5. Before and After Mass Culture as “Ominous External Force”

Dear Mark,

On to your point 5. My comments below itemize several of the questions I have concerning how to think about what the Red Book does to mass culture and what mass culture does to higher ed.

5. The Red Book is symptomatically silent on the subject of mass culture as a competing unifier. The issue comes up briefly in the final pages: “The press, radio, photography, television–our progressive disembodiment–and indeed all increased means of mass communication have their dangers too.” The authors seem particularly concerned about advertising: “‘In a world of strife, there is peace in beer.’ That slogan was no invention of a satirist. It adorned many a newspaper in the days before Pearl Harbor and is but one example, less harmful through its very fatuousness, of the modes of attack to which mass communication exposes standards in all fields. Against them we can only oppose general education at all levels” (266). Apparently, effective opposition won’t require knowledge of the adversary, since there is no place whatsoever for “mass communications” in general education as Harvard imagines it. What a difference from the situation before the war! Then, the problem of “mass culture,” how to learn from and about it, was absolutely central to considerations of the problem of democracy (e.g., in the Lippmann-Dewey debate) and the university both. Again, more research is needed, but this seems like a representative example of a familliar configuration: a particular notion of English Literature is elevated as isomorphic with the humanities, which are also, in the same stroke, clearly distinguished from the social sciences (which include history) and the sciences (which include math); mass culture appears as an ominous external force with which general education competes to unify the nation.

Before the Red Book authors turn to the dangers of mass culture upon which you focus, please remember that they also briefly imagine the pedagogical possibilities of visual mass media.

…the needed boost to conventional texts may come through an extension and supplementing of them by films and television. In both there is much experimenting and postulate searching in progress. For their more sustained enterprises–language teaching and continuous courses of study–films and television alike require printed matter designed to have a live relation to the sound-motion presentation. The challenge to the text is given when the screen ceases to be a mere illustration or adornment to the language and becomes the equal or superior means of communication. (262-63)

There’s more after this passage as the authors glance at the problem of print v. visual mediation and as they mull the supplementing of textbook based course materials in vocational v. “general subjects.” Note especially their citation of the Commission on Motion Pictures in Education regarding the use of visual media in training for war (as debates over video games today suggest, this particular educational question is evergreen) (263). And note the conventional wisdom that films (I don’t think they mean only documentary or “educational” films) “can present a theme, biographic, historic, or moral, with a massiveness of impact” (264).

Two observations about this treatment:

One, the Red Book authors do not appear to intend supplement in the Derridean sense, although it is hard to read their use of the term in any other way.

Two, there is little implication that one might actually study mass media, instead of using it to amplifying textbooks, etc. We are not to imagine that professors might find in visual mass culture new teachable “examples,” to use Ralph Berry’s term from an earlier thread on this blog.

In order to treat mass media this way, as having a limited experimental role in the classroom, as antithetical to the sorts of examples featured in general education, as (you put it) “an ominous external force with which general education competes to unify the nation,” one has to completely forget the early-century debates about including mass media in great books curricula and the like. On the basis of no evidence whatsoever, I read this as willful forgetting (can the Red Book authors really be ignorant of the fact that “experimenting” with mass culture in the classroom had been going on for several decades?).

If not willful, then purposeful forgetting. If English literature, which was itself so recently an “experimental” contributor to university curricula, is to appear so foundational to the humanities in the Red Book, it must need a more youthful, insurgent media against which to compare itself. (Flurry of footnotes concerning the transatlantic genealogy of this move: to the Leavisite strategy of presenting literature as a defense against [American] mass culture, to the efforts of British educators like John Churton Collins trying to get English courses out of the extension schools and into the universities at the turn of the 20th century, etc.)

By ignoring the past, the Red Book predicts the future. Its rhetoric anticipates later 20th century conventional wisdom that film and media studies is an insurgency. Even as they have established a firm footing in universities around the world, mass media bizarrely remain a dangerous supplement: “The Lady Gaga-fication of Higher Ed” is a real and present danger (at your University of South Carolina no less!). The way scary Gaga featured in the recent UVA debacle suggests there is a richly textured politics involved in distinguishing good from bad new media. Wherein good equals MOOC and bad equals Gaga? Or vice versa. For all that both MOOCs and Gaga appear shocking and novel to some, the contest between them reworks old promises and fears. We only make the mistake of thinking that massification in its various forms (massification of the media we study, of the pedagogy we practice, etc.) is a novelty when we forget the history of higher ed, treat Harvard rather than the early-twentieth-century extension programs as the true innovators of humanities study, and behave as if mass media are newcomers to the university.

One of the things we must understand better, and you direct us to this as well in your 5., is the way mass culture means very different things across the disciplines. “English Literature is elevated as isomorphic with the humanities,” you write, “which are also, in the same stroke, clearly distinguished from the social sciences (which include history) and the sciences (which include math).” Distinguished in part, perhaps, by how they greet mass culture and treat its potential to disrupt teaching and research. The story of the relationship between the humanities and mass media is not the same as that between English and mass media, clearly, but neither is it the same as that between history or sociology and mass media. (Another footnote flurry.)

I want to find a way to get from Red Book / mass culture to the Digital Humanities part of our argument, and in lieu of patiently detailing the logical links leading from one to the other (which, don’t doubt me, I can provide and will surely do so forthwith), please enjoy this rhetorical leap.

It can sometimes seem as though the Digital Humanities discussion reproduces the habit of elevating English, making it stand in for the humanities more generally, and in so doing reinforcing the centrality of a curriculum devoid of most mass cultural materials (novels excluded). This despite the more easily massified media in which DH traffics. This despite the sense that English is a place where anyone can study anything.

Piece of evidence the first: Matthew G. Kirshenbaum’s essay in the 2010 ADE Bulletin entitled “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?”

Towards the end of his essay, Kirshenbaum sums up in six points “why English departments have historically been hospitable settings” for DH work. All six points have interest. Two seem to me absolutely antithetical, and in a familiar way.

First, after numeric input, text has been by far the most tractable data type for computers to manipulate. Unlike images, audio, video, and so on, there is a long tradition of text-based data processing that was within the capabilities of even some of the earliest computer systems and that has for decades fed research in fields like stylistics, linguistics, and author attribution studies, all heavily associated with English departments.

…

Fifth is the openness of English departments to cultural studies, where computers and other objects of digital material culture become the centerpiece of analysis. (60)

So good to have it both ways. DH is no more a threat to English as usual than was cultural studies, nor should DH make English the least bit worried by the presence of other D media in other wings of the H.

Piece of evidence the second: Andrew Prescott’s July 2012 lecture to the Digital Humanities Summer School, Oxford University entitled “Making the Digital Human: Anxieties, Possibilities, Challenges.”

Although Prescott indicates that he subscribes “to a point of view which sees Super Mario or Coronation Street or Shrek as just as culturally interesting and significant as Ovid and Chaucer,” when it comes to DH projects that get funding and get done, there’s more Ovid than Corrie.

For all the rhetoric about digital technologies changing the humanities, the overwhelming picture presented by the activities of digital humanities centres in Great Britain is that they are busily engaged in turning back the intellectual clock and reinstating a view of the humanities appropriate to the 1950s which would have gladdened the heart of Ronald Crane.

(Crane’s 1967 The Idea of the Humanities has material for us, btw. Some juicy excerpts here.)

At Prescott’s King’s College London,

Of the 88 content creation projects listed, only 8 are concerned in any way with anything that happened after 1850. The overwhelming majority – some 57 projects – deal with subjects from before 1600, and indeed most of them are concerned with the earliest periods, before 1100. The geographical focus of most of the projects are on the classical world and western Europe. The figures that loom largest are standard cultural icons: Ovid, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Jane Austen, Chopin. This is an old-style humanities, dressed out in bright new clothes for the digital age.

Only Chopin (maybe Ovid) likely would be left off the list of literary works at the heart of the Red Book English curriculum.

How to remedy the situation? Prescott’s answer:

We might start by seeking closer contact with our colleagues in Cultural and Media Studies. There is a huge body of scholarship on digital cultures with which we engage only patchily and which offers us powerful critical frameworks in articulating our own scholarly programme.

English is “open” to cultural studies, as Kirshenbaum says, and certainly thinks of itself as less overtly antagonistic to mass culture today, but you and I would clearly agree with Prescott that English engages with media studies scholarship and media studies scholars “patchily.”

