The Blind Spot of Higher Education

Literature Is Critical Precisely Because Nobody Thinks So

As he sailed into the horizon, Odysseus might have wondered what really happens when you become nobody. That was Dante’s take on him, at least (see Inferno 26). The Ithacan overreached and his individualism erased him from the world. The Pillars of Hercules, which marked the edge of known existence, were no match for him. He took non plus ultra (“nothing more beyond”) as an empty threat and headed out to sea. But Odysseus also sinned by disappearing from the existence of the rest of us. He disappeared, or was damned, not so much by dying or getting killed as by vacating the social order. And this happens tragically, by virtue of his adventurousness and his heroic mastery of his own destiny. Professor Hans Vaget at Smith College taught me that in a roundabout sort of way.

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Let’s look at a recent advertisement for a literature position at American University. American is a solid research university that services the DC area, solid because any institution of its size with an admissions rate around 36% is doing something very right.

Due to the ongoing crisis in education, more universities than ever have admissions rates well above 50%, and as a result they’re increasingly committed to throwing substantial resources at remedial education. That’s bad because it can signal a higher-educational death spiral. Once a university admits more than half of its applicants, its overall level of instruction is on a slippery slope. Good professors will avoid the place as much as good students.

The job at American doesn’t show this … yet. The announcement still looks like an impressive one-year appointment at a premier university. American staffs much of the national bureaucracy, and so it has wealthy alumni and contacts throughout the federal government. The new professor will teach future intellectuals, technocrats, lawyers, and activists who will hold high-paying jobs in government, business, research, journalism, and the arts, mostly in Washington, DC.

American University invites applications for a term faculty appointment in the Departments of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies and Literature for Academic Year 2022-2023. Successful applicants will be able to teach interdisciplinary, intersectional courses at both introductory and advanced levels about American culture, power dynamics, and social change. Of particular importance is the ability to teach an advanced writing seminar, CRGC 360, entitled “Knowledge and Power: Critical Interdisciplinary Theory and Method.” Development of courses for the AU Core undergraduate curriculum will also be expected. Rank will be dependent on experience and stature in the field. The appointment is a 9-month term position and will commence on August 29, 2022. The position will require the incumbent to teach three courses per semester in Literature.

There are three tells that something is wrong, however. First, the position is political, involving charged issues that are lucrative in terms of grants and other money that flows into universities from progressive donors, alumni, and government agencies. These issues also attract the attention of our nation’s disgruntled youth. The field of “critical studies” thrives here. The “Knowledge and Power” course draws students further into the ambit of thinkers like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Ibram X. Kendi. The appointee will also politicize the core curriculum. No matter what the content of this curriculum, the critical studies perspective is getting more seats at the table.

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Second, the hire will be a dual appointment who shares obligations between the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies (CRGC) and the Department of Literature. This indicates that CRGC has targeted Literature. Viewed from the other side of the issue, the study of literature at American is now well down the road to critical studies. Literature likely spawned CRGC, and now it subsidizes it with enrollments and faculty. Over time, the more radical department will gain votes in the more traditional one. This will politicize literature even more.

Third, the work load also suggests deep institutional transformation. The new hire will teach six courses a year in literature. That’s about as good as it gets in this field. A new professor steeped in the ideology of modern academia is not just assigned a single course in literature, with the rest devoted to drudgery like basic grammar, rhetoric, or writing. Instead, new professors in CRGC and Literature at American are straightaway teaching literature in all their courses. Among these are the “advanced reading and writing courses.” No remedial toil for the new hire.

In decades past such deference to junior faculty would have disturbed pecking orders. Today, not so much. There is, perhaps, still some cultural cachet to be won by attracting students from other disciplines, but the game is now mostly about volume and noise. Get more radical faculty hired, get them teaching integral courses across the humanities, get the campus worked up about it. The one-year post at American can easily turn into a tenure-track line, which means releases, sabbaticals, grants, and seniority will reduce real course obligations and, thus, call for more hires of this ilk.

The objective, then, is twofold. (1) Continue to flood the zone opened by the jargon-filled critical studies department. (2) Pass off as many activists as possible as literature professors in order to attract students from outside the field who must fulfill humanities electives. Meanwhile, the national literatures of England, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy are excised, leaving a gaping hole in the place of any serious appreciation of Western Civilization. The result is an even stronger “red shift” in how American University teaches literature and everything else.

Demographic, moral, political, and economic pressures will continue to influence American. The reason this strategy works is because it both leverages and is leveraged by grievance culture and the mismatch effect. In other words, broken high schools feed the process. Angrier and more unprepared students brighten the prospects for critical studies programs. The growth of such programs, along with their appetite for grade inflation, allows administrators to tout the supposed success of their diversity campaigns.

This also shows how a major aspect of the political war over education is waged. A point of weakness is exploited in order to lay siege to the university generally. It’s no coincidence that literature is such an early and consistent target for critical studies and other grievance-based initiatives. Programs and departments like African studies, Hispanic studies, gender and sexuality studies, or indigenous studies can be leveraged to great effect on today’s campus. Once a few of these are established, a critical studies department can be easily justified and the takeover of humanities completed. Next up are more traditional departments such as history, economics, chemistry, and math.

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Administrative ombudsmen prompt, facilitate, oversee, and validate the takeover. A handful of dissident faculty members from any department or program can be tapped to start a curricular initiative, which then becomes a program, which then can be morphed into a department. The real metastasis comes when new professors in critical studies get joint appointments with other departments. The first of these is usually something that the rest of the faculty considers innocuous like, say, literature.

Politicians, administrators, disinterested faculty in other fields, and most people in the real world can be forgiven for thinking the study of literature is at best a pastime, and at worst a pointless free-for-all. They think there’s no logic to it; it can mean anything you want. Thus, literature is ideal for critical studies as a discipline and a political movement. If you want activists indoctrinating students at some university, you start with a “cluster” hire with a lot of overlap in literature. This is why literature is so important, and why conservatives, entrepreneurs, and STEM types need to pay more attention to what is happening to it at colleges and universities. Otherwise, the tremendous social benefits of radical individualism will never be heard by most students.

Letting literature go with the wind is a mistake for other reasons, too: (1) It’s entertaining. (2) We’re hardwired to understand and remember through stories. (3) It allows us to take the measure of what is universally human. (4) It often emerges from foreign canons to represent for us times, places, and cultures distinct from our own, encouraging us to respect both difference and wisdom. (5) It exposes the complexity of life by plumbing the depths of human folly, cruelty, kindness, and brilliance. These aspects are mutually reinforcing.

Finally, a healthy literature department can help prevent the ideological panopticons on college campuses that reinforce only one mode of thought. By its nature, great literature will expose the blind spots inherent in a single perspective which otherwise won’t get noticed. Great literature like, say, Homer or Dante needs to be read, if only so people can see that there are other ways of thinking about the world than the ones for which they are being trained. And since today’s students are being trained to hate Western Civilization, literature is as critical as ever.

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