Andrew Kay’s recent essay, “Academe’s Extinction Event,” offers gut-wrenching and at times humorous truth-telling. Likening the 2019 MLA convention to a gaggle of golfers putting against the backdrop of a raging wildfire is apt. 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. At its best, Kay’s essay captures the joy of literary study and the heartbreak of its diminishment as a profession.
But it is also worryingly anti-intellectual — and damningly uninterested in women and scholars of color. At the nexus of those two problems lies the essay’s greatest danger: By characterizing the profession as sadly diminished since its white male heyday, it winds up eulogizing precisely the worst aspects of academia, the ones many of us are trying to eradicate. By focusing on academia’s least interesting work, and overlooking the continuing efforts of cultural critique, activism, unionization, education, and so on, Kay contributes to the very narratives of ivory-tower uselessness that are hastening the demolition of the humanities by antagonistic forces.
The essay presents the current state of literary studies in particular as a series of tired caricatures: bescarved hipsters; inaccessible, droning papers; academese. In other words, no real ideas that matter. On certain counts we agree: The discipline suffers from too much navel-gazing, and jargon for its own sake can be a problem. But terms like “capitalocene” and “dialectic” afford a language for articulating the otherwise inarticulable, for thinking the thoughts the humanities are best equipped to think. Disciplinary knowledge is more than just an elaborate circle jerk masquerading as intellect.
More concerning to us than the essay’s anti-intellectualism is its investment in a certain kind of white male fantasy. One early vignette is a case in point. Searching “for victims,” Kay interrupts two older men in conversation, ignoring their lack of interest in his company (the luxuries of male privilege!). As Kay listens, the two wax nostalgic for the 1960s and 1970s, when literary studies was an “old boys’ club” populated by gentlemen who knew how to be “civil,” when the profession was raining down “solicitations” for white men, and when, by implication, the Peggys of the world knew their place and the Dawns were kept out of sight. A disciplinary moment that flourished not in spite of but because of its exclusionary politics — a moment in which white men possessed the power to determine the worthiness of the things around them.
Kay’s position in relation to this episode is disturbingly ambiguous. He calls this version of the field “deeply flawed,” but that description is immediately undercut by the qualifier “and more civil.” If this episode is meant to be satirical, it fails to achieve any tone of derision. Equally unsettling are Kay’s remarks that “the increased inclusion of women” and the rise of cultural studies “coincided with the shrinking of the field itself,” the verb “coincide” blurring the boundaries between correlation and causation. The paean to gentlemanly whiteness stands uninterrogated, with the author either sharing — or not caring whether he appears to share — the view that, golly, it sure would be nice to return to the halcyon days of overabundant employment for white men whose purported civility wasn’t, as it turns out, so civil. It is Kay’s choice to call this era “Peak English.” Peak for whom is obvious.
There is no denying the humanities have dwindled catastrophically. But as Kay laments this loss, he also suggests — winkingly or unwittingly, and, honestly, does it matter which? — that such attrition is the product not only of the devaluation of literary studies from without, but also the opening up of the field from within to historically excluded voices and conversations. In other words, some of what Kay figures as disciplinary attrition looks from our vantage point like the very necessary unsettling of white male dominance.
It is Kay’s choice to call this era “Peak English.” Peak for whom is obvious.
Let us be clear: We do not underestimate or dismiss the severity of the disappearance of the tenure track and of rampant adjunctification. This is our crisis, one we must indict and fight. It is also a crisis whose material conditions are deeply uneven. We are acutely aware of the positions of institutional privilege from which the four of us write. We, unlike Kay and countless others, did not wind up “supine on the mat” — and not because academia is a meritocracy. We do not speak from the contingent margins of the university, and we know that many of our colleagues who share the privilege of job security are less interested in listening to and fighting for our contingent brethren than in discrediting them to assuage survivor guilt and to safeguard power. Our purpose is not to participate in the delegitimization of contingent experience or quit lit.
On the contrary, we look to institutional critiques like quit lit to help expose the uneven distribution of the pain of academic collapse. But at no point does Kay appear to reflect upon how the inequities of this profession are magnified for those who are not white, straight, and male: people of color, women, queer and trans folks, the nonnormatively bodied, first-generation-college grad students and scholars, single parents, the economic precariat — the list goes on. As Manu Samriti Chander put it in a tweet: “Lots of folks — most folks actually — were excluded from literary studies, the humanities, and academia more generally long before the jobs disappeared. Seems to me we talk disproportionately more about those forced to ‘quit’ than about those already excluded.”
