Michael A. Winkelman, grammaticorum equitum doctissimus @TotalGrammarCop
18 November 2019
The New Trans-Mediocrity in Literary Studies;
or, The Sovereignty of Salierization
Abstract: What’s curtailing greatness in the study of literature at present? It seems like
nowadays the discipline’s been engulfed by a perfect storm of troubles. This think-piece
seeks to connect fundamental weaknesses underlying most scholarly publications to what
is increasingly being recognized as ineffective instruction in the classroom. Additionally,
this essay scrutinizes the cultural norms and ideological practices that lead to uninspired
timeservers getting promoted, while those exhibiting genuine talent and originality are
rusticated. Related to these institutional processes, it examines the characteristic mindset
held by many of the duplicitous, careerist English professors occupying today’s corporate
university, and the ensuing prevalence of subpar teaching. In so doing, it draws from
incisive fictional texts about the Ivory Tower to illuminate the “false consciousness” or
“doublethink” shared by numerous Humanities faculty in the post-meritocratic academy.
The last section suggests structural changes that would significantly improve and
strengthen the field.
SALIERI [to a priest]: I will speak for you, Father. I speak for all mediocrities in the
world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.
—from the film “Amadeus” (1984)
I. The Wave
Cowabunga! On rare occasions, a tsunami of inspiration rolls in and a few daring,
gifted soul-surfers ready to catch the wave enjoy the thrill-ride of discovery. Perhaps as
many paleologists contend, our ur-Eureka moment happened some 50,000 years ago
when a postulated prehistoric cognitive revolution sparked major advances in cave art,
weapons, burial artifacts, and general craftsmanship. Later instances include painters in
Renaissance Italy, playwrights in Jacobethan England, and modern astrophysicists such
as Hubble and Einstein.
This essay, in contrast, will examine the reverse situation: a field structurally
moribund and hostile to reformation. I mean, of course, the discipline known as English
at American universities and colleges today. In light of what’s known about fostering
bona fide learning and creative intellectual development, it will analyze this uninspiring,
crumbling, dysfunctional state of affairs. Following this diagnosis, it will suggest
remedies to ameliorate matters, should any parties be interested.1
Literature departments are fast becoming a joke. Nowadays systemic malaise and
lameness have reached pandemic proportions. Indeed, the revelation of the Grievance
Studies Hoax in 2018 suggests that mainstream practices have reached a tipping point of
satirical self-parody. At present, English shares more with failing states than with the
Republic of Letters, as entrenched phonies deep in denial cling to illegitimate power and
ruthlessly fight off dissenters. A substantial subset of critical university studies, a genre
experiencing exuberant growth, has anatomized English in part because of its status as
the sinking flagship of higher education.2
There’s been widespread agreement regarding
the causes for the decline of both literary studies and the liberal arts more broadly: the
corporatization of the university with the concomitant expansion of overpaid
administrative positions; the follies of P.C. post-structuralist Theory and its tenacious
offshoots; the coddling of millennial snowflakes by their helicopter or Velcro parents; the
general dumbing down of undergraduates in the Digital Age; failing public schools; and
simple old-fashioned laziness.3
Many clear-eyed observers have come to believe that
affirmative action has also had deleterious effects. Accepting these converging verdicts,
my miserere will explore two significant ramifications. First will be the present state of
play for research; second will be a collective faculty mindset given current ideologies and
institutional practices. I contend that the prevailing fashion in publishing consists mainly
of derivative theoretical mash-ups, and this mode of pseudo-scholarship is closely tied to
the dominant consumer-driven model of ineffective, unrigorous pedagogy; I am hereby
dubbing this situation “The New Trans-Mediocrity.”
II. PhD: Piled Higher and Deeper
There he was, devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a
glum repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life,
triumphantly ignorant of the English language—there he was in priggish New England,
crooned over by the old and caressed by the young—oh, having a grand time and fooling
everybody; and here was I.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Over the last several years, scholarship in the Humanities has gotten really weak.
Far from being original research or beneficial contributions to our knowledge, most of it
seems as fresh as sitcoms or “reality” shows on TV. How can insiders remain so
clueless?4
Ironically, most of it is poorly written and marked by hard-to-digest mumbo
jumbo, a malady diagnosed since the 1970s.5
Sanctimonious, pompous authors also
frequently affect a grating tone unpleasant to read. It seems that audiences (if anyone
actually reads it, an open question) now accept or expect just this sort of coded discourse,
rather than prose that’s smooth, graceful, and pleasurable, like a good conversation with a
wise, genial old friend.
