The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns

5. At the Ends of the Profession

 5 At the Ends of the Profession The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator (but superior at the same time to the abstract mathematical spirit); from technique-as-work one proceeds to technique-as-science and to the humanistic conception of history, without which one remains “specialized” and does not become “directive” (specialized and political). Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 10. I n T h e F o r m a t i o n o f College English, I drew upon Gramsci’s theories much more explicitly than I have here. His perspective has shaped the framework that I have used to examine how literacy and literacy studies have evolved in conjunction with the elaboration of civil society, including the institution of professionalism as the unifying ideology of the middle classes. One of Gramsci’s best known concepts is his deWnition of “organic” intellectuals by their integral involvement with the lived experience of a group, as distinguished from “traditional” intellectuals , such as educators and clerics, who occupy institutional positions from which they profess to speak disinterestedly for the common good. In the passage quoted above, Gramsci pushes that distinction to argue that intellectuals must be engaged with “practical life” to inXuence political developments. Gramsci identiWes a “humanistic” stance with an “active participation” in history in the making.This conception of humanism and the humanities can help us assess how the discipline has responded to the practical bent of modern education. By 1950, almost 60 percent of seventeen-year-olds were graduating  At the Ends of the Profession from high school, and in 1965, over 40 percent of eighteen- to twenty-fouryear -olds were in college (Charles Andersen 418, 435). Majors in English rose apace, and then they suddenly collapsed. Undergraduate and graduate degrees in the Weld both dropped by about 50 percent from 1972 to 1980.1 At century’s end, English departments were producing 20 percent fewer graduates than in 1972, despite a 50 percent increase in college graduates.These declines contributed to a collapse in professional jobs and an increase in “temporary” positions to cover the composition courses that departments had come to depend upon to maintain themselves. Rather than blaming the decline of literary studies on the “NewVocationalism” as Godzich and others have, I want to use Gramsci’s articulation of a “humanistic conception of history” to reXect upon what we are to make of recent developments in literacy and literacy studies. As discussed in the previous chapter, vocationalism has been a unifying point of opposition for the profession since literary critics Wrst secured their standing in higher education by setting themselves above “educationalists” and social scientists.That opposition can be seen as an example of how “traditional ” intellectuals reacted against the elaboration of the technical and managerial expertise that universities began to produce in the Progressive era, as the Ehrenreichs and others have discussed.2 The “professional-managerial classes” were provided with a general education in cosmopolitan values by English departments. However, as the technical and managerial classes developed their own “organic” intellectuals after World War II, they began to articulate their status in terms of specialized expertise rather than as a general professional ethos.With that transition, the culture of expertise came to replace the humanistic “cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie” (Guillory 45). As Guillory and others have discussed, our profession has recently developed its own class of technicians (compositionists) to administer its basic services. Unfortunately , such accounts generally seek to defend the status of literary studies in a space apart, and oVer little help in considering more “practical” conceptions of the humanities such as Gramsci’s. Of course much depends upon how we relate literacy studies to “practical life.” Throughout the history of the liberal and mechanical arts, humanists have looked down upon vocationalism. Since at least theYale Report in 1828, humanists have complained about students being too concerned with working for a living (see Reports on the Course of Instruction). Such complaints have been concentrated on classes of students deemed unworthy of liberal education . In the Progressive era, this hierarchy was used to dismiss such “prag- At the Ends of the Profession  matic, utilitarian disciplines” as education and engineering. Veblen and...