[A few notes by DGB, followed by write ups by Julia and Jeremy — for which, thank you!]
The opening discussion in our session today ended up circling a topic that remains on the minds of most: the job market in the humanities; the future of humanistic inquiry/teaching at the post-secondary level. In certain ways, it cannot but be a “tired” topic. But in another way, we have to keep it fresh — since it does not look like a problem that is likely to solve itself. Although it is hard to figure out how it is to be solved.
Should graduate programs take fewer students (if there are fewer jobs)? Should universities figure out how to hire more PhDs (if they are training them)?
We talked about this stuff, and I tried to bring some of the perspectives that circulate in gatherings of faculty — and these perspectives are diverse. Some feel we are, effectively, “professional school” for the professoriate. If that is the case, we need to be responsive to the market: fewer professional positions, fewer new trainees. Others incline to conceiving graduate training in the humanities as part of a wider project of cultivation of “intellectual life” or (along the lines of the Wendy Brown piece) the maintenance of civic/existential/social values/practices other than “market” values (or the associated reductionisms/heuristics, like “optimization” discourse or the game-theory schemes of adversarial maximization). For those that way inclined, a bad job market in the humanities is actually a symptom of a wider calamity of conscience and collective being — and the way forward is a doubling down on the project, in the hopes that new waves of “believers” can help save the day.
There may be other positions. But those are the ones I see. My own sensibility inclines, as I indicated, to the latter view. And I am less interested in sorting out how to help PhDs in the humanities find alt-ac career paths that articulate with the machinations of neoliberalism, and more interested in trying to change the world into which new humanities PhDs go — to make new spaces for the kind of work we care about and that I believe is essential to human wellbeing.
But this is a very difficult — indeed, possibly utopian — program.
I did mention a bright light: Matthew Spellberg (IHUM alumnus!) whose work with Outer Coast strikes me as part of a very exciting movement to create a new kind of network of two year colleges — rooted in local knowledge and indigenous traditions.
* * *
I won’t try to summarize Professor Hare’s visit, leaving that to Julia and Jeremy below. But I would be remiss if I did not mention Navjit’s immensely powerful intervention, in which, linking back to the question of the university humanities, she articulated a slashing critique of the provincialism of American university whinging about humanistic collapse: the idea of the liberal university, in her account, was born of an “original sin” by which the (sacred) “spaces of thought” were to be won by means of a severing of thinking from doing, a split between “head labor” and “hand labor.” This is and was a false move, and one rooted in class (and empire). The resulting universities “worked” as bastions for a special kind of humanistic “reflection” for exactly as long as the brutal “outsourcing” of physical labor could be maintained (exported, in effect, to the global south and subaltern peoples). It is THAT architecture that is collapsing. And as the brutalizations “come home to roost” (in the “heartland”) the little arcadia of the American college can no longer hold space.
An analysis not to be forgotten.
-DGB
* * *
[Julia follows…]
During the first half of last week’s discussion, our conversation shifted somewhat rapidly from the final project to, more broadly, the crisis of the humanities and the position graduate students and their departments hold within it. It stemmed from a comment made by Graham, who let us know that, in the History Department, faculty had met [back in pandemic times -DGB] to decide whether to accept the same number of Ph.D. students or grant for extra year for pre-existing Ph.D. candidates instead. This seemingly small dilemma opened the gates within our class for a number of questions regarding the usage of funding in the university and the possible politics that different department can take within the shrinking job market, giving way to our (perhaps first?) intense debate on a subject that, on one way or the other, preoccupies most of us.
Graham started the conversation by stating his position, advocating for the acceptance of the same number of graduate students as a way to create as many open-minded, intellectually curious academic individuals that could advance the conversations of our society forward, whether they were granted a job afterwards or not. This position advocated, in a way, for the conceptual health of the society and academia as a whole (and was maybe tied into our conversation a week ago where students where not only discussed within the space of the university, but within civic society more broadly.)
Chandler then proposed that students, within departments, should be encouraged to follow more alternative paths more often – from curatorial gigs to working at museums, applying for writing fellowships, and so on. This seemed to be of interest in the class, where the consensus was that “Altac” paths were discouraged more often than not. Minna responded here, and pointed out that many of these “Altac” jobs fall into a similar austerity that the academic market currently has, and signaled that getting a curatorial job at a museum was as hard to do as getting a teaching position. The conversation between Chandler and Minna, in this sense, turned into whether an alternative path was feasible at all, or whether it was as hard and somewhat pointless as trying to be a university professor. Finally, Navjit spoke very passionately about the role that faculty can have within the improvement and advocated for the unionization of professors as well as students, which would allow for some leverage to negotiate with the institution. I asked shyly about the possibility of faculty allowing for the creation of more jobs – as a direct way of counterbalancing the shrinking market – and Graham responded by underscoring the hardships of some of the negotiations that take place within party politics.
After that first half, prof. Thomas Hare came into our seminar to give a delightful talk about the tea ceremony, In Praise of Shadows, his own writing on nō theatre, and medieval Japan. The meeting started with a short presentation on the intense changes that the tea ceremony underwent during the 14th century in Japan, and how it came into being as it is today. Prof. Hare showed compelling images of tea houses and bowls and explained to us the fascinating relationships between aesthetics, class and art that are at the heart the tea ceremony. He also offered the idea that the tea ceremony was both deeply disciplinary as well as anti-disciplinary (in the sense that, at the time, it was intensely anti-traditional and even somewhat subversive).