Compare this program to History, or the version of what DH means for that discipline offered by Roy Rosenzweig, who begins his influential essay “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past” by asking how future historians will grapple with the complex itinerary of Evil Bert.

Please forgive this longish quote that you probably already know:

In 1996, Dino Ignacio, a twenty-two-year-old Filipino web designer, created Bert Is Evil (“brought to you by the letter H and the CIA”), which became a cult favorite among early tourists on the World Wide Web. Two years later, Bert Is Evil won a “Webby” as the “best weird site.” Fan and “mirror” sites appeared with some embellishing on the “Bert Is Evil” theme. After the bombing of the U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, sites in the Netherlands and Canada paired Bert with Osama bin Laden.

This image made a further global leap after September 11. When Mostafa Kamal, the production manager of a print shop in Dhaka, Bangladesh, needed some images of bin Laden for anti-American posters, he apparently entered the phrase “Osama bin Laden” in Google’s image search engine. The Osama and Bert duo was among the top hits. “Sesame Street” being less popular in Bangladesh than in the Philippines, Kamal thought the picture a nice addition to an Osama collage. But when this transnational circuit of imagery made its way back to more Sesame Street–friendly parts of the world via a Reuters photo of anti-American demonstrators, a storm of indignation erupted. Children’s Television Workshop, the show’s producers, threatened legal action. On October 11, 2001, a nervous Ignacio pushed the delete key, imploring “all fans [sic] and mirror site hosts of ‘Bert is Evil’ to stop the spread of this site too.”

Ignacio’s sudden deletion of Bert should capture our interest as historians since it dramatically illustrates the fragility of evidence in the digital era. If Ignacio had published his satire in a book or magazine, it would sit on thousands of library shelves rather than having a more fugitive existence as magnetic impulses on a web server. Although some historians might object that the Bert Is Evil web site is of little historical significance, even traditional historians should worry about what the digital era might mean for the historical record. U. S. government records, for example, are being lost on a daily basis. Although most government agencies started using e-mail and word processing in the mid-1980s, the National Archives still does not require that digital records be retained in that form, and governmental employees profess confusion over whether they should be preserving electronic files. 3 Future historians may be unable to ascertain not only whether Bert is evil, but also which undersecretaries of defense were evil, or at least favored the concepts of the “evil empire” or the “axis of evil.” Not only are ephemera like “Bert” and government records made vulnerable by digitization, but so are traditional works—books, journals, and film—that are increasingly being born digitally. As yet, no one has figured out how to ensure that the digital present will be available to the future’s historians.

Nearly everything about historical research appears to be put into question for Rosenzweig by digitization. That Bert would be an object of study for political historians, that preserving the archive becomes a very different matter if you’re talking about evil Bert instead of a 16th century manuscript, that there are experts on Bert who do not have tenure-track jobs, etc. “The struggle to incorporate the possibilities of new technology into the ancient practice of history has led, most importantly, to questioning the basic goals and methods of our craft.” You sometimes still hear such things said about DH in English, but I’d say less so than you used to. Rosenzweig’s essay was published in 2003, but it is difficult to imagine how the lid would have been put back on in the years since. Mass culture and digital technology conspire to alter History in ways that they seem not to have altered English?

As a bit of a side bar, I desperately want to correlate this kind of interdisciplinary comparison to your hypothesis about the abiding hierarchy among humanities departments. In your last post you wrote:

Surely it must be possible to get some comparative numbers on the sizes of humanities departments and programs for, say, the last 75 years. I suspect these numbers will show that the growth in areas like Women’s Studies, Southern Studies, and African-American Studies was accompanied by an increase in the size of English departments (and thus their institutional importance). If, as I also suspect, growth in these areas made English relatively larger than, say, Art History or Comparative Literature, than many of the organizational dynamics of the humanities can be thought of as problems of scale.

Scale is important to Rosenzweig too and might lead us back once again to questions about neoliberal higher ed and its MOOCs, about what Jacques Berlinerblau calls “engaged humanism” in a recent Chronicle column, and to a bunch of other issues we’ve been kicking around for a while.

English has more resources than many humanities departments and tends to have bigger departments, so it can fund more graduate students getting PhDs in the study of, for instance, video games than other smaller departments. The paradox being, this neither appears to alter the status of literature within English curricula (especially undergraduate) nor the status of English within the humanities. That’s one scale, the scale of the department and the humanities division.

Another, the scale of the classroom, seems much more threatening to English. We have yet to fully unpack this problem to our liking, is my sense, but I consider it important that we figure out how to do so. English professors have historically delivered their vital texts to students in lecture halls and discussion classes. Some of these are big, but none as big as the MOOCs get. Scale here has something to do with pedagogy (and testing), but it also has to do with prestige. Our literary “examples” circulate in particular ways within prestige granting as well as degree awarding institutions. Jefferson and Jackson redux. The problem, again, for the Red Book of how to scale a kind of teaching that seems most at home in places like Harvard. As Carlo Salerno puts it in Inside Higher Ed, “Our higher education system needs MOOCs to provide credentials in order for students to find it worthwhile to invest the effort, yet colleges can’t afford to provide MOOC credentials without sacrificing prestige, giving up control of the quality of the students who take their courses and running the risk of eventually diluting the value of their education brand in the eyes of the labor market.”

Before the Red Book, the MOOCs of the day were the extension programs, which in the British examples described by Alexandra Lawrie (“Browning in Hackney,” TLS January 20 2012: 14-15) anticipated their on-line brethren in allowing students to make the choice of whether they were interested only in listening to lectures or also in writing papers and seeking a credential.

In the Lent 1892 course in Lewisham on “Great Novelists of the Nineteenth Century,” taught by John A. Hobson, for example, fifty of the 100-strong audience at his lectures stayed for the class, yet only an average of twelve submitted papers to be marked each week. (14)

In extension classes as in MOOCs, there is a need to rethink the correlation between material studied and demographics served that is every bit as challenging as the Jacksonian/Jeffersonian debate stages in the Red Book. We should not take the Red Book as THE model for the university, the prevalence of competing models from the 1890s to the 2010s suggest, any more than we should take the Red Book’s version of the humanities as the ideal.

Today, Berlinerblau wants “engaged humanists who know less and communicate better,” while Rosenzweig imagines that new technology might democratize history in a fashion reminiscent of its early-twentieth-century mode, in which “the vision and membership of the American Historical Association–embracing archivists, local historians, and ‘amateurs’ as well as university scholars–was considerably broader than it later became.” Both the masses and mass culture (even Evil Bert) could find a home at the AHA, but we need not think that the hierarchy within the AHA was entirely flattened as a result. For this reason, democratize is perhaps the wrong word to use. Instead, the shifting sands of governmentality.

John

4. Until Further Notice: By 1945, but Not Before 1935, the Humanities Were Made Isomorphic With English

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Dear John,

I like this plan. Let’s drive on to Red Book issue #5 and return to the strange career of English Departments later on. Let me add two observations for that later discussion.

First, to the investigation of Richards you propose, I think we should add some consideration of the American Studies types that Graff finds it difficult to incorporate in his account of mid-century English, such that he has to loop back and tell the story again in the chapter “The Promise of American Literature Studies.” There, Graff identifies an alternative trajectory despised by Northrop Frye for its interdisciplinarity in 1957 and identifiable as early as 1948 in Stanley Edgar Hyman’s The Armed Vision, which characterizes “‘modern criticism’ as ‘the organized use of non-literary techniques and bodies of knowledge to obtain insights into literature‘” (Graff 209-10). We should look at Hyman. Graff also makes much of the difference between V. L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (1927-30), which treated literary works part of a broader intellectual history, and F.O. Mattheissen (and numerous others listed on page 216) who “conceived the organic structure of a literary work as a microcosm of collective psychology or myth and thus made New Criticism into a method of cultural analysis” (217). Tellingly missing from Graff’s English- and university- centered story are at least two influential humanists of the 1920s and 30s who wrote broadly on US culture and are looked to as generative in a number of disciplines: Lewis Mumford and Gilbert Seldes. I read a lot of this stuff back in the day, and would welcome a chance to revisit it. Also worth reevaluating from the vantage of the present is Graff’s conclusion that this entire trajectory is one of “‘patterned isolation’.” As he sees it, “cultural history” failed “to become a centralizing context,” and this “created a vacuum that was readily filled by an attenuated New Criticism of explication for explication’s sake” (225). If we shift our attention from the evils and virtues of New Criticism to the problem of when and how the study of “literature” seems to equal the study of “culture” or the “humanist” approach to it, I suspect this history will look rather different.

