A new consensus unites college administrators with many of their faculty members, especially in the humanities: Scholarship today must be socially engaged. This demand, and the morally charged language that comes with it, might seem to meet the urgency of our political moment. But it has a deforming effect — on our teaching, on hiring and funding, and on our understanding of scholarship and the university itself.
In a recent interview with The Chronicle Review, Feisal Mohamed reveals the logic animating our current moralistic attitude. According to what he suggests is the “American studies” model, whose influence extends far outside of American studies proper, “if you’re not performing work explicitly invested in some kind of social-justice mission, then you are advancing the cause of settler-colonialism.” It’s disturbing, as Mohamed notes, to see a “narrowing of humanistic learning” demanded by scholars themselves. What happens under this new dispensation to those knowledge projects that can’t easily be yoked to a vision of political action?
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A new consensus unites college administrators with many of their faculty members, especially in the humanities: Scholarship today must be socially engaged. This demand, and the morally charged language that comes with it, might seem to meet the urgency of our political moment. But it has a deforming effect — on our teaching, on hiring and funding, and on our understanding of scholarship and the university itself.
In a recent interview with The Chronicle Review, Feisal Mohamed reveals the logic animating our current moralistic attitude. According to what he suggests is the “American studies” model, whose influence extends far outside of American studies proper, “if you’re not performing work explicitly invested in some kind of social-justice mission, then you are advancing the cause of settler-colonialism.” It’s disturbing, as Mohamed notes, to see a “narrowing of humanistic learning” demanded by scholars themselves. What happens under this new dispensation to those knowledge projects that can’t easily be yoked to a vision of political action?
There always have been debates about how we value scholarship, what sort of work deserves attention, etc. — not only because there’s a limited amount of attention to go around, but also because attention nominally translates into funding and hiring lines in the garbage-compactor economy currently squeezing us to death. As the walls close in, things heat up. Manifestos grow like mushrooms. And professors who cannot properly lay claim to radical politics through their scholarly work find themselves in an odd position.
A great deal of modern scholarship does indeed find itself implicated in the political trials of the day, and many scholars do excellent work that either informs social-justice action (like, say, the study of race, policing, or the prison-industrial complex) or itself constitutes such action (community-engaged scholarship, teaching in prisons, etc.). In the past, professors who labored on behalf of political causes were often unfairly forced to justify their efforts as scholarship. This vital work enriches our departments, our universities, and our society; we should be grateful for the recent surge in institutional support.
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The persistent demand for such work, however — couched in a language of inflexible moralism — has its own problems. Our modern-day academic Manichaeism has little use for shades of gray, but a few fine distinctions remain necessary. When every thought has been given a moral nutrition label and scholars divided between sheep and goats, many of those distinctions disappear.
That some college courses, for instance, clearly point toward political action does not imply that other courses must somehow be propping up an unjust social order. This sort of thinking may matter little to the hard sciences or engineering (no one’s going to accuse the differential-equations instructor of failing to address the most recent social crisis), but it absolutely affects our perception of classes in literature and history, classics and anthropology. This kind of sorting unintentionally subjects our disciplines to the managerial ethos of what Chad Wellmon calls the “Other University,” where teaching is replaced by training. In the Other University, what we teach are not “topics for discussion and discovery” but “messages to be internalized and abided.”
There’s a deformation of political radicalism implicit in this shift, too. If we’re sincere in our desire to cultivate enlightened citizens and show students the possibilities for political action, how do we encourage them when our own radicalism appears confined to our occupations? If anything, it seems incumbent on us to demonstrate that politics and profession are not identical — that whatever our students study, wherever their careers lead, they can continue to work for justice as engaged citizens.
When we sort scholarship by its supposed political relevance and then choose to hire, reward, and teach accordingly, something crucial to the idea of the university is lost.
Moreover, this thinking removes from view a more democratic and less straitened idea of education. As Mohamed argues, “A university advances social justice by making the broadest possible array of intellectual pathways available to the broadest possible audience of people.” Individuals may put their studies to any number of uses. The institutions in which they study must remain at least relatively independent of those uses in order to survive. Agnes Callard nicely describes the university as “a place where people help each other access the highest intellectual goods.” The idioms of social engagement and “job readiness” have this in common: They would delimit those goods in advance.
