BY AARON BARLOW

Oh, the fear of losing relevance!

Responding to a Chronicle Review collection of essays on the demise of traditional studies in English called Endgame, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in “The Academic Apocalypse: The crisis of English departments is also a crisis of faith” (01/11/20), expresses the worries of some:

[O]ur so-called “core” curriculum promised to teach us “approaches to knowledge” rather than the thing itself. It was, and remains, an insane view for humanists to take, a unilateral disarmament in the contest for student hearts and minds; no other discipline promises to teach only a style of thinking and not some essential substance…. [H]umanists have often trapped themselves in a false choice between “dead white males” and “we don’t transmit value.”

It’s true, I do want to teach ‘approaches to knowledge.’ ‘How to learn’ is every bit as important as what is learned. If I can instill curiosity in a student, I have done a large part of my job. But neither I nor anyone else in the Humanities has given up or lost relevance through this approach.

But curiosity and even skills aren’t the whole of it; We always teach ‘the thing itself’ as  well. After all, students need something of a roadmap if their approach is going to get them anywhere, and they need to be able to read it.

My First Year Composition students this coming semester will be exposed to “The Seafarer” in Anglo-Saxon (I will provide a translation of it as I read it aloud), an excerpt from Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” (in Middle English), a piece from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and a passage from Milton’s Areopagitica. The map I have drawn for them also includes much more that is modern by a much more diverse body of writers, but the point is that I want to pass respect for history and the development of thought and art on to my students as well as introduce them to the complexities of the modern world, all while teaching them to write more effectively.

That my students are rarely themselves whites of European background makes no difference to what they can appreciate and understand. They can engage any literature, especially when drawn to connect it with art they are more familiar with. Old English poetry resonates in Rap with its internal rhymes and alliteration. Rap also reflects Gerard Manley Hopkins (himself looking back to the Anglo-Saxon) and his ‘sprung rhythm.’ Through broad exposure, students, I hope, can start to see the greater intellectual weave, recognizing that nothing comes to exist in isolation or without precedence. And that is valuable.

Many of the pieces in Endgame, though quite interesting to me as the product of a rather traditional American graduate program in English, speak more to the rarefied world I studied in than to what really concerns me professionally today. I want to open the world of higher education to undergraduate students whose vision has been limited by factors structural, cultural and economic. That is not the topic.

In Endgame, there is also an emphasis on the growing reality of a lack of jobs utilizing graduate degrees in English. As one who went to grad school for the love of it and not for a career (I did not conduct my first job search until fifteen years after earning my PhD), what I see as the real problem here is that we have been focusing our programs incorrectly for decades, coasting on expanding demand rather than recognizing that our field should never have been primarily about jobs. Still, I do feel badly for those who have entered Humanities programs for career reasons, for I think they have been fooled by complacent departments and universities—a view many of the Chronicle writers would, I think, agree with.

Most of us in English departments far from graduate programs have already begun to adjust to the new reality of American education. We may still teach literature courses, but we structure them differently, a great many of us placing art within cultural-studies contexts, completely avoiding the dilemma Douthat imagines. Most all of my colleagues who teach literature continually develop new courses and new approaches. They are excited by the possibilities opening around them, not morose, not feeling that something is being lost in a changing world but accepting the challenge it presents.

We are lucky in the English department where I teach. We do not have an English major so are not beholden to old ideas of what literature courses should be. Some of my colleagues are developing a major, but it will be unlike anything seen in an English department as recently as twenty years ago. And that’s as it should be.

We aren’t the only ones doing this. At community colleges and four-year schools across the country, the same thing is being attempted or, at least, being considered.

Even graduate programs are beginning to change their focus from a traditional literature curriculum to one with a great deal more bend to it. We are all attempting to add flexibility to academic silos in order to create curricula that focus much more broadly, in terms of majors, than on old ideas of what the disciplines should be.

This doesn’t mean that we want to dismantle the old, to take from Jeffrey Williams’ title for his Endgame essay, “The New Humanities: Once-robust fields are being broken up and stripped for parts.” Though I agree with much of what Williams writes, I don’t mind new configurations—as long as they are not themselves new silos, as Digital Humanities, for one, is striving to become. These are fighting ‘for their places at the table,’ as one Digital Humanities advocate insisted a decade ago, their advocates becoming in-fighting bureaucrats instead of scholars and teachers.

Williams ends: “The new humanities, I believe, represent another stage of adaptation. The issue, though, is who and what these crossovers serve, who has control, and what their aims are. Those are still in contest.” In my view, this means that the struggle is simply among the functionaires, and is only one for power and influence, creating nothing more than a new prison different from the old one.

Many of the people who are honestly struggling to create new Humanities and English programs are working instead to create something freeing, something that can serve their students rather than restricting their colleagues.

As G. Gabrielle Starr and Kevin Dettmarsay say, also at the end of their essay, “Who Decides What’s Good and What’s Bad in the Humanities?: Judgment can’t be handed down from on high”:

So while we may be teaching a set of rules that reflect disciplinary values (science is progressive, accumulates knowledge, and disputes it; humanistic inquiry is divergent, proliferates knowledge, and argues the heck out of it), that’s not the ultimate value of liberal education (the Aristotelian end or good, as opposed to, for the picky among us, the Kantian end or good that Clune embraces). No. The liberal arts — and our beloved humanities — are good because we help students learn that values are discovered through disciplined thinking. And pleasure draws us endlessly on. That’s worth something.

And that, from what I see, is the guiding light for many who are now trying to make the Humanities even more valuable to their students’ lives than they already are. And we don’t see anything depressing about it.

For those of us in the Humanities whose lives don’t revolve around graduate education, these are exciting times, not end times. Though I may have some sympathy for the current graduate-school morass, I can’t tamp down my enthusiasm because of what they face.

Few of us who teach only undergraduates are feeling trapped or irrelevant. We are, instead, hopeful. We see a new freedom and are striving to take advantage of it.

Don’t get me wrong, we professors at all levels face tremendous challenges, including threats to tenure and the increase in casualization of employment. But those are other questions….