The Great Unraveling: The University in Decline

By J. Battersby

This book addresses the corporatization of higher education, including topics such as administrative usurpation of the curriculum, the diminishing role of faculty in governance, the increase in contingent and adjunct faculty, and the rise of STEM courses at the expense of the liberal arts. The book also concerns many issues of interest on campuses, such as trigger warnings, safe spaces, interdisciplinarity, identity politics, and the value of humanities education.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543988284

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©All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-54398-827-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-54398-828-4

Contents

Preface

Introductory Overview

Academic Freedom at Risk

Academic Governance

Interdisciplinarity and the Disciplines

The University in its Essential Vestments

The Limitations of Education for Vocations

The Constitutional Basis of Academic Freedom

Literature and Human Well-being

The Nature and Value of Literature

Fictions and Facts

Literature and Wisdom

Clarity and Obscurity in Academic Discourse

The Administrative Hijacking of Curriculum Design

Contingent Faculty

Administrative Meddling with the Curriculum: A Case Study

A Brief Defense of the Canon

The Culture of Wealth: A Digression

The Digital Humanities

Scientism vs. the Humanities

Theory and the Loss of Literature

Identity Politics and the University as a Meritocracy

Preface

The Great Unraveling that this work has as its focus is that dismantling by which the university, indeed higher education more generally, is transformed into something more suitably identified as its antithesis, a corporate enterprise whose functioning is based on principles and values radically at odds with those of a university. Consequently, our mode of address throughout will be, of necessity, appropriate to a state of mourning, and our forms of expression are those of lamentation, jeremiad, and threnody, occasioned by the loss of someone or something of great value or importance. Despite the variations in tone throughout the text and the modulations of seriousness and occasional friendly badinage in the prose, the frame of mind underpinning the entire work is one of deep sadness.

The reader will quickly come to realize that a few topics, especially those related to academic freedom and academic governance, make repeat appearances, though each appearance will almost immediately establish its justification and manage to clarify the legal principles at issue. This is commonly the case when what is at issue are hotly contested principles of law or when, for example, the special employment status of faculty members is the topic of contention, and first amendment issues are at stake with a special subset of first amendment rights being attached to the speech of university professors, thereby distinguishing between university employees and university appointees.

Since what is unraveling is of central importance, special care has been taken to focus on those aspects of the programs of study that have acquired the status of being virtually mandatory, indeed essential features of what constitutes a university education. Aside from satisfying all the requirements of one’s elected major program, college-educated students are invariably obliged to have successfully completed several classes in the Arts and Sciences and several classes within the Humanities curriculum, such as literature, history, philosophy, foreign language, and so on through a vast array of options, and courses, without which there is no university credibility, and without which, moreover, there is no university. Nevertheless, considerable attention is also directed to the enumeration and evaluation of a diverse variety of STEM programs of study, along with an assessment of their job-securing potentialities. Although most of my specific case studies are focused on the unraveling of English Departments, in particular, the general principles that I advance are pertinent to all university departments residing in what can be called the general area of liberal arts.

The unraveling metaphor relates to the reversion of a handsome wool garment to a formless ball of yarn. A more mundane representation of what my book is determined to elucidate is captured in the first paragraph above when I state boldly in no uncertain terms the fact that what we continue to call a university is really transforming itself into its antithesis, a corporate enterprise. In brief, my book amply demonstrates that what has the temerity to continue to call itself a university has fewer and fewer of the features that the roster of authorities cited early in the book referred to as distinguishing markers of a true university. Throughout my book, readers will encounter a great variety of such transfigurations, as when, for example, appointees (a.k.a. professors or faculty experts) are reduced to employees and new Ph.D.’s are fledging disciplinary scholars (i.e., professional experts) who are reduced to adjuncts, in other words, contractual employees. Unfortunately, faculty members, in their efforts to attract students to their classes, are being forced to substitute the study of comic books for the analysis of Hamlet or King Lear, for example, while Wordsworth, Dickens, Milton, Chaucer, and all the other literary dignitaries and generators of durable wisdom wait in the antechamber for the call that will never come. Finally, readers should be alert to the manifold forms in which my book shows how the various players make their own contribution to the dissolution of the university, all of who are complicit in the unraveling, especially the administrators who were instrumental in taking on responsibilities that belong exclusively to the faculty.

