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PEOPLE—including me—have talked a lot in recent years about the state of the profession. That phrase usually designates the status of the PhD job market or predictions about the market or one version or another of our theoretical and critical battles. The state of the profession as we understand it varies from year to year and provides us with endless matter for conversation. Rarely, if we are to believe those who hold forth on this topic, is the state of the profession good. Oddly, though, the profession of teaching, studying, and writing about language and literature survives in a sense quite independent of its alleged state.
I was deeply touched when David Laurence called to tell me that I was to receive the Francis Andrew March Award, and I remain moved by and grateful for the honor. The prospect of this occasion has caused me to reflect on what exactly we serve when we serve the profession. Many people—probably most ADE Bulletin readers—participate in this service. We all know what it involves. We read manuscripts and write opinions for scholarly journals and for publishers; participate in tenure reviews for institutions other than our own; serve on various committees, including those of ADE and the MLA, that aim to improve or at least to comprehend what's happening in the academic community; write letters of recommendation for colleagues and for people we meet at other institutions, as well as for our own students; organize conferences and scrounge up money for them; read and discuss the work of younger scholars or of our peers. Not everyone does these things, of course, but enough of us do to constitute a saving remnant for a profession that needs us—but that also, I'd like to claim, deserves us. These and comparable endeavors characteristically lead to little or no reward or recognition. What are we serving?
I vacillate between pessimism and optimism about various aspects of our profession, but regardless of my immediate emotional condition, I retain some fundamental faith in the essential enterprise, whatever that means. To essentialize the profession as something apart from its specific practices raises severe theoretical problems, to say the least. Yet I think we actually serve an abstracted and idealized essence—an ideal profession, a profession in the mind, a profession that fosters no politics and entails no internal conflicts. It normalizes high endeavor and selfless devotion. Its members care about language and its uses and about the transmission not only of knowledge and skill but also of a capacity for pleasure in the text. The work that this profession demands—the endless, exhausting, often tedious work—justifies itself by facilitating these aims.
Readers may suspect me of irony as I sketch a profession that bears little resemblance to the one we experience daily, the one that keeps us feeling overworked and underappreciated and afflicts us with a constant sense of frustration because we so seldom manage to accomplish all we need to, surviving as we do by trade-offs. The profession we know includes difficult colleagues and colleagues who seem never to do any work at all, and it abounds in conspicuous manifestations of individual self-interest. But I intend no irony. Having studied the eighteenth century for a long time, I've learned to believe in the power and value of abstraction and idealization. I believe that we can't discern the nature of our profession unless we think about what in the profession may survive its immediate particularities.
William Blake long ago said that to generalize is to be an idiot. Since Blake's time, that view has been dominant among intellectuals professing the humanities. Yet we generalize all the time, as national elections frequently remind us. And I want to suggest that we need to generalize in positive as well as negative ways.
We all know—I say this with more confidence than I usually feet when using first-person plural pronouns in public—that immense variety characterizes the profession of English these days. In our individual teaching practices, we can only represent fragments of the possibilities currently available. One teacher uses the perspective of cultural studies to teach Victorian fiction, a colleague down the hall pursues a feminist agenda while instructing students in Renaissance drama, and someone on the third floor maintains the superior usefulness of principles from the old New Criticism as a basis for classroom procedure. Faculty members at a large university assume that research is an essential activity for anyone professing English literature, while their peers in a small college, who may be assigned four or five courses a semester, consider teaching a teacher's essential obligation. The professors at the small college couldn't grade the students' papers adequately if they demanded for themselves the sustained time that writing takes. Professional life requires countless hard choices among professional obligations. I tell myself that I will take on no more than four outside evaluations for tenure each semester, that I will limit myself to two short book reviews, that I will learn to say no. “Learn to say no,” we advise one another, trying to reinforce this message to ourselves. And then, likely as not, we keep right on saying yes, because we believe in our responsibility to the something beyond our immediate institutional context that constitutes the profession.
I would contend that at some level we probably believe in this generalized something, whether or not we acknowledge our belief. Acknowledging such a belief is embarrassing at a historical moment when irony and intellect seem to go together, when self-protective cynicism masquerading as realism characterizes the public stance of many intellectuals. Cynicism readily fosters the exercise of wit; idealism all too easily becomes wit's target. One hazards ridicule for claiming out loud that a profession is superior to many of its manifestations. Acts of faith are risky.
So I feel vulnerable in admitting that I believe in the continuing value of a profession that has vivid problems and that appears unequipped to solve them. I open myself to the charge of naïveté and to accusations that I'm closing my eyes to the real difficulties that beset us. Claiming the virtues of an ideal profession does not address the justified bitterness of the growing group of scholars who now feel excluded from the career for which they have prepared themselves. It does not prevent assaults on tenure or costcutting administrations' increasing reliance on adjunct faculty members—acute problems that need to be confronted. It does not even enable me to alleviate internecine strife in my own department. Such an assertion has no apparent practical value of any kind. And it makes me appear distinctly out of touch.