For instance, circular, mystifying High Theory still prospers—in spite of being
sdeignful of evidence and bordering on nonsense. Behold Walter Benn Michaels’ “The
Beauty of a Social Problem (e.g. unemployment)” in Twentieth-Century Literature 57
(2011). Larded with distracting subclauses, parentheses, buzz terms, and iterated
“more’s,” it is the opposite of clear:
So insofar as our interest is in periodizing (“then”) postmodernism, the first thing to note
is that its consolidation into a more or less identifiable set of theoretical commitments and
artistic practices is more a phenomenon of the years since the mid-‘70s (economists
sometimes call it the period of the Washington Consensus) than of the ones before (which
they sometimes call the period of the Treaty of Detroit). And the second is that if, with
the advantage of hindsight, we think about postmodernism not only in relation to what
Jameson in 1984 called “multinational capital” (Postmodernism 3) but, more specifically,
in relation to the rise in inequality that has accompanied what today we more usually call
neoliberalism, we can perhaps say something useful about postmodernism as a theory of
knowledge, as a theory of the ontology of the work of art, and most obviously, as a theory
of social organization. And finally, the useful thing I want to say is that the essence of the
postmodern has been precisely its theorization of equality, by which I mean its
disarticulation of difference from inequality and, more generally, from conflict and
contradiction. (309-10)
In-depth microanalysis of this soundbite, which has little relation to literature per se,
would, I fear, exhaust my Gentle Reader’s patience. Instead, let me briefly note that such
preposterous verbose posturings typify the field and its discontents at this moment.
An additional ailment is the worship of politically correct sacred cows. It’s nearly
impossible to find an argument that isn’t doctrinaire to the core. Put another way, English departments favor diversity in everything except thought. The idols of the marketplace
casting the longest shadows remain race, class, and gender. (At long last they’ve been
extended to queer figure skating with the appearance of Erica Rand’s Red Nails, Black
Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure on and off the Ice.) They exist alongside the other
household gods in the pantheons of Identity Politics and strong constructivism, along
with various flavors of socialism. Joining them are au courant hot topics: comparative
mash-ups, media studies, pop culture, and digital humanities.
A perusal of leading journals reveals innumerable samples. For starters, Meg
Wesling’s interrogations of Sapphic Oriental fiction could’ve been traced from a pattern.
In “Neocolonialism, queer kinship, and diaspora: contesting the romance of the family in
Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory,”
in Textual Practice (2011), she writes:
I want to suggest that queer diaspora provides a framework for thinking through the
complicity of state policy, global neoliberal corporate regimes of exploitation and
accumulation, and intimate mechanics of desire and attachment. . . . In looking at
Mootoo’s and Danticat’s work, I will explore how narratives of diaspora reveal a
complicity between state violence and sexualized discipline—or rather, how ‘home’ and
family become sites for the reproduction of state violence, episodes in which the
enforcement of political power is privatized into the realm of the family and thus
rendered natural, ‘private’, or invisible. (651)
The title of a similar piece divulges the content and slant, “‘There is no sin in our love’:
Homoerotic Desire in the Stories of Two Muslim Women Writers” by Indrani Mitra in
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 29 (2010): “Chughtai’s story . . . explores alternate
sites of pleasure and desire, legitimizes female libidinal energies, and exposes patriarchal
double standards” (319). Of course it does.
