The other day, Stanley Fish wrote in his NY Times column about the academic suicide being committed by SUNY-Albany, which has decided to cut its French, Italian, classics, and Theater programs. The students currently getting degrees in those subjects will be allowed to finish, and then the programs will be phased out — poof! — whole departments up in smoke. Here in Buffalo, the Art Voice details Erie County Executive Chris Collins‘ budget for 2011, which does not simply reduce, but completely evaporates, funding for a broad range of local arts organizations. This, ironically, comes fast on the heels of the same week when the thriving local theater scene kicked off its season, and the Beyond/In multi-gallery and museum exhibition launched, both examples of the sort of cultural revitalization that a dying rust belt community like Buffalo desperately needs.
Fish had already argued last June passionately and cogently for why a so-called “classical” education should still be made available to students, contra the test-based, math- and reading-skills curriculum that currently dominates everywhere. It’s a familiar argument — the disappearance of critical thinking in the younger generation; which leads, in turn, to a citizenry lacking the ability to make informed, responsible choices; the dearth of creativity and craft, in favor of marketable, scientific knowledge — bolstered by quotes from experts who say things like the “humanistic aspects of science and social science — the imaginative and creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought — are . . . losing ground.”
Meanwhile, as Fish relates, the explanation from SUNY-Albany president George M. Philip is a remarkable example of just such bottom-line thinking: “there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs.” They are not pulling their weight, not attracting enough customers. This vision of the public university as a sort of carnival midway, on which departments are like booths that must pull in students and research dollars by hook or by crook — or be left behind when the carneys pull up the stakes and the show moves on — is exactly what’s at issue in the higher education debate currently underway all over the country. This vision has already devastated the California system; it threatens the SUNY system, which continues to teeter towards privatization; now comes word that it’s even infected Britain. All this is happening, and there’s probably nothing any of us, those of us who care about art and literature and dead languages, can do about it. But the consequences of this reality, I believe, are even more dire and significant than Fish describes.
Consider Zeno’s paradox, of the arrow that never reaches its target:
- Zeno’s basic argument is essentially that we can never move past a single point because each point is infinitely divisible and it is impossible to cross an infinite space. For example, say one wants to get from point A to point C. First one would have to move through point B. But to get from A to B, one would have to move through some halfway point between A and B, yet to get to this halfway point, one would have to pass through a point that is between A and the halfway point, and so on and so on ad infinitum. Since it is impossible to cross an infinite space mobility is impossible.
Joan Copjec, in her book Read My Desire, describes philosopher Henri Bergson‘s response and “solution” to this paradox:
- To this analysis Bergson responds with a laugh: it is not motion that is impossible, but the comprehension of motion, of life, by the intellect. The simple lifting of one’s arm becomes grotesquely comic when contemplated by the intellect, which can only cut up movement, like a film, into hundreds of discrete moments. It is only the perception of motion from the inside, by intuition, that allows us to observe the former’s completeness.
Why is this relevant? Because a typical argument in favor of the humanities — Fish partakes of this to some extent, though he admits that it’s a difficult one to make — attempts to somehow quantify the impact of traditional study, the effect of studying art and language and culture, on one’s culture, in one’s society. And in fact, the Art Voice does a good job making an argument for how the county’s investments in cultural programs offer more bang for the buck in terms of jobs and tourism than more business-oriented investments (such as the ongoing waterfront revitalization fiasco), which tend to look good in Chamber of Commerce PR blasts but do little to bolster grass-roots, community enrichment and cohesion. But still… it’s a hopeless, losing argument. In attempting to make it, we are ceding to the grotesque comedy of the numbers.
To state it as clearly as possible: Art, culture, the humanities, cannot and never will make sound financial sense.
They cannot make sound financial sense, that is, in any way that’s coherent to someone who is not already an artist, an art patron, or a humanities major or professor. An art museum is never going to be a baseball stadium, or a microchip factory, or a Walmart’s. A humanities department is never going to find the cure for cancer, or bring in research dollars, or produce the next Mark Zuckerberg. These things always have been and always will be a sort of excess in the urban community and the university, something that not everyone is going to make use of, appreciate or enjoy. And when the dollars get tight and budgets crunch, it simply makes sense for them to suffer cuts, even disappear.