I

Introductory Overview

A good many years ago, way back in 1996, I read what struck me as a very important book by the distinguished American philosopher Catherine Z. Elgin, titled Considered Judgment, containing, among many arguments of interest to me, an intriguing excursus on games, on, more particularly, the rules of games. What she has to say about the rules has the power and authority that comes with the expression of what we feel is common knowledge, the obviousness of which only becomes accessible, when articulated. They create a context within which mistakes can be made and corrected, …conduct rewarded and punished. Moreover, there would be no standard against which play could be found wanting if there were no rules. Rules, in short, provide a game with a telos, a goal, an end in view that determines appropriate moves and the achievement of success, resolution, and completion. To understand a game it is necessary to recognize that its components, its parts, elements, players are defined functionally, that is, as deriving their functionality from the end that informs them and that they are obliged to realize. Elgin invites us to think of the function of the queen in chess or the quarterback in football. By specifying exactly what the function of the queen or quarterback is, the rules determine what it is to perform the function well or badly."

I am drawn to Elgin’s analysis of games in large part because of its emphasis on the normative structure of games, of the rules that permit the identification of missteps, shortcomings, errors, since it brings to my mind some striking similarities to discussions of language among post-analytic, Anglo-American-Australian philosophers. For instance, I think immediately of Michael Dummett’s remark that the fundamental fact is that our understanding of language is the grasp of system or structure, or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view that we understand an utterance only by grasping the practices or forms of life in which it has a part, or, to abbreviate what could be a long list of testimonies, Donald Davidson’s judgment that it is only against the background of a pattern that we can identify thoughts." Of course, as I write the preceding sentence, I am aware that any two things can be shown to be similar in an indefinite number of ways, that the number of possible similarities are limited only by time and ingenuity. For example, both an iphone and The New World Symphony didn’t exist in 1727, both can be carried in a knapsack, neither is edible, and so on ad infinitum. Playing games and using language in the composition of meaningful forms, literary or otherwise, are both practices, the successful resolution of which depend essentially on identical forms of coordinated cooperation among components responsive to an informing principle.

By highlighting certain characteristics of language use we can bolster the credibility of the analogy with games, I think. Language in use is always centered, is always selective and restrictive. For instance, I cannot talk or write about what I cannot mention or distinguish, but once I have distinguished what I am talking about, that is, what particular aspect, from the virtually infinite variety of aspects from which the thing I’m talking about may be considered, I’m focusing on, I have committed myself to a particular vocabulary, a given range of terms. As a consequence, I can say no more, while these restrictions are in place, than what falls within the logical and semantic range of those terms. For example, if I were to talk about a chair, I could focus on its production or its distribution, or its importance to the local economy, or its chemical constituents, or an infinite number of other aspectual possibilities, each with its own logical and semantic imperatives, each with its own players, moves, and governing objectives, as well as its own potential failures to realize its duties, responsibilities, and obligations. Analogously, if someone yells Baseball and eleven folks run out on the field in tennis outfits carrying bags of golf clubs, something is drastically amiss. Kenneth Burke gives expression to a companionable view when he notes that most of what we say is simply an implication of the terminology in terms of which we conduct our inquiry. Paradoxically, then, it is only by shackling ourselves to a vocabulary that we can achieve the freedom of coherent expression. It’s only by submitting to confinement that we can free ourselves to say our say. Or, as D. H. Lawrence once memorably put it in an essay: Ca Ca Caliban, find a new master and be a new man. Of course, on the flip side, it is also because the writer is so confined that she and we can tell when the text goes off the rails or fails to be true to itself. Let me bring this already much too corpulent paragraph to a close with a felicitous testimony to the joyful rewards of successfully cooperating with the responsibilities and obligations implicit in one’s engagement with an elected vocabulary. On the occasion of the first anniversary of Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller wrote for The New York Times a brief essay entitled The ‘Salesman’ Has a Birthday, (February 5,1950) in which he describes his reading of the play to his wife and two friends one evening and then comments on his response to their reactions as follows: I don’t remember what they said, exactly, excepting that it had taken them deeply. But I can see my wife’s eyes as I read a—to me—hilarious scene, which I prefer not to identify. She was weeping. I confess that I laughed more during the writing of this play than I have ever done, when alone, in my life. Recognizing, I suppose, the incongruity, indeed the incomprehensibility, of his odd reaction to his wife’s sensitive response to the play and his joyful exuberance throughout the writing of what no one would call a laugh riot of a drama, Miller immediately goes on delightedly to claim his grateful ownership of the gift of laughter that it has been his fate to enjoy, as follows: I laughed because moment after moment came when I felt I had rapped it right on the head—the non sequitur, the aberrant but meaningful idea racing through Willy’s head, the turn of story that kept surprising me every morning. And most of all the form, for which I have been searching since the beginning of my writing life.