Two studies of contemporary films set in the New York business world offer
further evidence of how hipness itself has gone stale and flat. The Girlfriend Experience
(2009) focuses on Chelsea (played by hardcore X-rated starlet Sasha Gray), a high-end
prostitute who supplies not only sex but also companionship—hence the title. American
Psycho (novel by Brett Ellis Easton, 1991; film 2000) deals with an ’80s Wall Street
hotshot who moonlights as a serial killer. In both articles these movies are read as
Marxist parables. Michael Sayeau concludes in “‘This number is the nadir of passion’:
Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience” in English Language Notes 48 (2010):
“Soderbergh’s systematic under-fulfillment of the genre [i.e. pornography] that he has
taken up with The Girlfriend Experience crossmaps this genre dysfunction from the realm
of the sub-categorized call girl back up not only into the structures that inform the
production of today’s popular cinema, but out into the world in which that cinema is
produced” (159).6
Richard Godden, in “Fictions of fictitious capital: American Psycho
and the poetics of deregulation,” in Textual Practice 25 (2011), arrives at the same point,
albeit with more meandering academese and pretentious name-dropping along the way:
My interpretive gambit (to modify Melville), risks translating American Psycho
(a dead, deadening and deadly book), into a ‘hideous and intolerable allegory.’ But
perhaps allegoresis may be thought to complement Ellis’ point, in that it is arguably an
apt poetic for a dead class-fragment. Borrowing from Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of
German Tragic Drama (1925), I shall ghost a bare case for the claim that a financial
culture dedicated to the delivery of mortal wounds is liable to generate allegorical
commentary. . . . I offer Benjamin’s reconstruction of a poetics apt to a mortifying world,
as a final gloss on American Psycho, in order hesitantly to suggest that Ellis stumbles
from a study of the fetish (as an affective and semi-secretive device for dealing with
loss); through an attendant anxiety over what has been lost; and so; via immanent
allegoresis, towards a critique of the workings of fictitious capital within the US economy
during the 1980s. (862-63)
Such “interpretive gambits” have come to seem interchangeable and denuded of
meaningful content—as insubstantial as ghosts.
Another maneuver is to dig up trifles and “re-present” them as groundbreaking.
Giulia Pacini’s “A Culture of Trees: The Politics of Pruning and Felling in Late
Eighteenth-Century France” in Eighteenth-Century Studies 41 (2007) exemplifies this
subspecies of historical-cultural-political critique: “Thus, representations of trees in the
late eighteenth century were often used for argumentative purposes. In particular, a
culture of stewardship shed a moral and political light on scenes of pruning and felling,
which therefore read as suggestive calls for intervention in, or conservation of, the French
geopolitical and cultural landscape” (12).7
Even more predictable, and closer to
(unintentional) burlesque, is Elizabeth Goodhue’s “At the Margins of Menippean
Dialogue: Sarah Fielding’s ‘History of Anna Boleyn’ and the Muted Female Figures of
Lucian’s Satiric Underworld” in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 29 (2010):8
After examining the antifeminist logic that undergirds ancient and modern dialogues of
the dead authored by men, I demonstrate how Sarah Fielding and her fellow
bluestocking, Elizabeth Montagu, altered the genre’s tropes to interrogate that
longstanding bias, adapting posthumous speech to serve feminist ends. . . .
Fielding’s Boleyn emerges from the margins of A Journey from This World to
the Next’s Menippean afterlife with a decidedly earnest voice. Neither angel nor whore,
she speaks as a woman whose experience on the marriage market makes her justified in
satirizing coquettish men and critiquing the patriarchal political system that confers value
on women solely for their beauty. (263, 266)
She may be making valid points; however, these cookie-cutter phrases have become
thoroughly pro forma and now sound utterly undifferentiated; one can imagine a
computer program generating such “discourse.”
This kneejerk hermeneutical orthodoxy connects to another malady infecting
criticism today: a palpable allergy to deep research.9
It’s inexcusable how much stuff
lacking a solid foundation gets disseminated. Most editors and readers at journals and
presses have eschewed their gatekeeping functions in this regard, as have book reviewers.
It’s as if instead there’s a collective amnesia pervading the Ivory Tower, and going back
into the library stacks or archives—the essence of scholarship once upon a time—is no
longer required. Even with Inter Library Loan (I.L.L.) and myriad online bibliographical
databases of primary and secondary sources readily available, real research still involves
a fair amount of effort, like Sherlock Holmes uttering “the game’s afoot” and tirelessly
stalking the clues left by his quarry. I’ve lost count of how many times an introduction
has led me to remark to myself, “Wow! Does the author really not know that this precise
issue was thoroughly treated in a classic study a few decades back?” Yet the mandate to
publish has trumped standards.
This adds up to work that is unexciting and unappealing. Renaissance vates John
Milton observed in Areopagitica that Truth must be pursued actively: “Well knows he
who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our
limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her
waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity
and tradition” (186).10 An apt gloss of scholarship nowadays. Instead of fresh water, we
get old wine in new bottles, or worse, vinegar passed off as the finest champagne. Once,
things like feminist rehabilitations of Aphra Behn or Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
Newcastle, or following the money trail in novels like Clarissa were new and produced
original insights. Now, though, these approaches have simply been exhausted, like fields
that have been overharvested. The hoopla is louder than ever, but we’re actually getting
lazy writing from academics exhibiting their groveling pusillanimity as they juice their
c.v.’s and demonstrate their ideological soundness. And since, as has been noted for
millennia, novelty and discernment are largely what makes work within a given form
worth paying attention to, we’re left with stuff that’s less and less readable. It’s like pop
music: hackneyed, commercialized, undifferentiated, stultifying.
