A Crisis of Confidence, Vol. 8

What I have been trying to do these past few weeks, as I've written my way through some pretty difficult personal and intellectual problems, is chart out a course for the next few years. Up until this point, there have been some pretty significant markers of progress--objectives that had to be hit.  I had to earn each degree--B.A., M.A., Ph.D.  I had to earn a job and then earn tenure and promotion at that job.  Now that I am tenured . . . what, exactly?

The usual answer is publish.  But I am forced to admit that I don't see it happening--not only because I'm frankly not smart or focused enough to put together a book, but I'm not sure I believe in the degree-book-tenure-book pattern taught to me by my beloved mentors at UNC.  The other day, I stumbled across this article, which seems to encapsulate a lot of what I've been thinking.  Here are some excerpts:

Railing against college professors has become a common pastime, one practiced almost exclusively by those who have been taught and mentored by those who are now being criticized. It is thus only fair to say upfront that college education in the United States is, in spite of its myriad flaws, still of incredible value and meaning to tens if not hundreds of thousands of students every year.

That said, too much of what our faculties teach is neither interesting nor wanted by our students. This is a point that Jacques Berlinerblau makes in a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Observers of gentrification like to draw a distinction between needs and wants. Residents in an emerging neighborhood need dry cleaners, but it’s wine bars they really want. The application of that insight to the humanities leads me to an unhappy conclusion: Our students, and the educated public at large, neither want us nor need us.

What is amazing is that not only do our students not want what we offer, but neither do our colleagues. It is an amazing and staggering truth that much of what academics write and publish is rarely, if ever, read. And if you want to really experience the problem, attend an academic conference some day, where you will see panels of scholars presenting their work, sometimes to one or two audience members. According to Berlinerblau, the average audience at academic conference panels is 14 persons.

I am under no illusions about the importance of the things I study.  I do find them interesting and even valuable to my understanding of the way rhetoric is employed in political, religious, and literary contexts in the Tudor and Stuart eras in England.  I am well trained enough to extrapolate points to other periods and contexts as well.  I think the rigor of what I study helps me be more rigorous as a thinker and as a professor (i.e., teacher).  However, I know that a book published on the things I study, assuming I could produce such a thing, would not be what anyone actually needs.

While there are exceptions, little original research is left to do in most fields of the humanities. Few important books are published each year. The vast majority are as derivative as they are unnecessary. We would all do well to read and think about the few important books (obviously there will be some disagreement and divergent schools) than to spend our time trying to establish our expertise by commenting on some small part of those books.

The result of the academic imperative of publish or perish is the increasing specialization that leads to the knowing more and more about less and less. This is the source of the irrelevance of much of humanities scholarship today.

As Hannah Arendt wrote 50 years ago in her essay On Violence, humanities scholars today are better served by being learned and erudite than by seeking to do original research by uncovering some new or forgotten scrap. While such finds can be interesting, they are exceedingly rare and largely insignificant.

As a result—and it is hard to hear for many in the scholarly community—we simply don’t need 200 medieval scholars in the United States or 300 Rawlsians or 400 Biblical scholars. It is important that Chaucer and Nietzsche are taught to university students, but the idea that every college and university needs a Chaucer and a Nietzsche scholar to teach Chaucer and Nietzsche is simply wrong. We should, of course, continue to support scholars, those whose work is to some extent scholarly innovative. But more needed are well-read and thoughtful teachers who can teach widely and write for a general audience.

There's plenty more in the article which, for the sake of space and in order to not weary my reader, I will save for another related post.  Still, this strikes me personally because I see so many colleagues and former classmates publishing wonderful stuff, and I greatly admire the work of my graduate school mentors.  I wonder why I cannot contribute in the ways they have, but almost immediately have to ask myself if anything I would write would in fact be a contribution.  Does this mean that I am a small-potatoes teacher in a small-potatoes college and must resign myself to that?  I have been able to tell myself that this position I am currently in, though it doesn't realistically allow for serious research or "scholarly" development, does fit my introverted personality and unwillingness to aggressively market myself.  It fits my service-oriented outlook.  I have told myself that because I am good at teaching, and because that teaching  (at least in the way I do it) is an important work, I should be satisfied with where I am and what I'm doing . . . and what the prospects appear to be.

Unfortunately, I'm losing confidence in all those things.