I have good reason, then, to conceal my idealistic predilections, and sometimes I do. So do others, I suspect. As Dr. Johnson knew, the tendency to abstract and generalize belongs inalienably to the human mind. We inhabit a culture that encourages excessive valuation of the individual, yet much public discourse still depends on generalizations. Most of them, though, are negative. As a faithful, if often irritated, reader of the Washington Post , I often encounter Jonathan Yardley's pronouncements about the corruption of Ivy League universities and George Will's claims about the evils of the academy at large. And we have all read the annual outpouring of prose that generalizes about the MLA convention on the basis of a few papers with funny titles.
Within the profession we too traffic in derogatory generalizations. I treasure the memory of a remark reported to me more than twenty years ago after I delivered a convention paper titled “Early Fiction and the Frightened Male.” The paper examined the ubiquitous presence in eighteenth-century novels of men who seem in one way or another terrified by women. A friend of mine in the audience overheard one white man of a certain age observe to another, “If that's the sort of thing people are saying now, it's time for me to get out of the profession.” I now feel the personal pathos in that remark, but at the time it filled me with glee. I was twenty years younger then, and I loved the notion that I was somehow defining the profession with my ruminations on Tom Jones .
But the personal element is also worth taking seriously in its broader implications. The threat to masculinity that the speaker presumably felt while listening to my remarks converted itself immediately into an altered comprehension of his professional context. In other words, a small particular reverberated to modify a large generalization. No longer—I'm making this up, of course, but it's plausible—could the speaker feel himself a normative figure in an utterly familiar intellectual framework. One small thing had changed: he'd heard a paper unlike anything he'd heard before. Therefore everything had changed. I imagine this guy as one of those who have stopped attending the MLA convention on the grounds that all the papers are political now.
That familiar negative generalization about the MLA and about the profession is heard among English teachers as well as among their critics: everything is politicized now. A related pronouncement would have it that no one cares about literature any more. State legislatures appear fond of generalizing about the laziness of college and university teachers. The most highly paid neglect their responsibilities. Young people in the profession care only about their own careers. Reviewing in our field is all a matter of back-scratching. And so on. Some of these dark generalizations have persisted through all the changes of the past century; others respond to more immediate situations. All arise from genuine perceptions: some young people are careerists, for sure; some papers are political; some professors are lazy. And that man who found my talk appalling was right to take it as a sign that the profession was changing.
We have all heard such generalizations. We may not like the ones that other people make, and we may argue with those people; we may also resent the tiny kernels of truth in many of these statements. If we don't make such generalizations ourselves, we probably feel conscious of their destructive effects on professional morale, on public opinion, and even on our financial welfare. Yet we take it for granted that people will always generalize in these negative ways.
Because the idealistic kind of generalization that I propounded earlier seems out of tune with our times, we are less likely to take it for granted. Yet idealism actually supports many negative generalizations. The notion that a humanistic profession should function humanely may account for part of George Will's outrage at the resemblance between the workings of academic departments and the operations of corporate America. The man who complained about my paper long ago presumably believed that his vision of the ideal teacher-critic and the ideal institutional context was being threatened. The tendency to see the world as totally corrupt depends on a concept of noncorruption and on belief in its possibility. So, at any rate, I would speculate.
We collectively know the necessity of generalization, without which abstract thought becomes impossible. However, that knowledge often disappears from consciousness, forgotten or repressed because of urgent particularities of daily experience. We can easily proceed without acknowledging our reliance on unexamined generalities. By their nature they are difficult to examine, their sources often obscure or confused. Folk wisdom tells us that excessive focus on trees impedes perception of forests. When we think of a generalized forest, though, we lose the particularities of trees and animals and birds, the carpet of leaves and acorns, the undergrowth of ferns and shrubs. We depend on the generalization because it's less complicated and more accessible than our detailed and self-contradictory memories of the actual forests where we picnicked as children. We can use our generalizations, depending on their nature, to argue about preserving the environment or about expanding development. But using these generalizations makes it harder to recall the riot of impressions generated by actual forests.
Like the forest in the mind, the profession in the mind both originates in and simplifies direct experience. My idealized version of what we do and who we are may bear little resemblance to the happenings of any individual faculty meeting or MLA convention session. Yet it selectively recapitulates my experience with colleagues near and far, with students, and with professional organizations. It omits the decaying trees: it has no place for memories of backbiting, ferocious public conflict over trivia, failures of support for students or for principles, irresponsible teaching, superficial and merely fashionable writing. I can summon up such memories if I try, sometimes without trying, but my idealizing generalization by definition can't accommodate them. The important truth it tells can never be the whole truth.