Recent writings on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) illustrate this replication
crisis. The novel itself is a rich masterpiece and not unworthy of in-depth critical
attention. One can readily imagine stimulating investigations into it from several different
angles. There’s the psychology of the heroine and the literary artistry to portray her
development; the narrative technique and Gothic fairy-tale plotting; the autobiographical
elements and critique of education at the Lowood School; the smoldering romance with
the Byronic Mr. Rochester; even sound avenues for examining its function as intertext for
the prequel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966) and the meta-fantasy The Eyre Affair
by Jasper Fforde (2003). That’s a fair amount to cover—it would not be unreasonable to
expect a few monographs and articles presenting different perspectives, the MLA guide
Approaches to Teaching Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, plus some background work on
the author’s family and other details. Ah, but what one turns up are hundreds of items all
told, including dozens of feminist readings. These may be earnest and sophisticated, but
if we step back from the Brontë industry, it should be clear that all this is excessive,
resulting in either decreasingly original, far-fetched, or marginal offerings.
What Alexander Pope observed three centuries ago in An Essay on Criticism
(1711) still rings true. Foolish critics strive to be fashionable; moreover, they’re
frequently less interested in expounding true quality than in expressing their jealousy:
Some ne’er advance a Judgment of their own,
But catch the spreading Notion of the Town;
They reason and conclude by Precedent,
And own stale Nonsense which they ne’er invent. (408-11)
. . . . .
Envy will Merit as its Shade pursue,
But like a Shadow, proves the Substance true. (466-67)
Pope’s ideal critic, in contrast, would be learned, urbane, “unbiased,” reasonable, and
“Blest with a Taste exact, yet unconfin’d; / A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind”
(631-42). These assets remain in short supply; nowadays Substance is mainly
overshadowed by stale Nonsense.
It may well be, as Sturgeon’s Law tells us, that 90% of anything is crap. If so, one
could defend the inefficient status quo as indispensable for finding the diamonds in the
rough. Contrarily, I believe, the vast majority of literary scholarship amounts to a sizeable
waste of time and effort (and funding), and is produced not in the search for new, true
information but rather to pad the résumés of bootlicking careerists.
III. Cognitive Dissonance
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre
educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
—A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (1983)
The habits of mind responsible for such unremarkable, slavish publishing do not
translate into effective pedagogy. That is, professors doing timid, subpar research do not
magically become audacious, challenging guides to the perplexed in the classroom.
Rather, they spoon-feed students trendy dogmas of dubious validity to be regurgitated on
essays and exams; they privilege “me-search” and identity politics over dispassionate,
reality-based inquiry; and at more prestigious universities, they neglect undergraduates to
focus on the scholarly rat-race. By extension, all the involved parties tacitly endorse a
credentialist, transactional diploma-mill ethos where a grade of A is the norm. In short, as
noted by many critics, college classrooms now supply mainly a self-esteem-enhancing,
consumerist experience.11 This aggregate lack of learning is the most important result of
the sea-change surrounding the bachelor degree. It affects politics, the economy, and
much more. However, since this issue has drawn so much attention of late, I wish to
ponder one puzzling implication of this set of conditions: the mentality of today’s twofaced, third-rate faculty. What the bleep could they be thinking?!
At one level, basic pragmatism dominates their reasoning. After a few semesters
of indoctrination, grad students know that coveted tenure-line assistant professorships are
bestowed upon well-socialized conformists: those whose work, like Cold War loyalty
oaths, broadcasts their risk-averse submissiveness; those who achieve popularity in the
classroom by hyperinflating grades, by delivering feel-good lite edutainment, and by
pandering to the lowest common denominator; and generally to those orbiting
obsequiously in the spheres of established arbiters of taste.
For careerists, the trade-off between advancement and principle is a no-brainer.
