A L S O_ T O D A Y

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Keith Knight: Hot for teacher

The power of positive shrinking
By Carol Lloyd
Is the new optimistic movement in psychology a theoretical breakthrough or a professional survival tactic?

CAMILLE ON CAMPUS | CAMILLE PAGLIA
--- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled ---

Take your thinking elsewhere!

While academia disembowels itself with theory's blunt knives, young scholars must still pursue intellectual livelihoods outside the ivory tower.

Dear Dr. Paglia:

Stop me if you've heard this one before. I am a former academic, who, after several fun years teaching undergrads at a Southern university, has now found himself completely unemployable in the current market. At 41, despite a "respectable" terminal degree from Yale and a considerable (to my mind) breadth of learning, I feel like a complete failure.

Associates constantly tell me to "publish," but having endured a year of pomo theory at another Southern university from a chipper lesbian theory-head Ph.D., I'd rather be boiled in oil and have simultaneous root canal than ever pimp for a job by using the word "patriarchy," "post-colonial" or "white male gaze" in any writing where my name was involved. So, naturally, I have no publications to my name because it seems that post-structuralist swill is still all the rage. I know you hate whiners, but do you have any advice on how to write or publish without contributing to the pollution of the human mind? Or at least, how to survive in a world where real appreciation for art, music, literature, culture and theater seems impossible without having to fake some kind of "hip" sniping attitude toward things one sincerely loves. Oh yes, you are the only academic whose books and articles I will read anymore. Anyone who preaches the virtues of Auntie Mame and Tom of Finland is A-OK in my book of names.

-- Confused in Carolina

Dear Confused:

Thank you very much for your cri de coeur from the politically correct wilderness. The destruction that has been wrought over the past 25 years by "theory" -- feminist, poststructuralist, postmodernist and postcolonial -- is incalculable. Graduate students of great promise have been systematically driven out of the profession by the pedestrian theory addicts, who have created an academic climate utterly antithetical to appreciation of literature and art.

The problems are pandemic. Liberal arts graduates even of the "best" schools these days have neither a wide nor deep knowledge of the humanities. An appalling amount of the students' time is taken up with reading fifth-rate, grotesquely overpraised contemporary critics. But the college years are already too short for study of the full range of major world art.

The professoriat -- betrayed by that gaggle of geese at the Modern Language Association -- is responsible for the shrinking prestige of the humanities in the U.S. Why should we be surprised that conservatives constantly threaten to slash or abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, since those in the universities who should be guardians and defenders of the arts have advanced their careers (and enriched themselves) by vandalizing art in the name of "politics"? The irony is that, with rare exception, current lit crit types are naively ignorant of actual political history, to which they were first introduced by the unlearned, rigidly schematic Michel Foucault (whose ideas were borrowed from Durkheim, via Dumézil; from the solipsistic Saussure; and from innovative Americans like the sociologist Erving Goffman, a major figure for anyone awake in the 1960s).

A very ill wind is blowing -- one that will have grave and long-lasting consequences for American education. Parents who scrimp to pay up to $30,000 a year for their children's education must inform themselves about the quality of humanities instruction at their chosen institution. "Theory" is a decaying corpse, but its stink will linger on for another 20 years unless the glaring spotlight of public attention is turned on the incestuous mediocrity of the faculty recruitment process (scandalous in the Ivy League).

Humanities teaching is presently an economic disaster zone because of the collapse of the job market, which began when universities had to retract from their baby boom overexpansion. Costs have skyrocketed for campus maintenance and renovation of the physical plant. And a rising portion of the budget now goes not to the library but to student services of the recreational and social welfare variety, with its army of overpaid, hand-holding deans and assistant deans (subbing for parents who either neglected their kids or can't let them go).

