Back in the MLA
Stephen Marche, a survivor of academia, returns to a troubled field
The distinct stench of decaying sense floated over the Hyatt Regency during the Modern Language Association annual convention in Chicago this year. For me, the smell was oddly reminiscent. I left a secure job as an English academic for the wilderness of writing more than ten years ago. Going back to academia was a bit like going back to the old hometown that has fallen on hard times: it’s mostly the same people, they’re just older. The town drunk’s still there. The local restaurant’s lousier than you remember. Of the friends who stayed, some have flourished, others look battered. But, of course, I don’t live there anymore so its problems aren’t really mine. And what problems. The MLA this year took, as its principal subject, the death of its own significance.
Any which way you care to look at them, the humanities in the United States are in radical, sharp decline. The number of history students is down about 45 per cent since 2007, the number of English students has halved since the late 1990s. The job market is uncoupled from the number of PhDs granted. One professor at the 134th MLA convention in January asked us to imagine an MA seminar with eight students in it. Of those eight, four will drop out, two will go on to complete PhDs and then find work outside academia, one will suffer as a short-contract academic worker, and the last will find work as a traditional tenured faculty member.
The institutions know how much trouble they are in. They even sort of know why. An ad hoc report from the Association of Departments of English in July 2018 offered torrents of explanation: “the radical downturn in the United States economy beginning in 2007–08, and, more generally, the rising personal cost of (and declining public support for) higher education, which together put pressure on students to value higher education for the employment prospects it produced”. That was just the beginning, the stuff they noticed first. But the problem goes far beyond intramural matters. “Other cultural factors were at work, too – among them the national decline in leisure reading and the saturation of culture by electronic media.” That’s an elaborate way of saying the rug has been pulled out from under a whole scheme of meaning.
For graduate students entering the marketplace, like the one I spoke to in the evenings during the course of the MLA, the present condition of academia feels like personal climate change, a terminal career illness. (For reasons that will become obvious she has decided to remain anonymous.) “In academia, we’re just waiting for all the shoes to drop”, she says. She’s at the MLA to attend a programme that helps graduates of humanities doctoral programmes find non-academic jobs. That’s how bad things are. Out of compassion, the profession is trying to help its products escape the clutches of its own industry. Naturally, they have come up with a neat piece of jargon for these alternatives to academia: the alt-ac track.
The most common response to the humanities crisis at the MLA was lament. At the many, many panels devoted to decline that I attended, many, many academics bemoaned their state, confessing to profound spasms of guilt and despair, and exploring “the larger cultural devaluation of the humanities”. But in a way they revel in their irrelevance. I attended a special session called “Game the Name: Crafting the title of your book or dissertation”, led by Professor Wendy Belcher of Princeton. The session’s description made a startling claim: “Your book’s title is the only part of your book that most scholars will read”. Which is both correct and insane. This is a profession in which people write whole books to have the titles appear on job applications. The measure of a title’s value is the number of times it is cited. Titles with colons are cited more regularly. Titles with question marks are cited less regularly. You want searchable keywords in your titles: periods rather than dates, topics rather than abstractions. Puns and unclear allusions are to be avoided.
Things are so desperate that a few academics are even considering change. Peter Kalliney, from the University of Kentucky, proposed a plan he had been imposing on his own department: “Fun, effective courses to non-majors” is “the way to the major”. What if you taught courses, in other words, that people wanted to take? At his department, Kalliney insisted on “a few strategic new courses in growth areas” – creative writing, film, mythology – and insisted, most radically, on senior faculty members teaching the most popular courses. This is the exact opposite of what is typically done, where senior academics toddle around their specialist subject among the upper years, while overworked contract staff slug it out in the trenches with the masses who have to take classes. Instead, why not have the best-paid, most experienced teachers teach students who need to be convinced of the value of literature?
The current state of the humanities can be found in the juxtaposition of these two sessions. First, academics devote their lives to writing things they know that nobody will ever read, then they gnash their teeth about why nobody cares about what they do.
In one of the more desperate pleas for relevance, the MLA introduced a session called “Humanities in Five” at this year’s conference. “Scholars from multiple fields present five-minute descriptions of their work in accessible languages”, the description read. “Chicago journalists serve as judges. The goal is to offer models for sharing work in the humanities with the general public.” The event itself, in a sparsely populated ballroom, had the painful incompetence of people doing stand-up for the first time. The professors reverted to the standard lecture speak and their weird fascinations: the trade in ivory between Zanzibar and Connecticut, the influence of Jewish conversos on early Jesuit writings, applying Bourdieu’s theories to YSL’s India collection from the 1970s. One of the scholars lost the ability to speak for fifteen seconds. Somebody played the blues harmonica, which is never a good sign.
