I must say that I find extraordinary the view, coming from a senior academic in literary study, that literary study is (more-or-less) a waste of time. Perhaps this reflects poorly on the mooted conception of what literary study basically is.
JD Fleming
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From: "Steven J. Willett" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, February 7, 2009 1:52:49 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: Neglecting Spenser
On Feb 7, 2009, at 9:35 AM, Peter C. Herman wrote:
As for Fish's blog for the NYTimes, his point was that the conditions that allowed him to have his terrific career no longer exist. The institutional supports are no longer there. Rather than promoting a scholar's career, colleges and universities prefer to devolve more and more of the teaching to part-time employees. And from what I can tell, no administrator today would even begin to countenance the expenditures necessary for hiring the academic superstars that became, for a short, the Duke University English department. While it is always difficult to argue over tone, I would not say that Fish was "smug" but rather, both grateful and sad, as the chances for people entering the profession now to have the kind of career he had are about nil.
The decline and fall of academic superstars is actually a healthy development: they never were worth the extreme commitment of university resources. But far worse is coming. We know from research of the NASULCG (National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges) published last year that the real cost of per student in public higher education is not increasing. It has remained nearly unchanged since 1996. But over the past decade university tuition has risen 6.61 percent, 2.7 times the consumer price index. Community college tuition rose 3.83 percent, 1.6 times the CPI. While private universities grew at a slower rate, their absolute dollar amounts were far greater: at the average public research university, required tuition and fees rose by $3,063 over the decade; at the private counterpart, they rose by $13,259. What caused constantly rising tuition when student costs remained nearly constant: real per student appropriations have declined. State and federal funds are dwindling, will dwindle far more and will never return to the levels we enjoyed in the 30 years from 1950 to 1980. It's all over because the United States has run up an unsupportable public debt.
Forgive me for some hard economic facts before I return to the curriculum issue. As of November 19 last year, the total US public deficit stood at $10.6 trillion. This is not, however, the true deficit. For those of you with a high tolerance for mathematics and economics analysis, Laurence J. Kotlikoff (Boston University) provides a tour of the actual debt in "Is the United States Bankrupt?":
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/06/07/Kotlikoff.pdf
The answer is, yes in effect. Since the article was written, the debt has probably swollen to well over $70 trillion. Kotlikoff argues that we have only a very narrow window of opportunity to begin the massive task of reducing this debt, a debt we cannot ever liquidate by growth and which we can never pay down without complete structural reform of the economy. He provides a scenario that would probably work, but it guarantees deep pain across the entire socio-economic spectrum and the end of the profligate US lifestyle. If we fail to act in time, however, national insolvency on the scale of Iceland is inevitable. We are not acting, and Obama's fiscal stimulus will not have any long-term affect, though we certainly need to repair our infrastructure, which fallen to a third-world level. The American Society of Civil Engineers just increased its estimate for the total cost of restoration from $1.6 trillion to $2.2 trillion. You can compare that with the two stimulus bills in the House and Senate. Geithner will announce the bank bailout program on Monday, but from what I've read and heard, it's just more of the Rubin cabal trying to protect their bankster friends. It has, indeed, the potential to destroy the US economy. Full analysis offlist if anyone is interested.
Contrary to the pronouncements of Krugman and Summers that the US is at risk of deflation, the country is already in serious deflation. The most accurate measure of the CPI is not that from the BLS but from Case-Shiller. The latest BLS shows a positive 0.1% for CPI-U (=All Urban Consumer), but the Case-Shiller CPI gives a stunning 5% YOY decline. Deflation will increase as retail sales fall, commercial real estate collapses, ALT-A, optional ARM, Jumbo and Prime foreclosures grow and joblessness skyrockets. From December, 2007, when the recession began, to January, 2008, 3.8 million jobs have been lost, half in the last three months. This is only the beginning of job hemorrhaging. The BLS just released unemployment data, and the official U-3 is 7.6%, but the far more meaningful U-6 is a seasonally-adjusted 13.9%. It was a staggering 15.4% without seasonal adjustment. We face the very real possibility of a deflationary spiral.
If we're lucky, we may limp along with something like the Lost Decade of deflation in Japan, but it will be far more painful since Japan had high personal savings and a large trade surplus. I lived through the Lost Decade without much discomfort as did most Japanese. It we're not lucky, we could see inflation up the line as the government tries to monetize our debt. Here's why. The budget deficit for 2009 will run at least $2 trillion with the stimulus and probably even more. The US faces trillion+ dollar deficits for several years, perhaps all through Obama's first term. We can only pay for that by selling Treasuries against which the Fed prints money. Because the US dollar is the world's reserve currency, we can sell government debt denominated in dollars to our great advantage. In economics terminology, we are free of original sin. But if the recession deepens or slides into a depression (which some economists think has already arrived), we may start running discretionary fiscal measures that produce 12% - 14% of GDP general government financial deficits. Should we decide to monetize those deficits because we can never pay them down, our credit sources (China, Japan, the Gulf States and the EU) will pretty quickly realize it and stop buying our debt from lack of confidence. A large fiscal stimulus from a government without fiscal credibility could trigger a sudden stop of all capital inflows. That would mean instant national insolvency and the implosion of the US, since we must borrow $2+ billion a day just to pay basic operating expenses. If you think this can't happen, you don't appreciate the gravity of our position, though it may be cold comfort to realize the UK is in far worse condition. I would say its bankruptcy is likely.
