What for are English professors?

When the Scott McLemee piece came out, I condemned it as lazy. Most reporters writing their annual MLA attacks at least attend the sessions they’re attacking.

This piece manifests a different sort of laziness. Unless an MLA paper is clearly wrong, it’s described as incomprehensible. Which means he didn’t take the trouble to comprehend it. English papers really aren’t that hard. But then he excuses himself for not attempting understanding, since this stuff really doesn’t matter. Only the teaching does. That’s what they’re paid to do after all. Not write this incomprehensible stuff.

Except they are. Paid to write the incomprehensible stuff, that is. Tenure track faculty typically teach a 2/3 or a 3/3 load. Non-tenure track faculty, those that have no scholarship/research requirement, typically teach a 4/4 or a 5/5 load. The difference is paid time expected to be spent in scholarship.

It is amazing to me that pieces like this get published.

Tenure track faculty typically teach a 2/3 or a 3/3 load. Non-tenure track faculty, those that have no scholarship/research requirement, typically teach a 4/4 or a 5/5 load.

Actually, quite a lot of tenure-track faculty teach 4/4 (or, whimper, 5/5). Some of them are even expected to do research–although they usually aren’t required to produce a book. At my own college, our 3/3 load is actually a 4/4 with one course release per semester for research.

Another thing, following Miriam’s comment: the pitiably ignorant author of this article seems to think that the bft-requirement is universal, when it only applies to (many) doctoral institutions and some liberal arts colleges. The overwhelming majority of tt jobs do not require a book for promotion.

Another, even less flattering, interpretation is that the author believes that only faculty at doctoral institutions and select liberal arts colleges produce scholarship–or perhaps that only they produce scholarship that matters.

So, if you can’t get even the basic facts right, what’s the point? It’d be like expecting a libertarian blogger to make sense of Davos, except of course that none of those masters-of-the-universe would allow themselves to be interviewed.

Miriam:

Yes. All statements about academia ought to begin with a disclaimer:

There are somewhere north of 1500 accredited four-year colleges in the US. The only generalization which is true of all of them is they all award degrees whose name contains the letter “B”.

And when one talks of the MLA, some of whose members teach at community colleges, generalizations become even more tenuous.

As a teacher of English, my first instinct is to pay attention to context. I read The Believer from time to time. This piece seems pretty consistent with the excessively long first-person pieces they run. It’s annoyingly tony at times, perhaps, but I suspect that the reason for that has to do with the author’s desire to make people laugh. At any rate, I thought the not-so-funny bit about the stupidity of present-day academic publishing in the humanities was pretty well done, for an outsider to the MLA world.

Y’know, I hadn’t read a Believer piece before. This, this is what they call dropping the snark?

bq. From an academic angle, Charlie finds the Hyatt most interesting. “It’s got one modern tower and one postmodern tower!” he says, and laughs. I can’t tell which is which or why, but I trust that he knows what he’s talking about. I figure if he says something like, “OK, then, let’s meet up at the postmodern tower,” I’ll just ask someone else.

Christ, save me from po-faced ironist manqués. Charlie deserved better.

Hooray! I finally got the article to load.

Despite my own oft-admitted statistical illiteracy, I still want to know where the following two memes come from:

a) Most people need a book for tenure.
b) “Some” colleges want two books for tenure.

To my knowledge, nobody has surveyed English departments about either requirement, but there is a survey available of history departments: Robert Townsend’s analysis of 441 departments at 4-yr.-to-Ph.D.-granting institutions in “A Survey of Tenure Practices in History: Departments Indicate Books Are Key and Success Rates for Tenure High,” Perspectives 42.2 (Feb. 2004): 5-8 (which I discussed here). Townsend’s subtitle is a bit misleading, since, in fact, what he reports is that while books are awfully helpful, they are actually required far less than one might think. 37.7% of all respondents expected a book for tenure; 1.4% wanted a second book.

I suspect–and this is not an empirically-tested statement–that the monograph log-jam partly derives from the over-production of folks like yours truly, with Ph.D.s from research institutions but careers at teaching colleges.

“Left me to wonder if the author felt there was any effective difference between the MLA and, say, a Scrabble convention.”

left me to wonder if someone with such difficulty reading should bother to make the effort.

but good on you for trying, even so.

When did being nice and good-natured become patronizing? Or maybe it was the earnestness that got you?

I took his remark on the “postmodern building” to be self-deprecating more than to be saying that Charlie is so silly for knowing things. I’m as defensive of academia as anyone, but I really don’t think that the author was going for the Mockumentary effect.

Steve,

Isn’t it possible that the stuff that MLA members are obscure specialists in is more relevant to politics, morality, etc., than the Scrabble dictionary or the International Handbook of Plumbing is?

I’d rather talk about morality with someone who had read a ton of novels, for instance, than with someone who had read a lot of car manuals.