This is joy, plain and simple in its completely unalloyed form-- to have day after day the right words in what is absolutely the right order, to say and do exactly what the form requires and not something else. Miller directly says as much himself when a few paragraphs later he writes: "There is no limit to the expansion of the audience imagination so long as the play’s internal logic is kept inviolate (my italics). Much later in this work I will have occasion to note a variety of other writers who attest to experiencing what seems to be the willful determination of the novel, essay, play, poem, or other extended verbal document to write itself, to insist on taking over responsibility for getting the right words on the page in the right order, much to the blissful delight of the compliant author. Of course, painters, architects, and other artists are also witnesses to instances in which a stalled, recalcitrant work in progress will suddenly exhibit a mind of its own" and get the artist exactly where the work was designed or obliged to go.

For now, I need to supplement this discussion of games and the internal demands of creative, intentional forms with a few remarks on ideas and ideals, on, specifically, the possibility of their realization and on the importance of acknowledging our deviation from their imperatives. Of course, since human beings can place a value on what is virtually an infinite number of things, and human flourishing is attainable in manifold forms of achievement, it is necessary to focus, for illustrative purposes, on some area of concern of broad interest. I have chosen to concentrate on higher education, in short, on our idea of, our conception of colleges and universities as it shaped or influenced by how colleges and universities represent themselves in their promotional publications and mission statements, that is, as they are ideally structured and performing at their very best, as well as on the general, infinitely various, loose, nevertheless relatively common and serviceable working conception of these institutions by parents, students, and a random selection of those folks comprising the general population. Of course, institutions of higher education are, as a species, remarkably different from games, novels, and other forms of coherent prose compositions in a stunningly impressive number of ways, but, like them, they can be unfaithful to and deviate from the obligations and responsibilities implicit in the stated principles and values of their publicly-promulgated pronouncements. Before moving immediately on to a consideration of our ideal notions of higher education, it might be instructive to consider our foundational embeddedness in the principles of democracy, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, in short, a set of documents whose stated and implicit imperatives we can honor, as we can in games and novels, in the breach or the observance. But if at the level of policy and law we opt for breach, we are of necessity complicit in what Mark Edmundson has identified as the worst kind of corruption, the corruption of our highest ideals, such as, for example, the self-evident truth that all men (humans) are created equal, as the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration insists.

At this point I had intended to run through a list of the inspiring and uplifting testimonies to the commitment of X University and Y College to the development and enrichment of the entire person, to provide the prospective student with the kinds of experiences that lead not only to a successful career, but to the formation of an intellectually and morally informed member of society with a keen awareness of being endowed, as a human being, with capacities for action and achievement in a multiplicity of human enterprises, physical, social, familial, intellectual, moral, creative, and so on and so on. Furthermore, I initially intended to buttress these genuinely decent and morally valuable sentiments with a generous list of college and university mottoes that seek to capture in nutshell form something quintessentially expressive of the institution’s nature and purpose. In place of the long list, I have substituted a rather truncated but still illuminating number of what I take to be a representative sample of the kind: Fordham: Sapientia et doctrina (Wisdom and Learning); Harvard: Veritas (Truth); University of Chicago: Crescat Scientia; vita excolatur (Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched); University of Georgia: Et docere et rerum exquirere causas (To teach and enquire into the nature of things); Yale: Lux et Veritas (Light and Truth); University of Texas: Disciplina praesidium civitatis (Instruction is the safeguard of the state); and finally Ohio State University: Disciplina in civitatem (Education for citizenship). Upon reflection, I decided that I could better serve the interests of the noble principles and values expressed in mission statements and given memorably concise articulation in a single meaning-packed word or a thought-generating phrase by exhibiting their meaning and force in on-the-job contexts, especially perhaps when their interests were being thwarted or misrepresented by alien values, most notably by corporate values or economic considerations.

