Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

through a time when outrage with the newfangled in the humanities—

with deconstruction or Marxism or whatever—has become plain lack

of interest. No one’s even angry with us now, just bored.^1

Devastating as that last comment is, I’m afraid it is all too accurate; for con-
sider one further fact that Weisbuch didn’t mention: the economy that could
not accommodate even the best of our new humanities PhDs in 1999 was still
a boom economy, with unemployment at a forty-year low of 4.2 percent. The
subsequent recession has of course exacerbated the situation, as statistics in
the Chronicle of Higher Education and PMLA con¤rm. The most recent MLA
census, in any case, reveals that less than half of new English and 38 percent
of Modern Language PhDs now obtain tenure-track positions.
Weisbuch’s own “solutions” for this dismal state of affairs—he calls them
“Six Proposals to Revive the Humanities”—are the following: (1) to gather
data on our departments, ¤nding out where our graduates get jobs so as
to ensure better planning, (2) to “practice doctoral birth control,” using
Draconian means to cut down the number of entering graduate students,
(3) to “reclaim the curriculum” by having all courses taught by full-time fac-
ulty members rather than adjuncts, (4) to “create jobs beyond academe for
humanities graduates,” (5) to “redesign graduate programs so as to accom-
modate the new community college market where teaching skills are more
important than scholarly expertise,” and (6) “to become newly public”—that
is, to make better contacts with the so-called outside world.^2
The trouble with such practical solutions is that they assume we have a
clear sense of what the humanities do and what makes them valuable: it is
just a matter of convincing those crass others, whether within the university
or outside its walls, that they really need us and can use our products. But
the more we probe the “humanities” question, the more apparent it becomes
that whereas schools of engineering or departments of economics have a
speci¤c curriculum and mandate, the “humanities” umbrella—at my own
university, Stanford, the disciplines included are history, philosophy, religion,
the various language and literature departments, art history, drama, and
musicology—remains amorphous.
What does the term humanities mean today? The mission statement of
the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), found on its Web site
(www.neh.fed.us), reads as follows:

What are the Humanities?

The humanities are not any one thing. They are all around us and evi-

dent in our daily lives. When you visit an exhibition on “The Many

2Chapter 1