And so as long as people are looking at art, culture, the humanities in terms of the ratio, the number, the bottom line, they will not see them for what they are. Their impact cannot be quantified. It’s a qualitative difference. Examples abound. Just the other day, an article in the NY Times about Dr. Abraham Verghese, who teaches at Stanford University, and who is “is on a mission to bring back something he considers a lost art: the physical exam. The old-fashioned touching, looking and listening — the once prized, almost magical skills of the doctor who missed nothing and could swiftly diagnose a peculiar walk, sluggish thyroid or leaky heart valve using just keen eyes, practiced hands and a stethoscope.”
Dr. Verghese is also a best-selling author who got his writing degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. The article makes much of the impact of this on his practice:
- Art and medicine may seem disparate worlds, but Dr. Verghese insists that for him they are one. Doctors and writers are both collectors of stories, and he says his two careers have the same joy and the same prerequisite: “infinite curiosity about other people.” He cannot help secretly diagnosing ailments in strangers, or wondering about the lives his patients lead outside the hospital.
A real-life Dr. House — of which, more in a moment — the point here is that Dr. Verghese’s study of writing is not quantifiable in terms of his medical practice. Learning to develop metaphors, craft prose, and shape plots did nothing to help him diagnose diseases, prescribe medications, offer cures. Yet, it has seemingly enriched the quality of everything that he does.
Same thing for arts organizations and artists in communities. If you are looking for the direct, traceable streams of money to measure what they bring to a city, a neighborhood, they will never add up to you. It’s a qualitative difference. It’s the group of artists who paint murals on abandoned buildings, or open a cafe, or put on a weekly reading, which subtly transforms a neighborhood and makes it attractive for small businesses and commerce and regular folks to move back in. Anyone who has lived in previously downtrodden or dangerous neighborhoods in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Detroit, can attest to this.
What all this means is that we have to attempt to shift the discourse itself. Quit trying to make the numbers-crunchers see how the numbers add up. Start trying to get people to see how having some parts of the landscape that are not directly related to economic growth are nevertheless, to paraphrase Pound, as necessary in their way as clean air and parks. Public support for a community cannot and should not be all about the bottom line. A public university cannot and should not be run like a carnival midway.
The other night, as we are wont to do, my wife and I watched an episode of House. The subplot of the episode, as it so often does, involved Dr. House — played by the incredible Hugh Laurie — pressuring and pranking his friend, Dr. Wilson (played by Robert Sean Leonard). (This is going to seem like an odd place to wind up my point, but… bear with me.) Specifically, House is trying to goad Wilson to go out and find some furniture for the apartment they share; the idea is that Wilson typically structures his environment to suit others, never making any decisions based on his own identity, his own personality.
After much back and forth, Wilson finally hires a decorator to make all the decisions — so, in a small way, thwarting House’s attempts to force creativity on him — yet, as House himself had also suggested, he makes one decision, purchases one piece of furniture solely on his own. And what is it? It’s an organ, a piece of equipment that makes no sense with the rest of the decor, which for this reason House appreciates, immediately sitting down at the organ to begin playing Procul Harum‘s “Whiter Shade of Pale.”
In the closing montage, which depicts House back in the hospital overseeing the final “payoff scene,” when the patient he’s cured through his brilliant, improbable insight is recovering in a room surrounded by loved ones, the actual song floods into the foreground:
-
And so it was that later
as the miller told his tale
that her face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale
House is, of course, the element in the show that represents what doesn’t quite fit, what doesn’t make sense in terms of strict medical practice, bottom-line thinking, the pure ratio. He’s the excess in the hospital, its one-man art museum — but of course, in this fantasy world, the art museum is actually indispensable, and appreciated as such. The flooding in of “Whiter Shade of Pale” over the payoff scene represents the overlapping of the quantitative and qualitative fields. And what does this mean?
House congratulates one of his doctors for rescuing his foundering marriage. This had been another subplot — one of the doctors had had issues with infidelity, and his wife had been on the verge of leaving him. The doctor, taking a cue from the idealistic romance of the young patient’s boyfriend, had wooed his wife back. But then in the closing scene, as “Whiter Shade of Pale” plays, House turns to see said doctor touching the arm of an attractive female nurse. He suddenly knows — intuits, sees with his artistic eye — that this doctor is either already being unfaithful, or will be, even if he doesn’t yet know it himself.
