This month The Chronicle Review published an epic essay by Andrew Kay, titled “Academe’s Extinction Event.” In the piece, which quickly went viral and occasioned days of feverish debate on social media, Kay meditates on the decline of literary studies while wandering through the corridors, conference rooms, and bar of the 2019 Modern Language Association conference, having given up trying to find gainful academic employment after recently receiving a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The structuring image is that of golfers genially playing against the background of a raging forest fire. Like them, the academics attending the conference are blithely playing the game, while “all around them, the humanities burned.”
The prospect of a rebuttal to Kay’s essay was, for me, a happy one. This was not because I didn’t like the piece. I loved it: Kay is so funny, so perceptive, his prose so sharp, his analysis so keen, and his heart so open that the piece not only is morbidly delightful to read but feels important. I was immediately convinced it would be read for a long time.
There is no better illustration of dithering while the profession dies than four tenure-track professors spending five paragraphs criticizing a line about Ann Taylor dresses.
But the prospect of a rebuttal was a happy one because Kay prophesied the apocalypse — the collapse of the humanities — and I had hoped, and still do, that he might be wrong. I have a soft spot for literary studies, having majored in English in college, but Kay’s essay was not just about that particular field. The whole forest, he argued, is burning — some parts faster, some parts a little slower — and the conflagration threatens to consume not just English but also history, religious studies, comparative literature, and my own field, philosophy.
I was therefore disappointed to see the authors of the response — Devin M. Garofalo, Anna Hinton, Kari Nixon, and Jessie Reeder, four tenure-track professors of English literature — concede all of Kay’s substantive arguments at the outset:
Tenure-track positions in the humanities are in steep decline. The majority of scholars in the humanities are overworked, undercompensated adjuncts. Humanities departments and programs are subject to austerity and annihilation. Adjuncts and graduate students are quitting or being shut out of the profession in droves.
All is as Kay says it was. What is left, then, to rebut?
The problem, the authors insist, is that Kay is thoroughly invested in “a certain kind of white male fantasy.” According to this fantasy, the humanities are failing not only because of external political, economic, and social pressures but also because of changes internal to them, in particular because the academy opened its doors to voices, themes, and methodologies that had been previously excluded from the academy. The authors acknowledge that Kay makes no such claim explicitly. But they insist that they are nevertheless able to infer it from several details in the piece.
The first piece of evidence in the trial of Kay is Kay’s mention of the fact that sociological and intellectual diversification in English “coincided with” the shrinking of the profession. Talk of coincidence, they argue, insidiously “blur[s] the boundaries between correlation and causation.” In other words, in merely stating the fact that those two phenomena occurred during the same period, Kay is in danger of promoting the misunderstanding that the shrinkage has been caused by the diversification.
Yet before we have even had time to digest this criticism, the authors change their mind: Perhaps diversification is responsible for shrinkage, and it is for the best! “Some of what Kay figures as disciplinary attrition,” they write, “looks from our vantage point like the very necessary unsettling of white male dominance.” It is not entirely clear whether they mean that the tremendous drop in enrollment and jobs can be accounted for by the attrition of white males (it cannot), or rather, more likely, that the shrinkage of the profession is a necessary and therefore justified consequence of the moral housecleaning it was forced to endure. On the latter reading, the problem with Kay’s essay is not one of diagnosis. It is rather that he fails to appreciate the extent to which both he and the discipline he eulogizes deserve whatever misfortune happens to befall them. (Indeed, these four horsewomen of the apocalypse promise that “a cleansing flame will allow us to build a better structure.”)
The second piece of evidence the authors provide for the claim that Kay is invested in a white male fantasy involves the portrayal of women in the article. The authors’ claim that Kay is “damningly uninterested” in women might seem unlikely, given that the piece’s two undisputed heroes are women: Caroline Levine, Kay’s adviser, and Anna Kornbluh, who gives the one MLA talk that Kay finds both insightful and inspiring. Indeed, over 25 percent of the piece is dedicated to Levine and Kornbluh, with Kay praising Kornbluh’s talk for its “scythelike” language in the service of the “unsparing” thesis that literary studies is contributing to its own demise.
Working on the assumption that Kay does not mean what he says, and means what he does not say, the authors write off Kay’s praise of Kornbluh as a “bright spot” in an essay that can be said to offer only “ostensible celebrations of the contributions [of] women.” Then they zoom in on Kay’s “description of his adviser as Pre-Raphaelite goddess, 4-H gal-pal, and edifying mother figure.”
Since so much of the case against Kay turns on the interpretation of his account of his dissertation adviser, it is worth pausing to ask whether Kay in fact describes Levine in those terms. Merve Emre, an associate professor of English literature at Oxford, has emphasized the subjective structure of the pivotal sentence: “You could call her maternal — many did — but then you’d have to note that she was upsettingly insightful and prolific.” As Emre observes, the line is subjective and self-critical, hardly amounting to a simple affirmation of Levine as an “edifying mother figure.”
