"Dare to write clearly and engagingly whatever the audience, Helen Sword urges junior and senior scholars alike in a myth-busting guide to good academic prose."

Yes, dare. Don't be a moral coward like everybody else.

Sciences:

The post-doc system is “dysfunctional and not sustainable in the long term,” Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman told top brass at NIH in June.

Humanities:

For Ph.D. graduates in the humanities and social sciences, postdoctoral fellowships are becoming increasingly attractive as a way to build research and teaching expertise before entering the academic job market, five current ACLS postdocs at Yale interviewed said.

SMH.

It's not "the job market"; it's the profession (and it's your problem too)

I enjoyed Kathleen Fitzpatrick's recent piece in the Chronicle* on risk-taking and the responsibility of mentors to back up those junior scholars who are doing nontraditional work. The piece's key insight is that it's one thing to urge people to "innovate" and quite another to create the institutional frameworks that make innovation not only possible but consequential.**

Kathleen's observation comports with some ideas that have been floating around in my head lately, especially around "digital humanities." I and my Fox Center colleague Bart Brinkman were recently called upon to define digital humanities for the other fellows in residence, and in the process of talking it over with Bart, and during the discussion at the CHI, I've come to realize that I have some real pet peeves around the notion of the "job market" that come into relief specifically around the field of digital humanities.

It boils down to this: peeps, we're all connected.

The recent rise to prominence of digital humanities is indistinguishable from its new importance in "the job market" (I insist on those scare quotes); after all, digital humanities and its predecessor, humanities computing, have been active fields for decades. What's happening now is that they are institutionalizing in new ways. So when we talk about "digital humanities and the 'job market,'" we are not just talking about a young scholar's problem (or opportunity, depending on how you see it). We are talking about a shift in the institutional structures of the profession. And, senior scholars, this is not something that is happening to you. You are, after all, the ones on the hiring and t&p committees. It is a thing you are making—through choices that you make, and through choices that you decline to make.

There's something a little strange about the way that digital humanities gets promoted from the top down; it gets a lot of buzz in the New York Times; it's well known as dean-candy and so gets tacked onto requests for hires; digital humanities grant money seems to pour in (thanks, NEH!) even as philosophy departments across the country are getting shut down; university libraries start up initiatives to promote digital humanities among their faculty. I am waiting for the day when administrators and librarians descend upon the natural sciences faculty to promote history of science. No, I really am.

So it seems quite natural that there should be wariness and resistance to the growing presence of digital humanities. Perhaps there is some bitterness that you might get your new Americanist only on condition that her work involves a Google Maps mashup, because it was easy to persuade people that your department needed a new "digital humanist," whatever the hell that is, and it was not easy to persuade people that you needed somebody to teach Faulkner.

The situation is not improved by the confrontational attitudes of certain factions of the digital humanities establishment (such as it is), which are occasionally prone to snotty comments about how innovative DH is and how tired and intellectually bankrupt everybody else's work is. (Not so often, I find—but even a little is enough to be a problem.) Under those circumstances, DH seems clubby and not liberating; not a way of advocating the humanities but an attack on it, and specifically on the worth of that Faulkner seminar that you teach, and that non-digital research that you do. Why, an established scholar might reasonably ask, should I even deal with this "digital humanities" nonsense? Shouldn't I just keep teaching my Faulkner seminar, because somebody ought to do it, for Christ's sake?

Well, whatever else DH is, it is highly political, and it has political consequences. So, in short, no.

I'm persuaded that the widespread appeal of DH has much to do with the leveling fantasy it offers, a fantasy of meritocracy that is increasingly belied elsewhere in the professional humanities. As Tom Scheinfeldt points out in his useful "Stuff Digital Humanists Like,"

Innovation in digital humanities frequently comes from the edges of the scholarly community rather than from its center—small institutions and even individual actors with few resources are able to make important innovations. Institutions like George Mason, the University of Mary Washington, and CUNY and their staff members play totally out-sized roles in digital humanities when compared to their roles in higher ed more generally, and the community of digital humanities makes room for and values these contributions from the nodes.

This is true. Those involved in digital humanities have also seen the ways that THATCamps, blogs, and Twitter allow junior scholars and scholars at non-R1 institutions to cut geodesics across the profession, allowing them to spread their ideas, collaborate, and achieve a certain prominence that would have been impossible through traditional channels. I'm convinced that real possibilities lie here.

And as traditional scholarly publishing becomes more and more constricted and humanities department budgets are slashed, the fiction of academic meritocracy becomes harder and harder to sustain. Perhaps on the web, we think, through lean DIY publishing and postprint review, meritocracy (or its semblance) can return to the academy. It seems at once a way forward and a way to return to a (fabled) time when people cared about scholarship for the sake of scholarship—not because they needed X number of well-placed articles or a line on the cv or a connection at Y institution without which their careers would disappear. Perhaps DH offers us a way out of the increasingly rationalized death-spiral of "impact scores" and credential inflation. Perhaps it will let us out-quantify the quantifiers, or sidestep them altogether.

