‘A Very Special Marketplace’
By Thomas H. Benton, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 19, 2010
According to Louis Menand [en la foto], “trying to reform the contemporary university is like trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter, or like riding a horse to the mall.” In The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Norton, 2010), Menand gathers four essays that deal with problems in general education, the transformation of the humanities, the resistance to interdisciplinarity, and academic conformity, and concludes with suggestions for reforming graduate education.
Considered together, the essays shed considerable light on the difficulty—or perhaps the near-impossibility—of changing existing institutions. As Menand knows, it’s hard enough to reach a settlement about a general-education program or define what counts as English nowadays.
The central theme of his book is that the problems of the contemporary university have origins that go back to the late 19th century, to Harvard University in particular—a time and place on which the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club is well prepared to comment.
I want to focus on Menand’s concluding chapter, “Why Do Professors All Think Alike?” because it contains his proposals for reforming graduate education.
The title of that last chapter suggests yet another foray into the culture wars, and perhaps some direct engagement with David Horowitz, a persistent critic of the tendency of professors to skew left of center. But Menand, a professor of English and American literature at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker, steers a moderate course. Like Stanley Fish, Menand agrees that preaching about, say, anarcho-syndicalism in your linguistics class is probably not something that should be covered by academic freedom, conventionally understood.
Menand references the 2007 study, “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, to show that, although there are relatively few conservatives in academe, professors gravitate toward moderate liberalism. It turns out there aren’t all that many tenured radicals. The reasons that Menand offers for the prevalence of moderate liberals are familiar: “Professors are trained to question the status quo”; there is a relative lack of other havens for liberals; conservatives prefer higher-paying occupations; and the baby-boomer demographic continues to dominate in academe (younger faculty members are more moderate).
More provocatively, Menand asks “whether holding liberal views has become a tacit requirement for entry and promotion in the academic profession” in a period in which political commitment has replaced the ideal of disinterested objectivity. He asks whether there is a “code” in academe that extends to “matters of intellectual, pedagogical, and collegial decorum, [that] the entrants are required to demonstrate for admission to the profession … including personal manner and appearance.”
Menand’s primary concern is not politics—he’s not demanding equal time for conservatives—but rather a sense of boredom with the homogeneity of academe. Perhaps it’s too easy to pick out academics at the airport on their way to the MLA convention. There are few surprises in seminar rooms and conferences; we are all humming and head-bobbing while the rest of the world ignores us. And, of course, academic freedom—the historic lynchpin of the whole enterprise—becomes almost meaningless in such a uniform context. “Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy,” Menand writes, “if only in order to keep on its toes.”
But Menand’s ennui becomes most interesting for me when he turns his attention to circumstances faced by graduate students, specifically the time it takes to earn a doctorate and the difficulty they face in finding an academic position: “The higher the barriers to entry in an occupation, the more likely there are to be implicit codes that need to be mastered in addition to the explicit entrance requirements.”
The length of graduate programs in the humanities has increased, Menand notes, because the dissertation has to be written as a first book instead of as an apprenticeship exercise. True or not, there is a perception that you need a book for an interview, and the recent collapse of an already bleak job market in the humanities only adds to it (even while publishers are cutting back on monographs). We all know this system is unsustainable, but we are trapped by the way things have been done before.
One reason graduate education needs to be changed is “simple humanitarianism,” he writes. “Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process,” and “there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get.” The barriers to the profession have become so high that a student who is “unsure whether she wants a career as a professor is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out,” and the consequence is “a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field.”
Menand’s solution is not to “make it harder to get into a Ph.D. program” or “harder to get through.” Standing against the calls for reducing the number of doctoral programs, Menand takes the counterintuitive position that “there should be a lot more Ph.D.’s, and they should be much easier to get.” Why? “The nonacademic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought.”
Moreover, he argues—and I agree with him, strongly—that the “academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo.”
He believes that we need to shorten doctoral programs because Ph.D.’s “are being seriously overtrained for the jobs that are available” (i.e., teaching positions at liberal-arts and community colleges). He rightly points out that the claim that a Ph.D. is needed to teach undergraduates is belied by the reality that graduate students often teach undergraduate courses from the year they arrive on the campus (apparently, not even a master’s degree is needed). “If it were easier and cheaper to get in and out of the doctoral motel,” he writes, “the disciplines would have a chance to get oxygenated.”
There is in Menand an interesting spark of contempt for the academic enterprise: He thinks it absurd that it takes 10 years to become a certified member of the literature guild, when it only takes six years to become a medical doctor and slice off someone’s appendix. He repeatedly observes that graduate school is a motel in which students “check in but do not check out.”
In his discussion of the time it takes to get a degree, Menand gives inadequate attention to the financial pressures faced by most graduate students. For me, graduate school, even at Harvard, was a continual chase for money: teaching assistantships, research assistantships, selling used books, applying for prizes and grants. My progress slowed to a standstill for almost three years until I received a dissertation-completion fellowship and wrote most of the paper in one year (and it shows). The problem is money at least as much as it is the need to produce a monograph before hitting the job market.
Another problem is that most of the people with prominence and power are insulated from the pressures that affect most academic workers. Well-positioned and connected faculty members generally don’t socialize with adjuncts, and, until recently, their graduate students dared not complain.
According to Menand, “the world of knowledge production is a marketplace, but it is a very special marketplace, with its own practices, its own values, and its own rules.” Marketplace rhetoric covers up the role that conscious decisions make in the structuring of an academic labor system. Menand reaches too easily for the claim that there is “a serious imbalance between supply and demand,” even as he puts forward a plan to create even more graduate students. Where will they work? How will they feel about having even fewer chances for the academic positions for which they’ve trained? How will they pay their student loans? Where are the nonacademic jobs to come from? Menand doesn’t say.
The suffering of underemployed Ph.D.’s is great because their devotion is so remarkable in a culture defined by marketplace values. Far from being a cultivator of the humanities, the academic labor system has destroyed dreams and stamped out passions; it routinely drives gifted and idealistic people to the brink of despair and beyond it. It has done so for 40 years now, and there’s no end in sight. The enemies of intellectualism—for whom the word “professor” cannot be uttered without a sneer—have no greater ally than the wasted lives of so many would-be academics.
Graduate schools ask students to behave like idealists, but the schools act like the corporations they train students to despise. That contradiction could only last so long before all the talk about “love,” “calling,” “the life of the mind,” and “apprenticeship” became so obviously dishonest that such words can only provoke mockery and anger in our time.
Menand shows how academe became professionalized, but he is less successful at explaining how professors are becoming deprofessionalized. In a year when Money Magazine is telling undergraduates that professor is the third “best job in America,” Menand is drawing attention to a problem, but his solutions are unconvincing, and I think he will find the debate he craves regarding his proposals for reforming graduate education.
Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich.
Artículos de Lous Menand.