Academia: Lifeboats to Ocean Liners

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

In my first decade or so as a tenure-track professor, I would sometimes advocate the consolidation of different disciplines into a single administrative department not for reasons of efficiency or cost-savings, but to nurture what I believed to be a better culture of interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty with different training and a more generative approach to teaching undergraduates how to match their intellectual ambitions to the right methods, concepts and traditions of inquiry.

I remember being particularly struck by a panel discussion that a group of students organized that featured professors from different social science departments talking about their research and their scholarly relationship to various disciplines. Most of us on the panel talked about how our research did not stay neatly inside disciplinary lines either in terms of methods or in terms of the scholarly resources we consulted and cited in the published work. The students in the surprisingly large audience responded that they had no idea that this was the way we approached our own research—what they told us, in a very friendly way, was that the way we taught our disciplines through separate departments created a very different impression, that they almost never saw archival work, close reading, critical theory, ethnography, survey research, statistical analysis, and so on put together within a program of study or addressed in an integrative (or even rivalrous) fashion. Here we were as faculty talking knowledgeably about methods and disciplinary traditions across multiple departments and being told by students, “But you don’t do that in your courses or in the designs of your curricula”.

Why did I stop talking all the time about combining departments? First, because I began to realize that departments really didn’t inhibit interdisciplinary thinking as much as I or those students had supposed. In a way, what the faculty on that panel said was an indication of that. Second, several colleagues pushed back on my advocacy by suggesting that perhaps the best preparation to think in an interdisciplinary way was to feel confident and grounded in one disciplinary and methodological tradition first—that to move to combine ethnography and archival research or anything else before feeling a mastery of either was to create a kind of formlessly protean mess rather than a strategic multi-modal approach to research. Third, because I came to recognize that departments are primarily administrative structures: their foremost function is routing labor to the site of need and managing the year-to-year offering of a curriculum, and secondarily is about supervising, mentoring or developing faculty as scholars and teachers.

And finally I stopped it because I came to realize that most professors are really, really attached to their disciplines and to their disciplines as departments. Attached pragmatically, with a keen and proper sense of self-interest, and attached emotionally to the idea of the department-discipline form. Meaning that what I was saying was upsetting or confrontational, even threatening, without me meaning to be any of those things. Like I said recently, I’ve come to be against the taste of institutions for undermotivated change, and that definitely applies to just rattling off blue-sky provocations for no particular reason or with no urgent aim in mind.

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That was then. Now, there might be something more urgent to consider. Not where I work, but in higher education as a whole. Right now our collective response to announcements about the elimination of departments at various institutions, most of them humanities—and more organized and highly politicized projects in some states intended to systematically remove departments in the humanities and humanistic social sciences from public universities—is to either rage against the dying of the light or try to organize situationally to prevent closures where they might be prevented.

The rage is certainly justified, especially when these decisions are being undertaken by serial failures like Gordon Gee. It may at times even be politically effective. But I wonder if there’s a strategic response that we are collectively undervaluing.

The case for the humanities in these dire times is made across a sprawling number of public venues and with some degree of rhetorical and substantive variety. A fair amount of the claims made on behalf of the humanities describe in general what humanistic inquiry and the subjects of humanistic study provide to students, to the wider culture, to being human. Often the authors of such appeals use their own discipline as a primary example, but rarely are they arguing that their discipline alone is special and worth preserving more than the others that are threatened with reduction or elimination.

The R1 universities that train a significant majority of faculty employed in American higher education are for the most part not under threat in this way at this time, though a few flagship public university have either been damaged already by political attacks or unbalanced austerity logic or are about to be. If we value the current mix of disciplines within the humanities, we can for the moment trust that faculty will continue to be trained in those disciplines.

What I want to suggest here is that in the majority of employing institutions, including undergraduate-only colleges where austerity lurks as a threat, perhaps we should consider creating new administrative units that provide a more durable kind of shelter for all those varying disciplines. Rather than watching the lifeboat of small departments of two or three faculty lines that train a small number of majors get sunk by administrations bent on elimination, let’s take all the lifeboats and gather them into a big passenger cruiser. Let’s consolidate into big departments that have more clout and are in a position to command resources, in part by laying claim to programs of general education in a steadier and more custodial way. When we build those programs now, we generally unleash Hunger Games-style rivalries between small units for who will be the beneficiary of a humanities requirement, or a requirement for pluralism or social justice or number of other requirements. If those units were all inside a single administrative cover, they’d be able to more successfully protect and cultivate the curricular structures and resources that sustain all the people working inside that structure.

I don’t think you want something as big and vague as “Arts & Humanities Department”. But something like “Department of Qualitative Social Science” that includes anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and other aligned faculty? “Department of Philosophy and Critical Theory”, “Department of Cultural Interpretation”, “Department of Language, Linguistics and Rhetoric”? “Department of Performance and Artistic Production”? And so on. Anything bigger and more permanent than a lifeboat, where there are some genuine compatibilities and synergies between the people who would work within the unit.

Yes, I’m very aware of the massive internal fights many such administrative units would face when it came time to make decisions about the allocation of resources in the future, about mentoring and evaluation within the department, and about developing a code of mutual respect between the methods and intellectual traditions within the new unit. Michele Lamont in her book How Professors Think describes how faculty brought together temporarily to make decisions about what to value or privilege in handing out grants, fellowships and other rewards make short-term covenants to sustain such judgments. Some disciplines, in Lamont’s judgment, are inclined to make those kinds of covenants in a generous way, and some aren’t. I was part of one of the deliberations she studied and it was always a great demonstration of that point—most of us read generously towards one another, and when someone didn’t, they generally became more and more isolated from the group consensus. But I also recall a different deliberation where a psychologist invited to evaluate the work of other social scientists outright rejected anything that wasn’t experimental social psychology, more or less, and the group was small enough that she couldn’t be ignored or out-maneuvered.

It’s easy to see the nightmares that might result, and it’s important to see that this is maybe nobody’s dream, not even mine. But it might be that as a strategic response, there could be safety in numbers without any loss of what we deem to be vitally important about humanistic inquiry, that we could maintain the strategic importance of humanistic teaching and scholarship in this fashion without turning ourselves into programs that just help scientists and technologists write better or talk about poetry when they get up on the TED stage.