So what has this got to do with the economic malaise in the humanities? Almost everything. The housing and derivatives bubble that began to deflate in December, 2007, actually began to inflate during the early years of the Reagan administration when it began the fatal neo-liberal process of deregulation. The 1999 cancellation of Glass-Steagall, which prevented commercial banks from engaging in financial speculation, the elimination of hedge limits on banks in 2004 (thanks to Rubin, Paulson and Greenspan) and the monetary policies of Greenspan in the wake of the Dot Com collapse blew the little bubble to a megabubble. Because of Greenspan's easy money and credit policies,US consumption rose to 72% of GDP. Only the bubble made this possible, but the bubble has burst and there will be no more bubbles. The whole US economy must contract dramatically to a point where we can satisfy our governmental expenses with our available revenues. That means no more borrowing $2+billion a day and serious economic restructuring. In the short run tax revenues will fall steeply as consumption recedes, but if we don't restructure, the global credit market will force it on us. Bear in mind that manufacturing comprises only about 12% of US GDP, dwarfed by consumption's 72%. The disjunct between the real economy and consumption has come to an end. Only the real economy can produce stable, long-term wealth. Right now we have no robust real economy.
State and federal appropriations for higher education will and must contract far more than they have to date. As they contract, the corporatization of higher education will proceed, since it offers the only practical way to manage the budget as tax money evaporates. One obvious tactic will be to unbundle the cost structure in large megauniversities. These behemoths have agglomerated many disparate departments and programs in a very complex organization whose cost effectiveness cannot be easily ascertained. It makes sense to reduce cost by unbundling their cost structure so the quality and effectiveness of each component can be measured. Low-quality components would receive lower budgets, higher quality higher budgets, poor quality budget cancellation. This triage process is now under way according to the NASULGC report. More threateningly for the humanities, unbundling will spread to individual arts and sciences departments. However much we may object to the application of cost-effective indices to say an English, foreign language or philosophy department, that is coming. Despite all the hot air that's been blown to justify the practical benefit of the liberal arts, there exists no quantifiable measure of their value. We don't even have a valid instrument for measuring the quality of higher education. The data show that holders of a BA will earn higher annual and lifetime earnings than nonholders, but no data exist that reliably show that the earnings bear any relationship to the institution from which an individual graduates. We do, however, have data to show the concrete value of a degree in chemical engineering, biochemistry, biological engineering, geology and so on. Since there is no connection between institution and earnings, more and more students will naturally move to cheaper public institutions. As the economic contraction bites, even the upper middle class and wealthy may start to blanch at spending $45,000-55,000 a year (minus books, food and fees) at a private school. Some institutions will fail--Brandeis may have sold off its art collection in toto to avoid bankruptcy--and others will have to shrink as they unbundle cost structures. Many departments will suffer funding cuts or funding termination. The humanities will take a very big hit. Tenure will also have to change. It's already under assault and may evolve into periodic reviews of tenured staff to determine continuation or cancellation. The private world enjoys no such privilege, and most tenured professors do not engage in any research that requires protection. Tenure has no more value than an appendix.
Let me say as prologue to what follows that I believe in the personal benefits that the humanities have given me. They have enriched my life immeasurably. They even got me good positions since I entered academic job market at the right time. But those times are gone, and we're not going home again. I urged my son and daughter to stay far away from the humanities, and they did, taking advanced degrees in chemical engineering and mathematics. Now they're working to help the public.
What is the value of an English Department today? What does it do that conveys an intrinsic public benefit? The comments here and over at the NASSR list suggest a widespread loss of confidence about its function and a sense of some malign intellectual disease eating away the heart of the profession. Professors who don't read, who don't know the English heritage prior to the nineteenth century, who regard themselves primarily as politicians or revolutionaries raising student consciousness, who know few foreign languages, who know nothing of the Classical past, who engage in intradepartmental cultural warfare, who angle for promotions that relieve them of teaching loads and maximize research time, who churn out badly-written opaque essays for journals that only a few hundred (optimistically) will ever read, who rush into producing monographs far too early in their career as the pressure of tenure distorts their creative development, who gravitate to minor authors and genres in the hope of carving out a personal fiefdom and who backstab competitors in the market of ideas make little or no contribution to the public welfare. They don't even contribute much to the mental welfare and knowledge of their students. And the students don't seem to raise much enthusiasm in their teachers. Everywhere I go in the US, and I'll be at my home in Oregon next Tuesday, I sense a loss of confidence in the value of what we do as teachers and researchers. Another book of literary criticism on Spenser or Sidney creeps into publication, is purchased by libraries and the relevant specialists and then vanishes into the remaindering grave. As a model for research, criticism and theory are dead ends. They can only lead to more inbred over-refinement of technique, more attempts to find an idiosyncratic take on a set body of texts that will give the discoverer bragging--and lecturing--rights. This list at least has a greater proportion of scholars doing the only honest, viable sort of research that conveys some public benefit: literary historiography and philology.
English departments are going to have to take a long, hard, realistic look at what they do relative to the economic contraction. They will need to restore intellectual integrity to the curriculum, to show that it gives students a full grasp of the English heritage and to demonstrate with objective metrics that a degree in English confers practical value in the marketplace. An English degree should require very hard work: the content should be rigorous, the standards should be strict and the assessments should be objective. The cachet of earning such a degree, known to be intellectually honest, is more likely to attract good students over the long run than watering the major down so anyone can get a degree. Such a degree could stand next to science and engineering degrees without embarrassment. The marketplace that is now developing will be merciless. It won't tolerate flabby degrees, but rigor will at least provide a better chance of competing for scarce financial resources.
If we don't want adjuncts taking over our jobs as tenure positions are axed, we had better show that what the full-time faculty does is sui generis and not transferrable to poor, overburdened, out-of-the-loop, evaluation-fearful, grade-inflating adjuncts. If we can't persuade administrations that the full-time faculty and only the full-time faculty can conduct an honest English program, why shouldn't they replace us with adjuncts? We can't even advance a persuasive defense.
Steven J. Willett
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