Emre is right: The line is far more nuanced and self-referential than Kay’s critics appreciate. That said, I must admit that, on a first reading of the piece, I hardly even noticed it, so absorbed was I, as a recent graduate of a Ph.D. program myself, with Kay’s astonishing descriptions of just how generous, caring, and dedicated Levine was, how keen and active her interest in his intellectual development. In Kay’s telling, nothing about returning to the MLA, rejected and dejected, is as hard as facing the person who had devoted so much to his advancement, nothing as mortifying as subjecting himself to her judgment: “Are you … cool with what I’m doing now?” He knows that this is “needy and boyish,” but he has to ask. She is the only one who can grant him permission and grace.
Kay’s treatment of Levine, however, is not the only evidence of his disdain for women, according to the authors. They reserve by far their longest discussion for Kay’s short description of the conference attendees’ clothes. Here is Kay:
In between was an open space populated by islands of academics who shared a self-conscious aesthetic that, in the case of the men, might be termed formal-flippant: hair mummified with product; scarf; sport coat; too-short khakis; and, like a bit of irreverent punctuation dropped at the end of some sartorial sentence, New Balances. A dozen women unwittingly wore the same suit from Ann Taylor, while myriad others went full flight attendant.
The response’s authors insist that here Kay subjects women to “cruel mockery,” and then describe at length the “quagmires” that female academics must traverse in choosing what to wear in professional settings.
Their lengthy description, displaying most fully the confusions of snark for wit and of hyperbole for exactitude that pervade the piece, is not, strictly speaking, false. Choosing what to wear for conferences and interviews is not always easy. And the attempt to meet contradictory standards (formal but not too formal, etc.) leads both men and women to come to resemble one another, as they all jointly reach toward an elusive ideal of professional suitability. But this awkward process of convergence is surely just what Kay means to convey with his description of the participants as sharing a “self-conscious aesthetic.” As for misogyny, it is not obvious to me who comes off worse, the men with their “mummified” hair and pairs of identical try-hard-casual sneakers, or those women in their suits.
But then again, who cares? The structuring idea of the essay, remember, is that English professors are dithering while their profession dies. It is hard to imagine a better illustration of this point than four tenure-track professors spending five paragraphs of their response criticizing a line about Ann Taylor dresses.
The authors are right that Kay’s essay is saturated, like a blood-drenched rag, with pained longing. But in asserting that what Kay is nostalgic for is the whiteness, maleness, and colonial chauvinism of Peak English, they once again draw inferences about what he does not say and ignore what he does. Kay says very clearly what he misses about his life at the university: talking to and reading poetry with an adviser he admires, doing work he cares about, and being part of a community that could provide him with the opportunity to talk about literature with those who share his love for it. This fantasy is the fantasy of those who wish to dedicate themselves to a life of the mind. It is mine.
Here, apparently, lies Kay’s real sin. It is not his unwitting bigotry. Ultimately, the scandal of his piece has little to do with his adoring descriptions of his academic adviser or his sartorial observational satire. His sin is that he fails to embrace his own sacrifice as well justified, fails to see his own loss as the “very necessary unsettling of white male dominance,” fails to welcome the “cleansing flame.” The problem is not what Kay says but that he dares to speak of his own predicament — that he dares to want publicly anything at all.
After all, according to the authors, Kay, despite having had to abandon his vocation, possesses a power and freedom that they can only dream of. “Our point is this: It’s not that no woman would have written an essay like Kay’s. It’s that no woman could have done so, because no woman is permitted to navigate the MLA — let alone the world — in this fashion.” Kay, that is, betrays women not only by failing to portray them as sufficiently capable and accomplished but also, and without contradiction, by failing to portray the degree to which they are, compared to him, utterly powerless. What woman could go in and out of conference rooms? What woman could sidle up to a couple of octogenarians in a conference-hotel lobby?
The suggestion that Kay’s feat of navigating the MLA is somehow beyond women’s reach is not merely insulting; it is downright bizarre, especially when one considers that all four authors have obviously succeeded in navigating the academy far better than Kay ever did.
The authors conclude their piece by offering two possible readings of Kay’s predicament. A “generous” reading “suggests he inadvertently lost track of the difference between male anger and structural critique,” whereas a more “critical” reading “suggests he crossed that line with the impunity of privilege.” I suppose readers will ultimately have to decide for themselves which authors mistake their own gendered rage for structural critique. This question is not just, as Kay suggests, about who has their eyes squarely on the cataclysm and who is scoring points while the fire burns. It’s also about who’s fanning the flames.
Anastasia Berg is a junior research fellow in philosophy at the University of Cambridge and an editor at The Point.