Second, I agree that we need follow this through the “1960s-80s debates concerning the hold of great English books on undergraduate education” as you state. I think as a result of those debates English Departments become more powerful than ever before, even if less coherently organized around a single literary mission. This was the period that invented the version of the English Department we now inhabit, which simultaneously claims that all of “culture” is within its purview and purports to be the special custodian of a distinctly literary knowledge and heritage. Key intellectual developments encouraged this state of affairs. For example, we’ve discussed already the importation of formalisms and structuralisms that allowed English professors to define themselves as experts in “narrative” or “texts” and authorized transposition of procedures for reading novels or poems onto any expressive medium. But there is another, perhaps less familiar, way to tell this tale. Big English departments are administratively convenient. They have lower overhead costs than creating numerous small “studies” departments or programs. It is much easier to develop and offer new courses under the umbrella of an established department than it is to secure the approvals necessary for new requirements and programs; and when departments are large this can happen without requiring revision of a shared curriculum–teaching can be distributed to allow the unit to pursue several agendas at once, although some will likely seem more central or legitimate than others. Simply put: I’m suggesting that we make organizational scale a factor in our analysis. Surely it must be possible to get some comparative numbers on the sizes of humanities departments and programs for, say, the last 75 years. I suspect these numbers will show that the growth in areas like Women’s Studies, Southern Studies, and African-American Studies was accompanied by an increase in the size of English departments (and thus their institutional importance). If, as I also suspect, growth in these areas made English relatively larger than, say, Art History or Comparative Literature, than many of the organizational dynamics of the humanities can be thought of as problems of scale.

A note on the Lippmann-Dewey debate. I warn you that I may feel compelled to bring this up again despite the fact that you are tired of hearing me prattle on about it. The debate was an absolutely formative argument of the 1920s, and it also demonstrates some of our overarching claims about intellectual life between the wars: what would later be seen as very different disciplines (philosophy, sociology, mass comm, education leadership) intersect there, the argument crossed over from the popular press to academe and was broadly influential, and the problem of “mass culture” animates it.

So let’s talk about mass culture!

Mark

4. Endorsing your Thesis

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Dear Mark,

So next up in our 5-point investigation into the Harvard Redbook aka General Education in a Free Society would be your fourth item:

4. In defining the humanities as a key component of general eduction, the Red Book privileges the study of English literature. In the section on high schools, for example, the humanities look more far more strongly balkanized by area than the social sciences and sciences. Math, chemistry, biology, appear as a distinct subject areas, but we move with relative ease from a paragraphs describing chemistry and biology courses to those laying out math courses. Under the humanities, we have strongly separated sections for: English, defined in New Critical terms as not history or politics but “the works themselves,” conveyors of a unifying heritage, and clearly the heart of the matter; Foreign Languages, which may or may not be a humanities endeavor depending on whether the languages are treated as communication “tools” or as aides in appreciating English as a language; and Arts, the appreciation of which is felt to be enriching in a vague, emotional way. In the section on Harvard, great English language books receive similar emphasis in the proposed new core curriculum. The authors voice a number of assumptions about what English Literature is and does that want further examination. I think we need to look, too, to the composition of the Committee whose report this is (Ivor Richards is the English professor on it). And we need poke around a little bit in the literature to determine whether the Harvard folks are voicing an established consensus about English or are attempting to institutionalize a new orthodoxy. This has the ring to me, however, of a representative example. Thesis: in 1945, but not 1935, educators could treat ”English Literature,” understood as the study of great works apart from their history and context, as if it were the essence of “the humanities.”

I think that you mostly propose a research agenda here rather than the need to fine-tune our rhetoric, which has I think largely been what’s wanted on the other items thus far. I know that these are not entirely separate enterprises, as your eagerness to make 3. about your Lippmann-Dewey argument in Love Rules suggests.

Pending new evidence, therefore, I hereby endorse your hypothesis that “in 1945, but not 1935, educators could treat ‘English Literature,’ understood as the study of great works apart from their history and context, as if it were the essence of ‘the humanities.’

Where would this new evidence come from?

I think we’ve read most of the pertinent accounts of the period and know what we think about Graff, et al. (We tend to think they are as guilty of reducing the humanities to English as the 1945 educators to whom you refer.)

It is probably time to sit down and (re)read Practical Criticism, and plug that in to what we already know and argue about Leavis.

Like Leavis, Richards loses the local institutional battle but wins the war, Harpham notes in The Humanities and the Dream of America: most of the Redbook’s recommendations were rejected by Harvard faculty, “including the idea of requiring a course on the humanities, the course Richards had been teaching as an elective: Humanities 1A ‘Sources of Our Common Thought: Homer, The Old Testament, and Plato'” (161). What to make of this fact, given the impact Harpham also thinks the Redbook had on humanities programs more generally. What too, given your thesis, to make of Richards’s sense of a humanities capacious enough to include classical Greek epic and philosophy as well as the Bible, not limited to “English literature” at all? One place to look to answer these questions would be Higher Education for American Democracy, aka “The Truman Report,” published in 1947, which replayed arguments codified in the Redbook. Another might be New Critical writing that talked about how they distinguished their sometimes more restrictive version of the humanities (more English, I’d say) from that of Richards.

There’s another question to ask here, namely, How long after 1945 do we think your hypothesis holds? Harpham recommends a couple of 1964 documents we might look at: J.H. Plumb’s Crisis in the Humanities and the ACLS Commission on the Humanities. These might help with our sense that we lose the thread a little bit in the 50s and 60s before feeling like we know what’s happening again by the 1980s.

Another way to think about your hypothesis would be to remember what we know of the contraction and expansion in “English” curricula during the second half of the twentieth century. We think, as your hypothesis suggests, that in 1945 the English curriculum had contracted from the experimental (and in today’s terms inter-disciplinary) courses of the 1910s and 20s, and that as it contracted it paradoxically came to stand in for the humanities as a whole. How does your hypothesis allow us to think about 1960s-80s debates concerning the hold of great English books on undergraduate education. Such things as “theory and context” obviously do their part to shake things up in English even as English loses its centrality in the humanities. Sort of. Internal to English, we still often compose syllabi made up of, exactly, great books and their literary competitors. My guess is that if you look at Gen Ed requirements for many schools such surveys are still treated as central to if less exclusively the heart of humanities study.

In sum, I believe that your hypothesis points to an argument we know how to make, but we need to do a little bit more reading to ensure we’re right.

Your point 5. is the mass culture point. I’m eager to move on and talk about that.

What do you think?

John

3. Humanists Should Inhabit the Present, not the Early Republic

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Dear John,

After too long a hiatus, let me try to pick up this thought where you left off. You wondered about the complex genealogy of this quotation and marveled at its ability to balance (which is to say manage) Jeffersonian and Jacksonian imperatives:

An ideal but not impossible vision of American society might see it as made up of myriad smaller societies representing between them all the arts and insights, all the duties and self-dedications, of civilized men. It would be in order that they might participate in some of these, quite as much as for making a living, that education would prepare young people, and this participation would in turn be the door to the good life. (98)

I think I can fill in some of the genealogy. To me the quotation highlights the some the more troubling aspects of Red Book rhetoric.

In particular, it dodges the central governance question. The idea here, I take it, is that the perception of civilized unity inculcated by general education will allow the myriad small societies to work in concert to open that good-life door. Yet all actually existing societies I know about comprise groups with competing practices, values, and interests, even if they may be said to be united by other practices, values, and interests. The Red Book’s authors may hope that general education will provide a foundation for the adjudication of competing group interests. They do not, however, envision plausible mechanisms whereby generally educated Americans might meaningfully participate in such feats of adjudication, nor is such judgment the kind of thing that general education in the humanities or social sciences seems particularly designed to encourage. The emphasis is on unifying works of durable value. If general education does not equip generally educated citizens to question what is meant by “the good life” and for whom, then “unity” and “civilization” become alibis for the status quo.

