Can Literary Studies Survive? ENDGAME
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THE CHRONICLE REVIEW CHRONICLE THE Can literary survive? studies Endgame THE CHRONICLE REVIEW ENDGAME CHRONICLE.COM THE CHRONICLE REVIEW Endgame The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it. Preliminary data suggest that hiring is at an all-time low. Entire subfields (modernism, Victorian poetry) have essentially ceased to exist. In some years, top-tier departments are failing to place a single student in a tenure-track job. Aspirants to the field have almost no professorial prospects; practitioners, especially those who advise graduate students, must face the uneasy possibility that their professional function has evaporated. Befuddled and without purpose, they are, as one professor put it recently, like the Last Di- nosaur described in an Italo Calvino story: “The world had changed: I couldn’t recognize the mountain any more, or the rivers, or the trees.” At the Chronicle Review, members of the profession have been busy taking the measure of its demise – with pathos, with anger, with theory, and with love. We’ve supplemented this year’s collection with Chronicle news and advice reports on the state of hiring in endgame. Altogether, these essays and articles offer a comprehensive picture of an unfolding catastrophe. My University is Dying How the Jobs Crisis Has 4 By Sheila Liming 29 Transformed Faculty Hiring By Jonathan Kramnick Columbia Had Little Success 6 Placing English PhDs The Way We Hire Now By Emma Pettit 32 By Jonathan Kramnick Want to Know Where Enough With the Crisis Talk! PhDs in English Programs By Lisi Schoenbach 9 Get Jobs? 35 By Audrey Williams June The Humanities’ 38 Fear of Judgment Anatomy of a Polite Revolt By Michael Clune By Leonard Cassuto 13 Who Decides What’s Good Farting and Vomiting Through 42 and Bad in the Humanities?” 17 the New Campus Novel By Kevin Dettmar By Kristina Quynn and G. Gabrielle Starr Losing Faith in the Humanities The Hypocrisy of Experts 20 By Simon During 45 By Michael Clune The New Humanities Academe’s Extinction Event 25 By Jeffrey J. Williams 47 By Andrew Kay Cover illustration by Jan Feindt for The Chronicle ©2020 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc. All rights the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain forwarded (even for internal use), hosted online, distributed, or other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, bulk orders or special requests, contact The Chronicle at recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without [email protected]. My University is Dying And soon yours will be, too. By SHEILA LIMING live in a land of austerity, and I’m not just er household revenue from the state’s Permanent talking about the scenery. When most peo- Fund, which pays out dividends from oil revenue to ple think about North Dakota — if, indeed, private citizens. they ever do — they probably imagine bare, Our campus has struggled to recover, first, be- ice-crusted prairies swept clean by wind. They cause austerity isn’t over for us, even if the blitzkrieg Isee the clichés, in other words, not the reality — of cuts has stalled for the time being. The second the towns that are, in fact, aesthetically identical reason is because there are fewer people around to so many in America, with all the usual houses now to help see each other through the grueling and shopping malls and parks and freeways. On the work of recovery. We lost our top-ranked women’s campus where I work, though, austerity has many hockey team, which nurtured many an Olympi- meanings and many guises. Some of them you can an over the years; we lost whole programs and de- see, like the swaths of new grass that grow where partments, or else saw them so hollowed from the historic buildings stood just last year, before they inside as to effectively be lost. We survivors lost were demolished in the name of maintenance back- friends, colleagues, and neighbors. No one from logs. Most, though, are invisible. my college, which is the largest at UND, a flagship Starting in 2016, our state university system en- state school, went up for tenure last year, because dured three successive rounds of annual budget there was no one left who was eligible to apply. cuts, with average 10-percent reductions resulting But these are the obvious losses, the ones that in a loss of more than a third of the system’s over- could be counted and read about in the local newspa- all funding. Additional cuts, even, were on the ta- per, or in the The Chronicle. It is the many and linger- ble this past year. And while our state legislators ing surreptitious forms of loss — loss of confidence, ultimately avoided taking yet one more stab at the of spirit, of purpose — that do the real damage. dismembered body of higher education, there has In the spring of 2018, I found myself occupying been no discussion of restoring any of those funds. a spot at a banquet table as part of our campus’s an- The experience of living with the metastasiz- nual Founders Day festivities. The event honors ing effects of austerity grants me some insight into faculty and staff who are retiring from the univer- what has been going on in Alaska. In July, Alaska sity, alongside those who have won awards for ser- Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced a plan to strip the vice, research, or teaching. Two of my departmen- University of Alaska system of 41 percent of its op- tal colleagues were included among the latter, so a erating budget. He has since tempered this plan, small group of us reserved a table (everyone — in- opting instead for a 20-percent cut to be meted out cluding award-winners — must pay to attend). No over a period of three years. After weathering three words can describe the bleakness of an affair recog- straight years of forced retirements, self-protective nizing dozens and dozens of middle-aged, energetic “pivots” to administration, and personal waterloos employees who have been told that it is the end of on my own campus, I cannot help but grieve for my their career. The theme for the evening was a 1950s colleagues in Alaska. Some of them, I know, will sock hop, which couldn’t have been less appropriate lose their jobs, or else be coerced into giving them given the age of most of the honorees. Then there up, as my own colleagues have been (my depart- were the speeches. The president was supposed to ment lost 10 tenured/tenure-track faculty mem- serve as master of ceremonies, but he couldn’t at- bers — half of its roster — in four years and has tend because he was interviewing for a job at anoth- not been permitted to rehire). But some of them, I er university. (He didn’t get it, but he got one a year know, will not, and I grieve for them, too. later and has since moved on.) Back in 2013, when I was finishing up my dis- This is what I’m talking about when I talk about sertation and heading out “on the market,” I did so living with, or surviving, austerity. I’m talking in the company of a number of other tenure-track about the nonmaterial consequences of material hopefuls. The end of that year saw two of us pack- resource depletion, which can last for generations ing up and heading off to new jobs: me to North and make earnest attempts at normalcy appear shot Dakota, another to Alaska. A third colleague at a through with undercurrents of gloom. But the feel- nearby school went off to Wyoming. What all of ing isn’t unique to campuses like mine — campus- these states and all of these schools have in com- es that have already met and locked horns with the mon, of course, are economies that rely on natu- new, ascetic order. ral-resource extraction. When the budget cuts first If you build it, they will come; if you tear it down hit North Dakota in 2016, our state legislature cit- due to a maintenance backlog, they will go some- ed falling oil prices. I had been hired at the tail end where else — if they possibly can. But austerity is an of a boom that was just starting to taper off and re- infection. It spreads with those who run from it. As semble healthily average rates of production. Karl Marx, writing in England but speaking to his na- Oil production in the state has grown since tive Germany, warns in the preface to his famous Cap- then and now outpaces the boom rates of 2014, ital, “De te fabula narratur!” The story is about you. even. But our campus has not recovered. The same will be true in Alaska, where the governor’s veto Sheila Liming is an assistant professor of English at the was spurred by campaign promises touting high- University of North Dakota. the chronicle review 5 ENDGAME English by the Grim Numbers Even elite departments can’t place graduates on the tenure track By EMMA PETTIT ALEX PROIMOS, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS t Columbia University, a poor nothing unusual about admitting 19 doctoral stu- job-placement record for Ph.D candi- dents. And the claim that the department is hands- dates in the English department cre- off and competitive “surprised and slightly dis- ated some “alarm” in the program, ac- mayed” him.) Carlos J.