Of course, the web always comes with liberatory rhetoric that usually turns out to mean little more than "what the market will bear," and the ostensible meritocracy of digital humanities in the present moment is really no more than a misalignment between its alternative (and potentially even more aggressively capitalistic) value systems and those of the institutionalized humanities more generally. It can be disturbingly easy for the genuinely progressive intentions of digital humanists to become assimilated to the vague libertarianisms of "information wants to be free" and "DIY U," and from there to Google Books and charter schools and the privatization of knowledge—an enclosure of the digital commons ironically in the name of openness. At the same time, the naming of the "alt-ac" "track" (it is generally not a track, of course, by definition) seems to provide new opportunities for young scholars even as it raises research expectations for staff and requires those on the "track" to subordinate their research interests to those of the institutional structure that employs them. Digital forms are exceptionally good at occluding labor. How to navigate those waters thoughtfully—to realize the real promise of DH—is a question to which we must all apply ourselves.

So you see what I mean when I say that "digital humanities and 'the job market'" as it now manifests isn't a narrow, merely administrative sliver of life of interest solely to junior academics who are still gravely listening to advice about how to "tailor" the teaching paragraphs in their cover letters. Digital humanities has become important to "the job market" exactly insofar as it is causing major shifts in the institutions of the profession. These shifts are political. And if you are in my profession, then they are your concern.

*I know, "enjoyed" and "Chronicle" in one sentence... mirabile dictu.

**As we all know, I have a complex relationship with the word "innovation" and do not consider it an unqualified good, nor a transhistorical value. For today, however, we will leave that particular word a black box.

Thanks to Bart and Colleen for sitting through a less-worked-out live version of this rant last week.

A few links on HPS, publicness, public knowledge, etc., etc.:

A charming rant by Dominic Berry on "HPS on't telly":

It looks as though TV is just catching up with what David Phillip Miller has called the ‘Sobel effect’, the seemingly endless growth in popular science and science history writing triggered by Dava Sobel in the 1990s. In the particular case of the programme which sparked this blog post this is literally so, for John Emsley, one of the more prolific contributors to this popular history of science movement, was a key consultant on Jim Al-Khalili’s Chemistry: A Volatile History which is currently being repeated. Much of this programming is bad, just bad. And most irritatingly, history of science seems to be something anyone thinks they can just pick up and spout off about. One of the most recent and partiuclarly aggravating examples of this was Niall Fergusson’s use of Newton and Boyle as the prime example of how the Royal Society thrived due to collective enterprise. Fuck sake.

More recently and perhaps more reflectively, Rebekah Higgitt on history of science spoiling everybody's party (with great links and comments):

As regular readers will know, one of my abiding interests is the relationship between academic history of science and popular history of science or, more specifically, how to make historiographically-informed books into readable texts. It’s an issue that has been around for some time, prompting comments by David Miller on the ‘Sobel Effect’ back in 2002 (when he told “The Amazing Tale of How Multitudes of Popular Writers Pinched All the Best Stories in the History of Science and Became Rich and Famous while Historians Languished in Accustomed Poverty and Obscurity, and how this Transformed the World”). This wasn’t just sour grapes, but an analysis of the effect on the publishing marking and an important discussion of how more recent trends in historiography tend to complicate narratives and question accounts of discovery as a heroic process.

James Sumner has a satisfying rant about "first-talk" — the first computer, the first refrigerator, the first whatever — in the history of technology, and how it is always absolute garbage.

I’m paid a lot of money not to write like that, but he’s saying what I’m thinking. First-talk, far too often, reduces to an annoying game which gets out of the historical record pretty much what it decides to put in. It’s a distraction. Real technical change is gradual, and rich in independent overlapping discoveries. That’s not a fussy academic quibble: it’s a point small children can grasp.

And only semirelatedly, Iain Pears offers the most thoughtful assessment of A. C. Grayling's New College of the Humanities that I've yet seen. (It's also one of the few that takes the time to debunk the idea that NCH is an "American-style university": "Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr do not, I think, download curricula from the internet to teach their students.") The golden insight comes at the end:

Professor Grayling is acting because he considers the battle within the national university system to be lost. But in some ways it has only just started, after long delays.

It was the duty of his generation to fight that battle, but it did not. Had serious opposition been mounted 10 or 20 years back then there might have been some chance of success. But his generation was extraordinarily supine.

Collectively, they let it happen, and contented themselves with gaming the system. That worked, and some gained as much celebrity as academics can get in a culture which cares little for scholarship. But these are not the people who should now be delivering lectures about saving the humanities: they had their chance, and they blew it. A little more activity when they were in their prime and the humanities might not have needed saving; a little more humility now and the reception given to their proposal could have been radically more favourable.

Now we're really straying from the original topic, but I really enjoyed Alex Golub's debunking of the idea that creativity is the same thing as spontaneity.

Of course, overall I agree with Robinson’s point: as someone with a long history of performance in drama and music I am often shocked at the cultural barrenness of my students. We have created a system that teaches them that music comes out of machines, not them, and most serious dance they see on television has more in common with a strip tease than Alvin Ailey. Arts education, like physical education, or the craftwork that goes into creating visual art, is desperately needed in our schools’ curriculum at both the secondary and tertiary level. It’s an important part of learning to be human.

But what that education is — what enables creativity — is often quite different from what people imagine. It requires more training and discipline, not less. In other words: being socialized into a culture of practice. This is a lesson that any athropologist — or any artist — should remind us as we think about education in this country today.

And a reminder to myself: never, ever read the comments at Inside Higher Ed. They are like YouTube comments, only about things that matter.

