The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities

Preface

p r ef a c e Universities are timeless. A Carnegie Foundation study forty years ago counted sixty-six institutions that have been in continuous operation since 1530: the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man, and sixty-two universities. Professors are a different story. As we know them—autonomous, tenured, afforded the time to research and write as well as teach—professors have only been around for the last eighty years. Yet, as the American university took shape in the twentieth century, the professor became one of its defining features. The Last Professors argues that they are now disappearing from the landscape of higher education. The university is evolving in ways that make their continued presence unnecessary, even undesirable. Over the course of the last century, the American university has risen to prominence both alongside and in opposition to corporate logic and corporate values. Important recent studies such as Derek Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace and David Kirp’s Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line have elaborated on this development.1 My book focuses squarely on the figure of the professor . I exclude from my study those academics whose work is subsidized by government or corporate funding or is supplemented by extensive consulting contracts. This leaves professors of humanities. I take a dispassionate look at how our jobs have evolved and how they have come to be assessed (and devalued) by corporate standards. I speculate on why those jobs are likely to vanish in the not-too-distant future and on what universities might look like without professors. I have written a book that I suspect will be unpleasant for professors and Ph.D. students to read, since I have not only pointed out but also foregrounded the market forces and the deeply entrenched institutional practices that will, I believe, eventually overwhelm us. I paint what could be called an unremittingly bleak picture of what the future holds in store for humanities professors, and I offer nothing in the way of uplifting solutions to the problems that I describe. I think that professors of the humanities have already lost the power to rescue themselves. xi xii Preface Clearly, mine is not the standard approach to the problems of the humanities , a topic that has recently been so richly debated that I only hope that I have done justice to my many interlocutors. This is a different kind of book for two reasons: first, my narrative’s historical sweep goes from the Gilded Age to the digital age. Some might argue that this history is a fitter subject for a series of books and, indeed, I intend to write more. However, I wanted to make this book’s narrative a unified and, I hope, memorable story. Second, the book is more directly personal than many of the contributions to this subject. Certainly, I make the requisite acknowledgments and apologies that one always finds in the prefaces to books on the academy; I am a professor in an English department at a doctoral-granting state university, so of course my whole outlook is colored by my place in a specific discipline in the humanities and at a specific kind of school. My position in the academy thus makes it difficult for me to do justice to the community college, the comprehensive commuter university, and the small liberal-arts college, places where professorial life is defined very differently than it is at the institutions—Brandeis, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Ohio State—where I have spent my time both as a student and as a professor. Nevertheless, my decision to focus on the figure of the professor has brought my narratives and arguments even closer to home. In the course of writing sections of this book about graduate school, going on the job market, academic publishing, tenure, and institutional and individual prestige, I have had to revisit every phase of my own professional life. In the process of researching and writing this book, I have had to step away from my original field of training, eighteenthcentury British literature, and this has ultimately made me feel like an outsider looking in, both on my area of specialty and on the profession at large. This has happened even though I have never ceased being a humanities professor, nor could I be mistaken for anything else. Writing about the last professors as opposed, say, to the university in ruins, has forced...