The term 2/3 I can manage, being .666 recurring, but all the others seem to be 1.0.
That’s just appearance. They’re all actually .999 recurring. Hope that helps. :)

(I always figured that’s the number of courses taught first/second semester, but I’m an undergrad, so I’m not sure)

I’d rather talk about morality with someone who had read a ton of novels, for instance, than with someone who had read a lot of car manuals.

I’d rather talk about morality with someone who had read a ton of moral philosophy. Anyone else is an amateur, and that’s completely fine, so long as their amateur status is acknowledged and we don’t pretend that an undergrad degree and five years of monomania over, say, the early novels of Ford Madox Ford, ipso facto makes you any more intelligent than a smart plumber. God knows if there’s one thing academia has no shortage of it’s people who are the World’s Greatest Experts on one subject but couldn’t find the arse of any other with both hands and a map.

I’d be happy to TALK morality with MLA members. But that doesn’t mean they are better at actually being moral. To paraphrase WFBuckley: I’d rather be governed by the first 1000 names in the Boston phone book than the faculty at Harvard.

What Andy said, in spades. What passes for moral philosophy these days seems sorely lacking.

Schwa’s Ford Madox Ford reference is obnoxious, and his idea that the world of thought consists of expert specialists of various kinds is wildly wrong.

Furthermore, the name “Coventry Patmore” is even more ridiculous than Ford’s (true name Hueffer, btw), and Coventry himself was sort of stupid, unlike Ford. Ya have to be careful about these things.

The circle-the-wagons mentality here is distressing indeed.

“Kafka had as much grasp on morality as Rawls”

Well, Rawl being a political philosopher aside, no.

Rigorous argument, peer review, an exhaustive knowledge of the history of the field and current work, the ability to express very abstract ideas cogently….moral philosophy and litcrit may or may not be sciences but they try to approach the standards of science.

There are wisdom and morality, which we can get from Kafka and Sophocles. They do provide evidence and argument, and are to a degree peer-reviewed. But they do not believe they are doing philosophy.

How about this: Barry Bonds does baseball;Roger Ansell describes baseball; and Bill James analyses baseball. Ghandi;Sophocles;Moore

(Don’t tell Chun I am here)

“Ah, but then we’re talking about academics, and so fatuous and self-inflated are standards of the territory.”

don’t be so mean. chun can’t help it.

The trouble with G. Lewis-Kraus’s piece on the MLA is its shallow knowledge of recent history–since the mid-80’s, say. Lewis-Kraus echoes the now-frequently-heard plea that the practitioners of esoteric literary theory and its offshoots constitute a hermetic community of initiates whose effusions are solely of interest to that community. Therefore, they have no real political effect. Consequently, that community ought to be immune from outside political pressure and interference, particularly when it comes from the political right.

This view founders, however, on the fact that the “apolitical” stance of its proponents is a rather recent adaptation to an inimical political and intellectual climate. The same folks who now take this position only a few years ago proudly embraced the mission of bringing political wisdom to the masses and were unashamed to describe their teaching as a species of ideological evangelism. One might note, for instance, the defenders of Paul de Mann, at the time the posthumous scandal broke forth, were by and large strongly identified with certain brands of left-activism, and clearly viewed de Mann’s theoretical hijinks not as an abstractly-worthy intellectual exercise divorced from political concerns, but rather as a very useful tool for delegitimizing capitalism, racism, the patriarchy, heteronormativity. and so forth. That the issue is now couched in terms of a supposedly insular and apolitical deconstructionist theory reflects little more than the fact that many of these same people are now running scared. But this does not mean that their basic political views or their sense of themselves as catalysts of political and social change has really changed.

Note as well that the alarm is raised about”politicization” only when the pressure is from the presumed Right. About political pressure from the Left–the derisive term “PC” is hardly obsolete–little is said. A number of the scholars Lewis-Kraus cites for their rather sanctimonious praise of an academy insulated from crass politics have frequently been on the warpath against fellow-professors whose views or methods are deemed politically retrograde. The long clamor against sociobiology and evolutionary psychology is one example. Another, briefer, episode, which I mention since Judith Butler was prominently involved, was the campaign against “Left conservatism,” by which was meant left-wing political activism that disdains to be guided by postmodern rodomontade.

Political posturing of the kind with which the MLA has frequently been charged may be a relatively unimportant matter–but that is because it has been laughably ineffectual in the real world, not because its practitioners have restricted their ambitions to impressing a tiny collegial in-group. Of course, it should go without saying that universities as a whole are in dire need of protection from the doctrinal bullying and outright rascality of the Bush-era Right. Scientists have come to recognize this even more than humanists. But this fact doesn’t get the MLA Left-establishment off the hook for its arrogance, its sharp elbows, and its intolerance of those who don’t hop aboard its wheezy bandwagon. Even accepting the honesty of the now-fashionable contention that literary studies and the like should be insulated from political programs and dicta, it is hardly clear that the postmodern extravaganza that has dominated the humanities, volume-wise, at least, in the last decade or so, should be the chief tenant of this ivory tower. The high-flyers of postmodernism, including a few that Lewis-Kraus praised along with those he damned, are nowhere near as bright as they think they are.