Telephone; or, Some thoughts on publicness

Please note that my office telephone has been disconnected due to budget cuts implemented by the state of California.

    --Professor Ian Duncan's email signature file

Call all you want, but there's no one home

And you're not going to reach my telephone.

    --Lady Gaga

There's a Telephone-like quality to news of the effects of the statewide California budget cuts on individual UC campuses, departments, and programs. You remember the game from early childhood--you pass a message around the room, whispering from ear to ear, and then giggle at the end when the original message is juxtaposed with what the last person finally heard.

This is partly because it is genuinely difficult to understand the distribution and effects of budget cuts (why were East Asian language courses radically cut just when a new East Asian library building was going up? an observer might, with fairness, ask).

But it's also because it's difficult to get an official account from anybody. With budget cuts comes a stigma, and therefore a dilemma. It is difficult to fight budget cuts without clearly representing how badly they damage the department and the university. But as soon as a department or a campus admits to having been hurt by cuts, it faces a loss of prestige and a concomitant flight of talent. Part of the damage that the budget cuts inflict comes from anybody knowing about the damage--or thinking they know.

The result is a mixture of genuine confusion and official obfuscation, in which information flows primarily through rumor and statistics--the latter to be understood as the superlative successor to Mark Twain's "lies" and "damned lies."

And that's how the UC budget cuts' effects on my department came to be emblematized, through a Telephone-like process, by telephones.

It's well known by now that English faculty at Berkeley no longer have office phones. Ian Duncan (to his credit, in my opinion) said so in his email signature file for about a year. Evidently there are members of UC administration who consider us a "bad" department for having let on about this fact. Anecdotally, I hear it's whispered among (and sometimes, by competing departments, to) prospective graduate students that our lack of phones is an emblem of how terrible the cuts have been for us.

Well, it is--an emblem, that is. But surely we English scholars can think a bit critically about just how that emblem signifies.

William Deresiewicz's recent, much-circulated, and rather good article in The Nation casually dropped the following statement: "Stipends are so low at the University of California, Berkeley, the third-ranked research institution on the planet, that the school is having trouble attracting graduate students."

I can't speak for other departments at Cal, but I know that the statement is not true for English--at least not this year. It's not that graduate stipends aren't low (they're graduate stipends; they're low by definition), and in fact we also had unusually low yield this year. But informal surveys (rumors, rumors) suggest that our peer departments did too.

So while it's tempting to make a causal narrative out of it, as Deresiewicz does, in this case the narrative seems unsupported by the evidence.

In fact, graduate stipends in Berkeley's English department are commensurate with those offered at much wealthier peer institutions. For instance, although we joke about our transbay colleagues at Stanford ("You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!"), the truth is that their fellowships ^for incoming students as of this year^* don't materially exceed ours. It's perhaps a little janky that our fellowship packages are often cobbled together piecemeal due to the bureaucratic idiosyncrasies and, yes, economic constraints, of being at a public university. But that's always been true of Cal.

Here's the thing about the phones: they're symbolic, in more ways than one. Part of the reason they seem like such a basic infrastructural need is that they're such an old infrastructural need. In point of fact, they don't get a lot of use, and are a low priority--that's why getting rid of phones was a very reasonable response to budget cuts. The Wesleyan historian Claire Potter, who blogs as Tenured Radical, recently wrote, "Take my phone. Please." After all,

By doing this, you could free up some money in our zero-sum budget game to reduce the cost of my benefits or bump up my research money. Or give me a tiny bonus to subsidize my cell phone costs. Or keep the money and allow me to deduct the cost of my mobile from my taxes as a legitimate business expense. And it would clear a lovely space on my desk where I could put a vase of spring flowers -- or a box of Kleenex, to prepare for the next round of budget cuts.

She's alluding to budget cuts at a private university, by the way.

Sure, it's pretty bootleg that we can't afford phones, and if you have enough bootleg working conditions it becomes a serious problem. If anyone from the state legislature is reading this: THIS NO PHONES SITUATION IS COMPLETELY BOOTLEG. But in and of themselves, office land-lines are not indispensable for teaching or research. In contrast, graduate fellowships are, increasingly, indispensable. So yeah, there's no phone on my desk, but our entire incoming graduate cohort--of modest size, for us, but nonetheless bigger than the incoming cohorts of our peer departments--is funded, because people in the department worked to make it happen. It's about telephones, and it isn't.

A department's reputation is as fragile as a lady's, and as easily damaged by rumors, whether accurate or not. Much ado about nothing can still make young Claudios considering graduate study wary of committing to a Hero who seems less than virtuous solvent.

But the aptness of the analogy should make us pause over how we are tempted to react to rumor. Ought we try to hide the damage the budget cuts inflict, as if defending our maidenly virtue?

I'm inclined to agree with the aptly named, clear-sighted Krystal Ball, the 2010 congressional candidate who refused to be intimidated when opponents challenged her virtue by circulating sexual photos of her on the internet. Instead of trying to suppress the photos, she challenged the premise on which they were meant to discredit her--what she correctly identified as "the tactic of making female politicians into whores," as if the unseemliness of being both a woman and public made her (tautologically) unfit for public office.

After all, what do the rumors say? That UC is struggling economically?

Shocking.

Let's re-examine the premise that the cuts that we are continually fighting are some kind of embarrassment for the department.