During the Q&A section of our discussion, some of the questions that arose had to do with the process of doing within scholarship, and how the performance of nō affected, to some extent, prof. Hare’s own writing. He remarked, here, on the fact that some of the aspects of the theatre tradition are better understood when one’s performing as well as writing. Subsequently, some of the questions turned into the discipline of comparative literature as a whole, where prof. Hare said that, within the past few decades, the orientation of comparative literature (and perhaps following broader, political movements) has influence literary studies that consider themselves within the tradition of certain national languages – i.e., that a comparative literature framework is used broadly today in departments like French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, East Asian Studies, and so on.
A remarkable moment of the conversation with Prof. Hare took place when he offered two, possible genealogies for the emergence of comparative literature as a field. One, he said out, could be thought of with the study of The Epic of Gilgamesh, which forced many academics from varying languages that are related to ancient Mesopotamia to come together and study comparatively. Another, possible origin took place, according to Prof. Hare, when, during the Holocaust, of Jewish scholars migrated from Eastern Europe into the United States and brought, with themselves, vast knowledge on traditions and languages. Erich Auerbach’s anecdote on the writing of Mimesis was brought as a key example, where memory served Auerbach as a form of writing his seminal work from exile in Istanbul (the word exilic figuring prominently in the board of a classroom, as part of the conception of comparative studies). Finally, some of the remarks turned into the idea of amateurism and the retro-feeding of dilettantism into interdisciplinary studies. Another last point that was left hanging in the air (and perhaps also one that might be worth picking up next week) was the so-called anti-intellectualism of American culture, and the damage it might do to academia as a whole.
-JK
[And Jeremy here below…]
“And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines,” writes Jun’ichirō Tanizaki in In Praise of Shadows, the primary text Thomas Hare assigned for us this week. Though our discussion never got to Tanizaki, for me this line captures a theme we wrestled with this week, and to a certain extent, one we have dealt with in many of our more quotidian discussions on doing humanistic work in present day academia.
Tanizaki is of course discussing the transmission of Japanese art forms through media made for western music, so I don’t want to conflate his move with what the (still largely western) humanities experience in the face of an academic landscape increasingly shaped by the sciences or when humanists seek out post-grad employment. But in the comparatist orientation of the week, I would put forth that much of our discussion seems to hinge on the unease of a similar distortion of spirit that occurs when humanists confront an abysmal job market and, to paraphrase Denise, the “conversations on conversations” that recur around it.
We circled around the problem a bit, questioning what “the job market” means to various disciplines, how alternatives to academic careers are seen and presented (or not) to us, and the instability inherent in many of these other careers. We delved deeper than the prior conversations I have been part of when we began to discuss how such conversations frame the problem—individual vs. collective—and who holds what responsibilities when it comes to faculty and students. There seemed a general hesitation with the concept of framing graduate students as the “vanguards” of any future revolution—that perhaps the vanguard feels too easily coopted by the entrepreneurship model already making its way into the humanities and seems separated from much of the problem’s origin in the increasing reliance on adjuncts, graduate student teaching, and larger class sizes at universities at all levels. A powerful end note to the discussion was Navjit’s call for unionization—of both graduate students and faculty—and reminder that the “my” in “my students are still getting jobs” is where solidarity ends. As it spilled into the break, our discussion concluded that the question of the job market beyond academia, even in the most well-intentioned of conversations, is still framed as 1) a second choice, 2) an “if” not “when” scenario, and 3) a “you” not “we” situation– i.e. “you could still do this if even after you’ve secured the incredible postdoc you don’t get a tenure-track job,” and not a “when our students all face this shared future.”
In our second half of class, Tom Hare of Comparative Literature presented on tea and in doing so gave us insightful threads to think about in terms of the body as vessel for cultural tradition, the demeanor of cultural production, and the issues of class and gender embedded in the organizational structures of training. Graham braided some of these threads together into an area we have yet to explore in depth, aesthetics, as well as our ongoing discussion of teaching vs. training. Julia asked if, in the IHUM spirit, training was an integral part of scholarship on writing about art forms like tea or noh, which got us back into thinking about thinking vs doing.
We entered a conversation on disciplinary formation with Minna’s questions about comp lit’s relation to area studies and Ben’s question about comp lit’s ascendance in the United States vs. Britain and discussed the range of origin stories told within the discipline, starting as far back and as textually as Gilgamesh and as recent and as contingently as the arrival of Eastern European Jewish refugee academics in the United States—to go back to last week’s discussion, a “seed bomb” that transformed many disciplines, my own field of architecture included. We then got into the exilic nature of interdisciplinary work and riffed a bit on this to think about excavating meaning from terms now seen as derogatory—like the amateur or the dilletante—as a way of thinking about interdisciplinarity.
This brought us back to the question we approached before break of what to do about professionalization and the de-skilling it entails. What do we do when, after narrow professionalization, no profession exists and much of the solutions that exist thrust more side-gigs and side-gigs-turned-main-gigs upon already time- and cash-strapped graduate students. Much of these ‘suggestions’ are framed as work that will make us competitive later on, but for graduate students today, just having five years of employment and health insurance and time to read and write may be already as much as we or our families may hope for. To paraphrase Navjit once more, the academy has always been built on the exclusion of different types of knowledge, and now it is dealing with it, and to paraphrase my own comment, institutions that only recently professed a desire for inclusion with no real way to attain it are especially poorly equipped to “deal.”
Also, thank you to Emilio for bringing what looked like a quite heavy typewriter all the way from home! We unfortunately never got to address it or put it to use but hopefully get to think with it as we go back to discussing our final project next week.
-JW
