Back to School… with Stanley Fish?

It’s that time of the year. Students have just arrived back on campus or finished their first week of classes; professors have attended faculty meetings and finished making their syllabi… and… out from their swampy lairs in the mainstream media, pundits have surfaced to perform that August ritual of “informing” the public about how foolish and misguided academics are. So, since the question of “how to do research” and “how to teach” are naturally on my mind at this particular moment, I thought I’d respond — angrily respond — to two recent articles, one about the “diminishing returns” of scholarly research by Mark Bauerlein [here] in The Chronicle of Higher Education and the other about the paucity of quality writing instruction by Stanley Fish [here] in the NY Times.

Bauerlein starts with a few facts about the state of academia which he believes (rightly, I think) indicate that the current generation of professors is expected by their institutions to publish much more than the older generation had to. Ironically, at the same time, such books and articles are less likely to actually get bought or read. He argues that publication today seems to be less about usefully explaining a literary text and more about uselessly performing some kind of academic identity.  For instance, consider that 2,406 things have been published since 1986 just about the play Hamlet alone — a statistic that causes Bauerlien to exclaim, “Whoa! Slow down! Hamlet can’t give you anything more.” His recommendations are that (1) departments should reduce the amount of publications expected for tenure and promotion, and (2) universities should subsidize and encourage research in “unsaturated areas” rather than “saturated” ones (such as Shakespeare, for instance.)

Much of my response will agree with my fellow blogger Dr. J [here], but I won’t be quite as kind and considerate as Dr. J tends to be. In my view, she rightly responds to Bauerlein by pointing out how new approaches to old texts (such as feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches) actually do lead to rather insightful scholarship and explications of texts, and though she and I would agree with Bauerlein that a lot of that scholarship seems redundant or uninspiring, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for new and good work. For example, just this year I read an excellent article on Hamlet [here] entitled “Making ‘Young Hamlet’” that made me see the play not only in a new light, but also in a better light. This article by my friend Matthew Harkins, a relatively young scholar in the field, is just one of many examples of illuminating truth and productive insight. So, contrary to Bauerlein’s comment, Hamlet can give us more. And even more importantly, Dr. J points out that if one of our roles as an educator is to teach our students how to do original research, then we should be actively modeling that kind of critical inquiry for them instead of just throwing up our hands in despair exclaiming, “vanity of vanities, all is vanity… there is nothing new under the sun.”  

I would go a bit further than Dr. J and say that there is something fundamentally ignorant about Bauerlein’s rather pathetic lamentation. First, what Bauerlein doesn’t acknowledge is that the pressure to publish comes not from departments but from deans and university presidents, and those deans and presidents in turn are under pressure to compete with other universities for rankings in the famous (or infamous) U.S. News and World Reports survey of colleges and universities. So, the problem is obviously bigger than Bauerlein is willing to recognize, and it has more to do with the competitive nature of higher education than with any error in judgment by academics. Therefore, his recommendations are a bit obtuse. And moreover, I think he should have recognized all of this, not because this fact is somewhat obvious, but because the Modern Language Association (to which he belongs) has been discussing this very issue for the past two decades (a fact that Bauerlein neglects to mention, since he wants to pretend that his diatribe is more original than it is.)

Second, most departments have already been subsidizing research in new fields since the 1970s — fields of African American literature, multiethnic literature, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies, postcolonial theory, new media, technology, etc. In other words, to his suggestion that we should be subsidizing new areas of research, the most appropriate response is perhaps, ”duh.”

Third, one of the reasons that young scholars feel compelled to publish on “saturated” subjects such as Shakespeare and the American Renaissance is because we are still expected to teach classes on those subjects. How to address the gap between the undergraduate curriculum and academic scholarship is an important and difficult question, but it is also a fairly old question, and I don’t think it is cause for alarm. As teachers, we’ve all been straddling that gap our whole professional careers. Often, we simply assume that the high-level scholarly work will trickle down to our teaching, but sometimes scholarship actually forces a useful paradigm shift in curriculum and instruction.

Lastly, Bauerlein bemoans that most scholarly monographs do not sell very many copies, but he seems to be ignorant of why academic university presses were created in the first place. They were never meant to compete in the marketplace. They never sold very many copies. In fact, the fact that some recent publications on scholarly presses have become international bestsellers is pretty amazing, because academic presses were always intended to publish the work of scholars primarily for academic libraries. The real crisis is not what Bauerlein thinks it is. The problem is not that these books aren’t selling; they were never meant to. The real problem is that university administrations are cutting back on their subsidies of their own presses, which forces these presses to either compete or go under. This is the real travesty.

Ultimately, Bauerlein’s lament is pretty standard fair for those who love to participate in one of America’s most popular pastimes — bashing academics – and so I agree with Dr. J that it’s important for our students and for the future of critical inquiry that we take such petty posturing with many grains of salt.