I think it is fair to say that the general public holds our universities and colleges in high esteem, perhaps primarily, though not only, because parents and potential students alike have been informed by the steady drumbeat in every conceivable media conveyance that the prospect of enjoying or simply realizing a decently sustainable middle-class future in our modern economy is reserved primarily or chiefly to those with a college degree. Indeed, it is what is generally understood, by parent and student alike, to be the qualifying ticket to ride to a decent, self-sustaining future, as measured by the annual income differential anticipated by all economists of forty or fifty thousand dollars between high school and college graduates. Back in the Neolithic age (the late 1950’s) when I graduated from high school, and when fewer than thirty-five or forty percent of graduates had any wild dream of going to college, the high school diploma was the demarcation document prerequisite to sustainable middle-class respectability.

Of course, what has always been somewhat true has become conspicuously and alarmingly true today when curricular choices are made and academic majors selected not because of any inherent interest in the subject matter but because they are, according to all available reports, highly likely to lead immediately to a substantial remunerative pay-off upon graduation. In the short run, of course, who would gainsay these choices, grounded as they are in a clear-sighted assessment of current economic realities and the heavy sack of loan obligations weighing on the shoulders of the recent graduate. In briefest digest, the current academic landscape looks something like this: more and more students are going on to college, with estimates ranging anywhere between eighty or ninety percent of high school graduates applying for admission to colleges and universities that are more and more expensive year by year, with the result that students and parents are taking on greater and greater debt loads, even as students are doing as much as they can to minimize their interest-accumulating financial burden by taking as many AP (Advanced Placement ) courses for college credit while in high school, and by reducing or eliminating as many elective or general education (that is, humanities or liberal arts) courses as possible, thereby opening up opportunities to take more courses in their major program or in major-affiliated courses and, not incidentally, shortening the time to degree in their STEM-enriched and job-oriented program of study. This, obviously, is to use a very broad brush to paint the current landscape, but it does capture some genuinely salient aspects of college life today, when training for employment trumps educating for human enrichment, social coexistence, and democratic citizenship. There’s a good deal more to be said regarding student choices and college curricula, but further discussion will be deferred until such topics can take center stage. For now our focus turns to our diverse but strikingly harmonious ideas of colleges and universities in their Sunday clothes, on their best behavior.

In fairness, I think I should acknowledge at the outset that when I refer to the idea of colleges acting appropriately while outfitted in their proper sartorial garb, I mean that they are not substituting alien corporate standards for those natural to the academic world, thereby obliging universities and colleges to adapt to completely foreign principles, goals, aims, rewards and so on. In what follows, I hope to demonstrate convincingly that corporations and universities are, at bottom, ontological opposites taking up habitations at the antipodes and being endowed with completely incompatible DNA. With the reader’s kind indulgence, I would like to approach the misalignment of corporate and academic conditions of existence by appealing to an analogous case in which an orchestra is evaluated by an efficiency expert, in much the same terms that university departments are currently being required to justify their continued viability by bottom line economic considerations. The evaluation of the symphony, in mercifully condensed form, proceeds as follows: For considerable periods the four oboe players had nothing to do. Their numbers should be reduced. …The twelve first violins were playing identical notes. This seems unnecessary multiplication. The staff of this section should be drastically cut. Much effort was absorbed in the playing of demisemiquavers. All notes should be rounded up to the nearest semiquaver. … There seems to be much repetition of musical passages. No useful purpose is served by repeating on the horns a passage which has already been handled by the strings. In conclusion the corporate efficiency expert determines that if all redundant passages were eliminated the whole concert time of two hours could be reduced to twenty minutes, and there would then be no need for an interval.

