Kay was one of the losers in the academic job search, and his attendance and report of the annual MLA conference held at the beginning of this year were for "closure," as he puts it. Even after several years, he continues to long for the intellectual community he imagines that academia represents, such a community now being in the throes of extinction because of the decimation of departments of language and literature throughout the American realm. Nowhere in his overly long piece does it seem to occur to him that it was the so-called intellectual community that put itself out of business, beginning with deconstruction and all the other theoretical B.S. that invaded the profession in the 1970s.
When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, it was the era of "Criticism,” which consisted of critiquing the writings of past authors, especially male ones, “deconstructing” them, which meant exposing the hidden or submerged ideology of power, racism, misogyny, repression, and so on that was hidden below the overt surface of a novel or of poetry. Literary scholarship itself went about institutionalizing the rejection of the literary heritage. The deconstructive temper extended right down to the students, even if most of them could not have identified Jacques Derrida. The lesson the kids absorbed from their professors was that the values of the past, whether literary or historical, but especially of America, stank.
Such professors seemed to have forgotten that kids of eighteen and nineteen are idealistic. The humanities can reach them, if you can touch their idealism. But kill that idealism -- which deconstruction did -- and the kids ran away in droves. It didn't take Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, cutting the educational budget in that state to extinguish the humanities. The departments of literature, especially those of foreign languages, were no longer attracting buyers. The best and brightest students simply do not see the relevance of the humanities. Why should they when their professors seem so dismissive of the subjects they teach? Instead of teaching the "great" writers, there has been, among others things, the continuous imposition of an ideological agenda, best encapsulated in the second and third rate female writers that take up so much space in curricula. The current crop of students ventilates their idealism in phony political issues like climate change, a subject on which in academia there is ZERO debate. It is all "97 percent of scientists" all the time.
The academic community, the leading voices of which came of age in the 1970s, now sees a crisis in the humanities and bemoans the shift among students toward disciplines like economics, business, statistics. "Academic extinction" is not the right term for describing what happened. It is more like the sinking of the Titanic, a great pleasure boat that was supposed to offer a never-ending party for the lucky few who had managed to board.
Kay brings on the head of the MLA itself, Anne Ruggles Gere, a professor in the English department at the University of Michigan, who mentions the drop from 1,000 English majors to 200 during the previous eight years. She believes, however, that the profession is on a course correction, in the functioning of the MLA itself. "I think we need to do a lot more educating of faculty, and of English departments, about how to rethink what they’re doing. But I think it’s possible. We’re talking about smart people.” So smart. Why didn't the MLA point out the problem twenty-plus years ago, when it was obvious that literature had become secondary to ideology?
Image credit: Times Higher Education
