Academe needs deprofessionalization and deyuppification. It has to recover its clerical or spiritual roots. Scholarship is an ideal and a calling, not merely a trade or living. Every year at commencement, we put on medieval robes that connect us to a great monastic past. We should be in the world but not of it. Our vocation is a ministry. There is no truth, but as thinkers we are obliged to seek it. The present system is geared to producing careerist academics rather than scholars or intellectuals. Specialization belongs only to personal professional research; it has no place whatever in undergraduate education.
I call for a total abolition of the annual Modern Language Association convention sessions (699 over four days in December 1990) for three reasons: They splinter the profession into political special-interest groups like Washington PAC lobbyists; they encourage the midget format of the “talk,” which is simply a vehicle for cozy relationships and networking; they occur too close to the formal marketing apparatus of the profession and are therefore corrupted by it. The MLA convention crams the moneychangers into the Temple instead of driving them out. Job recruitment should seek these qualities in a candidate: (a) overall mastery of the Western artistic and intellectual tradition; (b) ability to relate our tradition to other great world traditions; (c) a passion for learning; (d) an interest in communicating that passion to undergraduates.
Attendance at conferences must cease to be defined as professional activity. It should be seen for what it is: prestige-hunting and long-range, job-seeking junkets, meat- rack mini-vacations. The phrase “He or she is just a conference-hopper” (cf. “just a gigolo”) must enter the academic vocabulary. I look for the day when conference- hopping leads to denial of employment or promotion on the grounds that it is a neglect of professional duties to scholarship and one’s institution. Energies have to be reinvested at home. The reform of education will be achieved when we all stay put and cultivate our own garden, instead of gallivanting around the globe like migrating grackles. Furthermore, excessive contact with other academics is toxic to scholarship. Reading and writing academic books and seeing academics every day at work are more than enough exposure to academe.
The best thing for scholars is contact with non-academics, with other ways of thinking and seeing the world. Most of the absurdities of women’s studies and French theory would have been prevented by close observation of ordinary life outside the university. There should be more flow between the university and society. Politicians, businessmen, soldiers, artists, engineers, scientists should be brought in for regular visits and an exchange of views. Instead of schmoozing with other academics at conferences, faculty should be required to do outreach work via general-interest community lectures at public schools, libraries, and churches. A sense of the general audience must be recovered. All literary criticism should be accessible to the literate general reader. That there is such a general audience, which has been arrogantly blocked out by obscurantist theorists (laughably claiming leftist and populist aims), I know from letters I have received about my own book. Literature and art are never created for scholars but for a universal audience. If academics cannot see that audience, they cannot see art. Students are the nascent general readers among us.
The postwar “publish or perish” tyranny must end. The profession has become obsessed with quantity rather than quality. At top universities, two published books are becoming the minimum even for an associate professorship. Burger King now rules the waves. One brilliant article should outweigh one mediocre book. Real contributions to knowledge take time. Scholarly time is very slow. Right now, young academics are caught in a bind that pits scholarly integrity against their economic self-interest, particularly if they are responsible for children. Scholarship is a life of study leading to a mature production of the mind. Completed chapters of a substantial ongoing project, submitted to outside review, should be acceptable for employment or promotion. Rushing people into print right after grad school just leads to portentous fakery, which no one reads anyhow. Maynard Mack was already saying in 1969 to our graduate seminar at Yale that “95 per cent of what is published in any given year should be ritually burned at the end of that year.”
The pressure on shaky novices to sound important and authoritative makes for guano mountains of dull rubbish. Good writing and teaching require a creative sense of play. In American academe, as opposed to Great Britain, playfulness and humor, as well I know, are suspect, suggesting that you aren’t “serious” enough. But comedy is a sign of balanced perspective on life and thought. Humorlessness should be grounds for dismissal. Eccentric individualism, in the style of the old German scholars, must be tolerated. Teachers should not be conformist clones. Graduate students must be encouraged to let their personalities flower in the classroom. Teaching is a performance art.
A feeling or respect for the past is the great gift we can bequeath to our students, trapped in the busy, bright, brazen present. Even leftist professors these days lack a sense of history. Arguments against the canon have come suspiciously often from banal, uncultivated careerists who, whatever their current prominence, lack scholarly distinction. Individual authors or works may go in and out of favor (both Shakespeare and Bach had to be revived by Romanticism), but the overall line of Western culture will never change. Every woman, black, or Oriental raised and writing in English is a product of that main line. The piddling ignoramuses who deny there is a distinct, discernible, objective Western tradition are just woozy literati. That line is absolutely, concretely manifest in the visual arts: at the temple complex of King Zoser at Saqqara are the papyrus-capped pillar forms invented by Imhotep, which would be transmitted to us by Greece and Rome. Freshmen from the poorest neighborhoods are amazed to discover that, cresting the columns of Philadelphia banks, churches, museums, libraries, and civic buildings are the fronds and curls of Egyptian plant life, in 4,500 years of historical memory. The whole racial argument about the canon falls to nothing when it is seen that the origins of Greek Apollonianism were in Egypt, in Africa. Go down, Moses: even Judeo-Christianity sojourned in Egypt.
The human record is virtually universally one of cruelty barely overcome and restrained by civilization. Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly but are everywhere, from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China, and Japan. Current events should be systematically but sparingly worked into the ancient picture by teachers. For example, I like to show freshmen the elegant Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. There, in the bas-relief of the great menorah being carried from the Temple by Roman soldiers at the sack of Jerusalem and Diaspora, we see the beginnings of the political problems that still seethe in the Mideast.
Modernization means Westernization. The modern technological world is the product of the Greco-Roman line of mathematics, science, and analytical thought. The academic pop-politicos, pandering to students, rob them of their future. Education must simultaneously explore and explain the world’s multiculturalism while preparing the young to enter the Apollonian command-system. But ethnic descendants should, as much as possible, retain their creative duality. I feel Italian but love America. Oprah Winfrey shifts wonderfully back and forth, with jazzlike improvisation, between her two voices. African-Americans must study the language and structure of Western public power while still preserving their cultural identity, which has had world impact on the arts. We must expose the absurdity of our literary ostriches who think we need the death by-sludge French theorists to tell us about multiple “discourses.” The established scholarship of comparative religion, anthropology, and art history had already prepared us with a flexible, accurate methodology for negotiating among belief-systems and identifying the iconography and symbol-schemes of different cultures and periods.
I now address the graduate students. This is a time of enormous opportunity for you. There is an ossified political establishment of invested self-interest. Conformism and empty pieties dominate academe. Rebel. Do not read Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, and treat as insignificant nothings those that still prate of them. You need no contemporaries to interpret the present for you. Born here, alive now, you are modernity. You are the living link between the past and future. Charge yourself with the high ideal of scholarship, connecting you to Alexandria and to the devoted, distinguished scholars who came before you. When you build on learning, you build on rock. You become greater by a humility toward great things. Let your work follow its own organic rhythm. Seek no material return from it, and it will reward you with spiritual gold. Hate dogma. Shun careerists. If you keep the faith, the gods may give you, at midlife, the sweet pleasure of seeing the hotshots who were so fast out of the gate begin to flag and sink, just as your studies are reaching their point of maturation. Among the many important messages coming from African-American culture is this, from a hit song by Midnight Star: “No parking, baby, no parking on the dance floor.” All of civilized life is a dance, a fiction. You must learn the steps without becoming enslaved by them. Sitting out the dance is not an option.
Camille Paglia is associate professor of humanities at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, and author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published by Yale University Press. The essay above is adapted from an article in the May issue of Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, published by Boston University.