Manifesto of a Tenured Radical / Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities

Academe, May/Jun 1998 by Rowe, John Carlos

Manifesto of a Tenured Radical

Cary Nelson. New York: New York

University Press, 1997, 243 pp., $17.95

Literature Lost:

Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities

John M. Ellis. New Haven, Conn.:

Yale University Press, 1997, 262 pp., $25.00

JOHN CARLOS ROWE

MANIFESTO OFA TENURED RADICAL is a courageous book. Nelson's radicalism is that of democracy at its best: equal opportunity in education, employment, and public debate and equal treatment according to the law are goals worth struggling to achieve for all Americans. Such ideals can be realized only by well-educated citizens, capable of making their own decisions on the basis of the widest possible information and knowledge. In the humanistic disciplines particularly, but by no means exclusively, students should learn how to think for themselves by studying other intellectual positions, social behaviors, cultural experiences, and personal opinions.

It has not always been so. Nelson and I were undergraduates in exactly the same years-1963 to 1967-and we both studied a "brutally selective canon" of literature. I majored in history and English at Johns Hopkins and can add that the canon of important historical issues was also remarkably narrow. Along with many other teachers in the humanities, we have broadened our educations since then to include literature by and about women and minorities as well as historical study that focuses on central topics too often neglected in our educations, including the histories of racism, sexism, and economic exploitation of people.

Nelson is right that the advent of "literary and interpretive theory" in the 1970s "cannot take much credit" for the expansion of the literary and historical canons that has occurred since then. Nelson credits feminism of the 1970s with historical recovery work that helped transform both the theory and the practice of literary history and so challenged "high" theory as to compel its historicization or its defensive retreat into a moribund formalism. Although I agree with Nelson that second-wave feminism played a crucial part in the expansion of the literary and historical canons, I would also credit the work of scholars in ethnic studies in the 1970s for the historical recovery of Native American, Latino and Chicano, Asian American, African American, and European immigrant contributions to U.S. and Latin American societies.

These intellectual changes were not isolated from the mainstream of American society; they reflected changes in student demographics, new patterns of immigration, educational and social mobilities supported by civil rights activism, and the changing economics of postindustrial America. We want to teach our students about a multicultural society to prepare them for their civic responsibilities. At a time when "cultural studies" remains a relatively vague and inchoate term, Nelson offers a helpful "cultural studies manifesto" of sixteen principles.

The right complains that the left "politicizes" education. Nelson responds that it is far better to declare honestly the political convictions informing instruction than to pretend that what you teach is objective and apolitical, thereby foreclosing debate. The same attitude informs his insistence that we address honestly and directly our employment practices and labor policies in higher education. Intellectuals who challenge economic exploitation in their scholarship cannot ignore it in their own universities and departments. We can no longer pretend that the academic job market will improve without our active efforts to achieve that end.

Nelson is right that the academic job market has been depressed for a quarter of a century. The muchheralded expansion of the professoriate in the 1990s in response to growing enrollments and the "curve" of retirements, especially in the humanities, has not occurred, because colleges and universities have replaced vacated faculty positions with fewer and more cost-efficient lecturers, adjuncts, "academic coordinators," instructors, and countless other new job titles, many invented in the 1980s, to reduce drastically the lifetime salary and benefit costs of tenured faculty.

Nelson makes concrete proposals for changing this hypocritical and exploitative situation, calling on established professional organizations, such as the American Historical Association and the AAUP, to take the initiative in improving job opportunities for recent Ph.D.'s and the working conditions for graduate students employed as teachers. My own view is that Nelson's specific recommendations place too much responsibility on graduate students and non-tenure-track instructional staff; we need more powerful national organizations with real economic and political power to represent the interests of teachers from preschool through graduate school.

In contrast with Nelson's honest treatment of his own positions, his account of the complexity of the social and intellectual changes affecting the humanities over the past twenty-five years, and his attention to the real problems facing graduate students on the market, Ellis's Literature Lost treats complex intellectual debates reductively and simplistically, and Ellis rationalizes historical injustices in flagrantly inaccurate ways. He does not seem to understand, for example, that the massive and diverse rebellions of those enslaved contributed to their emancipation and an end to slavery as an institution. Often relying on false analogies, rhetorical questions, cliches, selective quotations, and global generalizations, he violates the basic principles of rational argument.