Berkeley English is and has been great, but it was never because it was rolling in cash. We've always been public.

To suppose that Cal's vulnerability to cuts is embarrassing--to whisper, Telephone-style, about our telephones--is, fundamentally, to think that our publicness is embarrassing. It's worth noticing that that's a political premise. Like a woman running for public office, or the rumors themselves, we do a little too much circulating for comfort, it seems.

What has happened to our national discourse when the idea of a truly great public university seems an oxymoron? Not to put too fine a point on it: if you think Berkeley's publicness is an intellectual liability, then you are part of the problem--the national problem of that perverse and pervasive neoliberal reflex, not "always historicize" but "always privatize." By the same tautology as that applied to women running for office, the very fact that we're public is assumed to be a disqualification for serving the public. Always privatize.

The Berkeley English department challenges that premise. Cal's publicness is part of its greatness, across the university and within the English department. There were UC-wide faculty and staff furloughs last year; it was the faculty that pushed for a graduated scale that would at least partially protect lower-earning university employees from the full force of the impact--an improvement on the blunt two-tiered model first proposed by university administration. And I've repeatedly seen Berkeley faculty stand up for the labor rights of graduate instructors and of non-academic staff. Our graduate students--and our postdocs--are unionized. Are yours? Or have your tenured faculty persuaded themselves that graduate instructors are "apprentices"?

People don't come here for the money--you couldn't, really. It's an exciting place to be, partly because, frankly, we can't just buy famous scholars (ten years after they've made their marks on the field)--we have to cultivate them ourselves. Our undergraduates, largely products of the California public K-12 system, are often less polished than those at private institutions, but they're also creative and diverse and ferociously intelligent. Some of our best are community college transfers--mature, curious students who really know what they want out of an education.

Economic scarcity makes some things difficult at Cal: that's a fact. We can ill afford further cuts. I'm furious at public disinvestment in higher education, and I fear that recent drastic tuition hikes will forever alter the quality of our wonderful student body. Also, whoever it was who floated that online course evaluations idea: total fail.

But we know how to make the best of what we have, to protect the least secure among us, and to advocate for humanities research and teaching. We do it damn well, all while producing some of the best research and best-trained students in the country.

No need to whisper. No need at all.

[UPDATE: Dean Andrew Szeri's response to Deresiewicz (scroll down)]


*clarification added 5/14, in a characteristically slimy way.

Goble, Mark. "Cameo Appearances; or, When Gertrude Stein Checks into Grand Hotel." MLQ 62.2 (2001): 117-63 [pdf].

Halberstam, Jack. "You Cannot Gaga Gaga"

The visible hand

Things on the internet are not made by magic; they're created by human labor. Who pays for that labor, and to what ends? Often, private corporations like Google pay for it. Wherefore?

Siva Vaidhyanathan's recent piece in the Chronicle argues that "Our uncritical dependence on Google is the result of an elaborate political fraud. Google has deftly capitalized on a decades-long tradition of creating 'public failure,'" which is to say, setting public projects up to fail so that private interests can swoop in and save us from our "broken" public sector:

Public failure may occur when the public sector has been intentionally dismantled, degraded, or underfinanced while expectations for its performance remain high. [...]

In such circumstances, the failure of public institutions gives rise to the circular logic that dominates political debate. Public institutions can fail; public institutions need tax revenue; therefore we must reduce the support for public institutions. The resulting failures then supply more anecdotes supporting the view that public institutions fail by design rather than by political choice.

[...]

Google officials, promoting their effort to scan millions of books purchased with public money [e.g. University of California, University of Michigan --N.C.] and donated by shortsighted universities, claimed they were trying to preserve libraries and perform an essential public service—just the sort of service that our great university libraries could have been working toward had they been allowed to succeed. Publicly supported institutions fail, so we leap into the arms of the private actor, ready to believe its sweet nothings.

Google Books is certainly read by most as a sort of public service that happens to be provided by a private corporation. Remember when the Bibliothèque Nationale de France resisted Google's digitization offers, only to later concede that they lacked funds to carry out their digitization project (the excellent Gallica) on their own? "La BNF se laisse séduire par Google," Le Figaro reported, using the language of sexual danger that Vaidhyanathan picks up in his Chronicle piece.

I'm largely persuaded by Vaidhyanathan's argument, although the persistence of this language of seduction (all literary critics know what comes next: betrayal) probably warrants further cogitation.

That Lovelace Google has practically unlimited funds to pour into whatever it wants is widely taken for granted, and it's well known as a place that is generous with said funds, especially with its workers. But despite its much-touted mission of non-evil (evil is such a strong word, isn't it?) its practices seem increasingly disturbing, including when it comes to digitization. Via Ryan Shaw, I recently came across the bizarre narrative of Andrew Norman Wilson, who says he was fired from a Google contract after inquiring into, and trying to document, the working conditions of "ScanOps":

They scan books, page by page, for Google Book Search. The workers wearing yellow badges are not allowed any of the privileges that I was allowed – ride the Google bikes, take the Google luxury limo shuttles home, eat free gourmet Google meals, attend Authors@Google talks and receive free, signed copies of the author’s books, or set foot anywhere else on campus except for the building they work in. They also are not given backpacks, mobile devices, thumb drives, or any chance for social interaction with any other Google employees. Most Google employees don’t know about the yellow badge class. Their building, 3.14159~, was next to mine, and I used to see them leave everyday at precisely 2:15 PM, like a bell just rang, telling the workers to leave the factory. Their shift starts at 4 am.

