The relationship between the ideal motive and the destructive instinct is like that between the spring and the fountainhead. The fountainhead is shaped by idealism and the water spewing forth gives it power. In the past, the fountainhead looked fiercer, more imperial, more decidedly masculine. Nowadays, the statue wears a kinder face. It could be male or female, straight or gay. But just because its features are androgynous and its sexuality is undeclared doesn’t mean it isn’t relieving a powerful internal pressure. The gallons per minute are still fueled by an insatiable desire to destroy. At least, that’s what Freud said in 1932 in Vienna. He hadn’t even seen the worst of it yet.

Human beings, it turns out, are hard-wired to destroy. Either we destroy ourselves with the anxieties of self-hatred or we destroy others after projecting our weaknesses upon them. Still, Freud wasn’t without hope. Just because we can’t suppress our aggressive tendencies, doesn’t mean we are without options. “If the propensity for war be due to the destructive instinct, we have always its counter-agent, Eros, to our hand,” he concluded.  “All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve us as war’s antidote.” Freud explains that Eros references two types of love; one towards a beloved object (the subject matter of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) and the other that forms the basis of identification. “All that brings out the significant resemblances between men calls into play this feeling of community, identification.” The counter-agent to destruction, then, is love, both singular and communal.

If the destructive urge operates most effectively under the camouflage of ideal motives, the erotic urge, it would seem, should operate best when it reveals itself. For the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to have pacifist effect, we need a lot more asking and telling about love. No doubt, that’s what the senators had in mind when they found their super-majority. “Do Ask! Do Tell!” said the members of Congress, most of whom actually do know how destructive these endless wars are to our nation’s well-being.

Politicians traffic in ideal motives; that’s how they raise funds and bodies for the war effort. This occupational necessity creates a strategic problem. After so much manufacturing of noble reasons to kill strangers, it’s hard to believe them when they say we’ve killed enough.  But if our young men and women could just start talking more about Eros, maybe we could find a way out of this mess. Remind us of the beloved object, oh fighters of the world. Speak to us of your love.

            Of course, Eros could be co-opted by destructive urges. In that case, it would sound more like the claims of empires, offering peace under the banner of human rights. We must kill you, we would then say, because you don’t recognize the rights we bestow on our citizens. A kinder face, yes, but an equally insistent killing machine. Or we could speak of love and beauty, and why Ralph is the light of my world and how Fatima is the lamp of your soul and maybe, with all that love talk, another fountainhead would appear. One that preserves and produces life and gives those powerful underground urges some place lovely to go.

Subject or Slave

            It’s the end of the semester and I thought I might write a column about the evils of technology. “This machine,” a colleague recently said, pointing to the full-sized, flat-screened monitor on his desk, “takes up most of my time. When I first started teaching, I read books in my office. Now, I just check email.” Indeed, on my way back to my office I noticed three other faculty members hunched in front of computer screens. “Are you going to lunch?” I asked the history professor next door. “Let me just finish this email,” he said.

            “Have you noticed?” I asked him as we walked down the hill toward the Dining Hall. “The students aren’t checking their email.” He laughed, “Email is kind of passé,” he said and then mentioned other, more portable forms of communication. “I think it’s a form of resistance,” I persisted. “Look at us chained to our screens.” I imagined what the students might be doing when they weren’t checking their email.  “Maybe they’re on to something.”

            As I was developing my serious critique of email culture ­– how it kept us tied to our desks, shooting us questions that must get answered right away, forwarding other people’s hurried answers, and cc’ing us on questions that someone else had asked and answered ­– I was simultaneously participating in a highly productive on-line forum with members of the Writing Strange class. When I sat at my computer reading the forum posts, I didn’t feel chained to my desk. Rather, I felt like a member of a workshop. If responding to email felt like a chore, participating in the forum felt like putting on a play. Why was that?

            On a purely physical level, email and forums have quite a bit in common. Both activities cultivate poor posture. There I sit, my spine curved at the shoulders, my chin jutting out too far. But with email, I’ve noticed, my shoulders creep dangerously near my earlobes. There is nothing like finding forty or fifty new emails to send one’s shoulders skyward. I might as well be a legal secretary, as I was in the early 80s. “This shouldn’t take you too long,” said my boss handing over a tape cassette with the morning’s dictation. He meant, “I want it done before you go to lunch.” Forty letters later, my shoulders were screaming and my ears were ringing from the din raised by 90 wpm on an IBM Selectric.

Thirty years later, the noise problem has abated but the bosses have multiplied. Rather than a single man with a Dictaphone, there is a minion of correspondents demanding my keyboard skills. Like my lawyer boss, none of them need to articulate the deadline. Everyone knows that an email ignored in the first twenty-four hours will, quite likely, never be answered. To stay on top of the flow, we need to be prompt with our rejoinders, quick with our counterpoint. No wonder my colleagues and I are always running late for lunch.

            The on-line forum makes no such timely demands. We’ve structured it according to the type of project we’re engaged in. For the first half of the semester, we posted our work in either a story forum, an exegesis forum, or an argument forum. The technology allowed us to comment on each other’s work and, by commenting, we began to understand what each form called for. Midway through the semester, using a wiki document, we created a grading rubric that listed each skill we were developing and described the different levels of competency. “What does it look like to create an A-level exegesis?” we asked each other. “And what about collaboration?” asked a junior, “That should be part of our grade.”

            “Good idea,” I said, pulling up the existing wiki rubric on the screen. “What does it look like to do C-level collaboration? What does A-level look like?” As each student identified the distinguishing details, I typed the words into the pertinent square on the rubric. “Is everyone in agreement?” I asked, as we considered our collective assessment tool. “It’s a wiki document,” I reminded them. “You can always go on-line later and edit what we have.”

