Louis Menand, The
Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New
York: Norton and Company, 2010).
This is a book of academic history
and policy, with a decided private / Northeast bias.
It treats the topics of General Education;
the history of the Humanities and literary studies; “interdisciplinarity”; and the
concept that “all professors think alike” [i.e. that faculty are overwhelmingly
liberal politically; not a very interesting chapter]. Some of what Menand has
to say about Gen Ed and the “humanities revolution” is not true at Ohio State (or, I
suspect, other large state institutions). But this is a very smart book with
good research and it raises interesting questions. I highlight some of them
below.
National Defense Education Act of 1958 led to direct federal subsidies of higher ed (rather
than only subsidies via specific research contracts): NASA, NSF, NIH; but also
targeted science and foreign languages as primary needs (pp. 66-68). Certainly
foreign language students and programs have depended on these subsidies for a
long time; everyone in my generation and since was funded by Title VI for a
year or more in pursuing our educations, and I even got a Dept of Education
grant to study in Russia one year.
New Critical Paradigms in the Humanities: Menand talks about the
“anti-disciplinarity” inherent in the “interdisciplinary” areas that developed
in the 1980s and 90s (women’s studies, cultural studies, science studies, gay
and lesbian studies, postcolonial studies) and asserts that these areas of
investigation remained outside of departmental structures (were “non-departmental
by design”) without faculty lines or terminal degrees. This is not true at OSU,
where departments have emerged in several areas. The question is, of course,
how do job possibilities map onto existing PhD programs?
Interdisciplinarity: Menand argues that interdisciplinarity is a red herring, that most
scholars remain “highly specialized” and that indeed that is the definition of
a PhD. [“The academic credential is non-transferable (as every PhD looking for
work outside the academy quickly learns),” p. 105]. An interesting
philosophical point:
Since it
is the system that ratifies the produce … the most important function of the
system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the
system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both
for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the
market for its products, is the production of the producers (105).
A correllary to his point is that it
takes so much longer to get a PhD in Humanities than, say, a JD or even an
MD/PhD in part because PhDs in humanities have less social authority. He argues
that “interdisciplinarity” is related to the anxiety Humanities scholars feel
that their “credential” is irrelevant.
To go further with
interdisciplinarity, Menand asserts that it promises to “smooth out the
differences between the empirical and the hermeneutic, the hard and the soft,
disciplines.” But since he has essentially redefined interdisciplinarity to
mean “anti-disciplinarity,” he then argues that individual scholars are simply
adopting methods from other disciplines (literary scholars from anthropology,
for example) without acknowledging the debates about these methods or insights
within the original discipline. (I agree with this idea.)
Menand concludes that
“until professors are produced in a different way, the structure of academic
knowledge production and dissemination is unlikely to change significantly” (121).
Reinventing the PhD: Menand reminds us of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation initiative (which
came out of the U Wash “Reenvisioning the PhD” project), but says that “these
efforts are a worthy form of humanitarianism; but there is no obvious
efficiency in requiring people to devote ten or more years to the mastery of a
specialized area of scholarship on the theory that they are developing skills
in research, or critical thinking, or communication” (151).
I don’t actually agree
with him, but what I don’t want to do is add requirements (more and more
professionalization seminars etc) that would lengthen TTD. He does offer the
radical and provocative thought that “if every graduate student were required
to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net
result would probably be a plus for scholarship” (152). (Probably not
practical, given the ratcheting up of tenure research requirements across the
country; we need all of our PhDs in Humanities to be ready to publish a book if
necessary for their employment situation.)
Conclusions:
Menand raises these various issues to argue that the 21st century
university needs to change, although it also needs to be aware of its past and
value its place in society. He concludes:
Despite
transformational changes in the scale, missions, and constituencies of American
higher education, professional reproduction remains almost exactly as it was a
hundred years ago. Doctoral education is the horse that the university is
riding to the mall. People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized,
since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly
ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end
of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization,
they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever:
to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues
that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be
interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to
people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors
to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently
(157-158).
Many people in higher education and
in graduate schools are working on this!
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