They are not elves; I repeat, not elves. Today Glenn Fleishman tweeted the picture below (via @GreatDismal):

hand spotted in a Google Book by Glenn Fleishman

Whose hand is this?

The image reminded me of Caleb Crain's post on encountering the finger of a Google technician in a translation of a Kant essay. As he wrote in a review of Adrian Johns's recent book on copyright and piracy,

... Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied an author's words, the author himself still had them. It was better for an author to argue that his book was not an object but an exercise of his powers which "he can concede, it is true, to others, but never alienate". In other words, Kant explained - in a passage partly obscured by the fingers of the Google technician who turned the pages in the scanner - a pirated book was not to be understood as property that had been stolen; it was rather a speech act that had been compromised. The business arrangement that an author made with an editor might make it look as if words could be traded like watches or pork bellies, but it just wasn't so. Could there be a fitter representation of copyright's contemporary plight than the fingers of a Google technician obscuring Kant's defence of writer's rights? An author's consent, Kant cautions in a footnote, "can by no means be presumed because he has already given it exclusively to another", yet Google is struggling to effect exactly this sort of transfer of consent today, as it attempts to win approval for a legal settlement in the United States that will allow it to republish works whose copyright owners have not come forward. I couldn't have read Kant's essay so easily without the Google technician's labour - in fact, without Google, I might not have got around to reading it at all - but her fingers were nonetheless in the way. The internet's attitude toward Kant's words is ambiguous, combining respect, appropriation, liberation and accidental vandalism.

hand spotted by Caleb Crain

This scan is particularly ghostly, the hand covered over with a second hand reasserting the text of the Kant translation.

The hand--always the synecdoche for the worker (the mediator between the head and the hand, we learn in Metropolis, must be the heart)--is inserted literally into our view of the text, disrupting for a moment our sense that Google Books are, quite simply, books that have been "put online," as if books themselves could simply leap media and enter a disembodied realm. The intrusion of the hand shows us that these are photographs (of a sort) and that someone must have made them.

In an inversion of our usual intuition that images are less mediated than text, these hands make us realize that Google Books made us feel as though digital texts were unmediated--were the books themselves. In contrast, the awareness that the digital object is an OCRed image of text--a photograph of its own scene of production, complete with visual evidence of the hand that wrought it--forces us to acknowledge the strange backwards ekphrasis (text to image to fallen, "corrupted" text--OCR is a silent diplomatic edition) in a Google Book, the labor by which it was created and uploaded, and the person who labored, now knowable only through the operative, synecdochal appendages that both create and corrupt the digital object.

This is not to argue for some kind of metaphysics of book presence wherein only a paper book is a real book, not haunted by ghostly disembodied hands. Our tendency to efface the digital laborer, as well as the work of editors, designers, etc., is precisely what enables the widespread belief that e-books are necessarily cheaper to produce than paper books, as if the cost of the book lay in the printing. At least with the heft of paper one is reminded that there was, somewhere, a scene of labor. A Google Book effaces the medium of the medium, until a latex-draped finger appears before us, as if to reassert the tactile element always running beneath the digital.

Obviously, this is a Blogger blog, i.e. run on Google resources.
More on GB hand scans:

• The Art of Google Books Tumblr
(via Rebekah Higgitt)
• BoingBoing, 2009
• Sydney Morning Herald, 2007
• Wired, 2007--basically a link to Techcrunch
• Dan Cohen, 2006, linked by Philipp Lenssen and Barry Schwartz

No time for blogging lately, but here's a roundup of recent humanities-defendin' links.

Here's a bit from the first link, an Inside Higher Ed piece about Cornell president David Skorton's recent call for national support of the humanities:

For a start, he said that it was time for university leaders to push for a halt to the erosion of the budgets of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and to articulate a vision for the importance of the humanities.

With regard to the budgets for the cultural agencies, Skorton noted that they survived attempts in 1994-5 to eliminate them, but had their budgets cut severely. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the endowments are today one-third below where they were in 1994, while the budget for National Institutes of Health has almost doubled and that of the National Science Foundation has more than doubled. The budget for the last fiscal year for the NEH was $167.5 million, and President Obama proposed a small cut, to $161.3 million for this year. (The total NEH budget would be a rounding error in the NIH budget, which exceeds $30 billion.)

[...]

Noting the current budget picture, Skorton said he would start with "modest" goals: first halting any cuts in absolute dollars for federal cultural agencies, then seeking money to cover losses to inflation, and then seeking meaningful gains. But he said it was important to start making a case on why the humanities need more support -- and to make that case based on national needs, not just the extent to which such investment would help higher education.

More support. That's refreshing!

• David Skorton, President of Cornell, makes a call to defend the humanities (Inside Higher Ed)
• From the Humanist list:
  
  • Alan Liu: Is the digital humanities community uniquely well positioned to advocate for the humanities?
  • Andrew Prescott: What's bad for the humanities is bad for digital humanities.
• On the UK's Browne Report:
  
  • James Vernon: The End of the Public University in England (Inside Higher Ed)
  • Stefan Collini: Browne's Gamble (London Review of Books)
    
• The ADE (Association of English Departments) protests the SUNY Albany Cuts (pdf)

The Humanities Are Not a Luxury

This talk is just one more reason--as if we needed it--to adore Martha Nell Smith.