With few teaching jobs available, there is terrible pressure on graduate students to conform to the party line. An extraordinarily talented and articulate young woman who works in New York publishing told me three years ago, for example, that the reason she had just left English graduate studies at Yale was that she realized her chances for employment as a college teacher were doomed: Of 20 recipients of the Yale Ph.D. in English the prior year, only eight had gotten jobs by June; of those eight, only four were tenure-track; of those four, two were in postcolonial studies.

When only sycophants, time-servers and cliché-mongers are left in the feeder chute for college teaching, it's undergraduates who will suffer by being defrauded of a genuine humanistic education. The natural energy and optimism of graduate students are being crushed by the methodology of "sniping," as you so aptly call it, which snobbishly looks down on and trashes art with lumpish, moralistic categories like "racism," "sexism," "homophobia" and "imperialism." Weary affectations of sterile irony or sophomorically self-conscious punning whimsy are routinely imposed on grad students, stunting their future creativity.

Early in this decade, I received an unforgettable letter from a woman who had left graduate study in comparative literature at Berkeley in the 1980s when her expressions of enthusiasm about any given text were treated as vulgar gaffes by the stone-faced members of her trendy seminars, who were learning to play the cold careerist game. What is abroad in the world when the one thing teachers will need in the classroom -- enthusiasm -- is being bred out of them in grad school? Every tenured faculty member in the country who remains silent in the face of this continuing outrage has become a collaborator in fascism.

Those of you struggling to be heard should take courage from my own disastrous professional history. In the 20 years before "Sexual Personae" was finally published (nine years after it was completed), I experienced an overwhelming number of rejections of my work in whole and part. But I kept patiently developing my craft for its own sake. And I branched out into general-interest journalism, which proved very fruitful and rewarding in the long run.

For example, while trying to make ends meet in the early 1980s, I wrote articles "on spec" for Connecticut newspapers on subjects I cooked up like the New Haven Italian-American pizza-making dynasty; a small, local African-American history museum; and a mysterious house (since torn down) that I identified as a stop on the Underground Railroad and whose ownership I traced through New Haven's yellowing real-estate records.

To you and all aspiring writers and teachers out there, I say: Don't give up the faith! No matter how frustrated your career options, you can still contribute meaningfully to American cultural life, even at the state and local levels. Too many developing writers with brilliantly original minds simply peter out because the constant rejections are too stressful. For example, the late Richard Tristman (a gifted polymath and my Bennington colleague who succumbed to cancer earlier this year) was presciently exploring "canonicity" in the early 1970s -- but no one wanted to publish his essays on what seemed a very esoteric subject. Richard could and should have produced the definitive magnum opus on canonicity, which would have appeared precisely when the "canon wars" broke out in the 1980s. But poststructuralism was in the ascendant in the 1970s (sound familiar?), and Richard couldn't penetrate the closed critical circles. He got discouraged instead of stubbornly soldiering on, as I did with Italian peasant defiance.

In England and Europe, there is a powerful tradition of highly educated intellectuals writing for a general audience. European journalists often amaze me with their advanced philosophic and cultural knowledge. I would urge you to use your extensive training in the public interest. You can write book reviews for newspapers and give lectures on writers and artists at the public library, as well as submit articles for international quarterly and monthly magazines on a huge variety of subjects that might interest you. Why should you confine your efforts and identity to academe, which is currently (at least in the humanities) in ethical and scholarly decline?

The institutional structure of the modern university is a relatively recent invention. People had profound thoughts and made significant art for thousands of years before American education mushroomed up and then disemboweled itself. Wherever and whenever you can transmit your knowledge to others, you are doing the work of the mind and carrying forward the flame of civilization. The self-sacrificing, teaching priests and nuns of Roman Catholicism (like St. Teresa of Avila) remain an inspiration to me, even though I long ago left the church.

There are thousands of like-minded people out there -- lovers of literature and art who have taken to their bunkers to escape the PC pollution. If you all would ally, you could move mountains. For Jupiter's sake, if imperial Rome could fall, so can the tyranny of theory!
SALON | Oct. 21, 1998

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