Courtoisie may be powerful, but it is hard to imagine how something so thin as the contemporary variety can sustain the humanities much longer.
not only because society is shifting towards a more crude and quick mindset (in a sense, we simply do not have time to stand on ceremony), but also because our sense of collegiality and civility is starting to shift in its entirety.
Deep down, what most humanists value about the humanities is that it gives them participation in a community in which they can share similar tastes in reading, art, food, travel, music, media, and yes, politics.
intellectual incest
Where it always has been, with the people who read (old) stuff and think about it.
this is the root of the meaning of "university"
overproduction
I still do not see how this production is overproduction
So the humanities have both Left and Right defenders, Left and Right critics
I find it incredibly interesting that the humanities and its pedagogy is at the center of a Left/Right political tug of war. We might benefit from considering the other hotbeds of conflict between right and left--what ties them all together?
the reason for studying them in the first place.
Should we leave open the possibility that the humanities need not be goal oriented and quantifiable ? Maybe part of the way to preserve the humanities is to find new ways of talking about it that does not succumb to these measures.
intellectual philistine
we cant appropriately qualify this rejection of Montesquieu until we know what they offer instead. Ostensibly there is always some majority dictating "what our children need to know" and maybe this is the problem--not the what, but the how. The problem is canon-building in general i would propose.
By all available metrics, student intellectual performance has declined precipitously as the university administration has ballooned
yes. absolutely. also ballooned in response to our over-administrative reality in general, not just within the university.
Ask about virtually any problem in the university today and the solution proposed will inevitably be administrative. Why? Because we think administrators, not professors, guarantee the quality of the product and the achievement of institutional goals. But how is that possible in an academic environment in which knowledge and understanding are the true goals? Without putting too fine a point on it, it’s because they aren’t the true goals any longer.
Much of the reason for the over administration of education is also professors who throw up their hands and say "that's not my job" when less "intellectual" and more "practical" issues arise. "im interested only in ideas" is a common refrain that I heard throughout graduate school. I have some problems with this, but also in many ways agree that professors should be in a sense objective purveyors of ideas
accountable
accountability as the main differentiating attribute
each of us belongs to multiple identity communities,
such a productive center point--we need to be doing so much more work around challenging categorization, if not only to provide evidence that in fact every single human is capable of (and prone to) fluidity (conscious or not), but also that there is no "safety" to be found in neatly compacted, singular identity.
he, too, is America
This poem by Hughes will always haunt me, in the same way his later poem, "Let America Be America Again" will always haunt me in their reveal that absolutely nothing in this country has changed, and in fact, this mythic, rhetorical America is growing even more aggressively racist and chauvinistic (eg: Make America Great Again).
don’t often write about what it means to lose friends and colleagues.
I love this point. It is a loss palpable to all.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what I’m good for. I don’t know how to come to terms with the fact that I have so much in my head, and so much in my Google Drive, that is basically useless right now.
My one true gripe with these lamentations--all appear to work within a very conservative frame of what is the life of the mind. You can be employed elsewhere and still pursue scholarship. If your mind's work is so deeply embedded in who you are as a person, you must be able to find a life for your ideas outside of the academy (honestly, even if you work for the academy, you should still aspire to this). The validity of scholarship must not depend on institutional backing. In my opinion, we need to start cultivating a broader, more enlightened understanding of intellectual work that lends just as much heft and validity to independence as it does to affiliation. Some of the most interesting work is achieved by those who pursue their ideas untethered by institutional milestones. My suggestion is, rather than lament the institution that won't have you, begin generating ideas for a new institution.
Being a scholar isn’t my vocation, nor am I curing cancer with my research on 19th century Catholic women. But more importantly, no one is owed my work. People say “But you should still write your book – you just have to.” I know they mean well, but actually, no, I don’t. I don’t owe anyone this book, or any other books, or anything else that’s in my head.
And in a similar way, not every individual is "owed" work (though certainly we need it to survive, no one is guaranteed work simply because they acquired a degree) and this is possibly what needs to be considered within the micro-world of the PhD---expectations for employment need to be curbed and this should start at the level of the institution. Phd-dom is a gamble--as is acting, as is being a musician.
We need to be careful not to mistake new technology for new knowledge
Amazingly prescient for ten years ago
cannot be recycled
productive deciding parameter for experimentation
To risk failure one needs a sense of unfettered play, the play that would allow a failure to become useful for the next attempt, that would, in a sense, recycle the disaster.
To reframe failure as the jumping off point for experimentation is immensely insightful and inspiration and helps to bring out the dual-edged quality of any experiment--it might fail, but failure also allows experiment to be repurposed/recycled. We make an attempt, all over again.