The prestige, quality of life, salary, and job security of the tenurati differ immensely from
the precariate: those woebegone losers holding part-time adjunct gigs or Alt-Ac positions
outside the university, where many Humanities Ph.D.’s wash up in the New Economy.12
It’s comparable to the current music scene: in our age of shallow celebrity worship,
wannabe pop stars take the commercial route no questions asked. They go for a sound
and look that is market-tested and focus-grouped, churning out Autotuned singles or
catchy ringtones and playing the media-whore game.13 Questions about selling out or
artistic integrity hardly even surface anymore: the Fame Machine has become, selfevidently, the only imaginable worthwhile goal. However, while in both venues success
depends on relinquishing virtue, important distinctions exist between the music industry
and learning.14 First, now more than ever, eclectic music connoisseurs have ready access
to non-mainstream choices: Delta blues, English madrigals, or Mexican narcocorridos.
Theoretically, college English majors should be able to select high-quality options too,
but unless they’re unusually well informed, demanding, and lucky, they’ll end up
receiving some version of this prevailing miseducation almost everywhere. All that will
differ will be the emphases and the cachet of the sheepskin.15
Pragmatism provides a compelling motive force for such illicit, cowardly
accommodations by scheming faculty members, but I sense it’s not the whole answer for
this widespread trahison des clercs. What goes in on inside their heads (if not their hearts
and souls) as such supposedly brainy people, claiming to be dedicated to Education with
the best intentions, justify or whitewash their actions? Unlike guilt-wracked Macbeth, the
New Mediocrities seem blind to their dastardly deeds. What Renaissance scholar Stephen
Greenblatt (profoundly compromised by his own late-career leveragings) said of
Shakespeare’s Lancastrian monarchy is apposite: “its moral authority rests upon a
hypocrisy so deep that the hypocrites themselves believe it.”16 I suppose this attitude
depends partly on rationalization. One starts down the primrose path with minor
concessions (teaching a fun film over a demanding masterpiece here, caving in to a
whiny coed for an unwarranted grade boost there), which, when rewarded, are
internalized as ongoing “professionalization.”17 Over time, such a yielding stance
becomes habitual. It gets easier and easier to suppress honest self-examination and to
equate success with evidence of providential favor. The ends justify the means: “I will
secure a position of power within the system and then I’ll have a chance to make things
better,” one tells oneself. Eventually, the Career itself becomes the overarching goal;
youthful idealism falls by the wayside as new occasions to maneuver upwards arise. Pace
rare saints like Thomas à Becket or Sir Thomas More, martyred by the royal powers that
be, few can resist such Faustian bargains.
These elemental erosions of morality, as old as official bureaucracies in human
history, inspired Sir Thomas Wyatt’s court satires five centuries ago. Inheriting Wyatt’s
spirit is Jeff Schmidt, author of the sharpest analysis of today’s toxic work environment
—toxic, that is, for imaginative and honest individuals, but empowering and nourishing
for weaseling suck-ups and brown-nosers. Yet not only has his book Disciplined Minds:
A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes
Their Lives (2000) gone unheeded, its publication got the author fired from the journal
Physics Today (though not of course for the quality of his work there, which was never
faulted).18 Like Wyatt and other whistleblowers, Schmidt was outcast and threatened for
speaking truth to power. Disciplined Minds persuasively exposes how white-collar
knowledge workers are chosen because they toe the company line:
[The] professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can
trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an
assigned ideology. The political and intellectual timidity of today’s most highly educated
employees is no accident. (16) . . . Individuals are selected to do professional work not
because they are more creative than others, but because they can be trusted to make sure
every detail of what they create is politically correct from their employers’ points of
view. . . . Professionals generally avoid the risk inherent in real critical thinking and
cannot properly be called critical thinkers. They are simply ideologically disciplined
thinkers. (41) . . . Employers reward mediocrity and punish excellence. (210)
Schmidt has elucidated something commonplace yet tacit in English Departments and
similar professional organizations. There, mortarboard mafias beholden to their own code
of omertà exert extreme pressure to curtail arete. Schmidt’s explanation of the illusion of
critical thinking can help us to understand how the selection process has generated a
dependent cadre of unimpressive time-servers. Joining the Humanities faculty of today’s
post-meritocratic university is like pledging a sorority: a candidate should be, figuratively
speaking, cute enough to maintain the chapter’s prettiness quotient but not so hot she
steals the spotlight. In other words, when one realizes that talent or percipience are red
flags for search committees and PRT reviewers looking for comfortable compliancy, it
becomes clearer that people are promoted because they’ll perform as uncritical drones for
the university-industrial complex. Compliant, deferential Rosencrantzes and
Guildensterns ascend, while critical, poetical Hamlets crash and burn. Or, in the words of
agitator William Deresiewicz, “tenure [is] a system for enshrining mediocrity.”19
Teachers, then, have become servile facilitators for the “income delivery devices”
formerly known as students, and promotion has become a limbo pole to shimmy under
rather than a hurdle to jump over.