Kay’s essay perpetuates those exclusions. There are many MLAs, but the one he depicts is painfully whitewashed. Indeed, the 2019 meeting featured well-attended panels like “Critical Race Theory and New Directions for Victorian Studies.” It seems no coincidence that proper names in Kay’s essay tend to have something in common: Keats, Pepys, Hopkins, Coleridge, and Crane feature in his portrait of the profession, while Toni Morrison is cast quite strangely alongside John Milton as a canonical heavyweight pushing out the “exotic” likes of Victorian poetry. Such positioning smacks of nostalgia for the colonial purity of “Peak English.”
Not only does Kay’s essay indulge in white male fantasy, it also subjects women to cruel mockery. Take, for instance, the moment when Kay sneers at a “dozen women” who “unwittingly wore the same suit from Ann Taylor, while myriad others went full flight attendant.” This was a real kick in the teeth. The fact is, these women aren’t “unwitting” (so much ignorance and disdain packed into that one word!). The charming dishevelment prized by so many male academics is not a posture available to women. Most every woman reading this essay knows what we mean, but let’s just go there, shall we?
To go “full flight attendant” is to do as you, a woman, have been repeatedly advised, in nuggets of professional “guidance” that wreak havoc on your sense of self long after the “market” has chewed you up and spit you out, on or off the tenure track. The act of dressing, let alone of sitting — whether on a bed or in a chair — is a gauntlet for those who are not men.
Quagmires abound. Do you wear a pant- or skirt-suit? Do you go with pantyhose (opaque or sheer? flesh-toned or black?) or do you rock bare legs (ballsy! — shave that shit, wear lotion, and pray you’re spared the creepers)? Should you wear heels (potentially too sexy or femme) or flats (comfortable, but might read grandma, plus you’ll have to shell out the money to hem pants you couldn’t afford in the first place)? Do express your interest and enthusiasm by leaning forward, ladies. But don’t lean too far forward or speak too confidently, because the committee might think you’ll eat them for lunch. (And because you couldn’t pump in the hotel lobby and you wouldn’t want to secrete breast milk down the front of your blouse while answering a question about mothering, er, mentoring.) Be “emotionally available,” ladies. But not too “available.” Your voice is annoying — you should work on that. Communicate openness! Passion! Energy! Enthusiasm! If you’ve never received such advice, you’re MLAing while white, straight, and male.
Oh, and have you thought about your face? Here’s the thing: Fix it. Don’t look washed out, or tired, or like you’ve been up all night for weeks rehearsing answers to interview questions while grinding your teeth and clenching your jaw to the point where it starts clicking again and you have to see your dentist — again (if you’re lucky enough to have dental insurance, that is). On second thought, though, you’d better avoid cosmetics altogether. That cat-eye is too much, the lipstick is whorish, and those glasses have an off-putting amount of personality. Please also consider changing your hair color and texture (but take pains to look “natural”). Take off that ring. Put on a ring. Now you’ve overaccessorized. Those pearls are too Audrey, the skirt too young. Don’t wear all black, but also avoid bright colors, quirky patterns, frills, and gaudy jewelry. A navy pantsuit might be best. If you’re tall, consider shrinking. If you’re short, there’s always Willy Wonka’s taffy puller. If you’re “old” (by some unspecified and yet ubiquitous standard), dump yourself in a vat of eye cream and cross your fingers. If you’re “young,” they’ll say you’re destined for “authority problems” in the classroom. We couldn’t imagine why.
And whatever you do, don’t buy a suit at Ann Freaking Taylor: You’ll look like a lemming. (Not to mention that on your current “salary” the Ann Taylor suit is aspirational at best.) On the other hand, since your personality is a liability, looking like a lemming is probably safer than looking like yourself — until you become a punchline in an article critiquing the exclusivity of academe. Ouch.
Kay seems profoundly unaware that in his contingency he nevertheless navigates spaces like the MLA with an ease which even women and people of color who do land in careers as noncontingent faculty will never experience. This is not to diminish Kay’s position as one of the many either ousted from academia or never invited in. But we do think it is important to consider not only those whom academia has shut out, but those against whom its hostility is especially intense. Such hostility is palpable in the biting tone of Kay’s essay. 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. Not even Kay’s mentor, Caroline Levine.