So much for the scholarship question. What about teaching?

In his op-ed column for the NY Times, Stanley Fish responds to a report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which is a somewhat bogus organization created by Lynne Cheney (Dick Cheney’s wife) and whose goal is primarily to promote conservatism in college curriculum and classrooms. Fish ultimately disagrees with most of ACTA’s arguments, but he does agree with them on two important points: (1) that the college courses should focus on their academic subjects, not on liberal political agendas, and (2) that colleges really should require a course that focuses entirely on writing skills. That’s pretty much all Fish has to say, though he takes a really long time to say it because he feels obligated to dismantle ACTA’s argument.

Although I do regularly teach one of Stanley Fish’s essays in my intro-to-theory course because my students and I appreciate his clear writing style, I have to admit that in general, a lot of Stanley Fish’s work (both his scholarly work and his journalistic work) pisses me off. Even the essay that I teach pisses me off, and the reason for my pissy-ness is that Fish claims to be a theorist, but he writes more like a lawyer trying to win a case in court. Theorists are dedicated to raising questions and revealing ambiguity, indeterminacy, and complexity; the goal of theory is to open up lines of inquiry, not to cynically oversimplify the question or snidely close off inquiry as Fish tends to do.

For instance, his rather unscholarly and questionable opening statistic (which is unverifiable since it is based on a personal observation) is the sole piece of evidence that gives his argument any rhetorical force. His point there is to demonstrate that English faculty do not genuinely value writing instruction and instead teach courses on whatever subject they happen to be interested in or on whatever liberal, politically correct feel-good agenda they prefer. Those who have been reading Fish’s work for the past decade are by now somewhat tired of this oft-repeated diatribe about “professional correctness” because Fish’s claim (as usual) sets up a straw-man which is all too easy for him to argue against, and doesn’t acknowledge a number of competing facts. One of those competing facts is that most faculty wrestle with this issue all the time, and it’s a much more complicated issue than Fish acknowledges. In order to get students excited about writing and also in order to model for them what sustained, scholarly inquiry looks like, teachers often give their writing courses themes or topics. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about writing; it means that the effective teaching of writing is difficult and complicated. It’s not as easy to separate writing instruction from thematic content, political debate, and/or ethical dilemmas as he suggests. And in fact, most people who do research on the teaching of writing believe that writing instruction works better when its purpose is felt by the students — in other words, writing instruction with theme, politics, and/or ethics is more pedagogically effective than writing instruction without those things. And everyone knows that one learns to write not just by writing, but also by reading (and the stuff we read tends to be about something.) Fish is such a giant on the academic scene that I doubt he has ever had to teach a basic writing class, so I don’t blame him for being unaware of the real thought that goes into planning one… though it doesn’t seem like he bothered to ask his junior colleagues, and I do blame him for that.

Another of those competing facts, of which Fish should be aware, is that there has been a significant rise in composition pedagogy over the past two decades, so that on the scholarly side, a lot of new and innovative research has been done, and on the administrative side, even elite universities such as Princeton are valuing basic writing classes more now than they were before. And I say that Fish “should be” aware of it, because everyone else in his field is aware of it. (Of course, readers of the NY Times generally aren’t aware of it, which is why Fish is doing his readers a disservice by deliberately misrepresenting the situation.)

All that said, I do want to give Fish some credit for his careful efforts to consider ACTA’s points. He acknowledges where he thinks they are right, refutes their errors, and exposes their hypocrisy. However, what I am curious about is why he even bothers. Does anyone take ACTA seriously? It doesn’t really represent university trustees and alumni as their name implies; their organization is spearheaded entirely by private, partisan money, not by any inclusive, democratic survey of actual trustees and alumni. In truth, they don’t “represent” anyone except for Lynne Cheney’s own radical agenda. And so, I wonder why Fish even bothers to deal with them, especially considering that several real representative organizations — e.g., the American Association of University Professors, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, not to mention the individual boards of colleges and universities and the aforementioned MLA – all do deal with all the questions Fish raises and/or do regularly assesses the performance of colleges and universities. Why doesn’t he discuss them and what they do? Why doesn’t he talk about how the real world works and instead wastes so much ink pandering to the radical agenda of a bogus organization? Well, to be fair to Fish, perhaps he does because ACTA is backed by some pretty deep pockets and because, unfortunately, a lot of the ethically limp members of our House of Representatives and our various state assemblies do pay attention to ACTA.

