Are English Departments Killing the Humanities?

Are English Departments Killing the Humanities?

Feisal G. Mohamed: Are English Departments Killing the Humanities?

The focus of this post is not the thousand-and-one times told tale of how the corporatization of the university and state divestment from higher education has had a particularly disastrous impact upon humanities departments. There are several informed and important books on those economic realities, of which Stanley Fish provides a partial bibliography in a recent blog post and David A. Bell provides a review essay in the Fall 2010 print issue of Dissent. We can treat these realities as facts to be taken for granted. But even as we strain against such pressures, we can engage in difficult self-scrutiny. We might wonder if there are conditions of intellectual deprivation for which the institutional structures governing the humanities are partly to blame. And any such consideration must look squarely at that elephant in the olive grove, the English department, and ask if it does more harm than good.

This upstart institution has had a brief if also voracious life. Professorships of English language and literature began to appear in earnest in the late nineteenth century, spurred by an unlikely and uneasy alliance between philological study and the kind of civilizing errand of literature one might associate with Matthew Arnold. For Arnoldians, literature would play the cultural role once occupied by religion, with beauty civilizing the modern individual. Such views reached their climax in the era of the Second World War, with the cultural mobilization against fascism that made liberal values seem all the more worth cultivating in their fragility. The avatar of that attitude was Harvard?s Douglas Bush, who speaking in 1944 identified the cultural tradition running from the ancient Greeks through Milton as ?that heritage for which the war has been fought.?

It is no small achievement of Marxian, gender, and race studies to have announced the naked chauvinisms of this imperialist cultural narrative. But having now knocked the self-satisfied smirk off of the civilizing project of literary study, there seems little justification left for English to dominate its cousins in the humanities. To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it.

This might be why some of the most accomplished scholars in the field seem willing to stop teaching the tradition altogether. In recent contributions to both the ADE Bulletin and MLA Profession, Sidonie Smith deploys many of the buzzwords of this anti-pedagogy, which advocates ?collaborative learning? rather than the development of student knowledge, and making undergraduates critical readers of their digital environments rather than critical readers of humanist traditions. Such sentiments are not Smith?s personal view so much as they are the expression of what is becoming a prevailing orthodoxy. At the risk of being impolite, I will be pointed about their implications: this is not a progressive program of higher education, but is in fact a perniciously anti-progressive one. It confirms the casual undergraduate presupposition that nothing occurring before 1980 is of real significance, that the free market is the culmination of the human desire for liberty, and that digital fora for blather are now fundamental to meditations on our role in the universe. This is not training thoughtful citizens; it is training the next generation to become an ignorant herd easily led through a cultural landscape shaped by the corporate interests dropping shiny techno-apples in its path.

At my home institution, the University of Illinois, English is larger than departments of philosophy, religion, classics, and art history combined. That relationship is quite typical. And its disproportionate size has come at the expense of other disciplines. In its youth it promised an education in literature without the hard work of learning languages, much to the dismay of classicists. In its middle age it offered a stripped-down version of philosophy under the banner of critical theory, an intrusion that philosophers bore with Stoic calm. Now in its senescence, the English department is being beaten by communications at its own game of watering down curriculum and reducing humanist traditions to what today?s adolescent will find?to use the favorite malapropism of the text-messaging generation??relatable.?

At this point many of my colleagues in the discipline will wonder if they have a Judas in their midst or, worse yet, an Allan Bloom. The typical maneuver of conservative movements in the humanities is to offer in such moments a paean to ancient Greeks and Romans. I have no such intention. In an age more forthright in its bigotries, Irving Babbitt advocated a New Humanism that readily embraced a meritocracy of learning. The humanitarian, in Babbitt?s phrase, ?has sympathy for mankind in the lump,? where a humanist ?is interested in the perfecting of the individual.? The return to the classics, or to great texts traditionally conceived, never seems in my mind fully to dispense with such patrician sensibilities.

The humanities programs of the next century might rather be structured around ?world humanisms.? In such programs the phrase ?great texts? would evoke the Bhagavad Gita every bit as much as it does The Iliad. The learning of at least one world language would be required, be it Arabic, French, or Mandarin. At its center would be neither the vernacular nor an artificially constructed ?Western tradition.? Instead it would explore on their own terms, and in their rich cross-fertilization, millenia of world traditions offering insight on the relationships between individual and society; on our ethical obligations to our fellow beings, human and non-human; and on flourishing and justice. The study of English and other literatures would still play a prominent role?unlike philosophy, literature gives us insight on the blood-and-guts world of cultural production, where the desire for pure idea and beauty strains against the fetters of material contexts and the smallness of mind they breed; that?s what keeps me coming back to it, and especially back to Milton, where those agons are writ large. There is no humanities department, English included, that needs to shrink, but there certainly are some in desperate need of growth, and English is far from the top of the list.

An example of a ?world humanisms? approach is suggested by a conference that I recently attended in Istanbul, which brought together philosophers and theologians from North America and Turkey. One of the many rich portraits that emerged was of first-century Alexandria, where the Neoplatonism of the Jewish philosopher Philo directly influenced the early Christians Clement and Origen, as well as laying the foundations of Islamic philosophy through al-Kindi and al-Farabi. We are blinded to the study of this kind of influence by a focus on ?Western Civilization? that favors Athens and Rome to Alexandria and treats Origen only as a precursor to Saint Augustine, that supposed inventor of an exclusively Christian syncretism between philosophy and theology.

To paraphrase one of the least insightful essayists of our time, the world is emphatically not flat. It is everywhere richly textured. And textured in a complex interweaving that defies the narrow confines of vernacular or hemispheric bounds. Our task as humanists of the twenty-first century is to make those long and deep traditions visible, and to do so in the teeth of those forces that would strip them away, be those forces technological, commercial, political, or intellectual.