Academic life

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 21^st 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!