Day Late, Dollar Short: The Next Generation and the New Academy (review)

Day Late, Dollar Short: The Next Generation and the New Academy edited by Peter C. Herman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. vii 233. {54.50 cloth; {17.95 paper.

Start with the cliché that provides the title for this new collection of essays about English professors, "day late, dollar short"—meaning, you got here too late, and you didn't bring enough resources anyhow. Meaning you're out of luck because the game is over, even before you begin. (It depends on who you are, of course, because some of us did get here before it was too late, which is also part of the story.) But then there's the subtitle, "the next generation and the new academy," which implies that maybe there's hope yet for the academic Generation X who arrived after the end of all the big deals that were the making of the boomer-generation's careers: the theory invasion and the culture wars, and the trinitarian grappling of race/class/gender, and above all the burgeoning growth of enrollments that created the post-World-War-II academy. And this is probably where your eyes start to glaze over. You're thinking it's just another cliché rehash of the same old same old—the on-going "crisis" that seems the only story academics are able to tell about themselves nowadays.

And that's true, about this being a crisis story, like so many others— stories abetted by the same academic "stars" who populate the footnotes here, some of whom even take a hand in the discussions: Gerald Graff and Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Michael Bé rubé, Cary Nelson and Stanley Fish, et cetera, et cetera. But this collection is also—crucially—something more. It's a generational story about a future betrayed, both pedagogically and institutionally, and the people who got stuck holding the bag. As the editor Peter C. Herman characterizes them, they're the X Generation of "critics who are now at the beginning of their careers, people who are in graduate school or are assistant professors. If tenured, then tenured only recently" (1). That's who this book is about, and largely by. And that's who has shown up—it seems—a day late and dollar short. "To summarize," Herman writes, "for most of the next generation. ... itmight not be exaggerating to say that . . . getting a position will be the trauma that will haunt the rest of our professional lives for two reasons: the wretchedness of the process and, for the successful few (meaning those who have gotten tenure-track positions), the awareness that so many of our friends have not been so lucky" (16).

As David Galef suggests in his essay, "The message is clear: In a time of cutbacks in English departments, universities are nonetheless expanding and diversifying their writing programs, with an emphasis on teaching students how to produce effective prose. Unfortunately, this message came as belated news to those of us schooled in the literary theory practiced by our professors and handed on to us as professionalism. . . . Our generation, downsized here and unemployed there, has yet to find itself crucial to any enterprise" (164). Galef, happily, does have a job. (He's an associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi). But a lot of his generation do not, and never will, at least not a "real job," "crucial to any enterprise" (as he so poignantly puts it) with only 25 percent of America's 1.2 million professors being tenured, and only 40 percent being tenure track, which is a drop of 20 percent from only two decades ago (218). And that is the real issue—or set of issues—that this collection explores.

Young scholars today must find their careers in a world undreamed of in the philosophies of their teachers, who have shown a scrupulous (if benignly ignorant) care in not preparing students...