It’s a neat trick. The wicked thing about it is that the locating of art in the person of House elides the effort behind it and underscores the unbridgeable difference — House is presented as a tortured genius who can’t help being the way he is, is even made monstrous by it. Thus we as viewers both identify with House and feel the enormous gap between ourselves and him — hence, between ourselves and artistry, intuition. Artistry and intuition, while indispensable, are also monstrous, freakish, Other. It’s a place that we, like the ordinary doctors who surround House but don’t share his penchant for insight and intuition, cannot occupy, wouldn’t want to if we could.
The reality is that the ability to see things through the artistic and intuitive eye is not about categorical difference or individual genius. It’s about desire. Desire to learn for learning’s own sake. Desire to learn something, practice something, become good at something that has no bottom-line payoff other than its own useless excess, its pure sovereign moment. Its repeated instances of failure on the road to the vanishing point of mastery. This is what arts funding and study of the humanities provides the space and opportunity for. Those of us who care about it have to bring the argument onto this ground.
Hi David,
Yes, yes, and yes to this great post. One quick add–I’d hate to see humanities as you describe it here die at the 4-year university level. But is it the only place they’re on offer? Or, to put it another way, how much is the larger public interest in the various pleasures and benefits of a humanities-based education held hostage by the university?
In the last few years I’ve met a number of retirees who sit in on classes for free. Many of them had different careers, often technical, or made different choices about raising kids, and missed out on that narrow little 18-21 window in which we usually try to cram the humanities into the citizenry. These “returnees” have enthusiasm levels through the roof.
What if we came up with a different way of reaching out to people outside the usual band of undergraduate experience? I don’t think poets at least would lose too much by this–not sure the university’s been the greatest home for them, all in all. I just can’t shake the feeling that the interest is out there, and the university more or less has a lock on it because it’s got the capital to pay for lights, research, maintenance, and attractive sweatshirts in the gift shop. I mean fund it, yes. But at the same time, I wonder if the time’s right to start thinking of other “delivery models.” Thoughts?
Rodney–
thanks for the thoughtful response. yes, the intellectual goodies of the humanities are necessarily going to be off-loaded from the traditional university in the coming years, and i think it’s right to start thinking now about alternatives for ‘returning students’ and ways of cutting out the middle man and reaching them directly… probably all of us poets still fantasize about moments like black mountain, and the early days of new college — heck, even the UB poetics program began as a sort of insurgency of folks like olson, creeley, etc., crashing the academic party… so when we think about the university itself being an evanescent phenomenon, how much more so is the tenuous connection of the actual artists with the study of arts…
but my dirty little secret is that i’m not terribly interested in studying poetry per se at the phd level — most of my coursework and reading has focused on medieval / early modern lit. i work with a guy in classics. like most of my friends who’ve gone the phd route, i have aspirations of landing a TT job and teaching not just poetry, but chaucer, etc. — and tenure itself is a sort of excess that can’t be thought in bottom-line terms, which is why it too is going the way of the dodo bird.
and speaking of returnees who are desperate to learn stuff they weren’t able to in college, last summer i met one — a 60-something yr old dude who was hungry to learn latin. we sat down with a bunch of undergraduates to sweat out conjugations and declensions… now, it might be POSSIBLE to set something like that up via a community program or college, but where do you get the knowledge base for a totally “useless” language like latin or ancient greek? our intensive was taught by a young TA, but i now work with a senior faculty who typically goes on archeological digs and does loads of research.. i simply don’t see how such work can be supported outside of a university classics dept. // you can’t do it through rosetta stone, or whatever. and so there are certain kinds of knowledge i have trouble imagining in the alternative mode, attractive and inevitable though it might be…
Hey Harper’s!
How about a reprint of this in your “Readings” section??
Blogging at its best…
Awesome post!
One of my bosses believes House and all of the characters are directly based on Moby Dick. Makes sense. There were even some references to the novel in one episode I saw.
Perhaps once we finally decide to fix the American education system we’ll engage in some bottom-up arts and literature revamping, starting with Kindergarten language arts, some Spanish, some Latin and Greek perhaps (just the cool words) and every first grader will be reading Sappho, the Old Testament, and the Odyssey on Kindles. Actually, let’s be more progressive and teach them Chinese and use their classics because our classics suck hard. Also, I think the Henry Darger collage style should be taught. More crazy. Everything more crazy.