Which brings us to the essay’s ostensible celebrations of the contributions women make to this profession. Kay’s representation of Anna Kornbluh’s recent work is a bright spot, but the much lengthier description of his adviser as Pre-Raphaelite goddess, 4-H gal-pal and edifying mother figure is not. Levine is one of the pre-eminent names in literary studies. Kay indeed describes her as “prolific,” but he reserves the bulk of his praise for her work as a mentor. We wholeheartedly agree that Levine is an outstanding mentor. Two of us wrote dissertations under her keen guidance and cannot speak highly enough of those experiences.
But there is little we recognize in the essay’s account of Levine’s mentorship, which renders her “a Girl Scout den mom” who dispenses advice like prepackaged cookies. (On second thought, we do indeed recognize something, but it’s a pattern, not a person.) The essay gives no more than a passing glance to the intellectual expertise — to the ideas — that help make her the shrewd mentor that she is. To be clear: we do not denigrate the work of mothers, which is falsely naturalized and all too invisible. But “why,” asks Andrea Kaston Tange, is a woman’s “ability to be a nurturing, thoughtful, supportive person in academia inevitably coded as feminine?” As “motherwork” and thus something that “should be done for free,” something more like “breathing” than a “sustained, conscious effort”? It is denigrating to construe the intellectual and emotional labor of mentorship — disproportionately performed by women — as some kind of innate magic rather than the hard work that it is. No man would be described as such.
By now, you may have inferred that some of us went to graduate school with Andrew Kay. Some readers might on this basis wish to dismiss our critiques. But each of us — those who know Kay and those who do not — are, through direct experience, familiar with the perspective he espouses, as are many of you. And that’s the point. Our concern is not Kay the individual. It’s the all-too-familiar type he represents.
We neither recognize nor celebrate academia as described by Kay: None of us mourn “the death throes” of the “monastic world” that academe was and supposedly should be because, for so many, that world never existed. In graduate school and since, we have forged intellectual communities in spite of men whose fantasized “monastic” bubbles took too long to pop. This is a problem in and for the profession. It’s everybody’s problem.
Much of Kay’s essay is difficult to read because it’s agonizingly raw, tracing painfully the atrocity of watching “your life’s prospects shift and attenuate.” We take this indictment seriously. But much of it is also difficult to read because if it is an indictment, it’s also a power play. And that is why Kay’s essay is not, as some have been saying, the quit lit to end all quit lit. In contrast, essays like Tamura Lomax’s, Keguro Macharia’s and Robert Cashin Ryan’s respective contributions to the genre show what it might do at its best: They do not simply rehearse the familiar facts but complicate them, affording nuanced insight into the variable material conditions of contingency and the futurity of humanistic inquiry. We wonder how the essay might have looked had it been more honest in its representations, and established solidarity with other marginalized scholars.
It’s one thing to own the ugly feelings with which one is understandably and unjustly riddled after years of hanging on by the fingernails while applying for job after job, only to be ghosted by the search committees who pronounce judgment. But it’s quite another to wield those feelings as a weapon against people who are also marginalized. If that sounds harsh, consider Kay’s callous joyride through the Academic Jobs Wiki, a toxic but nonetheless compulsory stream of job market updates. “On a whim,” and with cruel intoxication, Kay describes “making fake updates” to pages upon pages of the message board. He proudly displays his indifference to the very real people whose lives are at stake in those updates. In the face of crisis, in spite of the toxicity that is the wiki (fake posts and all), very real people are building things — ideas, communities, worlds. Very real people have worked and will continue to work to destroy “Peak English” and its nostalgia for (white male) humanistic monasticism.
The humanities right now are a house on fire. Some want to save the house, while others think a cleansing flame will allow us to build a better structure. But Kay’s essay is less interested in such questions than in the spectacle of the conflagration. A generous reading suggests he inadvertently lost track of the difference between male anger and structural critique. A more critical reading suggests he crossed that line with the impunity of privilege, not caring who else burned as he fed the flames, tossing a “Molotov cocktail” into the house as he walked away.
Devin M. Garofalo and Anna Hinton will both be assistant professors of English at the University of North Texas in the fall. Kari Nixon is an assistant professor of English at Whitworth University. Jessie Reeder is an assistant professor of English at Binghamton University.
