University Reform: Threat or Opportunity

When you feel yourself beginning to slide down a cliff, you are not likely to think too hard about what it is you grab to stop the fall. But the choice of handholds makes a difference—the difference between continuing to plunge and holding on long enough to plant your feet. As you descend, what seems a vine turns out to be a viper, and what seems a solid trunk proves rootless and tears away. So it is as faculty have contended with the growing shelf of studies criticizing, occasionally analyzing, and mostly prescribing for, higher education. We feel the structure, the norms of our profession, shifting and sliding beneath our feet. We reach for a handhold, a point of stability, and discover, alas, that there’s little that is reliable, much that is frail and fragile. Three of the mid-1980s higher education studies1 were among the opening shots in what has become an extended battle over the character and quality of the institutions in which professors work, as well as over what exactly it is that faculty and staff do. One could, of course, dismiss these and more recent studies, perhaps citing their manifold banalities as sufficient reason for indifference. Or, as faculty, we could acquiesce, agreeing to such changes as the reformists are able to compel, but doing little more than what is necessary to protect our turf. Either course is rationally defensible. Neither is advisable for the academic community. It seems to me that either indifference or generalized resistance would be mistaken—for at least two reasons. First, this has proven to be an unusually strong tide of reform, and even now, half a decade later, it seems still to be waxing. Even from the perspective of strict self-interest, not an unfamiliar ground for academics to stand upon, it would be dangerous to ignore what is a continuing effort to reshape the character of our work and lives. Second, the drive to reform college education presents faculty and staff with an opportunity to shape the direction of change, and in particular to raise what none of these reports really contends with: What political values, what economic forms, what social objectives do we really wish to pursue?

A Scandalous Misuse of Faculty—Adjuncts

While increasing attention began to be focused a decade ago on the scandalous misuse of part-time or “adjunct” faculty in colleges, their use has persistently spread. In fact, new varieties of “temporary” positions continue to be invented by college managers. “Part-time” faculty now include some who teach what amounts to a full load, but who are paid on a credit hour or per course basis, others who scramble for one or two courses each term and are paid flat rates, as well as a few whose salaries and benefits are prorated fractions of those of a full-timer. But there are now many “off-tenure” full-time appointments as well: “lecturers,” whose contracts are renewed every year or two but who may remain in their positions, without tenure, indefinitely; “nontenure-track” instructors and assistant professors, who may stay at an institution for four, six or more years but who, at the point of a tenure decision, must move on; “replacement” appointments, who fill lines for a year or two and then migrate to similar positions elsewhere. I shall use the term “adjunct faculty” or “adjuncts” to describe this quite varied group of individuals, for while the word is not precisely appropriate in all cases, its dictionary definition calls attention to the fact that such faculty, while “joined or added” to the institution, are in critical ways “not essentially a part of it.” Handwringing over the plight of adjuncts has brought no relief, and even most union contracts have so far been marginally helpful. That should be no surprise, for the exploitation of adjuncts serves a number of crucial interests of college managers and of those to whom they report. It is important to identify these interests more clearly if the abuse of this large number of our colleagues is ever to be brought under control, much less halted. For the exploitation of adjuncts is not a function of managerial nastiness, nor is it—any more than was the War on Vietnam—an unfortunate product of historical “accidents.” Rather, it is rooted in a particular conception of college management designed to serve historically distinctive social and political interests.

