1. Choose an entirely new set of service activities to invest myself in. I've been doing many of the same committees for years now; maybe it's time to take on something I wouldn't have considered even a few months ago.Something has to change...just not sure in what way yet.
2. Rid myself of interactions that bring me no peace or enjoyment.
3. Look for work elsewhere.
4. Spend more time exercising and less time in the office.
5. Double down on my own academic projects and let everything else take care of itself.
6. Resign myself to the way things "have to be."
To say that excessively specialized humanities scholarship today is irrelevant is not to say that the humanities are irrelevant. The humanities are that space in the university system where power does not have the last word, where truth and beauty as well as insight and eccentricity reign supreme and where young people come into contact with the great traditions, writing, and thinking that have made us whom we are today. The humanities introduce us to our ancestors and our forebears and acculturate students into their common heritage. It is in the humanities that we learn to judge the good from the bad and thus where we first encounter the basic moral facility for making judgments. It is because the humanities teach taste and judgment that they are absolutely essential to politics. It is even likely that the decline of politics today is profoundly connected to the corruption of the humanities."The corruption of the humanities?" This is where I would be likely to be looked at askance by some of my colleagues. I don't think there's any question that the disciplines of the humanities are in themselves the most worthy to be studied:
What unites culture and politics is that they are “both phenomena of the public world.” Judgment, the primary faculty of politics, is discovered, nurtured, and practiced in the world of culture and the judgment of taste. What the study of culture through the humanities offers, therefore, is an orientation towards a common world that is known and understood through a common sense. The humanities, Arendt argues, are crucial for the development and preservation of common sense—something that is unfortunately all-too-lacking in much humanities scholarship today.
What this means is that teaching the humanities is absolutely essential for politics—and as long as that is the case, there will be a rationale for residential colleges and universities. The mania for distance learning today is understandable. Education is, in many cases, too expensive. Much could be done more cheaply and efficiently at colleges. And this will happen. Colleges will, increasingly, bring computers and the internet into their curricula. But as powerful as the internet is, and as useful as it is as a replacement for passive learning in large lectures, it is not yet a substitute for face-to-face learning that takes place at a college or university. The learning that takes place in the hallways, offices, and dining halls when students live, eat, and breathe their coursework over four years is simply fundamentally different from taking a course online in one’s free time. As exciting as technology is, it is important to remember that education is, at its best, not about transmitting information but about inspiring thinking.Sadly, most of my colleagues would take the above as an ideological attack aimed at their chosen disciplines/values/etc. As long as this kind of critique is seen as a kind of anti-intellectual demagoguery (I have heard similar critiques--and their authors--be summarily dismissed with just this language), the necessary adjustments (and I do believe they are utterly necessary) will not take place until the market forces our hand--which it may have already done, given the kind of conversations I hear when the state secondary and higher ed curricula come up.
The focus on pedagogy is a mistake and comes from the basic flawed assumption that the problem with the humanities is that the professors aren’t good communicators. It may be true that professors communicate poorly, but the real problem is deeper. If generations of secondary school teachers trained in pedagogy have taught us anything, it is that pedagogical teaching is not useful. Authority in the classroom comes from knowledge and insight, not from pedagogical techniques or theories.
The pressing issue is less pedagogy than the fact that what most professors know is so specialized as to be irrelevant. What is needed is not better pedagogical training, but a more broad and erudite training, one that focuses less on original research and academic publishing and instead demands reading widely and writing for an educated yet popular audience. What we need, in other words, are academics who read widely with excitement and inspiration and speak to the interested public.The critique he levels against "pedagogical" thinking is apt, I think. My experience has been that while some of my students who focus on Education are quite bright, the qualities they bring to the classroom (when and if they become teachers) will have very little to do with the theories they know (especially that blasted "Bloom's Taxonomy" which is apparently gospel) and much more to do with the actual things they know--how much and widely they have read, how intellectually curious they are, how carefully they are able to analyze not only their own thinking and writing but that of others. Conversely, I have observed many colleagues both in graduate school and later--and there were some whose teaching could not be saved, yea, even by years of workshops on classroom management techniques.
More professors should be blogging and writing in public-interest journals. They should be reviewing literature rather than each other’s books and, shockingly, they should be writing fewer academic monographs.
To say that the humanities should engage the world does not mean that the humanities should be politicized. The politicization of the humanities has shorn them of their authority and their claim to being true or beautiful. Humanities scholarship can only serve as a incubator for judgment when it is independent from social and political interests. But political independence is not the same as political sterility. Humanities scholarship can, and must, teach us to see and know our world as it is.
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: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.
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.
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.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.
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.
The higher-education bubble has been inflating for decades, and it’s ready to burst, or at least deflate. That’s because many Americans are realizing that the huge cost of college is often a waste. Whereas college degrees used to be regarded as sure-fire investments, the labor market has become glutted with people who have been to college but can’t find “good” jobs.(link)
Did you know that 22 percent of customer-sales representatives and 16 percent of bartenders have bachelor’s degrees?
Furthermore, at many schools, academic standards have fallen to the point where students can coast through without learning anything worthwhile. As University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds recently wrote, “The higher education bubble isn’t bursting because of a shortage of money. It is bursting because of a shortage of value.”
As a result, many students and parents are looking for less expensive, more effective alternatives to the traditional degree. They’re finding plenty of new options with online courses and independent certification of competencies, such as ACT’s National Career Readiness Certificates.
This educational revolution will transform higher education for the better as people shop for good value for their education dollars rather than robotically enrolling in a college, taking its courses and paying its bills.
During the bubble, colleges could get away with offering lots of courses that met a standard that former Indiana University English professor Murray Sperber characterizes as “the faculty/student nonaggression pact.” That is, the professor didn’t demand much of the students and gave high grades; in return, the students didn’t expect much from the professor, who wanted time for academic research projects.
The students were happy: Who complains about courses with high grades but little work? The professors were happy, and the administrators were happy because students getting good grades typically don’t gripe or, more important, drop out.
But courses in which students just go through the motions without learning anything are a waste of time and money.
The good news is that in the new higher-education world, courses like that will be jettisoned. Like dieters giving up doughnuts in favor of more nutritious, low-calorie foods, college consumers will look for affordable courses that lead to demonstrable educational gains.
The housecleaning in higher education also will sweep out lots of courses that exist only because professors like to teach them. Such courses typically focus on narrow, trendy or highly political subjects that interest the professor. For example, students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, can take “The Psychology of Clothes: Motivations for Dressing Up and Dressing Down.” In the new era of value consciousness, such boutique courses will be culled out.
Not only will boutique courses go, but professors will be required to do more of something many dislike and avoid as much as possible: Work with students.
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