Thanks to my friend Miranda for posting this opinion column by Columbia's Mark C. Taylor on her Facebook page. I'm not sure I have a lot to say. I'm glad he's pointing out the ruinous labor conditions in the humanities, but he seems not to realize that scholars have been struggling with this for years, especially in rhetoric and composition, where many in our field are responsible for employing scores of underpaid TAs and adjuncts to teach the mandatory freshman course. This is not to disparage those scholars, of course--most of them abhor the conditions but have little choice as their hands are tied by administrators. And I guess this really brings me to my problem with Taylor's piece. First, he seems to put all the responsibility in the hands of academic units, whether majors or content-driven collectives, but forgets the role that MBA-trained administrators have turned the university into a coroporation, both for better and for worse. Moreover, it isolates one set of problems without attending (much) to the larger contexts of ranking systems (i.e. USNews), the publishing industry itself, the percieved needs of students, and even the high school system that is based more or less on the same disconnected disciplinary system. Certainly change has to start somewhere, but who's to say it hasn't already begun on a much smaller, more local scale at institutions much less recongizable than but no less important than Columbia? I don't have data to back that up, but who knows?
Update: Michael Bérubé posted on his blog this response from Chroncile.com responding to Taylor's piece. Check it out.
Wendy Kozol’s The War In-Between
2 years ago
We actually had a discussion about this article during a seminar last night because it tied into the professor's observation about the kind of work we were doing in our papers. He pointed out that he felt we were focused more on investigating problems, without the fear of branching out from the literary texts, while still focusing on and making arguments about those texts. I thought that it was a version of what Taylor claims to want, but without the dismissal of the humanities in general.
ReplyDeleteTaylor seems to suggest that problem solving should be done in the vein of the hard sciences, and humanities do not provide anything useful. This seems ironic considering his field. I agree with you that just because Taylor does not see evolution in the academy does not mean it is not happening. I AM seeing it and it pleases me for the most part.
ES