It’s a situation where “the endeavor,” as Matthew Arnold described it in The
Function of Criticism at the Present Time, “to see the object as in itself it really is,”
amounts to a fatal flaw (806). Again, this phenomenon isn’t new. A century ago, in his
passionate rebuke The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of
the Universities by Business Men (1918), the great sociologist Thorstein Veblen pointed
out that “a businesslike system of accountancy standardizes and measures this instruction
by mechanically gauged units of duration and number, amplitude and frequency, and so
discountenances work that rises above a staple grade of mediocrity” (124).20
Other factors also affect what goes into the make-up of the vast majority of
English Departments in the here-now. Envy plays a significant role, turning virtuoso
ability into a hindrance rather than an asset. As explained by mathematician André Weil’s
logarithmic rule, Weil’s Law: “first-rate scholars and administrators tend to hire other
first-rate scholars, but second-raters tend to hire third-raters, third-raters tend to hire fifthraters, and so on, until quality diverges towards minus infinity. Weil’s law of academic
hiring partially explains the collegiate corruption in the U.S.”21 Current institutional
practices guarantee that resentful, jealous hacks are well positioned to sabotage those
who are truly gifted. “In medio tutissimus ibis” (you’ll be safest in the middle). In
responding to her own sniping critics, the seventeenth-century “Mexican Phoenix” and
poet extraordinaire Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz pointed out:22
That politically barbaric law of Athens by which any person who excelled by
cause of his natural gifts and virtues was exiled from his Republic in order that he not
threaten the public freedom still endures, is still observed in our day, although not for the
reasons held by the Athenians. Those reasons have been replaced by another, no less
efficient though not as well founded, seeming, rather, a maxim more appropriate to that
impious Machiavelli—which is to abhor one who excels, because he deprives others of
regard. And thus it happens, and thus it has always happened. (28-29)
This dubious constellation of shady practices have resulted in an ecosystem that is
fundamentally homogenous (despite minor surface differences between subfields and
specialists). Operating in such a closed shop also makes it easier to suppress any voice of
conscience or dissenting views because one’s colleagues share a similar self-interest.
W.B. Yeats had this to say on the subject in his mordant poem “The Scholars”: “All think
what other people think; / All know the man their neighbour knows” (9-10). Now,
nonetheless, a confederacy of dunces functions to maintain the pretense that they do
diligent, top-level work for the future well-being of the commonwealth, marked by
intelligence, veracity, and high standards across the board. This is ironic not least because
professors routinely deride the weaknesses of their students (without of course giving
them the low or flunking grades they’ve earned). There’s also been a trickle down effect
of late, as ill-prepared young adults fashioned by the current system enter the
professoriate. At present, then, several forces are acting in concert to maintain this house
of cards.
We have, therefore, overdetermined causes for the situation: both higher-ups in
administration and student-consumers prefer unbrilliant minds teaching classes.23 There
still seems to be something more about the mindset at work here that merits additional
exploration. I mean, getting a doctorate, actually publishing something resembling
scholarly research, and leading college classes (even piece of cake ones) entails an aboveaverage IQ and some capacity for mental rigor. Shouldn’t a few of these P.I.N.O.s
(professors in name only) have an inkling or dim awareness of the distance between
rhetoric and reality? (This is especially true given that calls for change are ratcheting up,
and several empirical works are providing prima facie data that higher education is
unsuccessful in actually transmitting fundamental knowledge and skills to
undergraduates.) Lauding the Emperor’s New Clothes requires a strained effort these
days.
Unfortunately, this analyst was unable to recruit informants from this strange new
tribe of faculty frauds to reveal their thinking (“How do you defend your position as a
craven, deceitful mountebank?”). The emergence, however, of repentant, apologetic
confessionals, jump-started by Frank Lentricchia’s “Last Will and Testament of an ExLiterary Critic: A Theorist Rejects His Calling” in Lingua Franca (1996) lays bare the
hollowness experienced by at least a few zealots. Turning to fictional texts, creative
works of the imagination by close observers of institutional dysfunction, can shed more
light on these manifestations of bad faith.
The classic account of this peculiar modern maladroitness remains the definition
of “doublethink” in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out,
knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against
logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was
impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was
necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was
needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to
the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness,
and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just
performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.