Everything sounds better

The tag-line for the Gregory Brothers' Autotune the News series is "everything sounds better."



I'm fascinated by the internet principle that there is almost nothing that cannot be improved by a dance beat. The Gregory Brothers (a misnomer--they are actually the Gregory brothers and sister-in-law) capture the highly mediated, corporatized medium of television news and mediate the hell out of it, editing, remixing, inserting themselves into the videos, and of course turning media and political celebrities into American Idol-like singing contestants. (Each Autotune the News video ends with awarding the unwitting participants "best accidental singer" rankings.)

In reappropriating the news, the Gregory brothers trivialize it, but perhaps not more than it has already been trivialized by the news media itself. There's a way in which Autotune the News performs the same work as the classic spoof trailer of The Shining, which pitches the horror film as a goofy family comedy:



It reveals the extent to which music and framing tell us what to think about the film we're watching. But Autotune the News doesn't just reframe; it also insists on a particular kind of reframing through music--patently derivative but joyous nonetheless. The "serious" news--where seriousness has been produced by grave tones and facial expressions, music, and infographics--becomes an occasion for catchy pop play.

This ethos seems to find the ultimate expression in the "Bed Intruder Song." The song is based on real news footage--a moment of the same kind of outbreak of human passion that Autotune the News celebrates. Regular guy Antoine Dodson delivered a brilliantly enraged rant on the news in response to a terrifying home invasion and the attempted rape of his sister Kelly. Breaking out of the dampening mediation of the interview format, Dodson addressed the public and the fugitive attempted rapist directly, expressing his righteous rage and heaping indignant insults on the criminal. The Gregory Brothers autotuned and edited the video to create the Bed Intruder Song:



Tellingly, Dodson was surfing Facebook at the time of the invasion, and later took to the Bed Intruder Song with glee ("it's my ringtone!", he acknowledges with some joy). Dodson himself is a part of the internet culture that believes that "everything sounds better" autotuned and set to a dance beat. And why not?

In the only logical turn of events, Dodson later performed the Bed Intruder Song live (but still autotuned!) at the 2010 BET Hip Hop Awards, with a Gregory backing him up on keyboard:



(Various other remixes and covers were inevitable.)

Even Carl Sagan sounds better with a beat, as one obsessive musician has demonstrated:



Perhaps naïvely, I see the "everything sounds better" ethos as a resistance to the corporatization of art and media and the utilitarianism of the information age. Students are increasingly trained vocationally; they're made to feel guilty for taking courses that don't feed into their pre-med requirements, or for (heaven forbid) majoring in music or theater or German (or French, Italian, Russian, Classics, or theater, the programs being cut at SUNY Albany, or philosophy, which is on the chopping block at, of all places, Howard University). Making art and engaging in critique, they're told, must be left to those who can make a living at it, and the people who can make a living at it are those who work for the major media corporations.

But people can't live without making art and engaging in critique; more to the point, they don't want to. Ordinary citizens who aren't going to win American Idol (one of the Gregory Brothers--sadly I haven't had time to research this in any detail--was briefly a contestant on one of these shows, I believe), at a time when everybody knows that breaking into sanctioned corporate art depends on luck and popularity with focus groups, rebel by reappropriating corporate media, often flirting with copyright violation in the process. Corporate media becomes everybody's media; CNN cannot do better than I can do, because "everything sounds better"--and a little funny--with a dance beat. Supposedly utilitarian information, routed through the infamous 24-hour news cycle, is revealed as entertainment--entertainment that now "sounds better." Sometimes it's creative and original (I think the Carl Sagan song definitely qualifies as original) and sometimes it isn't. But it's pop culture, and it's ours.

It seems to me that the popular mistrust of critics, especially when they write using specialized language, is structurally similar to popular mistrust of difficult writers like Gertrude Stein. Like that of Stein, the critic's status as a worker is always in question, and the critic's claim to cultural legitimacy is therefore always threatened.

We need to revisit the structures of feeling around work.

Assigning monographs

I found Cathy Davidson's recent post (reprinted from ADE Bulletin 149 (2010): 53-60), "Research Is Teaching," perceptive and enlightening. Davidson explores discrepancies in our profession between stated and practiced values, e.g. for hiring and tenure.

One of the arguments she makes is that there is a bewildering discrepancy between how we say we value the academic monograph (foundation of our profession! gold standard for tenure!) and how we actually value them (won't buy them unless they're remaindered for $6 at Moe's, won't assign them). Cathy asks why this is:

We require a monograph for a scholars entry into the profession but do not respect the form enough to teach it in our classes. This imbalance is field-specific and almost singular. We are monographic fundamentalists in our theology but monographic agnostics in our religious observance. No wonder young professionals in our field are confused about the relation between teaching and research. Other fields teach what they prescribe. Historians teach the best new books in history in their undergraduate and graduate classrooms. They take as the subject of their courses not only the content about a given historical field but also the practice of writing professional history. So do anthropologists. Where do English students learn about the finest practices of writing professional, book-length literary criticism? Articles are not equivalent in form to a scholarly monograph. Or maybe they are. Consider the misalignment in the reverse direction. If course packs of articles constitute the gold standard of what we want to communicate to our students about the best practices of the profession of English, then why are we pretending there is something special about the monograph as a form so special that tenure and promotion depend on its production?

