Chronicle of Higher Education, English literature teacher on "Facing My Own Extinction"

I'm seeing more of these sorts of pieces in the last few years.  Liberal arts educators feel that there's a crisis in the very nature of their vocation.  It's hard to really argue that such a crisis exists.  Sometimes the writing is interesting.  I linked to something about academic precarity earlier and this is a more direct musing upon the eventual extinction of the English instructor in light of contemporary academic trends in the Anglo-American world.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Facing-My-Own-Extinction/241988

 

 

 

By Nina Handler   December 07, 2017 

 

 

 

Charles Smithson, a character in John Fowles’s 1969 novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, is a wealthy, idle gentleman who faces the challenge of realizing that he, as a type, is becoming extinct. The novel is set in 1867, and Charles, a devotee of Darwin, considers the recently published On the Origin of Species to be his bible. His social class will cease to exist within a generation, and Charles has both the wisdom to see that he must adapt and the self-awareness to know that he is incapable of it. He is being swept away by evolutionary change but is helpless to change his fate.

 

I am a college English instructor. This is a bad time for my species — and a bad time for the study of English. In academe, we are witnessing an extinction of fields of study once thought essential. I teach at a private university that has just canceled majors in English, religious studies, philosophy, and music. The English major is becoming the useless gentleman, the Charles Smithson, of the modern university.

 

My institution is very small, and thus faculty members must be generalists. I teach freshman writing as well as survey courses on British literature and genre courses on fiction and children’s literature. I see my job as acquainting students with writers whom they have not yet encountered, giving them some tools to guide their reading and writing, and then getting out of the way as the texts work their magic. In those Brit-lit surveys, I teach relics of more than one bygone world.

 

In fact, I just finished teaching Tennyson’s "In Memoriam A.H.H.," a poem that tries to render meaning from grief. The poem moves beyond being a lament on the early death of an individual to grapple with existential issues of sorrow and doubt. One of the most memorable aspects of "In Memoriam" is its response to the "scientific erosion of divinity" aroused by notions of evolution in works such as Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Tennyson captures the fears of his time: The world is not the result of direct divine creation and intent, but is instead at the mercy of a frequently cruel, impersonal, and indifferent Nature.

 

In 1849, the questions raised by evolution can fairly be said to have freaked out millions of people. Within Tennyson’s poem, the speaker’s first insight is bleak enough: Nature doesn’t care about the individual, only the species. The author’s particular friend, whose loss he mourns so deeply, has no significance in the overall scheme of things

 

But then the speaker is confronted by a grimmer reality: Nature doesn’t care about anything. Whole species have come and gone from dominance to extinction. We are not special; someday humans, too, will become extinct. There is no divine intervention and nature is not a kindly mother. All of life is a struggle for existence in the harshest terms.

 

Even though an alert reader will have worked it all out by now, there's such a thing as giving a reader what they have come to expect is coming and so ...

 

In the academic struggle for existence, English has lost. This is not specific to my university; English has been weak for a while now. According to the Modern Language Association, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, English accounted for about 7.5 percent of all bachelor’s degrees granted in the United States. By 2004, the MLA reported, only 3.47 percent of college students earned bachelor’s degrees in English.

 

I was considering an English major in college decades ago but decided against it because there was no reason anyone with just some English degree would necessarily land a job outside the walls of an academy.  So I picked an even dumber degree, arguably, journalism.  I thought that I should at least try to learn how to write in a way that might get published somewhere and journalism seemed more explicitly dedicated to writing stuff that people would read than other kinds of degrees that were more officially English or officially writing.  Besides if all those axioms about what can't be taught were true there was no point in being an English major if I could read stuff on my own time.  But I had to minor in something with my journalism degree and I didn't minor in English.  The tens of thousands of words about musical form might give the rest away there.

 

So let's get back to some of the article.

 

 ...Times change, and institutions of higher education must change along with them. If no one wants to study a particular field, if it’s not filling a niche, it will die a natural death. This is evolution in action. I have no choice but to accept that the vast majority of students at my university don’t want to major in English. They don’t want what I have to offer. Instead, they want degrees in the health sciences.

 

Of course, my students and their worldviews don’t exist in a vacuum. They live in a culture that tells them in every way that STEM fields are where the money’s at and consequently are the only fields worth studying. They want to know — for the return on the gargantuan investment they and their families have made in a college education — that they will be able to get a well-paid job tied directly to their major.