(32-33).
Writing just after World War II, Orwell’s primary fears were fascism, technocratic
totalitarianism, and the suppression of individual spirit. His work also pays a lot of
attention to “Newspeak” and thought control.24 Readers are still engrossed by his bleak
depictions; here I simply want to stress how perfectly this Orwellian description applies
to most English professors. I also would venture a guess that the current post-Theory
cohort (following the marching orders of the banally evil deans watching over them),
having been raised on a junk-food diet of relativist hermeneutics, are perfectly poised to
embrace and internalize the fuzzy logic and groupthink required to “succeed.” Most of
the new breed of Humanities educators are “doublethinkers.” Or to look at it from the
other side: since they haven’t been schooled in the natural sciences, admonished to act
ethically, nor trained rigorously in the medieval trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic,
they readily accept without qualms the moral flexibility the system demands.25
As it applies to the Groves of Academe, these theories and practices are well
illustrated in the macabre satire The Lecturer’s Tale by James Hynes.26 The Tale, centered
around one Nelson Humboldt, marginalized member of the English Department at the
University of the Midwest, is silver-tongued and allusive in extremis (e.g. “Nelson had
felt positively Anglo-Saxon, like a lonely scop whose liege lord had died, whose wierd it
was to plough the icy waves in search of a new mead hall” 105). One bleak joke running
through The Tale is that although the various parties involved, covering the typical
menagerie of figures (the Eurotrash deconstructionist, the dead-white-male canonist, the
chic feminist, the stereotypical creative writers embodying clichés, the African-American
token) proclaim the most idealistic beliefs when it comes to their publishing and
Winkelman 14
pedagogical agenda, they behave in the most deceitful, backstabbing, Machiavellian, and
selfish manner when it comes to internecine departmental squabbles. Like other satires, it
utilizes exaggeration, yet nonetheless it presents a painfully recognizable portrait of the
contemporary professoriate. It captures the deep duplicity, the core lies masked by a
veneer of truthiness. It’s actually as scary as it is funny; for really, it’s mostly now all
about dishonest charlatans maintaining privilege and providing an enjoyable
undergraduate experience, masquerading as a system that’s egalitarian and merit-based.
NOTES
1 My argument contests business as usual, as represented in documents such as glowing, rose-colored
department websites and annual reports; sterling faculty evaluations; and sparkly admissions viewbooks.
References to the Chronicle of Higher Education will be abbreviated CHE.
2 See, i.a., Williams, “Deconstructing Academe”; Newfield, Unmaking the Public University; Ginsberg,
Fall of the Faculty; Bousquet, How the University Works; Noble, Digital Diploma Mills.
3 For answers to Nicholas Carr’s question, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” see Carr, The Shallows;
Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation. Cf. Forni, The Thinking Life, Moss, Education and Its Discontents,
and other proponents of contemplative, old-school slow reading.
4 E.g., the Sokal Hoax: physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article of postmodern pseudo-scientific gibberish
to the journal Social Text, which didn’t see that it was a parody and published it (see The Editors of Lingua
Franca, Sokal Hoax). Examples in this section are based on random shelf-reading of current serials in
Literature at a major research university library. They are not from my own field nor by any individuals
I’ve met nor from schools where I have any connections.
5 See Vidal, “Hacks of Academe,” Pinker, A Sense of Style, 57-76.
6 Sayeau also describes how publicity before the film’s release “played an elaborate but highly familiar
game with its potential audience,” much as literary criticism now does (155).
7 We might’ve been spared Pacini’s piece had she heeded the warning about cliché in Alexander Pope’s
Essay on Criticism: “Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze, / In the next Line, it whispers thro’
the Trees” (350-51).
8 N.b. this text is attributed to Sarah Fielding but was published as her brother’s, the novelist Henry
Fielding (see Goodhue, “At the Margins,” 266).
9 There are exceptions to the plague of research lite, such as high-quality, collaborative editing projects of
old texts involving manuscript collation and paleography, some with user-friendly online components.
10 N.b. modernized spelling of early modern English in this essay is by the author.
11 The amount of smart criticism about the declining state of undergraduate education, especially with
respect to the liberal arts, and the encroachment of corporate values and practices on campus has become
immense, but to dip your toes in the water, see, i.a., Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift; Donoghue, The
Last Professors; DeMillo, Abelard to Apple; Brandon, The Five-Year Party; Sykes, Fail U.