Reconstructing American Literature: Curricular Issues

Next to where I type, I have tacked up the syllabi for two American literature courses taught in the 1980s at well-known, indeed prestigious, institutions in the United States—one in California, the other in Ohio. Both are survey courses, one called “The American Literary Imagination,” the other “Life and Thought in American Literature.” One covers, in a single semester, thirty-two writers, including Philip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, John Greenleaf Whittier, John Crowe Ransom, and Ezra Pound; all are white and male, except for one assignment on Emily Dickinson and one poem by Marianne Moore. The other, a two-term course, includes twenty-three white male writers and Emily Dickinson. I do not want to argue that today such courses have no right to exist, for that kind of statement would engage the significant issue of academic freedom. But such courses are simply not truthful, nor professionally current. The pictures they present to students of the American literary imagination or of American life and thought are woefully incomplete and inaccurate. In the profession of literary study they represent what, in Psychology, was represented by generalizations about moral development based on interviews with a sample of white, male, college sophomores and juniors; or in History, was represented by conclusions about the “expansion” of opportunity under Jacksonian democracy when, in fact, white women's opportunities and those of black people were largely contracting. Were such courses titled “American Literature from the Perspective of ‘'Diner’” (a film set in 1958), they might have accurately represented themselves. But now, over a quarter of a century later, a large new body of scholarship has transformed the intellectual base of our profession. To be responsive to this scholarship and to present an accurate picture of the development of the literary cultures of the United States, teaching has begun to change. A number of recent volumes record such change and offer means for encouraging its systematic development. The changes in our profession I am describing are rooted in the movements for racial justice and sex equity.

The Two Criticisms—or, Structure, Lingo, and Power in the Discourse of Academic Humanists

In October of 1966 the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center was the site of an international symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” The name of the symposium expresses part of its ambition: to model literary criticism on certain “scientific” paradigms. In particular, the meeting was designed to explore the implications of structuralist thinking—and especially that of continental scholars—on “critical methods in humanistic and social sciences.” Whatever the organizers may have meant by “humanistic . . . sciences,” and whatever the value of the conference in examining structuralist thought, as it turned out the symposium will be remembered historically, if at all, as a beginning of poststructuralist analysis in the United States. For at the conference Jacques Derrida made his American debut, delivering a critique of structuralism whose title, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” embodied many of the terms and concepts that have since characterized academic criticism in this country. In the two decades after that Baltimore conference, some version of Derridean analysis— call it deconstructionist, speculative, formalist, or, my preference, “ludic”—has come to be increasingly central to the practice of literary study ... at least as it is carried out in the influential academic towers of New Haven and its suburbs across the land. A few months before this event in 1966, and I dare say unnoted at that conference, Stokely Carmichael had posed a new slogan for what had been thought about up to that time as the “civil rights movement.” Carmichael had been arrested by Greenwood, Mississippi police when, on June 16, participants in the march named after James Meredith had attempted to erect their tents at a local black school. During that evening’s rally, Carmichael angrily asserted that blacks had obtained nothing in years of asking for freedom; “what we gonna start saying now,” he insisted, is “‘black power.’” The crowd responded immediately to those words, chanting its “black power” response to Carmichael’s call.

Teaching Nineteenth-Century Women Writers

During the last twenty years the opportunities and challenges to teach nineteenth-century American women writers have widened almost beyond the comprehension of those trained in previous decades. When I was in graduate school in the 1950s at Indiana and Yale, we read Emily Dickinson. Period. Today, that would be considered a scandal. The changes have been great, and good, but they have not been without problems. In this chapter I address a number of what I perceive as significant issues in teaching nineteenth-century American women writers. These I have named the problem of texts, the problem of history, the problem of context, the problem of subject, the problem of form, the problem of difference, and the problem of standards. As will be plain, the names are occasionally arbitrary and the categories somewhat overlap, but they may provide frameworks useful not only for those of us who were expected to know no more than Dickinson, but for those expecting to teach no less than Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Lydia Maria Child. As recently as five years ago, a comprehensive course on nineteenth-century American women writers could only be taught by copious use of the copying machine. For if you wanted your students to know anything by Harper or Child—or even anything about them—you had no choice. That is, beyond the brief anthology selections of seventeen writers (including Harper) one finds in Gilbert and Gubar’s Literature by Women, the nine (spread over two volumes) in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, or the twelve in the recent Harper American Literature, few texts were available. The only piece of Child’s writing then in print was an excerpt from Hobomok (1824) in Lucy Freibert and Barbara White’s useful volume called Hidden Hands. Apart from that book, only Judith Fetterley’s pioneering 1985 collection, Provisions: A Reader from 19th-century American Women, had resurrected such women, and others like Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern and Alice Cary, from oblivion.

