The Educational Politics of Human Resources: Humanities Teachers as Resource Managers

Evan Watkins The Educational Politics of Human Resources: Humanities Teachers as Resource Managers ? Although identified in many different ways, intellectuals in humanities departments in the university haven't typically been seen as economic agents. Christopher Newfield reminds us of the importance of university structure in establishing a rather different role: "Dominick LaCapra once remarked that the research university is structured like a nuclear family: the scientists are the dads, and they go out and make the money, and the humanists are the moms, and they stay home and take care of the kids" (341). Men aren't usually socialized to take care of the kids, and the men who set the agendas and terms of value for the humanities during the first half of the century not only borrowed liberally from a scientific vocabulary to describe their work, but also inscribed the morality of arduous effort and the masculine heroism of discovery onto the tasks. Registering the exact measure of ambiguous force to a verse fragment or the precise field of reference for an historical document was above all difficult; not just anyone could do it. Payday, however, was a reminder that no matter how rigorous, the economic value of their efforts was not commensurate with the value of their colleagues's work in the sciences and in the professional schools. As Bruce Robbins has argued in Secular Vocations, one compensation for this economic marginalization in the university was the equation of "genuinely" critical positions with independence from the marketplace. Humanities intellectuals could never expect the financial support extended to colleagues, but conversely their scholarly work could claim to represent the best interests of a general public, uncontaminated by allegiances to financial interests. "Professional" position as academics then appeared as ambivalent at best, registered in the many versions of fall narratives into professionalism that Robbins analyzes. Professionalism is suspect not only because professionals are assumed to represent only their own narrow areas of specialized expertise rather than the public interest, but also because the work objectives of professionals are to some necessary extent market driven. Particularly in English, "service" and "service courses" thus became dirty words, a reminder of the marketplace side of professionalism to be displaced whenever possible onto composition specialists , graduate students and junior faculty. English became a "high volume" field, but most of the volume of student circulation through the discipline was handled by these lower-level workers. 148 the minnesota review The now familiar model of economic change from high volume, mass produced, standardized goods to high value, flexibly specialized goods and services immediately responsive to shifts in specifically targeted markets can't be applied directly to the organization of work in English departments. Nevertheless, there are enough similarities between the model and the assumptions that inform directions of recent educational reform proposals to suggest a range of serious issues. These proposals imply that the educational "value" of departments like English will no longer lie in high volume, in terms of sheer numbers of faculty, courses taught and student credit hours produced. Rather, it will appear in terms of a wide array of relatively specialized services to very different audiences, and the potential effects of such a shift are considerable. Financial and institutional support may well begin to be directed not at English, to be allocated within the department as the department sees fit, but at specific programs within English dependent on perceived demands for services. In such circumstances , programs will be tied first of all to their immediate sources of support. It is already evident that the familiar hierarchy consigning an indiscriminate collection of service courses and instructors to the bottom of the discipline is changing in any number of ways as new forms of those services are often in demand. Composition and composition theory, for example, stand out as the one relatively bright spot in an otherwise deeply depressed market for English Ph.D.s. Suspending for the moment judgments of whether such changes represent a good or bad thing, it's necessary to remember that "culture " and "cultural discourses" have a specific contemporary status that extends well beyond the academic disciplines. In the midst of recent and variously theorized economic changes, corporations discovered...