12 See Brook, The Trap; Childress, The Adjunct Underclass.
13 This turn in music recalls a feature of leading dystopian literature. Pace Horace, pop culture, by its very
absurdity, has become way tough to satirize, but cf. Carl Hiaassen, Star Island; Cintra Wilson, Colors
Insulting to Nature; Libba Bray, Beauty Queens; and the film “God Bless America.”
14 On the trend towards selling out, see my forthcoming essay “‘It’s a Ho’ Wide World’: Prostitution as a
Conceptual Metaphor for Advancement in Our Times.”
15 The minority of traditional Great Books curricula and publications defending liberal arts education show
that there’s been some effort to maintain Western Civ, but the fundamental issues delineated herein appear
to be ubiquitous.
16 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations 55. Greenblatt’s description of clerks at the Renaissance Papal
Curia in The Swerve is, perhaps unintentionally, ironically similar to conditions for many of today’s
beleaguered professoriate: “The problem was not only a matter of this or that difficult personality; it was
structural. The papal court had, to serve its own needs, brought into being a class of rootless, ironic
intellectuals. These intellectuals were committed to pleasing their masters, on whose patronage they utterly
depended, but they were cynical and unhappy. How could the rampant cynicism, greed, and hypocrisy, the
need to curry favor with perverse satraps who professed to preach morality to the rest of mankind, the
endless jockeying for position in the court of an absolute monarch, not eat away at whatever was hopeful
and decent in anyone who breathed that air for very long? What—apart from attempts at character
assassination and outright assassination—could be done with the seething feeling of rage?” (146-47).
17 One Orwellian aspect of knowledge work today is that in many ways, “professionalism” has become
synonymous with “unprofessionalism.” The developmental arc of the heroine in the recent film Sicario
(2015) exemplifies this, as she strives to advance her career and uphold the law by breaking it.
18 In a similar vein, historian Jacques Barzun observed that “the conditions of that life in the present-day
university are intolerable for anyone with a love of truth and a sense of honor” (CHE, 2013).
19 Deresiewicz, “Love on Campus,” 40. N.b. Deresiewicz has also published a insightful, inflammatory
attack on practices at the most selective campuses and the stratified socioeconomic system they support:
Excellent Sheep. It’s a timely, provocative book with great insights and serious flaws.
20 Sociologist Max Weber, a fellow maverick, followed suit a year later, in 1919, asking of academics: “Do
you think that, year after year, you will be able to stand seeing one mediocrity after another promoted over
you and still not become embittered and dejected?” N.b. John Dos Passos composed a moving elegiac
prose-poem about Veblen, The Bitter Drink (1936; the title alludes to the death of Socrates).
21 Quoted in Flinn and Crumbley, Measure Learning, 27. Cf. Italy’s universities, “rife with . . . i baroni—
‘barons’—powerful professors and department heads who create academic fiefdoms, blocking young,
talented researchers; promoting yes-men and relatives; and fixing job competitions” (CHE, May 4, 2012,
A12). There’s no way at present to know what percentage of job searches in American higher education are
fixed; but many are based on personal rather than professional factors (besides, of course, the imputed
prestige and flash of candidates’ credentials rather than actual talent). There’s also clearly a trend toward
hiring fresh blank slates or empty vessels who can promise everything to everyone without being
encumbered by an actual record. The structures of the hiring process have become instrumental in the
corruption and mediocritization of higher education nowadays. The recent Varsity Blues admissions
bribery scandal and Supreme Court cases about affirmative action are also revealing just how insignificant
merit per se has become in contemporary American academia.
22 This trope is also expressed by Medea, another wise foreign lady: “If you are thought superior to those
who have / Some reputation for learning, you will become hated. / I have some knowledge myself of how
this happens; / for being clever, I find that some will envy me, / Others object to me” (Euripides, 300-04).
23 What gadfly Lewis Lapham stated a decade ago has become an established principle: “Misjudgment in
high places can be accepted as a constant; so can the habits of mind that favor criminal incompetence”
(Harper’s, June 2004).
24 See also Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.”
25 In Book One of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Hythloday suggests that would-be philosopher-courtiers take
such an accommodating “indirect approach” (ille obliquus ductus), invoking sharp disagreement from the
character of More himself (96-101).
26 The Lecturer’s Tale begins with the campus clock tower striking thirteen, an allusion to 1984. In this
bibliophile’s considered judgment, it belongs in the pantheon of great college fiction.
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