 

Once education is viewed as a hoop to be jumped through to get somewhere else, people start assigning value to it in a way that privileges direct connections to prosperity and jobs they can easily see. With no sense that being an English major leads to any job but being an English teacher, students are "voting with their feet," as my provost said when she canceled the major. Social Darwinism speaks of "survival of the fittest," a victim-blaming phrase that has been distorted to justify socially constructed imbalances of wealth and power. If you can’t make it, it’s your own fault — or it’s just nature taking its bloody course.

 

The bloody course ... reminds me of something.

 

https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond
...
 I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Painting and Poetry Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

 

More or less you see that painting and poetry and music and the finer arts are at the end of the line, not the beginning.  Between politics and war at one end and poetry, painting, music and porcelain is mathematics, philosophy,  geography and natural history.  How might we update and translate that battery of topics for our time?    STEM. What humanities specialists don't seem to notice in resenting or lamenting the fixation on STEM is that if we consider Adams envisioned arc of history, the pendulum swinging back from the fine arts into STEM is a swing that is also back to/through war.  Not that we haven't had a war machine going constantly but I'm riffing playfully here.  People into the fine arts tend to keep forgetting, as if by an insistent choice, the inextricable relationship the fine arts have with imperial contexts.  Anglo-American liberals and liberal arts advocates seem to want all the art but without, if possible, all that cultural imperialism being associated with actual bloodletting imperialism.  I'll admit to cynicism at this point, the shift back into STEM could just be a sign that empires crumble and their glory fades.  There's not necessarily anything wrong with loving great literature and music and all that. 

 

The United States has been called the leader of the free world while there was a Cold War going on.  Its just that now that the Cold War has been over a few decades wwe've had time to see that none of us were necessarily more free here than the people under Soviet rule were necessarily free over there, either.  This author can see, at least, that a lot of what's taught in an English literature program simply won't connect to those who have had to learn it.

 

As someone who knew I wanted to study literature since I was a child, and who viewed higher education as an all-around enriching experience, I’ve felt like a 19th-century relic for my entire adult life. Middle- and working-class people can’t afford to learn just for the inherent value of it.

 

Like Charles Smithson in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, I can see the future and know that I won’t exist in it. I don’t know if I am capable of survival in this new environment. Social Darwinists would say it’s adapt or die, but I don’t know how to adapt to a society that doesn’t want what I hold dear.

 

The adapters, too, face a predicament: You can adapt only so much before the changes are significant enough that the species itself dies out. The woolly mammoth and the mastodon look a lot like today’s elephants, but they are different things.

 

Well, one possibility that has been tried over the years and tends to get underemphasized in Anglo-American arts education is to remind people that a lot of these people had day jobs so boring arts teachers prefer not to tell you that the famous artists and writers and musicians had them.  American literary education and educational enterprise as a whole may not have appreciated the extent to which our Americanist literary culture has been subsidized and sustained by an American academic system.  It can be thought of as a hothouse growth. 

 

 ... And not to diminish courses in health sciences, marketing, or communications, but I sometimes think that the most important thinking students do happens in their English classes. I’ve seen light bulbs go off over their heads. I’ve seen the moment when their brains seem to short-circuit — when the possibilities of interpretation, or the interplay of complexities and their implications in a text, are overwhelming. Then they go away and think some more and give me papers full of insight and analysis. I’ve seen English majors born in those classes.

 

A majority of the most important thinking moments I've had that I can think of off the top of my head involved reading the Bible.  Significant moments also happened reading Conrad, Melville, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Didion, Austen and a whole bunch of other writers, too.  It's exciting when people share comprehension of something it is that you love but I haven't really had any such moments where someone looks at me with this glow in their eyes and then saying, "Why, yes.  Of course, you can totally take this fugue subject and create a stretto with it where the subject gets answered by its own retrograde!"  That has never happened to me once in my life and I suspect it never will. 

 

Had I gotten what I wanted it might have been me writing this piece I've been quoting from. 

 

What arts academics may want to wrestle with more directly is that if the pendulum is swinging back into STEM as war continues it may be a portent that when the pendulum finally gets back to war all of the arts will be shown to be the luxuries that Adams realized they were when he wrote in hope that one day his descendants would be able to pursue them, but not until after he'd made a study of war and politics.