Alena Selezneva
Over a surprisingly long career, I’ve watched the professionalization of academe and the politics of disciplines drive us farther away from humanistic approaches to, well, the humanities. At the same time, a push toward an everyone-get-on-board-the-DEI-train—which was a vital and long-overdue corrective to centuries of exclusion—has increasingly turned into a rigid cultural orthodoxy. Watching these two forces converge has left me queasy, and I’m struggling to find ways to think about where we are today and what needs to change.
When I went into publishing in 1984, Oxford University Press, which had long been an outlet for the imperial power to pump out Bibles and later books of interest to general readers, decided to begin publishing scholarly monographs. No longer did books have to be bought by a whole bunch of individuals; libraries had standing orders and we could count them to snap up 800 to 1,000 copies of even the narrowest slivers of contributions to fields.
Authors, for whom an OUP imprint could be a tenure-worthy stamp, flooded us with submissions. Editors were like grizzlies during salmon spawning, needing to do little more than dip a paw into the rushing river of manuscripts to fill a list. Pretty soon we were awash in titles that were sometimes little more than posthole filling. That some (many?) of these monographs didn’t feel like they were written by or for humans mattered not at all.
Oxford’s list was serious, but my brow is pretty low. When I presented books at sales conference, I always made sure I told the reps why the arguments mattered, even if the authors had neglected to make that point. As a twenty-something, I didn’t have the confidence to edit serious scholars strongly enough to shape the text. On monographs, well, I did almost no editing at all, even when the prose was not exactly pellucid.
Though no one wants to think of herself as anything other than edgy and interesting, the truth is that in college I majored in English at a time and place where Derrida and de Man were on the faculty. My friends were deconstructing literary theory; I read plain old literature. In 1991, when I took a job as acquisitions editor at Duke University Press, I said to another new colleague that I feared he was going to think my list was boring and I’d find his dumb. The jargon of high theory dressed up sometimes trivial ideas in ways that made me want to puke and would reach no one who was not already a member of the club.
At the same time, I got interested in what was going on in the law schools. Critical legal studies, including critical race theory, lit me up. That scholarship excited me because I could clearly see its implications. I also loved old-fashioned narrative history, though I puzzled over comments from peer reviewers who called manuscripts “journalistic” when they were written in lucid prose. For a time, I thought I was just not smart enough to follow the polysyllabic jargon fashionable at MLA academic cocktail parties. The Sokal affair implicated the press that cut my paycheck, and reader, I gotta say, I loved it.
Performativity sticks in my craw. (See! I can use academic lingo!) I hate anything that’s not real and honest, though I give a pass to things like marshmallow Peeps and diet A&W root beer because I’m human and those treats are divine. And I’ve never been a joiner. Look: I wanted to be Brownie because of the outfits, but I got kicked out after two days because I refused to pledge my love to God. So, let’s just say I don’t tend to go with the flow. Call me naïve, but I think the words we spout should matter. One of my favorite books, Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing, shows how scholars throw around the word “Foucauldian” to mean, well, pretty much nothing.
I believe in every cell of my body that diversity, equity and inclusion are essential and quintessential American values. And without teaching students the value of studying the humanities, our society will suffer. I also think we’ve gotten wasted on the Kool-Aid of a social movement that had its heart in the right place but has often been reduced to a police state of virtue signaling. We need to acknowledge the mistakes of the past and those we continue to make. Many of us are too scared to say things have gotten ridiculous. Well, here I go.
As much as the sight of a certain red baseball hat makes my blood boil, sitting through a rote hairshirted land acknowledgment grates almost as much. I mean, yep, we stole land and we need to own that. But what if, instead of just saying three Hail Marys to assuage our guilt, we passed around a hat at the start of each meeting so everyone who truly cared could pony up some coin to give to the tribes? Instead of turning off every single person who clenches their fists (and tightens their legislative purse strings) when called out as “colonizers,” we could do something meaningful.
This is all to say, when the Vandy/Wash U report came out, I hoped it might kick off a much-needed conversation about the lasting importance of the humanities and reckon with what we’ve gotten wrong. Public confidence in higher ed ranks lower than the insurance industry. People! We have to get our shit together. Even among Democrats, we’re losing the battle for the hearts and minds of America.
One of the report’s authors, Ashley T. Rubin, made the case for why it matters in a piece in The Chronicle. Amen to everything she wrote and here’s what I’d add: As Patricia Nelson Limerick pointed out in 1993, professors are the people no one wanted to dance with in high school. We get our revenge by writing in ways that shows our intellectual superiority. Those chickens have come home to roost in our emptied-out humanities classrooms.
I believe that humanities scholars’ unwillingness to write to anyone who isn’t already a member of the club has contributed to our decline. The bottom line is the bottom line: Faculty still want to get and keep their jobs. We have a wacky system of evaluation and reward that does much to squelch courageous thinking. Most academics see themselves as rugged individualists, their many-year mission to boldly go where no scholar has gone before. The truth, friends, is most of us are sheep. And if you’ve ever known a ewe up close and personal, as I have (RIP, Tess), you know that not only do they follow the herd, they can also be total assholes.
While academic clothes may not always be the most fashionable, we follow la mode as much as any group. If you want an example, simply sit in Faculty Senate meetings. You hear the barn owls hooting and the elk bugling and all the little lambs sit silently while the Angry Eight have their say. It’s easier to go along than to be brave. In many ways, the rewards system of peer review and collegial approval has been our own undoing.
Unless you want to bring the wrath of the AAUP on your head (yes, I’m expecting a full inbox of messages that tell me I was right the first time and that I’m just not smart enough), there are things many of us on humanities faculties think and cannot say aloud to our colleagues, though we whisper them to each other.
In a hushed conversation with a friend who has long worked to support the humanities (like, literally, by doling out real dollars), he said he thinks the reason there are few conservatives in academe is not entirely that they were driven out by liberals, but because “they saw it was a lousy business and opted out before ever going into it. So all of us crazies were left to run the asylum.” All those books providing lit crit interpretations of Harry Potter and Game of Thrones (filled with unintelligible prose) that scholars need to publish to reap professional goodies? Well, no one is buying them, and university presses can no longer afford to subsidize the costs. At the same time, the world outside our campus gates loves the humanities—book clubs and music performances and podcasts, oh my!
If you read commercially published novels by liberal straight white cis men with M.F.A.s, you can see that they are fed up with being told they are the root of all evil. It’s best when they’re funny about this state of things, but the subtext is simmering rage at diversity trainings that called them out as implicit racists and exhaustion at pronoun exercises they’ve had to learn. That’s a whole lot less dangerous than the other men who get shouted down, hear their time is up and take up arms.
No one wants to be aligned with an administration (either federal or institutional) that is horrible and corrupt. But what if some of the ways we’ve leaned in to ideas of equity have screwed up the arc of the moral universe? Instead of making it more just, have we called people out instead of bringing them in? Has the way we’ve approached difficult conversations serve to create not more speech but enforced silence? How much of this did we bring on ourselves?
How, now that we’ve lost the confidence of those outside our campus gates, do we move forward to a world that is better than it was before? Maybe it’s by doing the hardest thing and admitting we may have made mistakes, but we’ve learned from them and will strive to do better.