The Book of Bloom and the Discourse of Difference

About a year ago, I received a copy of a letter that took the editor of the Trinity Reporter, the College’s alumni magazine, to task for publishing a version of some of the previous chapter. An institution like Trinity College, the writer argued, must “unequivocally support the values and institutions of traditional Judeo-Christian culture and western European civilization.” Otherwise the “elitist” and “totalitarian” political agenda, which he believed I was pushing, would triumph, to the ruination of academic freedom, our democratic way of life, and even the cultural diversity I was espousing. It its small way, this letter expressed a set of ideas in a strident tone widely heard in Reaganized America. Its best known cultural representative is, of course, Allan Bloom. Like the letter writer, Bloom sets forth a conservative answer to the questions of the canon—that is, from what tradition, or traditions, do “we, the people” derive? And what should be the canonical texts we ought to study, teach, and pass on to our young people? My letter writer, in brief, and Bloom, in a book of some 400 pages, argue for what they see as the key works of a well-defined Western tradition, from Plato, through St. Paul, to the American Founding Fathers. Others, like those who succeeded in reforming Stanford University’s core humanities sequence in small but significant ways, propose a rather more diverse set of traditions, reaching out beyond the patriarchal or even the Western script. Under this important but seemingly academic question of the canon lurks a more intense conflict. Indeed, the intellectual battle in which my letter writer and Bloom are enlisted has been waged in terms usually reserved for a war of succession. Stanford gets excoriated as a mutinous principality; whereas Columbia, entrenched behind its primigenial curriculum, is lauded for repelling the hordes from outside the Heights. Questions about the adequacy of the Western canon seem to get taken as doubts about the birthright of its defenders. Bloom pitches his book like an Old Testament jeremiad designed through its very denunciatory power to rescue us from imminent barbarism.

Retrenchment—What the Managers Are Doing

When part of this article was first written in 1974, large-scale retrenchment of college faculty was a relatively new phenomenon. To be sure, there had been occasional layoffs when an institution threatened to go broke, and the 1940 AAUP statement on tenure provided that it could be nullified for reasons of “financial exigency.” But such cutbacks were infrequent and unusual, the exceptions that proved the solidity of college job security. What was new in the early 1970s was the invocation of retrenchment processes not necessarily because a college was edging toward bankruptcy but because it wanted to change its programs, its “product.” That seemed to many of us an outrageous violation of collegiate norms. Many faculty had been led into teaching precisely because of its stability and its insulation from market forces. Now the market in all its worst forms was invading the campus. Furthermore, we believed, decisions about what could be taught were being removed from the hands of their proper judges, the faculty, and appropriated by a fleet of increasingly remote administrators. No one's work was safe! The essential quality of the academic community was at stake! Thus, when colleagues in History or English or Education received pink slips, we bitterly protested. But it rapidly became clear that protest was not enough, that the new breed of collegiate managers, whose skills had been honed by the student activism of the previous decade, were not going to be impressed with impassioned speeches at faculty Senate meetings or with letters to the student newspaper—or, indeed, to the New York Times. Nor were faculty unions— such as they then were—going to be much help; indeed, our union president shrugged that “you can't force Ford to keep making Edsels forever”—a remark which hardly endeared him to laid-off historians. We found that we had to understand this new phenomenon better if we were to have any chance to organize against it. Why was retrenchment coming upon faculties at this historical moment? How valid were the arguments of declining enrollments and needed flexibility being made by college managers?