In the hope that functioning small societies might through a vague process of magnetic conduction improve the common weal, I hear the echoes of Charles Beard’s college textbook American Government and Politics, which went through six editions between 1911 and 1931. Beard taught Arthur Schlesinger, the historian on the Red Book collective, when the later was a graduate student at Columbia in the early 1910s. It may be Schlesinger who gives the Red Book its organizing “Jeffersonian” and “Jacksonian” metaphors. His autobiography could offer a clue. In any case, in an epilog entitled “How can citizens play well their part in the development of American political society?,” the 1931 edition of American Government and Politics confronts a problem of bureaucracy that Beard had addressed the year before in American Leviathan. To whit: the machinery of the state has grown too vast, and its mechanisms too sophisticated, to be susceptible to informed direction by the masses of citizens. The sorts of participation idealized in the Early Republic’s vision of democracy–public debate, elections, and so on–seem feeble in the face of increasingly sophisticated public relations efforts by political parities and pressure groups, not to mention an ever-increasing number of bureaus only nominally controlled by elected officials. How could young citizens hope to affect a political culture so obviously controlled by experts paid to control it? Beard’s advice is to join “small societies”–political parties as well as business, professional, labor, and civic groups–and to hope to influence the broader direction of politics by influencing these smaller groups.

I am proposing that the Red Book marks itself as a twentieth-century work in its hope that the kind of political participation that we might think of as a hallmark of neo-liberalism will secure the type of republic idealized by classical liberalism. In the US context, probably all wishes along these lines respond in one way or another to the argument between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey inaugurated by Lippmann’s 1922 Public Opinion. I’ve written about this at length elsewhere (in Love Rules), and I won’t drag you through it all again. We may never know a more effective critic of Jeffersonian ideals than Lippmann, who treats the entire edifice as a massive PR exercise that convinced Americans to confuse the procedures outlined in the Constitution with self-governance. The PR machine was perfected under Jackson, he argues, when the political parties learned how to use Jeffersonian imagery to legitimate themselves. Henceforth, voting on agendas shaped and decided behind closed doors could count as public rule. Lippmann’s overarching critique centers on the power of media to define what citizens can know about the world that they are invited to help “govern.” Famously, for Lippmann media do not promote communication so much as circulate stereotypes–reductive views of the world that get mistaken for the world itself. After Lippmann, I think, any serious argument about democracy had to take on board a theory of mediation. Certainly Dewey does in his riposte, which advocates a program of continuous community-building education more radical than the Red Book authors could countenance, but that probably informs their appeal to education as an instrument of unity.

In later posts, we’ll deal with the Red Book’s limited treatment of mass culture as a competitor to general education in uniting American society. Here, I’ll just note that the issue of mediation is a serious and indicative omission from their account of general education’s supposed democratic benefit. To change how people are governed requires changing the shared signs and symbols that make modern governance possible. I think it possible that the Red Book authors know this perfectly well and see themselves as engaged in such an adventure. They just don’t think that knowledge about how this works this should be part of general education. Their proposed course on American Democracy, for example, leaps over the Lippmann-Dewey debate. Students will read only defenses of classic liberalism: Tocqueville, Bryce, and Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (219).

References to Jefferson and Jackson make it seem like the Red Book authors are talking about education’s contribution to a long heritage of American democracy. They are not. As they sometimes acknowledge explicitly, they are really talking about the role of expanding twentieth-century educational institutions in identifying and encouraging talent and in defining and inculcating social norms. In this project, educational institutions have a great many competitors as well as collaborators. A real commitment to democracy would require an educational program encouraging much harder questions of actually existing governance in the present.

All that said, good management must agree that education should be about more than making a living, that it should encourage people to discover affiliations with one another, and such affiliations ought to renew the evergreen challenge of “the good life.”

Mark

3. Humanists Should Aspire to Balance (which is to say Manage) Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Imperatives

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Dear Mark,

I’ve been struggling with the scale of item 3. I’d love to suggest that this was mostly your fault, but you’re totally right that the Redbook authors are the ones responsible for binding matters of governmentality, normalization, and the notion of merit. We would do well to recognize that accomplishment. You wrote,

3. In claiming “the opportunity to rise through education to the level of one’s merits” as a unifying force, Harpham rhetorically sublates tendencies the Red Book presents as opposites in need of balancing. Centrally, it weighs the “Jeffersonian” principle of “discovering and giving opportunity to the gifted student” against the “Jacksonian” principle of “raising the level of the average student” (27). The authors stake the nation’s future on balancing these opposing imperatives: “The hope of the American school system, indeed of our society, is precisely that it can pursue two goals simultaneously: give scope to ability and raise the average. Nor are these two goals so far apart, if human beings are capable of common sympathies” (35). “Unity” thus becomes the central problem, and “general education,” its instrument. Harpham does not err in pointing out that Red Book-era rhetoric made meritocracy, democracy, and training in the humanities appear to coincide. But he empties that achievement and reduces it, precisely, to a cliché, by underplaying the “Jacksonian” imperative. No merit without normalization, the Red Book reminds us. If the Jeffersonian principle looks to individuals, the Jacksonian considers populations. General eduction, in contrast to Jeffersonian specialized education, was to be a unifying instrument for populations, and not so much a meritocratic one for individuals. “Democracy” in the Red Book is not centrally a problem of “self-government,” rather, it is a question of proper training, a management proposition (see, e.g., 93).

You would make managers of us all.

Certainly, the contemporary tendency is to separate Jeffersonian and Jacksonian imperatives rather than to balance them.

Exhibit A: pressure on community colleges to stop thinking of themselves as part of higher ed more generally and consider themselves a venue where people are trained for “middle-skill jobs.” Writing in The New York Times, Joe Nocera argues that for community colleges the “raison d’être has always been to help grease the wheels of social mobility.” Once, “in their earlier incarnation,” community colleges did this by serving as “a passageway to a university degree. (They used to be called junior colleges, after all.)” Now, however, “with the skills gap such a pressing problem — and a high school education so clearly inadequate for the modern economy — the task of teaching those skills is falling to community colleges. There really isn’t another institution as well positioned to play that role.” Nocera seems fine with that. Better than fine: “Community colleges can be our salvation, if only we let them.” To think of community colleges this way brackets “training” as well as Jackson. Training here includes, “important soft skills that the upper-middle-class take for granted, like how to interact with colleagues in an office setting.” Behave like a Jefferson, even if your average ability keeps you from attending his university. (You wrote in your last post that “The proposition that a healthy nation needs general education that includes the humanities is alive and well.” I don’t disagree, but do think we’re in the process of restricting who gets that general education beyond high school.)

Exhibit B: we are tasked with understanding how democracy and higher ed intersect every time the liberal arts college gets exported to non-democratic polities (NYU in Abu Dhabi, etc.). We are further compelled to wonder if Jacksonian principles of raising the average are in peril in the likes of Quebec, where the daily protests of French-speaking college students and would-be college students have garnered administrative/governmental responses ranging from stick (managing the blow of tuition increases with new formats for student debt) to bigger stick (new laws that criminalize protest). Much talk in the papers recently about whether and how the student strikes will shape elections in the fall. Is this the democracy the Redbook was talking about?

Your point, regardless of whether these ripped from the headlines Exhibits seem germane, was that Harpham underplays the Jacksonian side of the equation. “No merit without normalization, the Red Book reminds us,” you write in 3. And in your last post you continued the thought in claiming,

We have not arrived at a new day in which established defenses of general education, talent, and “critique” have lost all traction. What has broken down are the mechanisms conjoining these rhetorics (ideologies?) with the actual practice of humanists, who look most out of touch not in the content of our scholarship (who reads most of it anyway?), but in the institutional configurations we tend to defend. Defend is the right word. Where’s the offense? This Chronicle headline may be relevant.

It is possible that the bond market agrees with you. Moody’s not only expects “governance and leadership clashes to increase in coming years as the [education] sector’s ability to grow revenues dwindles,” but also argues that at UVA “the final resolution affirms the stability of the university’s faculty-centric governance model that will allow it to continue to effectively compete with the nation’s leading universities for top students, faculty, research grants and philanthropic support.”

“’Democracy’ in the Red Book is not centrally a problem of ‘self-government,'” you argue, “rather, it is a question of proper training, a management proposition (see, e.g., 93)”.

