A Descent to Cultural Studies.(Brief Article)

When we encourage young people to suffer the rigors of higher education, we do not think enough has been said if we merely point to the connection between a college degree and a better-paying job. A college education, we believe, is a chance to broaden one's mind, a precious opportunity one will not have again during the course of a working life. Yet, many of the fields of study by which students can indeed broaden their minds--in particular the humanities--have been in recent decades undermined from within, so that students are less likely to have their minds broadened than to have some of their adolescent prejudices confirmed. This subversion of one of the commonly agreed-on purposes of higher education ought to be a public issue, but it has not been, in part because the rationale for this intellectual revolution is couched in an arcane language that is difficult to grasp even for those of us familiar with academic discourse. This essay attempts to clarify what has been happening, first by describing the demise of what used to be called the Humanities Department at the University of Minnesota, then by showing how this local incident fits into the larger canvass of contemporary academic life.

1. From Humanities to Cultural Studies, Writ Small

During the 1950s, the University of Minnesota's College of Letters, Sciences, and the Arts created two academic units, Humanities and Social Sciences, for teaching undergraduate courses on broad topics not then dealt with by any of the departments. Both were called programs, not departments, meaning that those teaching only in these units could not achieve academic tenure. Hence, courses were taught either by graduate students working for their doctorates in specific fields, or by faculty whose tenure-home department was likely to be English, philosophy, or history. Social studies fell by the wayside during the 1960s, but the dean of what was now called the College of Liberal Arts sought to maintain the Humanities Program by negotiating with the key departments: in some cases there was money for a new position, on condition that the new appointee teach half-time in humanities for the first three years.

These were the terms on which I was hired as an assistant professor of history in 1966. In fact I liked the idea, since I had just come from a temporary appointment at the University of Michigan, where I taught Great Books courses. To be sure, the Humanities Program prided itself on being multidisciplinary, not limited to great works that happened also to be books: each course syllabus was to include some treatment of art or music as well. This regulation I probably honored more in the breach than in practice, but I enjoyed the Humanities courses and I think students did, too. Instead of lecturing most class periods, as in a history course, I conducted class discussions on the texts assigned for that quarter (Homer-Thucydides-Plato-Sophocles, Vergil-Livy-Augustine-Dante, Machiavelli-Erasmus-Luther-Cervantes, or Montesquieu-Pope-Voltaire-Rousseau). That I was an expert in only one of the chronological periods involved did not matter, since imparting expertise was not, I thought, the purpose of these courses. Rather, a Humanities course was to be a conversation between teacher and students about how to read intelligently works that subsequent generations had identified as great--each so different from our world in its basic assumptions, yet so uncannily similar in other ways. This stretching of the imagination beyond the limits of the present is an obvious and important way of broadening the mind.

During the 1970s I was a member of a supervisory committee that, in response to the wishes of Humanities faculty, oversaw the transformation of the program into a department, with its own tenure-track appointments. In retrospect, I think this was a mistake. Humanities had value as a forum where scholars from various disciplines could meet, less as experts than as readers of works whose richness tests the limits of all our expertise. But the self-understanding of the new department (notably on the part of its first chair, brought in from the University of Chicago) was that humanities itself was a kind of discipline-of-all-disciplines, foundational, in its multi-disciplinarity, to fields like English or art history. The pretentiousness of this rationale is obvious (most departments in a college of liberal arts can easily construct an argument as to why their field is foundational to all the others; such talk is seldom taken seriously by members of other departments). But there was another and more serious problem. Defining humanities as foundational opened the door to bright young scholars who, working from the perspective of "critical theory" or "cultural studies" (for both these terms, see below), claimed to have the real truth about the ugly social reality on which humanities in the traditional sense was founded.

During the 1980s, the bright young scholars hired in the 1970s, now tenured, took over the department and reshaped its curriculum. Their premise was that no book, no work of art or music, is intrinsically better than another, since judgments of what is "great" always reflect the judge's position in the socio-economic pecking order. Hence, the very notion that there are "great books" is a gigantic transgenerational lie, concocted by the ruling classes of the nineteenth century as a means of inducing subordinate social groups to bow respectfully before the "high culture" of those who had benefited from an elite education. Accordingly, courses on "cultural products" should address matters of interest to ordinary people, or, even better, groups marginalized by the powers-that-be--racial minorities, women, homosexuals. So-called "great" works are treated, if at all, only to lay bare the nefarious process by which they have been "canonized" and set apart from other works.

This dramatic shift in focus is clearly visible in the official description of the current curriculum. For example, one upper-division course, "Sexualities: From Perversity to Diversity," deals with "traditional discourses [that] divide sexual practices into normal/deviant, sanctified/sinful, natural/unnatural"; the course examines "constructions" of sexuality produced by major social institutions, by way of "sites of evident contestation of these constructions, including pornography, erotic domination, and lynching." Another course, "The Body and the Politics of Representation," examines how Western culture has made the human body a site for "the construction of socio-cultural difference by race, ethnicity, class and gender ... in a way that serves to make these constructed differences seem `natural'." In the perspective suggested here, the only thing in human experience that might truly be called natural is the capacity of the powers-that-be to construct realities that are not real, including the idea that some sexual acts are perverse, and the idea that some books are great.