Good point. Cathy suggests making a conscious effort to assign monographs, which made sense to me up until I thought about my syllabus for this spring. "Oh no," I thought, "I can't assign a monograph. I teach undergrads!"

This is of course patently ridiculous. I read a number of academic monographs as an undergrad at a school that was culturally different from but certainly no better than the one at which I now teach. But somehow I'd gotten it into my head that I couldn't expect advanced English majors to read a whole book that wasn't a novel.

So now I'm wondering what made me think that, and whether others have the same feeling about whether they're allowed to assign monographs--whether it would be considered a prudent decision.

I mean, really, why the hell not, right?

They enter the new world naked

I'm waiting for the day when The Problem With Literary Studies Today is replaced by Here Is Some Friggin' Awesome Literary Criticism.*

It's great to reflect on method, but better yet to develop it. Creativity is our friend, and literature is amazing.

I'm teaching The Conjure Woman right now, a very simple example of the pleasure that results from developing a competency. At first, my students complained bitterly of the difficulty of reading Julius's dialect, which Chesnutt sometimes makes more visually alien than necessary ("wuz" for "was," for instance). After a while, they found that they could get themselves into "the Chesnutt zone" and read fairly quickly, and enjoyed the tales.

They're taking tentative stabs at their own literary criticism right now. So far, it's good.

One thing I've learned about giving feedback is that it's more helpful to offer emulable models and to praise what's going well than it is to offer a list of what not to do. Writing isn't about avoidance, or it shouldn't be. Creation is difficult, but it's what we do.

*Apparently my brain has been permanently warped by Dinosaur Comics.

I have that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you add A Room of One's Own to a syllabus.

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I like much of what Neil Verma has to say about the defensive The Humanities Are Dead essay. He admits near the end, though, that he doesn't know what the alternative is yet. May I propose Humanities!: The Musical?

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Oh, dear. Alma mater, could you please stop doing so many embarrassing things?

Citations: Useless and Boring

Mark Taylor wants to end the university as we know it. I was thinking we were about due for another call for radical change from a tenured professor. I hadn't heard one since MLA. Taylor's essay has the unusual virtue, at least, of wanting to see the restructuring happen from the top down, rather than placing the burden of transforming the profession on disenfranchised grad students. But Taylor's proposals are incoherent.

He wants interdisciplinarity (radical!), but he confuses interdisciplinarity with adisciplinarity.

He wants to avoid the pitfalls of "overspecialization," but simultaneously advocates for hyperspecialization (one university specializing in French studies, another in German).

He acknowledges that universities could never get along without cheap grad student teaching, but also argues that there is "no market" and "no demand" for new PhDs. This is clearly incoherent. Given the choice -- and this is reflected in college ranking algorithms everywhere -- having real, tenured professors do the teaching is always preferred. The point of going to a four-year school in the first place is that it's considered best to learn from people who are active in the field, who are institutionally supported in doing research.

The fact is that there is a huge demand for trained scholars, but like the WalMart nation we are, we want them as cheaply as possible. The difference is that people don't kid themselves that the cheap plastic goods from WalMart are equivalent to artisan-made products in the way that universities try to insist that farming their teaching out to inexperienced-by-design, officeless, unsupported grad students is the intellectual equivalent to giving students small seminars with professors.

But I'm even more bothered by Taylor's cavalier treatment of research being done by young scholars in his own field. So far as I can tell, it's a byproduct of a deep suspicion of specialized knowledge and possibly scholarship itself. Taylor writes,

Unfortunately this mass-production university model [proposed by Kant] has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

Taylor represents specialization as per se tending to uselessness -- as if knowledge were not an end in itself. So Taylor decides to make a joke out of some young scholar's work, using his position as a tenured professor at Columbia -- the kind who can get Op-Ed pieces into the NYT -- to ridicule his own field rather than attempt to inform the public about what it really does. Taylor pretends to be sympathetic to grad students, but to ridicule someone's dissertation in the pages of the New York Times is nothing but hostile. And, if he is talking about a real colleague's real student's real dissertation, unethical.

Taylor plunks the description down there as if it were supposed to be obvious that a dissertation on Duns Scotus's use of citations were trivial. But is it that there is something inherently trivial about this student's dissertation, or is it that Taylor himself is in the wrong gig? When a professor of religion cannot imagine why a dissertation on Duns Scotus might be important or useful, and when a scholar thinks that citations are necessarily trivial, then there's trouble. I'm not a specialist in medieval theology, but offhand, and as someone who studies modernism, I know that citation practices involve questions of authority and deference, intertextuality, bibliographic/genetic information about the author's sources, and philosophical positions on presence/absence that are probably fairly relevant to theology. I don't know enough about the project to evaluate it, but there's nothing about that description that should give anyone license to dismiss the project out of hand, unless that person is already hostile to the idea of specialized knowledge per se.

I get that impression, too, from another shot Taylor takes at citation in his recommendation that we abolish traditional dissertations in favor of multimedia projects for the post-print era. "[T]here is no longer a market," he writes, "for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text." Actually, there never was such a market, which is why we have university presses. The idea is that scholarly value might not be the same thing as market value.