I agree with this and find it offers tantalizing propositions to rethink the role of faculty as managers and maybe even teaching as a form of administration. The Redbook authors urge us to “hold firmly in mind the final purpose of all education: to improve the average and speed the able while holding common goals before each” (90). That is, absolutely, a management problem. It can be difficult to think about the relationship between what goes on in the undergraduate classroom or in the curriculum with what is happening in boardrooms at UVA and in the streets of Montreal. I wonder how much that disconnect owes to the conceptual separation of teaching and service (as the administrative portion of our job is bizarrely known), and with the institutional bifurcation of managerial and professorial labor. I’ll lean just slightly farther out on this branch with help from an entry to that Chronicle forum on inequality. Anthony Carnevale asserts that “College education is becoming a passive participant in the reproduction of economic privilege. Taken one at time, postsecondary institutions are fountains of opportunity; taken together, they are a highly stratified bastion of privilege.” The problem here, it seems, is one of passivity as much as inequality. Or, the problem is passivity that keeps us from thinking about the sort of inequality (we call it meritocracy) we’re invested in and could be more aggressively managing.

Let me wind up this (rambling) post with my favorite passage in the Redbook. On page 98, the authors provide a vision of the America they think their model of higher education might produce and reproduce.

An ideal but not impossible vision of American society might see it as made up of myriad smaller societies representing between them all the arts and insights, all the duties and self-dedications, of civilized men. It would be in order that they might participate in some of these, quite as much as for making a living, that education would prepare young people, and this participation would in turn be the door to the good life.

There’s surely a complicated genealogy behind this model, but what strikes me is how the Redbook appears to consider the movement of students among classrooms and majors as a kind of training for participation in more various large and small societies upon graduation. What a compelling balance of Jackson and Jefferson: the Jacksonian common goal of Jeffersonian differentiation both organizes the Redbook university and the Redbook society.

John

2. A Jeffersonian matter? Funding merit.

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Dear John,

It’s taken me a while to work up a reply to your excellent post–not least because I so tragically misread your previous. I think you hit the nail on the head in asking: “who if anyone has interest in funding meritocracy these days, and how much do our cliches of critique, etc. depend on their capacity to mold the “talent” those Redbook authors think America needs? ”

With Chris Hayes and Althusser you point out that the language of merit can ratify privilege. (For Hayes, this is because of the contradictory principles of difference and mobility inherent in meritocratic systems, for Althusser it would because, in “the last instance which never in fact arrives,” capital has structured the rules according to which merit is judged merit.) I also take the (mostly implied) point that even when we “see through” merit to the privilege it ratifies, you and I will continue to believe in meritocracy anyway, because our professional practice is inconceivable without it: we’d be different people in a different line of work. No question of getting outside this ideology, only, perhaps, of exploiting its contradictions. One answer to your question, then, is that the already “meritorious” want to fund meritocracy and that, insofar as they have the resources to do so, they may be likely to fund merit in ways that undermine meritocracy by exempting their own values and interests from challenge.

This leaves your intriguing suggestion that the 20th Century’s educational institutions may have exhausted the meritocratic rhetoric that justified them, such that “meritocracy” can no longer be appealed to as a reason for funding public universities and, more particularly, humanities disciplines. If this suggestion is correct, the exhaustion of the old order would create an opening for alternatives that would appear horrifying or lovely, depending on one’s point of view and ability to apprehend them.

In the “America needs talent” universe of the Redbook it was imagined that properly funded high schools would do the sorting, and also that the cost of college would pose no obstacle for the meritorious student. Students certified by the very best colleges could confidently claim to have obtained their credentials due to talent. With a Jacksonian general education in place, they could also claim that those credentials certified a certain kind of public virtue, an exposure to the stuff of the commonweal, particularly as rendered in classic works of fiction. Even in 1945 this was an ideal. The Redbook authors’ insist throughout on the wide disparity in the quality of high school and college experiences. If high school disparities are regarded as a problem, college disparities, as you note, are regarded as inevitable. The authors take for granted that vocational, junior, and 4-year liberal arts colleges differ (178-180) and suggest a place for general education in each before focusing on Harvard as a test case. I find no argument in the Redbook that college should be publicly funded. The argument, rather, is that Harvard should and will provide financial assistance to “broaden the economic base from which its students are drawn” (184). Clearly, others had made and would make an argument for publicly funded meritocratic universities–not least those responsible for the Morrill Act. We probably need to look more closely at some of those arguments. So long as the Redbook provides our example of mid-century rhetoric, however, it’s worth underscoring a fact that emerged via our last round of exchanges: the authors give the humanities (and especially English) a special role in Jacksonian leveling but not so much in Jeffersonian sorting. When Harpham appeals to Redbook-era clichés, he’s reprising a move barely hinted at in the Rebbook itself. That move marries the work of literary eduction to specialization in literary reading and thereby makes the role of English in “general education” depend on special expertise, talent, and sensitivity. The Redbook and “Criticism, Inc.” are not merely contemporaries, but structural complements, the role prescribed for English in general education makes no sense absent the kinds of professors Ransom (and Leavis) believe should be trained. It is this compact, established at mid-century, that the second half of the century brought to ruin. The proposition that a healthy nation needs general education that includes the humanities is alive and well. More about this in a later post. For now, at the risk of belaboring the point, I just want to underscore that the Redbook’s “America needs talent” argument includes, but only by implication, a call for talented humanities specialists capable of engineering the leveling functions of general ed (206-07). Were the Rebooks authors to make this argument explicitly, they would hazard looking like their great antagonists: propagandists and advertisers (266).

Back to the present. Despite the dominance of “college for all” rhetoric, I think we continue take for granted the idea that “college” is a tiered market of different types and qualities of institutions. I also think we continue to imagine that excellent K-12 education should ideally be equally available for everyone (even though it manifestly is not). Doubtlessly the fact that K-12 education is, for the most part, compulsory in the US has a great deal to do with this. (I wonder what the Carnegie poll results you cite would be if, after being asked whether higher education should be a “right,” respondents were also asked if it should be required?) If “college for all” has not changed these assumptions, then it contains a meritocratic logic within it: the assumption is that everyone will be able to get into and attend some college or another according to their merits; not everyone will be able to get into every college; some BAs will be more equal than others. In the Carnegie poll, 67% of respondents said that funding was the greatest barrier to attending college. Which college, one wonders, did they have in mind? The “best” college to which a student is admitted? Any college whatsoever? It’s unclear to me that for any given student there would be a huge difference, although marketplace intuition says it’s always possible to buy up. My main point is that the question ambiguates the difference. It allows us to imagine that “attending college” equals “attending any college” and simultaneously that it means “attending the best possible college for that student.” The rhetorical shift from “America needs talent” to “college for all” is perhaps best grasped, then, not as a move from meritocracy to equal opportunity, but as a shift in emphasis from the nation’s needs to the individual’s. Both formulations, it seems to me, rely on old-fashioned liberalism’s logic that society and individuals have opposing interests that should be balanced. I think we both regard that logic as powerful, but bogus. This may suggest an avenue for further comment along the lines of pointing out that individual merit is meaningless except in reference to group norms.

Here’s more evidence that the shift from “America needs talent” to “college for all” amounts to no fundamental change. In the press release announcing the Carnegie poll results, Carnegie President Vartan Gregorian finds Redbook rhetoric ready to hand: “We shortchange our nation’s progress and squander our greatest renewable resource–our intellectual capital–if we allow critique of academia or passing partisan squabbling to stifle investment in higher education.” With Jefferson he appeals to “intellectual capital,” and with Jackson, national unity. One could say that Gregorian’s a throwback who preaches to a shrinking choir–I’m not so sure of that–but my point would be that, anyway, he does so under the “college for all banner.”

I know I’m leaving a lot of threads dangling, but indulge me in one more. Bill Gates, interviewed by the Chronicle on the Morrill Act anniversary and at the height of the Sullivan episode , speaks unapologetically about what business leaders want to bring to higher ed: a set of approaches geared to identifying best practices and solving those structural problems affecting large numbers of students. Public enemy number one: completion rates. I’ll go out on limb here and declare that not only am I not against improving completion rates, but also that I think Gates is right to identify this as the kind of issue with which business leaders should be concerned. I acknowledge the problems involved in treating completion as a reliable metric made apparent in here. Nonetheless, “completion rates” gives Gates a way to ask about what Universities are doing to deliver what they say they’ll deliver without telling them what they should deliver (in terms of curriculum, e.g.). Does this Jacksonian emphasis amount to a rejection of funding meritocracy? Not at all. Gates says he funds “change agents” who model the best practices that improve completion rates. There is a lot of room for humanities expertise here, it seems to me. No surrender of clichés would be required. Critique and completion are compatible. What might be required are changes in how the workforce is structured, how the curriculum is imagined, how space is used on campus, etc.