So in sum, what are we academics and teachers to do as we head back to school? It is a bit frustrating that such public attacks on our integrity should come from our fellow academics because their status lends their arguments some authenticity and, in my view, leads the public astray. (Like when the mainstream media finds conservative black people to slander the NAACP and lament the rise of hip hop.) Is it surprising that the one literary theorist (out of hundreds) whom the New York Times selected to publish a weekly column just happens to be the one who has spent the second half of his career making fun of his colleagues? And it’s even more frustrating when such dishonest slanders of literature departments should appear repeatedly in the main newspaper of higher education itself — a newspaper whose every issue delights in printing intellectually wimpy diatribes against the use of theory in literature departments.  Though I welcome honest critique of our practices (and such honest critiques actually do fill the pages of both scholarly and popular periodicals), the dishonesty of Bauerlein and Fish, alongside the bizarrely anti-intellectual tone of The Chronicle of Higher Ed,  feels to me more like a deliberate betrayal. Should we fight back or ignore them? Clearly, I have chosen to fight back, though I fear that at the end of the day doing so might do more harm than good.

Nairobi Diaries 9: the Ethics of Aid and the Catholic Church

Two obvious understatements: (1) Kenya has been seriously affected by HIV, and the Catholic Church does quite a lot of AIDS relief work there; (2) the Catholic church is officially against the use of condoms and many of the other things that social workers in Africa think need to be done to address HIV properly. Contradiction? Problem? A valid disagreement about what works best? Or maybe just an effective division of labor?

I ask this question (and don’t expect me to answer it) in light of Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s provocative statement on a segment of NPR’s Speaking of Faith in December 2008 entitled “The Ethics of Aid.” His host Krista Tippet was surprised and baffled that he’d rather white people in Europe and the United States stop giving aid to Africa — that no aid was better than misguided aid. He compares the 21st-century desire to help Africa to the 19th-century desire to colonize it. His biggest criticism is directed at those Westerners who seem to want to save their own souls and alleviate their guilt by donating something — something that ends up being temporary and soon forgotten by the donor. Such ineffective programs help the Westerner imagine themselves as saviors of the poor Africans who — in this imagination — can’t save themselves. However, as far as I know, Wainaina hasn’t said anything specifically about the Catholic Church or any of the programs I witnessed, and I am curious about what he would say. CRS’s programs aren’t temporary fly-by-night, feel-good charities, and the staff of CRS are mostly Africans themselves working with local organizations and culture. After all, about 33% of Kenyans are Catholics.

As several of my earlier Nairobi Diaries mentioned before, much of my trip was about this situation. Whether in the background or in the foreground, both HIV and the Catholic church were very much present. Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is one of the largest non-governmental organizations doing AIDS relief there. Most of CRS’s budget for AIDS relief comes not from the church itself but from the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) set up by President George Bush in 2003 — which is to say, it comes from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). PEPFAR has been much praised for the widespread distribution of antiretroviral therapy (ART) medications free of charge to the poor and needy around the world. Many non-governmental organizations, both religious such as CRS and non-religious, have collaborated effectively with international agencies and national governments all over the world to make this happen. However, what has been controversial for a long time about both PEPFAR and the Catholic Church’s involvement in AIDS relief  is the conservative ”family values” agenda that severely hampers aid workers in their efforts to do what they think they should to address the real roots of the problem. See [here], for just one example of this criticism. Some worry that such efforts may just prolong the problem. I personally wonder whether PEPFAR creates a dependency in Africa on ART so that the corporations that manufacture it can continue to rake in money from the American taxpayer (though admittedly I have no idea if these companies are making a profit off it or not.) I also couldn’t help but wonder if the evangelical presence of the Catholic and protestant churches in Kenya were not being deliberately strengthened by PEPFAR dollars, and I wondered what would happen if the U.S. government allowed such aid to support HIV programs organized by socialist or Muslim organizations. (And I think I need to emphasize something about USAID, because a friend of mine doubted me – I saw USAID signs all over rural Kenya,  including at the Day of the African Child events that I attended.)

In any case, the biggest criticism of PEPFAR and USAID is that the money comes with strings attached. In the case of CRS, the money seems to be tied to identity politics; for example, when I asked one CRS worker about the difficulty of fighting AIDS within the limits of U.S. government and papal policy, she implied that their identity as a Catholic institution was part of what made them effective and ought not be compromised.

In particular, Pope Benedict XVI is somewhat notorious for stating during his first visit to Africa that (against all evidence to the contrary) “the problem [of AIDS] cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics: on the contrary, they increase it.” For the full text of that statement see [here], and for just a couple of reactions, see [here] and [here]. Naturally, the African Bishops fully endorse the Pope’s position as you can see [here]; what else could they do? While I was in Kenya, I wondered whether this policy was adhered to by those who had to work with HIV cases everyday. And I wondered this several times out loud. Do the CRS social workers strictly follow papal decrees? It’s impossible to know for sure what the answer to that question is… but… when we were interviewing a poor farmer with HIV who received assistance from CRS, and he proudly told both us and his case worker that he now used condoms. (I was afraid to ask how he was able to afford them, considering that he couldn’t even afford a tin roof for his mud home without CRS assistance.)

