Humanities in Isolation
KLEIN, MARCUS
Humanities in Isolation Literature: An Embattled Profession By Carl Woodring Columbia. 220 pp. $29.50. Reviewed by Marcus Klein Professor emeritus of English, SUNY/Buffalo; associate...
...Expenditures tell the same story...
...In addition, everyone (particularly any father-in-law) thinks that academic jobs are pretty cushy—although Woodring figures at least a 60hour week for a professor of English, based on a diary he kept and some supporting survey statistics...
...This shows the literally exponential growth of vice presidents and assistants to vice presidents and assistants to assistants, and so on, mostly reporting to each other, with ever increasing support staffs for the support staffs...
...Ezra Pound said yes, because leaders need language, and poets have it...
...associate editor...
...Multiculturalism," initially a refreshing social challenge, has multiplied and divided absurdly...
...Here is Henry Adams in a letter dated 1876, at the point when he is considering leaving his post as a teacher of history there: "Dr...
...In an age of Science and Technology, why is imaginative literature in itself not trivial, and the academic study of it not therefore twice trivial...
...Worse, there is a movement afoot to get rid of tenure, a state being attained by fewer and fewer young—and aging—teachers of English, anyway...
...I am allowed to sit in my chair at Harvard and rail at everything the college respects, and no one cares...
...Put to an English department hireling, queries of that kind are painful in the extreme...
...He cites a Modern Language Association report for the first half of the '90s, issued in December 1997, that found 55 per cent of the 7,598 new English PhDs failed to secure the employment they had been trained for in the year their degree was awarded...
...Bill changed many things, it generally was the case that one did not become a professor of English or history or philosophy without an independent income...
...He does not contend that administrators are by and large malign, or that they are usually mistaken in theirpriorities, but rather that many end up in administration as a result of avarice or stupidity...
...Who is to blame...
...A Manhattan or Albany lawyer who hears another in the firm allude to idols of the cave with reference simultaneously to Bacon and to Plato recognizes a fellow graduate of Columbia College...
...At which point perhaps it is difficult to distinguish commonality from chumminess...
...No wonder office space is crowding out classroom space...
...He proposes a new advanced degree for those who want to be college teachers, the "PhDT," as opposed to those who will do something to be called "research" into literature...
...Those for instruction rose by 175 per cent, while those for administration did so by 400 per cent...
...Woodring also maintains convincingly that the literary profession is meanwhile contributing to its own demise...
...Kenneth Burke said they might contribute something to advertising...
...His argument is by now familiar: Humanities departments are isolating themselves, both from the general public and increasingly from one another...
...In substantial part, though, Woodring's book is an attempt to provide his embattled profession with a new rationale...
...Imagine: Today is Wednesday and so it must be Nietzsche...
...Plato said no, they are subversive...
...Perhaps he does not know that course has traditionally been a killer for young instructors, and has aborted as many careers as it has inaugurated...
...Woodring, whose specialty is the English Romantics, is Woodberry Professor Emeritus of Literature at Columbia, so he has delved even into grim statistics...
...The situation of professors in the humanities, especially would-be professors, has been deteriorating steadily since the time, not so very long ago, that it became a "profession...
...Add the fact that jobs are drying up while the number of candidates for them continues to increase, and the situation becomes such that only a person safely emeritus can bear to muse upon it...
...instead, they would read in traditional fields and periods, under supervision, and undergo teacher-training...
...For example: What is the purpose of teaching literature...
...Having enjoyed a successful career in a major university English Department, he is concerned about the fate—indeed the very jobs—of his former colleagues and their would-be successors...
...The requirement of publication," the author accurately charges, "has nourished both mediocrity and opacity...
...How the latter are to be paid is left vague...
...And so on...
...The value of the course for Woodring is not only that students will be introduced to the great books, but that they will read the same ones: "Every teacher of a class for upperclassmen at Columbia can expect students to understand allusions to concepts or phrases from the seminal works read in the courses required of all...
...Dialectal usage can be tolerated, and on occasion applauded," he writes, "but only standard American English should be taught in freshman composition...
...Higher education's expanding administrations on the one hand, says Woodring, and the humanities departments themselves on the other...
...Can poets serve the state...
...PhDTs would not write a dissertation...
...Despite changes, professors have usually been able to cling to an amused tolerance from the public and within the university...
...Salaries and security are tied to publication, but then, who does or can read the stuff...
...Deconstruction," once an invigorating impertinence for some, has become a vocation in itself, grown old, and degenerated into a preening "claustrophilia"—Woodring's nice word...
...They amount to asking, Why should we pay you...
...The end of all of this and of much more is to be "commonality," a word that throbs throughout the book...
...Without putting it so bluntly, Woodring suggests that some hard questions need to be confronted...
...Woodring strongly approves of the required twoyear sequence of courses at Columbia College, instituted in 1919, usually called "Contemporary Civilization," where students are divided into small classes but all read the same curriculum of great books and great ideas...
...Then Adams adds, "Nothing ever comes of it all...
...Nor has the market manifestly improved in the second half of the decade...
...Holmes, who does the wit for the city [of Boston], is allowed to talk as he will—wild atheism commonly—and no one objects...
...Unfortunately, it is a weak one...
...Until the G.I...
...First composition: something like instructions for tying a shoestring...
...Woodring offers detailed plans for the teaching of Freshman Comp...
...American National Biography" The "profession" Carl Woodring refers to in his subtitle is the literary professoriate...
...Woodring begins his book by looking back at the supposedly good time when the role of the teacher of literature was not questioned, specifically the day of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes, who overlapped at Harvard during the 1840s and '50s...
...Between 1966-67 and 1991-92 in the University of California," the author observes, "the number of students grew 97 per cent, the instructional staff 61 per cent, and the General Administration 151 per cent...
...In an Appendix, he examines the published rosters of several major public and private universities...
Vol. 82 • September 1999 • No. 11
