Experts and Encounters

In a 2018 piece for the chronicle of higher education, Michael Clune describes a “rude awakening” he once experienced when developing a new course as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. As was customary then at Johns Hopkins, he was required to submit a course proposal that underwent a review by a board of professors from different fields. Clune arrived at the interview ready to discuss a syllabus that, as he recalls, “purported to explain urban decay, novels, the nature of free-market economics, and the political history of the 1970s in one brilliant synthesis.” But the board was underwhelmed. As Clune cited the “illustrious figures” and “hallowed formulas” he had learned to incant in literary studies, the political scientists and historians sitting in front of him—people who spend their lives researching stuff like urban decay, free-market economics, and recent political history—responded with “withering skepticism” and did something he hadn't anticipated: they “actually asked difficult questions about the reasoning behind the stars' dicta,” unimpressed by “the heroes of literature-department economic, political, and historical thought.” Clune doesn't say whether he got to teach the course, but the episode was the first time he began to see literary studies as “a kind of twilight zone,” an “exploded discipline” with fading intellectual prestige.