So my answer is that funding for meritocracy is not in jeopardy, but meritocracy may well be depending on where the funding for it ends up coming from. We have not arrived at a new day in which established defenses of general education, talent, and “critique” have lost all traction. What has broken down are the mechanisms conjoining these rhetorics (ideologies?) with the actual practice of humanists, who look most out of touch not in the content of our scholarship (who reads most of it anyway?), but in the institutional configurations we tend to defend. Defend is the right word. Where’s the offense? This Chronicle headline may be relevant.

Mark

2. A Jeffersonian Matter? Shrinking colleges, shifting dollars to K-12.

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Dear Mark,

Your question 2. about General Education in a Free Society reads as follows:

2. In Harpham’s account, the Red Book seems of a piece with the good old days of taxpayer supported higher-ed, but by far the strongest funding argument happens in chapter 3, where the authors note that inadequacies in state funding for what we would now call K-12 education mean that “out of every hundred young people between six and nine are good college material but do not reach college” (88). The argument here is not “college for all” but “America needs talent”: it is wasting youths that could succeed in college if only their parents could afford to get them through high school. Has Harpham considered that reclaiming midcentury clichés might logically mean shrinking the number of college students and, perhaps, shifting dollars to K-12?

I am going to treat this as a Jeffersonian question, leaving the Redbook’s consistent counterpoint of normalization and the Jacksonian goal of “raising the level of the average student” (27) to our discussion of 3.

I’ll speak to my sense of Harpham on this in a moment, but in general I would say two things about the status of “America needs talent.”

First, I think the conventional wisdom today outside academia is very much “college for all,” with considerable disagreement on how to fund that goal and whether you get a residential experience to go with your course credits. Populists on the left and right privilege “accessibility.” This term morphs according to the user. A Fox News editorial supporting the ouster of UVA President Sullivan propounds, “Simply put, high-quality universities have become too expensive and increasingly inaccessible because their presidents and other top leaders have failed to recognize and address the challenges and opportunities posed to their institutions by new technologies.” On the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Morrill Act, the Carnegie Corporation has put out a press release concerning new poll data that shows “3 out of 4 Americans Feel Higher Education Should Be a Right.”

That may be how Americans feel, but will they pay for it? In California at least K-12 funding is what gets people to the polls. Or so our Governor hopes. He’s using a threat to cut K-12 spending as a stick to encourage voters to support tax hikes. Meanwhile, we may soon have a state budget that boosts funding to higher ed if the UC and CSU systems don’t raise tuition any more.

It appeals to me to think of this question of “college for all” v. “America needs talent” in terms of broader thinking about meritocracy. Has college stopped seeming like an engine for generating meritocratic hierarchy? And is that a good thing or a bad thing? There is, I’m hoping, a Chris Hayes “America After Meritocracy” angle to the question of how humanities cliches relate to the politics of academic funding. Hayes argues that universities have gotten worse at talent spotting as test prep and application coaching programs blur the good and the great (and leave those who cannot pay for test prep and application coaching out in the cold). He goes further, contending that the ideal of meritocratic mobility “runs up against the reality of…the Iron Law of Meritocracy. The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible.”

For Harpham’s part, I confess to not having finished his The Humanities and the American Dream yet, but so far the closest he gets to this question is in a chapter adapted from a talk he gave at the University of Richmond. There, he rehearsed the cliches of liberal arts education with its “critiquing, probing, testing, speculating” (132). He ties those skills to professionalization but not to meritocracy per se. The “liberal arts faculty,” he contends, “was brought into being by the desire to professionalize knowledge” (135). He has his eye, I presume, on the mid-century field-definers we talk about too in our work in progress. For liberal arts faculty alarmed about the rise of the professional schools, he argues, “the glass is half-full. For if the liberal arts are already professionalized, then the intrusion of professional education into the curriculum does not constitute a second fall of man, and a productive collaboration may be feasible without either side’s having to capitulate” (136). Of the examples he offers, the executive training team Movers and Shakespeares is especially intriguing. “A two-person mom-and-pop company,” in Harpham’s characterization, “founded on the premise that in order to be a good leader, one must understand people, and that Shakespeare understood people better than anyone” (139). So many thoughts come to mind. Among them, reflecting back on your post from a couple of weeks ago: here’s Shakespeare as an example for you. Certainly, the humanities in this usage (or English in this usage, lest you accuse me of conflating the humanities and English [perish the thought]), are on the side of professional-managerial differentiation.

As for the Redbook, as you say the authors of this volume see high school as a sorting mechanism, and hope that it makes clear who has the talent to attend college and who is but one of those “young people of average intelligence…not suited for the traditional college,” rather capable of profiting from “training in agriculture or nursing” (89). Everybody should have the “chances to perfect what is in them,” but what is in some is not in others (98). I think of Althusser here, and of an education apparatus that boots people out into vocational / specialized training as their aptitude allows. The Redbook authors imagine general education as “the trunk of a tree from which branches, representing specialism, go off at different heights, at high school or junior college or college or graduate school–the points, that is, at which various groups end their formal schooling” (102). The smarter you are, the longer you remain general in your education. When you shift to vocational training, you are finding your place on the great tree of merit.

It is fortuitous that Harpham has a tree as well. The faculty in the professional schools, he suggests, have long looked out of their well-appointed offices and asked of the university, “Why aren’t the English teachers treated as the marginal ones, the ornaments rather than the tree?” (135). Who is the tree and who the ornament at UVA if, as some commentators anticipate, the Board of Visitors decide to un-oust Sullivan?

Trees aside, who if anyone has interest in funding meritocracy these days, and how much do our cliches of critique, etc. depend on their capacity to mold the “talent” those Redbook authors think America needs? To answer this question might well tell us how out of sync our cliches really are with the tenor of contemporary conversation about the university.

John

1. The scope of the project is vast (part 2).

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Dear John,

How could I fail to leap at your prompt?

Back to where we started. You asked: “Does the Red Book warrant description of the ‘humanities crisis’ people as reactionary defenders of an increasingly narrow and rapidly obsolescing point of view?” The suggestion that Sullivan was kicked out because she wouldn’t crush Classics and German makes me ask the perhaps obvious follow up, What part of the administrative turmoil at UVA and elsewhere turns on the humanities contribution to general education?

Not the whole enchilada, and I’m not sure that this is the most useful form of the question.

Retracing your steps “back to where we started,” I notice, first, a series of rhetorical moves reducing “general education” to “the humanities” while pushing aside questions of disciplinary emphasis or orientation within the humanities. This gets you to the statement: “A crisis of general education, in other words, is what the Redbook authors might mean if they said the humanities were in crisis.” You make these moves deftly. Tthe reasoning is not unfamiliar. A different reading of the Red Book might challenge it.

For example, I would not be prepared to say that exposure to Darwin is less important for general education than exposure to Shakespeare or Casablanca. The Red Book’s authors are absolutely clear, however, that the history and philosophy of science should be part of the sciences’ contributions to general education (230). Darwin does not become “humanities” property by virtue of being important to general education, nor, I think, should he. While there is a privileging of the humanities and of English in the Red Book’s imperative to make general education a unifying force, the authors do not themselves equate the humanities with English with general education.

And it’s a good thing too, particularly given the narrowness of the Red Book’s conception of the humanities, which, one might note, includes neither Classics nor German. Although replete with references to hoary Greek classics, the Red Book does not isolate them as a disciplinary object of study, but instead tends to wedge them into history of Western thought and civilization under the social sciences. To the extent, then, that they are part of shared general education, they might not need a separate department to look after them. The Historians can take care of it. A similar argument could be made about German–let the business school offer language instruction for the MBAs, but one doesn’t need the full departmental apparatus for that. Let me pause here to say unequivocally that I think a university of UVa stature should offer advanced training in Classics and in German language and culture (although I remain open regarding the ideal administrative configuration to support such endeavors.) My point is that I do not think the Red Book’s defense of the humanities as a component of general education provides the rationale for such training. It could in fact support closing such departments, particularly if, for example, Classic made a general ed argument without succeeding in producing the desired unifying experience among masses of undergraduates. We look to the Red Book as a defender of the humanities at our peril, precisely because it so strongly links them to “general education,” whereas so very much of what humanities departments at large public universities now do looks like specialized education.