Outsiders tend to believe the cliché about humanities professors, that they indoctrinate students in cultural Marxism and multiculturalism and radical feminism. They are not entirely wrong. But what they don’t understand is that the ostentatious left-wing politics of academia is camouflage for a deeply conservative way of life. The closest analogue to the humanities as it currently functions is the Anglican Church in the nineteenth century. The Church had vicars and it had curates then, and it divided its young people into these two streams. Vicars were propertied, lived in the major centres, acceded eventually to the responsibilities of administration. The curates were poor, and worked for an annual salary, and lived in the sticks. The humanities in the United States works the same way, with tenured faculty paid six figures to think, and the contingent faculty paid a few thousand a course on a contract basis. Since the published work, what supposedly distinguishes these two streams, explicitly has value only inside the system, connections are the sole determinant of value. The difference between a comfortable living and scratching by is patronage, in academia as in the nineteenth-century Church.
The piety of academia – its radical front of social justice – takes place in the context of massive inequities and supremely vulnerable young people. “You can divorce your husband any time you want, you can’t divorce your supervisor … They make you. They break you.” Academia systematically turns students into courtiers. “The patronage is out of control. The kneeling and kissing the ring of the master and all that”, said my source. “How do you act? How do you dress? You don’t want to offend anyone. When do I email? When do I not? How do I ask for things?” It’s a gruelling business of attending approval from a minuscule and disconnected body of people.
This way of life is stunting. The anecdotal rule of thumb is, for every year a person spends in graduate school, subtract two years from his or her emotional age. So, if you meet a thirty-year-old who has spent four years in grad school, she will speak and act like a twenty-two-year-old. If you meet a twenty-seven-year-old man who went straight into graduate school, he will behave like a seventeen-year-old. The cloistered interiorizing logic of the system makes life outside seem halfway impossible. From the outside, “academic prestige” as an idea is completely ludicrous. From within, nothing could be more in earnest. Thus the inherent hilarity of the phrase “academic superstar”.
And this is what the graduate student facing a non-academic job has to confront: They’ve been collecting Disney bucks their whole lives and must now leave the magic kingdom. Alt-ac brings with it stigma and shame as well as terror. “This is the toxic culture of academia”, she said. “How I’m going to define success or happiness is not the same as how my friend or my supervisor do.” The MLA, to its credit, is trying to figure out ways to navigate the sometimes traumatic encounter when grad students tell their supervisors they’re leaving academia. Chris Golde, who works in career education at Stanford, promotes a practice begun at Washington University in St Louis, of academics placing postcards outside their doors that read “I support diverse careers for PhDs”. It’s an important gesture. The anonymous graduate student I spoke to feels as if she is betraying her mentors by having to find a non-academic job. “They’re telling us that it’s OK to be selfish. That it’s OK to listen to our emotions and what we want”, she says. “To have someone validate how we feel is everything at this stage.” It’s amazing. The student feels like she’s betraying her mentors by having to find a non-academic job. I want to tell her: It’s the professors who betrayed you long ago.
It’s not just hurt feelings. The problem is practical. If you are a graduate student, and you want advice on how the world outside academia works, there is nobody worse to ask than an academic. Asking a professor for advice about how to find a job outside academia is about as useful as asking a priest for advice about the wedding night.
My anonymous graduate student attended a job fair set up for the alt-ac stream. “I quickly peeked my head in and I peeked my head out. Homeland Security is there. CIA is there.” That’s great, I said. She should go and work for them. “Gross”, was her answer.
But she needs a job. She needs a job and the CIA needs humanists. The military’s massive new history of the Iraq War came to an obvious conclusion: the military disaster of that engagement was largely due to “gaping holes in what the US military knew about Iraq. This ignorance included Iraqi politics, society, and government – gaps that led the United States to make some deeply flawed assumptions about how the war was likely to unfold”. The four-star general John Galvin famously acknowledged the lesson of the past ten years, that the military was “uncomfortable with warfare’s societal dimension”, which was the same lesson General Stanley A. McChrystal shared in his report of 2009, which was the same lesson General David Petraeus shared in his report of 2006. The wars of the recent past, particularly the wars of terrorism, have been cultural wars. The generals and senior staff talk about the importance of hearts and minds yet make scant effort to engage with an enormous expert class trained to analyse the nature of hearts and minds. But for generals who genuinely want to “get comfortable with warfare’s societal dimension”, there are an awful lot of young people who know how cultural forces manifest themselves – and are unemployed.
As the humanities decline in the United States, the country is losing the craft of understanding, losing its capacity for citizenship. Even educated people are increasingly unable and unwilling to distinguish between fake and real information, becoming a community that cannot understand itself as anything more than a circulation of figures. Self-righteousness takes the place of substantive discussion. Narcissism and outrage become the dominant techniques of self-definition. And the cure for all these problems is the same: read widely, read deeply, read.
Facebook is what happens when you hand society over to engineers without any humanistic education. The only history it knows is the triumphant history of technological advancement, which made it easier for its products to be used in the incitement of genocide, as happened in Myanmar in 2018. It recognizes no other epistemological value than engagement numbers and therefore sells out its country to Russian agents for tiny sums of money that it doesn’t need. A world of diminished humanities is a technically adept world that is fundamentally stupid.
And that was the most chilling thought of all, as I watched the herd of the bookish wandering the halls of the Chicago Hyatt Regency from panel to panel in an anxious daze. The world might actually need these people.
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