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Versions of this debate have simmered on various burners over the past decade. In my own field of Victorian literary studies, scholars have often asked what our investigation of the past owes our political present. In one of my favorite contributions, Andrew H. Miller offers this thought experiment:
Imagine an undergraduate devastated by the present injustices around her. Why should she study the Victorian period? Why, if she is American, should she not study America? Alternatively, why not major in political science or international relations […]. One response she might entertain would be to consider a career studying the Victorian period as only tangentially related to the political activism she engages in when not interpreting culture of the past. Say she understands a good society to be one which values such study and so understands her career to be exemplifying that value — and this would be all the more important in a moment like our own, which has seen the waning of learning as a shared value and consequential force. But she also understands this study to be politically secondary to the more important work she does redressing the wrongs of her school or city or country.
This example gets to the heart of the matter. When the value of scholarly labor is determined by extrinsic definitions of political consequence, there is simply no justification left for any other sort of work.
Our students deserve to find themselves in whatever subjects, authors, texts, and ideas they may light on during our time together. That’s the great promise of higher education, especially public higher education, and there’s no predicting beforehand what concerns students will take as their own — just as we ourselves chose our own disciplines and fields. The attempt to make all scholarship accountable to the political exigencies of the moment removes that freedom.
Across the sweep of human knowledge, much of what we study is not immediately usable for political work: irrational numbers, the logical system of Ramus, medieval manuscript illuminations, Galenic medicine, classical French verse forms, string theory, Roman aqueducts, or the camouflage of tree frogs. Nor can we be certain what kinds of research, what byways of thought and imagination, will yield usable materials in the future. When we sort scholarship by its supposed political relevance and then choose to hire, reward, and teach accordingly, something crucial to the idea of the university is lost.
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Far more concerning than the tone of current debates about disinterestedness and engagement in the academy (when aren’t we fighting about the future of our disciplines?) are the ways scholarly values can be chosen for us by the institutions within which we work. Right now, much of the demand for socially engaged work comes not from the faculty but from the administration. When grant-hungry administrators sign on loudly to political initiatives, a certain amount of skepticism is due.
“Oedipus and the Sphinx” (1808), by IngresWikimedia Commons
Like the corporations they increasingly resemble, university administrations can hardly be taken as good-faith participants in this discourse. The discourse of social justice hands them a moral justification as they cut some humanities programs and let others die by attrition. It has been hard enough to push back against the logic of the student as consumer. If students don’t want to take classics, art history, or German, why should the university continue to fund departments devoted to those subjects? Neither the intrinsic value of these disciplines, nor their place in the history of the university, nor the integrity of their departments as research units has offered any defense against an administration bent on obeying the whims of enrollment.
The benefit to the corporate university of the new moral turn is that it supports the logic of austerity in a way that academics will have even greater difficulty contesting. After all, we told them ourselves: Some scholars are deleterious political reactionaries, not by ballot or even by disposition, but simply through the elective affinities of scholarly engagement. When they cut entire programs for their failure to keep pace with evolving political demands, on what grounds will we resist? We should be wary of providing ideological cover for changes and cuts the material causes of which lie elsewhere.
It’s easy to sneer at the notion of disinterested scholarly inquiry — especially when the right has cynically deployed the concept to attack academics whose work runs up against their political prejudices. And it has become axiomatic on the left that nothing is free or pure, nothing liberated from the workings of power; to think otherwise is false consciousness and self-delusion. Everything is political. And maybe this is so.
But the ideals of scholarship and public service represented by universities at their best are not undone just because they come to us compromised from the start. Like so many other ideals of liberal society, their power derives from their impossibility.
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If that sounds too romantic, let us just say that, with respect to our values, we must often act “as though.” Even if we’re certain that knowledge is caught up in power, that objectivity is an illusion, we ought to act as though we could in fact be disinterested knowledge workers. In a world that would either instrumentalize or obliterate us, defending the disinterested work of the university might itself be a radical act.
Justin A. Sider is an assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Parting Words: Victorian Poetry and Public Address (University of Virginia, 2018).