I continue to find important the Red Book’s insistence on “general education” as a problem set that conjoins K-12 and Universities, and I continue to be struck by a corresponding lack of commerce between contemporary discussions of K-12 crises and public university crises, although the frameworks of “privatization” and “neolibralism” are often applied to each. Henry Giroux offers an exception proving the general rule when he points to an “education deficit” at all levels. (Your friend Andy Lewis is absolutely right that Brown v. Board needs to be in this story, by the way.) I bring this up in response to your question because I think that the UVa situation points to arguments over what education should do and how it should be paid for that are broader than the university and certainly broader than the humanities. Reading through a bit of Helen Dragas’s email, for example, one is struck by the importance she attaches to publicly visible ways of reducing cost. To the extent that this interest exceeds the reasonable and appropriate oversight functions of a board member, it’s easy to imagine that the politics here have little to do with education at all (cost to renovate dinning facilities are a major issue), but rather with the deep suspicion of/hostility to spending on public institutions. Again, I think we turn this into a “humanities” problem at our peril. It is much broader.

I prefer Newfield’s “management” vs. “professionalism” to “humanities” vs. “the neoliberal university.” I understand him to be talking about two different professional-managerial styles. One, quintessentially business sector, focuses on short term optimization of outcomes, and the other, quintessentially public sector, thinks about the welfare of populations in the long term. This is a longstanding, core ideological conflict. Thinking about the problem in this way broadens it beyond the university and also provides a way to explain what’s at stake in advocating for a particular conception of the university. I think Newfield is right to conclude:

The core issue in the Sullivan firing is whether professionals will generally self-govern academic change–in equitable partnership with financial and other types of managers–or whether academic change will be defined and shaped primarily by managers, in nonbinding “consultation” with academics only when necessary.

I think he’s also astute in pointing out a rhetorical trap that resonates with our concerns:

Unfortunately, Teresa Sullivan falls into the trap of describing her collaborative method as incremental and conservative. This kind of rhetoric allows the Board to define her as slow and inadequate in a time of rapid change, and to justify executive authority as that which is bold and decisive.

Should we go another round on this? I might rather first hear your thoughts on #2 and then circle back as needed.

Mark

1. The scope of the project is vast.

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Dear Mark,

I say “Yes!” to your proposition that we write a series of posts dealing with each of the five problems in your framing of General Education in a Free Society.

On to problem 1., with acknowledgment that I’ll necessarily touch on issues you have categorized in other problems. You wrote,

1. The scope of the project is vast. It surveys high school as well as college, charts the development of these institutions since the 1870s, considers problems of funding and staffing, and confronts squarely the issues of differential ability and meritocracy. The authors situate their argument for university-level general education squarely within an analysis of the educational system as a whole. Unless I am much mistaken, such an awareness of the big picture is almost totally absent from the current alarmist rhetoric about “the humanities in crises.” It does show up, however, among those thinking about the digital revolution (e.g., Davidson’s, Now you See It). Does the Red Book warrant description of the “humanities crisis” people as reactionary defenders of an increasingly narrow and rapidly obsolescing point of view?

There are a bundle of issues in this item that I care about. Let me drift my way towards one answer to your question. Warning: my answer will take the form of another question.

For the authors of the Redbook, the humanities are most important as the focal point for a general education curriculum. “While the Redbook never explicitly identifies the humanities as the first among equals in the divisions of knowledge,” Harpham writes in The Humanities and the Dream of America, “their primacy is strongly implied, not least by the fact that whenever the divisions of knowledge are treated serially, the sequence is humanities, social studies, and science and mathematics” (157). As both you and Harpham note, no humanities discipline receives more attention in the Redbook than English. More on this in posts regarding Problem 4.

To the extent that the humanities feature so importantly in general education, they are agents for the Redbook’s effort to de-emphasize specialization in both high school and college study. “[A]s modern life has come increasingly to rest on specialized knowledge, the various fields of college study have in consequence appeared simply as preparation for one or another position in life. They have become, in short, for many, though by no means for all, a kind of higher vocational training” (38). The challenge or problem the Redbook sets out to resolve with a revised curricula “is how to save general education and its values within a system where specialism is necessary” (53). The “aim of education,” the book’s authors declare, “should be to prepare an individual to become an expert both in some particular vocation or art and in the general art of the free man and the citizen. Thus the two kinds of education once given separately to different social classes must be given together to all alike” (54). Not only does the education system envisioned by the Redbook have both Jeffersonian and Jacksonian aspects, but also the subject of that education system has a more specialized and generally human qualities. The humanities are, by and large, important in the Redbook for their special capacity to help a person develop the general side.

Different humanities disciplines contribute to this “general art of the free man and the citizen.” English is a unifying force, its great books are meeting points, and serve as tools for illuminating “norms of living as they are presented to the eye by the best authors” (107). You’ve noted this normalizing component, which English shares with the other humanities disciplines. The arts “bring delight,” and they also “train the emotions; they develop understanding.” “Foreign” language training is primarily important in high school and college because it can help you understand better how English works. Philosophy’s contribution is imparting “the habit of self-criticism” and “perspective, the capacity to envisage truth synoptically, from the standpoint of ‘all time and all existence.'” More on the contributions of “New Media of Education” under Problem 5.

From the perspective of the Redbook, the only crisis of the humanities worthy of the name would entail a breakdown of these complementary functions.

A crisis of general education, in other words, is what the Redbook authors might mean if they said the humanities were in crisis.

It is tempting to suggest that they would be alarmed in just this way by recent events at the University of Virginia. The Washington Post was among the news outlets to report that Teresa Sullivan was forced out as President because some members of the Board of Visitors felt she “lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.” Combined with the Board’s appointment of Carl Zeithaml, Cornell Professor of Free Enterprise and head of the UVA McIntire School of Commerce as Interim President, what is going on in Charlottesville seems to be putting pressure on the Redbook version of the university. The neoliberal recentering of the university on the business school certainly looks like a reversion to exactly the sort of vocational training that the Redbook authors rail against. But is this what is at stake in the suggestion that Sullivan was canned because she wouldn’t exercise the authority of her office to defund Classics?

(The fact that UVA is a public university makes it different from the Redbook’s Harvard. Still, given the private donors in play what is happening at UVA touches on yet another matter for yet another post, namely, Harpham’s good and bad philanthropists. Good ones from mid century and a few remaining like Richard Franke, discussed in The Humanities and the Dream of America, think that the humanities are useful for businessmen, public policy experts, and all sorts of other specialists. Bad ones are impatient types exemplified by Peter D. Kiernan, recently resigned chairman of the Board of Trustees for UVA’s Darden School Foundation, who wrote the much-quoted email in which he claimed that “the governance of the University was not sufficiently tuned to the dramatic changes we all face: funding, internet, technology advances, the new economic model. These are matters for strategic dynamism rather than strategic planning.”)

(Related too, Chris Newfield’s analysis of the UVA matter, which hinges on his insistent opposition of managers (bad) and professionals (good), where the former favor dynamism and the latter planning.)

(Also: my friend Andy Lewis thinks we should consider mid-century innovations in general education in concert with Brown v. Board of Education, a rough contemporary of the Redbook.)

Back to where we started. You asked: “Does the Red Book warrant description of the ‘humanities crisis’ people as reactionary defenders of an increasingly narrow and rapidly obsolescing point of view?” The suggestion that Sullivan was kicked out because she wouldn’t crush Classics and German makes me ask the perhaps obvious follow up, What part of the administrative turmoil at UVA and elsewhere turns on the humanities contribution to general education?

This sort of question was invoked by an apposite series of tweets appearing yesterday in response to a comment by the columnist Matt Yglesias. He tweeted: “I like mocking MBA-speak as much as the next guy, but is there really a sound case for taxpayer-funded German language instruction?” A film blogger (!!!) named David Robson responded with the vocational position: “German’s ‘the language of the dominant economic power of Europe.’ Learning it’s good for economists.” Swarthmore History Professor Timothy Burke asked, “Is there really a case for any subject once you start putting it like that? Or is the only case narrowly vocational?” Mike Konczal, a Roosevelt Institute fellow who writes a blog on finance and politics, asked, “Isn’t it just a subset of the general case for humanities education?”