            As the semester went on, the forum began to operate as a parallel universe. More than a place to showcase our work, the forum became a space to think creatively about the very nature of our work. Indeed, many of the students began to use the forum as a site to reclaim their education. Ethan commented that, “when we, as a collective, wrote and re-wrote the rubric, [Meg] gave up both her capacity to punish and reward, and I picked up that responsibility for myself, as I assume each member of the class did. In grading, she can only act within the parameters we have given to her.” By explaining to us what the rubric exercise did, Ethan articulated the values of our parallel universe, a place where we all took responsibility for naming what made our work valuable.

            If the email produces servitude, the on-line forum produces subjectivity. Rather than rushing through the messages in my in-box before the next wave comes in, the on-line forum allows for time to think about what is being written. Unlike email, there is a finite number of producers. Because this finite number of producers are able to see what is being produced, we are also able to step back and consider how our efforts might be more valuable to us. With email, there is no parallel universe created, just more questions posed, more messages to reply to, more work to be done. The condition of slavery is the condition of working without deciding what work needs to be done. This new generation of technology users knows servitude when they see it. Luckily, there are other spaces available for us to do our work, spaces where there is enough time for us to decide what work is worthy of our keyboard skills.

           

           

The Politics of Help

            It’s the time of the year when word goes out to help the homeless, feed the destitute, and care for the children at risk. The need is great and, without volunteers, many people would go hungry. Without kind neighbors, shelters would stay closed and more people would be sleeping on the sidewalk. It’s up to each one of us, these posters and pamphlets say, to keep the poor alive.

            The fact that most of us seem to accept that poverty is something best addressed by well-meaning neighbors indicates just how accustomed we are to life in the post-welfare state. If there isn’t enough to go around, private citizens should take a shift at the local soup kitchen. If there aren’t enough shelters available, faith communities must be at fault. We seem to have forgotten that one of the key charges of government is to care for the nation’s poor.

            Thirty years ago, neo-liberal economists (many of whom were trained at the University of Chicago) convinced world leaders that civil society could take on more social responsibilities, leaving their administrations free to deal with more important matters, such as providing infrastructure for a growing economy and security to protect expanding wealth. In places like Chile, the Chicago Boys (as they were called) replaced industries that produced for a domestic market, such as textiles, with industries that produced for a global market, such as grapes.  During the time of massive restructuring, poverty rates in Chile climbed to 57 percent and unemployment in some urban neighborhoods hit 80 percent.

            The Chilean government’s response to these difficult social conditions was an all-out war on the population. Pinochet’s regime will go down in history as one of the more brutal forms of government, but he did prove the Chicago Boys right. During the 80’s, Chile experienced economic growth as high as 8 percent. But it wasn’t just Chile’s gross domestic product that was affected. By the time Pinochet was voted out of office, civil society had been adjusted enough that it no longer expected the government to solve social problems. As far as most Chileans were concerned, government did two things: reorganize the economy, and remove any one who disagrees. For anyone paying attention, it was also clear that these economic policies were producing wide-scale poverty.

            In the United States, the neo-liberal agenda may have been less brutal but the results were equally effective. Under Presidents Reagan, Bush, Sr. and Clinton, government cut back on social programs and increased spending on global markets and national security. As in Chile, globalization disrupted American domestic industries, such as textiles, leaving lots of unemployed textile workers to fend for themselves. The military provided some relief for the able-bodied, and strict drug laws took care of some of the surplus labor, yet there were still lots of people left out of the neo-liberal picture. Who would care for these people?

The Chicago Boys scratched their heads a bit and then replied, “Why, that could be civil society!” As government reduced social services, schools started instituting community service requirements and George Bush, Sr. called for a thousand points of light. We don’t need to provide basic services for the poor, said the proponents of neo-liberalism, now that we have this new army of volunteers.

The only problem with this model is that volunteers have a difficult time addressing what political scientists would call the structural forces of poverty. Soup kitchens and homeless shelters aren’t in a position to challenge neo-liberal demands for global markets and military security. Indeed, one could argue that all this emphasis on community service and volunteering is just what neo-liberal governments need. Volunteers tend to worry whether they are doing enough, whether they are giving enough. They forget to wonder what economic policies created this poverty. They stop looking to government to provide social services.

Anthropologist Julia Paley, who worked in Chile during its transition to democracy, noticed that, under the banner of civil society, Chileans were being tasked with the solving the problem of urban overcrowding, poor sanitation, and infectious diseases. On the one hand, this was a good thing, particularly when compared to the autocratic ways of the dictatorship, when poor communities were relocated at the whim of the military. On the other hand, participation “enabled the government to count on the support of citizens to provide social services no longer considered the responsibility of the state.” Paley noticed that the more community members took up those responsibilities, the less likely they were to complain about government policies. Participation, ironically, tended to have a quieting effect.

Before Chile was democratized, poor communities survived through ollas comunes, literally “common pots.” “Unlike soup kitchens in the United States,” reports Paley, “where volunteers or paid staff provide food and the poor receive it, these were cooperative endeavors between the people affected by hunger.” Rather than perpetuate the divide between the provider and the receiver, these Common Pots provided opportunities for all participants to be decision-makers. “Women,” notes Paley, “were central actors in these organizations.”

The advantage to the Common Pot model is that it produces political actors. Political actors are more likely to criticize policy decisions than volunteers (who tend to worry whether their contribution is enough) or recipients (who need to look sufficiently grateful). Unlike soup kitchens, cooperative endeavors cultivate people’s decision-making capabilities, not just their needs, and that’s just what neo-liberal governments don’t want. As more people affected by hunger begin speaking out against the structural forces of poverty, some of the Chicago’s brightest may have to go back to the drawing board.