Talking out of my butt here but maybe we need to teach Intro to Hip-Hop and Remix 101 (Lawrence Lessig suggestion) and simply do a better job of making the arts relevant to the audience. I suppose this would result in more departments getting axed, not less.
kent —
i used to love harper’s, at least when lapham was in charge…
andrew —
didn’t you know, EVERTHING in american popular culture is based on moby dick… there’s a guy here doing hip hop prosody for his diss… crazy but he’s canadian so it works… darger in elementary school? are you trying to traumatize children???
Hi David,
I agree that something irreplaceable would be lost if specialization vanished entirely; in fact, I think it’s the benefits of professional specialization that have been the cornerstone of arguments for funding in the humanities up till now. Just playing devil’s advocate to the specialization orthodoxy for a minute: what’s been its cost? As best the polls can tell, there’s been a steady decline in interest in humanistic study among the general public that may not be totally unrelated to the demands of specialized research and the closed professional structures it fosters–Classics is a great example. I’m thinking too of the well-known paradox that fewer and fewer people are said to be reading poetry while more and more people enroll in programs to write it (nearly everywhere they start them, MFA programs turn into cash cows). If that’s true, it’s a trend that might not be unrelated to the way Creative Writing’s been slipped into the academy as if it were commensurate with other specialized research fields, with a well-established system of accreditation, conference circuits, professional associations, graduate programs (we’re up to a Ph.D. now in Creative Writing), “peer-reviewed” awards, university publishers, professional advancement contingent upon publications and securing of grants, etc.
Personally, I think this structure serves poetry less well than it does a field like Middle English lit or Archaeology. I mean, poetry can easily survive (and does) outside that system, while Archaeology, like you point out, would collapse. But even thinking of your noble senior professor–what a great program to have, but when I think of the debt load today’s undergraduates are carrying for the privilege of access to his knowledge, I sort of scratch my head. I mean I know, they’re paying too for gyms and stadiums and student health centers and retention specialists and lobbyists and statisticians in the Dean’s Office and branding consultants and student life counselors and overcompensated executives and benefits for retired faculty and all the other “cost centers” a modern university takes on to be a “competitive” institution. I don’t object to specialization per se, but to how difficult and expensive it’s becoming for the non-specialist to access it. No real answers, just a hunch the ship is sinking and wondering where to look for the life boats.
Rodney–
I’m the wrong person to ask about MFA programs — i spent most of my time in one pursuing literature courses to shore up my reading background, and dreading the workshop environment, which is centered, as you note, on students’ own work. That’s the approach most MFA students take, in my experience: they avoid actual graduate-level study of literature and maximize their creative time. And it works for some of them, in terms of garnering pubs and edging into the literary scene. But personally I feel it’s endemic to the disconnect between creative writing and literary history, for better or worse; hell, you could even argue it’s helped produce a particularly myopic strain of postmodernism, which refuses to see the traces of tradition in its own praxis. I guess I am saying that I believe poetry can and perhaps should be reintegrated into a rigorous study of that tradition; that’s what I learned working with Tom Clark, and I also think of your good friend David Larsen, who’s made careful study of medieval arabic poetry, and whose own poetry is richer because of it.
As for the academy and skyrocketing student costs, well, can’t we lay that mostly at the feet of the refusal of (the government? society?) to fulfill its end of the contract with regards to the public university and fund the damn thing at a reasonable level? I mean sure, there’s legitimate concern with inflated overhead — mostly due to administrative bloat — but prof. salaries, tenure costs, and associate faculty have either stayed flat or taken a hit. Aside from that, we’re back to trying to figure out cost effectiveness per discipline, and as I argue, I don’t think that’s viable with the humanities. I think it’s got to be there because people recognize the importance culturally, aside from all notions of cost and financial return; the great tragedy of America in its late capitalist death-throes is that it’s quickly abandoning everything that can’t be figured in dollar terms.
Hi David,
Thanks for your response, which makes some great points, esp. about the real beneficiaries of university bloat.