Canon Theory and Emergent Practice

I want to begin with what some might cite as a characteristic move of the socialist intellectual in capitalist society: namely, biting the hand that feeds you. In the course of explaining to me the rejection by the National Endowment for the Humanities board of a highly-rated proposal for a Seminar for College Teachers, the NEH program officer wrote that “some reviewers were concerned that the focus on the canon, while doubtless an important issue for teachers of American literature, lacked the kind of scholarly significance generally expected of Summer Seminars. . . .” Pursuing this theme, he later wrote that my “application was rather more thesis-driven than most of our seminar proposals.” I discover everywhere signs of this division. On the one side, we find the supposedly pedagogical or professional problems raised by the question of the canon, and on the other side, what is lauded as “of scholarly significance” or, more simply, criticism or theory. In a recent “Newsletter for Graduate Alumnae and Alumni" issued by the Yale English Department, for example, Cyrus Hamlin ruminates “precisely how this procedure of hermeneutical recuperation” he is proposing “should affect the canon and the curriculum of our institution is difficult to say. . . .” and he proceeds to ignore the question (p. 2). In the same document, Margaret Homans suggests why he does so. “At Yale,” she writes . . . while post-structuralism has proven to be intellectually more unsettling than liberal humanism, the feminist versions of post-structuralism are institutionally more easily accommodated than some of the projects of liberal feminism, such as challenging the content of the canon we teach, with its vast preponderance of white, male authors (p. 4). . . . Interestingly, Homans here appropriates the project of canon revision solely to the domain of “liberal feminism,” a common enough way of trying to limit the scope of this intellectual movement to a supposed clique of uppity, middleclass women.

Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon A Case Study from the Twenties

In its original form this chapter was delivered at a late-1970s forum sponsored by the Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession of the Modern Language Association. It had a kind of underground, mimeographed existence for a few years before seeing print in Feminist Studies in 1983. It has made its way and continues, I think, to be useful for those studying the canon. I have therefore not undertaken to change it. Judith Fetterley has raised one important criticism of the piece. In her fine introduction to Provisions: A Reader From 19th-century American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 18–19) she argues that the exclusion of nineteenth-century women writers from the literary canon began far earlier than the 1920s, in fact during the nineteenth century itself. There is significant evidence to support that contention. John Macy’s 1911 volume The Spirit of American Literature, for example, devotes its sixteen chapters to sixteen white men, though his “Preface” expresses admiration for the work of Jewett, Freeman and Wharton, and even passingly for Stowe. Brander Matthews’ similar volume, An Introduction to the Study of American Literature (1896, rev. 1911), focuses fifteen chapters on individual white men and then devotes one to “other writers,” including Whitman and Stowe. These very likely reflected the state of much academic opinion, though volumes like An American Anthology, 1787–1900 (ed., Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1900) and Mildred Cabell Watkins’ young adult primer, American Literature (1894) offer countervailing evidence. And, of course, as I outline in the article, other older academics like Fred Lewis Pattee and Arthur Hobson Quinn offered a far wider version of American letters. Fetterley thus provides what I think is a useful corrective to broad generalizations about academic canons, especially with respect to early and mid-nineteenth-century writers. But the central point, in my view, is that dominantly male academic accounts of the American canon were far less weighty around the turn of the century than they became in and after the 1920s.

Society and the Profession, 1958–83

When I was asked to write about the impact of society on our profession over the last twenty-five years, it occurred to me that the period also measures my own lifetime as a professional. I took up full-time teaching in 1957, the year before I received my doctorate. I gave my first paper at a Modern Language Association convention around that time, participated in producing two sons, and published my first article. I left one job, joined in antinuke, anti-ROTC, and prounion activities, and got fired from the second job. I remember complaining to my graduate school director, en route to a third job, how painfully remote upstate New York seemed from everything I valued. Said he, flatly, “You can publish your way out of any place.” Perhaps that was so, then; certainly I acted on that instruction. But I never really put it to the test, for somehow my career swerved that splinter and never returned quite to the groove. In 1963 I went to work for the Quakers, promoting peace studies and learning about political economy. Then, in 1964, I traveled to Mississippi to teach in Freedom Schools and discovered the profound limitations of my graduate school education. With deliberation, among a group of my students from Smith, I went off to jail in Montgomery. Later, as the peace movement brought the war home, I was provided with a more impromptu visit to the Baltimore pokey after trying to protect a Vietnam vet from an outraged policeman. For a number of years I sported a little red button that said “A free university in a free society”—an idea on the basis of which I tried to conduct my life. In due course, I became an active feminist, involved in efforts, like The Feminist Press, to change education and thus society. That pattern of life was not, of course, precisely typical of members of our profession— though more people than we now acknowledge participated in it one way or another. I speak of my life because it reflected, in a sense became a vehicle of, the forces for social change I am to write about here.