Interestingly, the Pope’s comment about condoms was said in passing during an interview, not during an official speech. His speeches given in Africa never made any recommendations about sexual practice. Catholic TV’s coverage of the Pope’s visit focused entirely on the ethics of reconciliation in the context of violent civil conflict.

I think liberal media such as the Huffington Post  have made too much of the condom comment and done so in a rather unsophisticated way, when you consider the issue in the context of regional violence, systemic poverty, government corruption, human trafficking, child labor, etc.  And of course, this is exactly the context that the Pope was addressing, so if we are to evauate the Pope’s overall mission, we need to think more broadly about the his emphasis on personal and religious ethics as a solution to the various problems in Africa — problems that everyone living in Africa recognizes to be extremely complex, in part because Africa is far, far, far more diverse than the average politician in America or Europe seems to realize.

So, for instance, in his first speech ever delivered in Africa, after detailing the horrors of regional violence and human trafficking, the Pope said,

At a time of global food shortages, financial turmoil, and disturbing patterns of climate change, Africa suffers disproportionately: more and more of her people are falling prey to hunger, poverty, and disease. They cry out for reconciliation, justice and peace, and that is what the Church offers them. Not new forms of economic or political oppression, but the glorious freedom of the children of God (cf. Rom 8:21). Not the imposition of cultural models that ignore the rights of the unborn, but the pure healing water of the Gospel of life. Not bitter interethnic or interreligious rivalry, but the righteousness, peace and joy of God’s kingdom, so aptly described by Pope Paul VI as the civilization of love.

Obviously he is not giving technocratic solutions but searching for guiding principles… but hold on a second…. Am I reading this incorrectly or is the Pope’s solution to child slavery and ethnic violence really that we ban abortions? And exactly how are “righteousness” and the “Gospel of life” going to address the global problems he lists? My knee-jerk reaction is to critique the Pope via another theologian, Reinhold Neihbur, whose famous book Moral Man and Immoral Society argues in a Marxist sort of way that individual morality (such as the Pope seems to be speaking of) cannot solve systemic, social problems.

But the Pope’s thinking might be a bit more complex. Later, right after I came back from Kenya a little over a month ago, he delivered his third Encyclical “Charity in Truth” that focuses on the ethics of global capitalism and suggests that the logic of the market only works if there is a moral consensus guiding it, and of course there isn’t any such consensus, and in a “fallen world” such as ours, there never will be, implying that regulations and global governance is perhaps necessary. I would agree with him there, except that he also seems to me to be implying that the Vatican might be a good candidate for governing the globe. [Here] is a somewhat incoherent response to that encyclical by People for Peace in Africa whom we met on my trip and whom I mentioned in Nairbi Dairies 2. And [here] and [here] are a couple other summaries because I definitely don’t have time to read the whole thing — yo, it’s 144 pages!

One of the theoretically interesting upshots seems to be his notion that capitalism may be moving into a new phase beyond the simple profit motive, beyond simple commercial value, and towards a realization that social welfare and ethical human relations are increasingly a part of the way the economic system measures value. This almost sounds like Negri and Hardt’s Marxist manifesto for the 21st century in their books Empire and Multitude, except without the many social antagonisms (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.) that Hardt and Negri and countless other theorists of globalization recognize as basic to the capitalist world system. Their books argue that an economy increasingly based on information systems, human services, and social capital (and not just financial capital and commodities) will transform itself — a sort of “democracy from below” — almost (but not quite) the way the Pope seems to imagine because of the ethical relations immanent in social capital. So, maybe the Pope and Bush are right that, when thinking of aid (i.e., charity) and solutions to HIV, ethics should come first…. But then that begs the question of what kind of ethics are we talking about here?

At the end of the day, however, what concerns me can be summed up in these two photographs that I took. The first photograph on the left is of a Bishop’s house in a small diocese. We had lunch with the Bishop in the house. It was the largest and most opulent structure I saw my entire three days driving all around that diocese. The second photograph is a street corner of a nearby town. The motorcycles are basically taxis, which have become popular all over Africa because they are fuel efficient and oil is too expensive. It’s clear that the Catholic church is powerful in Kenya, since it owns a lot of the most expensive land…. And so I repeat, what are the ethics of aid here?

In addition to that kind of disparity, I can’t help but remain sceptical of a church that requires Africans to adopt European names in order to be baptised and that still officially and adamantly promotes an image of Jesus as a white man — yes, I asked about that while I was there, and no, Jesus obviously wasn’t a white European – and still seems to be waging an ideological battle against protestantism, Islam, and secularism not only at the level of the Vatican but also precisely at the grassroots level of CRS itself.

In conclusion, I have no conclusion, only questions, but for a really good novel about ethical ambiguity, family, and the Catholic Church in Nigeria that I just finished yesterday, check out Chimananda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Purple Hibiscus.