John

The Red Book

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Dear John,

The relatively brief, but eventful, history of the Humanities after Hollywood as we currently imagine it begins in the period from around 1915 to around 1935. Then, “Hollywood” provided any number of institutions and disciplines a formative and, to remarkable extent, shared example. The example encouraged novelists, psychologists, social reformers, sociologists, Great Books advocates, policy wonks, filmmakers, and curators to collaborate in the project of managing populations through the management of culture. I mean “collaborate” here a very loose and general sense: with hindsight, positions that may at the time have seemed antithetical can be understood as aspects of a common project. Thus, although there were clearly differences of opinion about whether and how film should be included in university curricula, disputants of the 20s and 30s seem notably eager to experiment with including it. “Hollywood” does not in this period name a problem clearly external to “English,” for example. This comes as something of a surprise to those of us brought up on the narrative in which Film Studies arises in the 1960s along with other challengers to traditionalist disciplines.

Our explanation for what changed around mid-century has emphasized the growth and increasing professionalization of the humanities disciplines. We accept the standard line that New Criticism (in the US) and F. R. Leavis (in the UK) established new forms of professional orthodoxy for English. These orthodoxies have been associated with disciplinary rigor ever since. When asked to define for non-specialists what makes the study of “Literature” important (and different from the study of anything else) even the most cutting-edge of our contemporaries may well find themselves reproducing some version a New Critical or Leavisite argument.

English, we have been acutely aware, is not the humanities. We have wanted examples that would give the mid-century configuration of English a better context. Geoffrey Harpham led us to Harvard’s 1945 “Red Book” (General Education in a Free Society) through his essay in Representations special issue on “The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public University.” In our FSU talk, we are critical of Harpham’s nostalgia for the moment the Red Book exemplifies:

In this heyday of general education and core curricula, funding humanities research supported a “perhaps quixotic and definitely nationalistic but fundamentally noble attempt to create a society unified…by the common opportunity to rise through education to the level of one’s merits” (Harpham 56).

What seems to have irked us most is Harpham’s two-fold belief, first, that capitalists in the Carnegie mode were inherently more friendly to the humanities than a “new breed” of “venture philanthropists” that seeks a “quantifiable return on a ‘social investment” and thus “inclines toward science, technology, and management and away from the humanities,” and second, that this state of affairs is best addressed by reclaiming the rhetoric that worked with old-school funders. He concludes: “we must make every effort to reclaim, reactivate, and reinvigorate our own clichés.” We wrote:

What worries us about this call is not the agreeable and valid argument that a liberal arts education is good for juries, op ed pages, and dinner party conversation–it clearly is. We are dismayed, rather, by Harpham’s cynical embrace of a midcentury rhetoric built to find “American democracy” in the alliance of big-state nationalism and robber-baron capitalism. This alliance did not fund “democracy” in any direct way. It paid for meritocratic educational institutions. Such institutions work to certify and distribute the authority to represent and manage others. The logic of a “return on ‘social investment’” has never been as foreign to them as Harpham would have us suppose.

Now having read the Red Book, I like this argument against Harpham better than ever. The Red Book does indeed emphasize general education as instrument of national unity and “democracy.” Nonetheless, I never would have intuited from Harpham’s admittedly brief discussion some of the most notable features of the book.

The scope of the project is vast. It surveys high school as well as college, charts the development of these institutions since the 1870s, considers problems of funding and staffing, and confronts squarely the issues of differential ability and meritocracy. The authors situate their argument for university-level general education squarely within an analysis of the educational system as a whole. Unless I am much mistaken, such an awareness of the big picture is almost totally absent from the current alarmist rhetoric about “the humanities in crises.” It does show up, however, among those thinking about the digital revolution (e.g., Davidson’s, Now you See It). Does the Red Book warrant description of the “humanities crisis” people as reactionary defenders of an increasingly narrow and rapidly obsolescing point of view?
In Harpham’s account, the Red Book seems of a piece with the good old days of taxpayer supported higher-ed, but by far the strongest funding argument happens in chapter 3, where the authors note that inadequacies in state funding for what we would now call K-12 education mean that “out of every hundred young people between six and nine are good college material but do not reach college” (88). The argument here is not “college for all” but “America needs talent”: it is wasting youths that could succeed in college if only their parents could afford to get them through high school. Has Harpham considered that reclaiming midcentury clichés might logically mean shrinking the number of college students and, perhaps, shifting dollars to K-12?
In claiming “the opportunity to rise through education to the level of one’s merits” as a unifying force, Harpham rhetorically sublates tendencies the Red Book presents as opposites in need of balancing. Centrally, it weighs the “Jeffersonian” principle of “discovering and giving opportunity to the gifted student” against the “Jacksonian” principle of “raising the level of the average student” (27). The authors stake the nation’s future on balancing these opposing imperatives: “The hope of the American school system, indeed of our society, is precisely that it can pursue two goals simultaneously: give scope to ability and raise the average. Nor are these two goals so far apart, if human beings are capable of common sympathies” (35). “Unity” thus becomes the central problem, and “general education,” its instrument. Harpham does not err in pointing out that Red Book-era rhetoric made meritocracy, democracy, and training in the humanities appear to coincide. But he empties that achievement and reduces it, precisely, to a cliché, by underplaying the “Jacksonian” imperative. No merit without normalization, the Red Book reminds us. If the Jeffersonian principle looks to individuals, the Jacksonian considers populations. General eduction, in contrast to Jeffersonian specialized education, was to be a unifying instrument for populations, and not so much a meritocratic one for individuals. “Democracy” in the Red Book is not centrally a problem of “self-government,” rather, it is a question of proper training, a management proposition (see, e.g., 93).
In defining the humanities as a key component of general eduction, the Red Book privileges the study of English literature. In the section on high schools, for example, the humanities look more far more strongly balkanized by area than the social sciences and sciences. Math, chemistry, biology, appear as a distinct subject areas, but we move with relative ease from a paragraphs describing chemistry and biology courses to those laying out math courses. Under the humanities, we have strongly separated sections for: English, defined in New Critical terms as not history or politics but “the works themselves,” conveyors of a unifying heritage, and clearly the heart of the matter; Foreign Languages, which may or may not be a humanities endeavor depending on whether the languages are treated as communication “tools” or as aides in appreciating English as a language; and Arts, the appreciation of which is felt to be enriching in a vague, emotional way. In the section on Harvard, great English language books receive similar emphasis in the proposed new core curriculum. The authors voice a number of assumptions about what English Literature is and does that want further examination. I think we need to look, too, to the composition of the Committee whose report this is (Ivor Richards is the English professor on it). And we need poke around a little bit in the literature to determine whether the Harvard folks are voicing an established consensus about English or are attempting to institutionalize a new orthodoxy. This has the ring to me, however, of a representative example. Thesis: in 1945, but not 1935, educators could treat “English Literature,” understood as the study of great works apart from their history and context, as if it were the essence of “the humanities.”
The Red Book is symptomatically silent on the subject mass culture as a competing unifier. The issue comes up briefly in the final pages: “The press, radio, photography, television–our progressive disembodiment–and indeed all increased means of mass communication have their dangers too.” The authors seem particularly concerned about advertising: “‘In a world of strife, there is peace in beer.’ That slogan was no invention of a satirist. It adorned many a newspaper in the days before Pearl Harbor and is but one example, less harmful through its very fatuousness, of the modes of attack to which mass communication exposes standards in all fields. Against them we can only oppose general education at all levels” (266). Apparently, effective opposition won’t require knowledge of the adversary, since there is no place whatsoever for “mass communications” in general education as Harvard imagines it. What a difference from the situation before the war! Then, the problem of “mass culture,” how to learn from and about it, was absolutely central to considerations of the problem of democracy (e.g., in the Lippmann-Dewey debate) and the university both. Again, more research is needed, but this seems like a representative example of a familliar configuration: a particular notion of English Literature is elevated as isomorphic with the humanities, which are also, in the same stroke, clearly distinguished from the social sciences (which include history) and the sciences (which include math); mass culture appears as an ominous external force with which general education competes to unify the nation.

What would you say to a series of posts dealing with each of these five problems?

Mark