I often used the full review in my classes when varieties of irony were under consideration. But it is clear that there is nothing so richly and enjoyably complicated as irony in the judgments that, say, deans make when they decide to disinvest in the English, History, or Philosophy department. Something of the deleterious effects of the corporatization and the business is business mentality dominating decision making in the groves of academe today is found in the remarks of the distinguished British historian Anthony Beevor in The Guardian when he dolefully notes that in the most recent debates about the national curriculum history has been granted the status of an ‘inessential subject,’ a designation he initially attempts to mollify, unfortunately, by testifying to the employment and economic utility of one of education’s most ancient and venerable subjects, giving special emphasis to the value of the history essay, the primary product of the student’s historical training. In for a pence, in for a pound, Beevor goes on to say, quite truly and justifiably, that the history essay teaches students to research and assess material, to marshal facts and develop arguments, and to arrive at logical conclusions. Composing such essays trains young people, don’t you see, to write reports and prepare presentations. Ergo, History is an essential element of the education system after all. The last three sentences are, I’m afraid, a bit too snarky and so require sincere and serious qualification. Beevor, a bright and good man, recovers quickly from the appeasing mode and, quite eloquently grounds the justification of historical study in its social, intellectual, and humanistic significance, insisting that history offers the richest imaginable source of moral examples and moral dilemmas, which are themselves, he generously acknowledges, the essence of great fiction, great drama, and life itself. He brings his case home with the following two sentences. Without an understanding of history we are politically, culturally, and socially impoverished. If we sacrifice history to economic pressures or to budget cuts, we will lose a part of who we are. To this handsome summation, I can say, in solidarity with Beevor, that without an academic engagement with history, literature, philosophy, foreign languages, without, that is, liberal and humanistic study, we would have a very truncated conception of what falls within the range of our genetic endowment, of the potentialities that we are capable of bringing to realized achievement.

In a 2009 essay in Harper’s, the poet Mark Slouka finds a felicitous, if depressing, similarity between a professor in a liberal arts or humanities department and the poet narrator in Mayakovsky’s Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry, in that both are forced to account for themselves in an alien idiom that is committed to standards, values, and interests that are radically different from, if not absolutely antithetical to, those intrinsic to poetic expression and professorial modes of inquiry and analysis. Increasingly, departments of Literature, History, Philosophy, Foreign Languages, indeed, all those areas of study traditionally falling under the rubric of the Liberal Arts or Humanities are currently in danger of being either downsized or eliminated. Perhaps the most notoriously conspicuous and deplorable instance of mass departmental exile on record in this country is that executed at the campus of SUNY Albany in 2011, when five Humanities programs—three in modern languages, one in classics and one in theater--were unceremoniously kicked off the island. But, lamentably, competition for the title of most deplorable instance of the demolition of foundational academic departments and programs of study, along with the elimination of the tenured scholars who teach them, proceeds at a pace very difficult to keep up with. Mills College, a distinguished and highly respected women’s liberal arts college in Oakland, California submitted its bid for the title in June, 2017 when, in compliance with a newly-minted Financial Stabilization Plan, it sent layoff notices to five full-time tenured faculty members, representing the following tangential, inessential fields of study and inquiry: English, History, Philosophy, Physics, and Ethnic studies. And so it goes and goes and goes, as Kurt Vonnegut so powerfully and memorably said in Slaughterhouse Five of various forms of dying great and small whose cumulative effect is deeply moving. Of course, a full bibliographic record of essays and books dealing with the precarious situation in which the Humanities and all other financially underperforming academic units are in would make a truly impressive doorstopper of a book. To preclude a tiresome iteration of the same points over and over again and to facilitate movement to a consideration of how a sizeable roster of knowledgeable professors and educators have differentiated colleges and universities from corporate and other top-down managerial enterprises and in the process given expression, surprisingly, to a commonly shared (for the most part) understanding of the idea of the special character of the properly functioning College/University, even as they distinguish one from the