I hope I don’t sound like a nut with an idee fixee when I suggest that the sort of education you managed to pursue in your MFA program, and with Tom Clark outside the university setting, isn’t really the sort that graduate-level specialization is designed to provide. If you go on to a tenure-track job in an academic field (and I hope you’re successful at that), the broad knowledge you’re talking about here isn’t likely to count for very much, not as much at least as the publications you produce within your “myopic” academic specialty. Larsen’s expertise in medieval Arabic lit may enrich his poetry, but the poetry doesn’t count a whit to the departments deciding whether he gets a job in medieval Arabic lit. The enlarged sense of literary tradition you describe is something I think you’d still have to pursue on your own time, regardless of (even in spite of!) the academic setting.
My own experience with academic specialists (long may they be funded) is as gatekeepers that weed out the eccentric, odd, inadequately credentialed, or suspiciously amateur. Their systems produce, and promote, a certain kind of mind, much more (IMHO) like the MFA students you describe (myopically garnering pubs and working to edge into a professional field) than, say, Tom Clark. I’m sure you have–or, if not, sounds like you soon will–sat across the table from them at interviews, and been assessed by that metric. I feel bad for the flat salaries, and often enjoy the fruits of the specialized research, but wouldn’t want to entrust them solely, or even primarily, with the “rigorous study of the tradition” you advocate here. Nothing personal–many cultured, curious people with wide interests work in that world. It’s just, within their professional structures, it’s not the wide interests and curiosity that count. It’s the expertise within a relatively narrowly defined field, and an ability to generate grants, research, publications, and professional connections within that field. The stuff you do outside it is sort of on your own time.
For me, one alternative model (and I’m thinking about alternatives, not asking that we uproot what’s there–I do believe we should fund academic research better than we do!) is the ad hoc reading groups that happen in the Bay Area. That’s kind of a unique situation, I know, as I suppose Tom Clark’s study groups are. But the uniqueness is part of the attraction, and while there’s no funding–a big downer–there’s also no gate to keep. You can follow your interests, often very rigorously, without the need to acquire professional status or expertise, and the only requirement for admission is caring enough to show up.
Eager to hear your thoughts if you care to share them, and promise to clam up after I hit “Submit” on this one, so I won’t sound like a comment box troll! Thanks for starting this great thread.
rodney–
not at all! i find this a valuable conversation, and i also want to make clear that none of what i said in the above was meant to devolve on you in any way…
i feel like we’re talking about two different things to some extent. yes, there are career snobs in academia who deliberately use tortured ‘professor speak’ to cut off contact with the nonacademic world and seal themselves on islands of specialized knowledge. that’s something to always guard against. most of the people i’ve met, and certainly those i’ve delighted in working with, however, are not of that ilk. they do study pretty broadly and they’re pretty down to earth. i suppose it’s subjective.
in terms of someone like larsen, my point was not that being a poet will help him get a job — it certainly won’t! — but that being a serious scholar of medieval arabic lit has, in my opinion, made him a better, more interesting poet. in that sense, he’s squarely in the tradition of a poet like spicer, who was, like larsen, a serious and highly trained scholar of medieval literature coming out of berkeley. this is something i’ll be devoting a good deal of attention to in my upcoming project, by the way; spicer is typically situated as a proto-language poet who lets ‘martians’ do crazy things with the ‘furniture’ in his head. but so far all the focus has been on the martians, hardly at all on the furniture. that furniture included a deep knowledge of philology (not just linguistics), old english, and of course medieval lit.
i suppose you could get that stuff outside the academy — i’ve already mentioned alternative schools like new college and black mountain, and your description of the open reading groups in the bay area sounds like a move towards something similar. but those sorts of situations tend to be pretty short-lived historically, which is why some of the refugees from black mountain scattered to various universities (dorn to colorado; olson to ub and then uconn; creeley to ub / brown; etc.). and frankly — again, this is subjective, others might disagree — i really don’t believe you can efficiently approach a subject like the history of the english language, say, involving as it does the study of several dead languages and theoretical structures underpinning them and language itself, outside the academy, flawed as it may be. i just don’t.
spicer taught history of english during his exile in minnesota… but i suppose, again, you could use his life as a for and against argument. he committed academic suicide by refusing to sign the loyalty oath, or else he certainly could have and probably would have become a career academic. and it quite possibly saved his poetry. yet still, he had that knowledge, and he never really disowned it, despite what he said in the lectures.
hey, if you’re feeling dodgy about continuing this in the comments, please feel free to backchannel. i’d love to discuss some more.
best,
d