But Taylor's evidence that academic books are arcane and useless is apparently that they come with a scholarly citational apparatus, which Taylor gently exaggerates for maximum mock-value: "more footnotes than text." Can he be serious? Citations are part of academic standards of intellectual honesty (quite a different thing from intellectual "property"). Citations acknowledge the research that one has done, and help others do their own research. Citations refer other scholars to one's sources and expand on points of contention in the field. Citations are fundamental to good research, but Taylor only alludes to citations as jokey stand-ins for what he sees as the problem with the university as we know it. There seems to be something deeper at work here than the usual discontent with How Things Are.

Calls to reform academia are fairly common. I've made some myself. Inherent in the genre is a tension between wanting to do away with large and entrenched structures and an awareness that much of what is good, and indeed foundational, about academia has been produced by those same structures (like, say, disciplinary methodologies). Taylor registers those tensions in moments like his proposal for interdisciplinary problem-based research groups.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

A Water program sounds like an interesting, nay, even exciting idea. But as Taylor himself acknowledges, this would hinge on bringing together multiple disciplinary perspectives, not eradicating disciplinarity. That means it wouldn't work out to "[a]bolish permanent departments," as Taylor proposes at the beginning of the section, because methodological perspectives do not happen in a vacuum. I suspect more and more that the Humanities Are Dead (TM) essay cannot be coherent.

It is, on the other hand, perfectly possible to write such an essay without mocking a colleague's grad student in the pages of the New York Times.

Times are tough. Let the humanities help you.

A few weeks ago one of my friends was interviewed in a coffee shop about the crumbling economy. She was in that coffee shop working on her dissertation because she doesn’t have an office (neither does any grad student in my department). The reporter asked her how the stock crashes were affecting her. She responded that they didn’t affect her at all -- that she lived well below the poverty line, and did the reporter know what kind of money you have to have to get into the stock market?

Nonetheless, those who had anything to lose have lost it or are in the process of losing it. People want to point fingers.

The obvious people to blame are the people who somehow made money off of crazy meta-economic juggling and somehow made the rest of the economy depend on the aforementioned juggling.

But that’s boring. With our long-held Freudian taste for analysis, we’re moved to dig deeper, and by “dig deeper,” I mean “dig shallowly and pull up the first ready-made pat narrative you find.”

That narrative, of course, is the two cultures, for lo, it will not die.

Thus in yesterday’s New York Times, I find Maureen Dowd crowing that too much technocracy has gotten us into trouble and we must all go back to reading Latin so that we can learn from the Stoics that greed is bad. Capital is scarce: cultural capital is back!!

Then Op-Ed contributor Richard Dooling writes that “math and physics geeks” are raining destruction upon us, in the form of nuclear warfare and financial ruin.

And then there is Harold Bloom, who advocatesreading Emerson.

Let’s look for a moment at how Bloom quotes Emerson:

Pride, and Thrift, and Expediency, who jeered and chirped and were so well pleased with themselves, and made merry with the dream, as they termed it, of Philosophy and Love, — behold they are all flat, and here is the Soul erect and unconquered still.

“Pride,” “Thrift,” “Expediency”? That’s nineteenth-century talk for business school – which Dooling improbably aligns with physicists. In short, it’s all number-people collapsed together. “Philosophy and Love,” on the other hand -- the humanities.

So after hearing that the humanities are in crisis for basically the entire time I’ve been in the humanities, I’m starting to hear that this is our hour of glory.

The logic seems to go:

There are two cultures, numbers culture and humanities culture. Finance isn't part of the humanities, so it must be part of the numbers culture, which also includes, I don't know, botanists and the Maytag repair person. The soulless numbers culture, like the Republican party, squandered its period of dominance, and now the other party will rise to power. That would be the humanities. Here is the Soul erect and unconquered still!

That's where I'm balking. It takes some really confused categories (Dooling, I’m looking at you) to make nuclear physics, robot takeovers, and the world financial system into the same phenomenon. Physicists actually have nothing to do with the economic crisis. Correlation is not causation, and numbers per se do not create hubris.

It also takes some pretty confused categories to think of Latin, “philosophy and love,” or Emerson as the inverse of irresponsible economics. The economy is a mess, but Emerson is not going to come back into fashion. Latin is not going to come back either. The NYT editors will not suffer Dowd columns in Latin for long. People are not going to come flocking to the more decrepit buildings on campus beating their breasts and calling out, “Oh, literature professors! We were wrong! Sell us your academic monographs!”

The current economic situation is not about the two cultures. The two cultures are not real. The two cultures, as being invoked here, are an intellectually lazy binary that lets us point fingers without actually having to think about economics.

But I am pretty sure the current situation is actually about economics.

This so-called "iced cream"

In the recent Chronicle article "Literary Geospaces," Jennifer Howard leads with the following:

In one of the most recent public eulogies for literary studies, a Nation essay that ran online in March decried the "trendism" on display in the Modern Language Association's job listings.

"The major trend now is trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy," wrote William Deresiewicz, an associate professor of English at Yale University who has since left the profession. "Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism — whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children's literature, even in something called 'digital humanities.'"

Hmm. These crazy trends, these sexy digital humanities.

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Burns: I feel like such a free spirit, and I'm really enjoying this so-called...iced cream.