Generalizations about a profession can be falsified only with extreme difficulty. Theoretically, I suppose, someone could amass sufficient data to prove that most college teachers of English neglect their students; such evidence would discredit a generalization to the contrary. But there would have to be a lot of data. Fifteen individual instances of venality or laziness cannot disprove a generalization about the hard work and devotion of members of our profession, nor can twenty-five such instances or two hundred. At the same time, even my multiplied experiences of dedicated service by others can't refute George Will. We believe what we want to believe.
I believe in our profession partly because of my long experience in the classroom. In a time when the future of graduate studies and of those who participate in them seems so unclear, I feel almost ashamed sometimes of my deep pleasure in teaching graduate students. Scrupulously, I try to discourage undergraduates from going on. When graduate students express worries about their futures, I endeavor to help them seriously consider alternatives to a career in higher education. Yet what takes place in graduate courses consistently exhilarates and inspires me. These courses exemplify the rich intellectual exchange that lies at the heart of our profession. Perhaps more important—they reinvigorate faith in the value of sustained, intelligent attention to the life of language. The students believe in that value. More now than ever before, those who insist on pursuing the PhD in defiance of practical considerations do so out of love for literature and for the activity of investigating it. They explore new theoretical possibilities, argue over the issues that divide their elders, compete vigorously with one another, and display an appetite for encounters with texts of every variety. This too may sound like an idealizing generalization, but I can think of almost no exceptions to the description I have offered. Like other people, graduate students are more or less good at what they do. They display a range of capacities but little deviation in passion—although of course at any given moment their anxieties over their futures or resentment about perceived administrative mistreatment may override their literary preoccupations. Not in the classroom, though. There they embody the best potential for the profession.
But my encounters in the more compromised sphere of departmental, institutional, and wider professional operations have also fueled my faith. I have found generosity and devotion surviving in the face of discouragement and even defeat. Our profession, like others, distributes its goodies unevenly and sometimes unfairly. Of course people struggle for the available rewards; of course they resent insufficient recognition and inadequate compensation. In the pursuit of a career, competitive interests may outweigh principled ones. Pettiness can erupt at any moment. Conflict thrives everywhere. Nonetheless, generosity and devotion abound.
I think I have referred in print before to a department meeting I remember as archetypal. It occurred at Wellesley in the 1960s—before the explosion of new texts that have enlarged syllabi in the last twenty years or so. The agenda was to construct communally a reading list for English majors. The department was a small one with maybe fifteen or sixteen faculty members. The discussion began, civilly enough, with Shakespeare. After that, matters became less clear. The Bible? Marx? Opponents and proponents argued with equal fierceness. Eventually, not even Shakespeare survived. The modernists declared that if traditionalists wouldn't vote for Joyce, they wouldn't vote for Shakespeare. The meeting ended, after more than two hours, without agreement on a single text.
This story now has a certain comic resonance, but the events did not seem comic in the least. I felt profoundly irritated, even angry, with many colleagues, as I have felt before and since, with the same colleagues and with others. I raged about people who were protecting their own turf, about the degree to which immediate self-interest motivated public positions. Even at the time, though, I knew that more than narrow self-interest was at stake. The ferocity of the arguments reflected intensities of personal conviction and emotion about the works being discussed. People fought because they cared. Such caring exists everywhere, in institutions large and small, institutions that US News and World Report declares at the top of the heap and those it puts at the bottom. This commitment supports, even defines, the profession as I understand it.
Many of us say of teaching that one gets more from it than one gives to it. I can say the same thing about working with professional organizations, serving on the editorial boards of journals, reading manuscripts, consulting with outside departments, and performing the other activities that constitute service to the profession. In all these undertakings, I have encountered thoughtful, hardworking people striving not only to do a good job but also to further the welfare of their students, their institutions, and their profession. I have read a lot of prose and met a lot of people. Both enterprises have fostered my idealistic views.
Some Bulletin readers may remember a letter in the January 1996 issue of PMLA that responded to my Presidential Address, a letter complaining about the falsity of my vision of the profession. The writer reported that she had discovered nothing but corruption in the academic world. Evidently unable to achieve secure employment, she had repeatedly found herself exploited and betrayed. She believed that the very structure of the profession, its system of tenure, promotion, and reward, encouraged the unscrupulous, and she resented what she perceived as my effort to prettify ugly reality.
The manifest pain of this letter moved me when I first read it and moves me still. In my published response, I said in effect that the writers experience had as much authority as my own but that the authority of my experience also demanded acknowledgment. My experience, I insisted, had introduced me to dedicated, high-minded, productive men and women and shown me many fine things happening within the profession.
I've thought about that exchange often since it took place. I understand vividly what the letter writer meant, and I too feel acutely troubled by aspects of our professional life now. I could readily give a talk of my own about my sense of what's gone wrong. Yet I still want to generalize positively about our shared enterprise. Generalizations about a profession, as about other matters, derive from the preponderance of evidence. Where there are more living trees than dead ones, there is a lush and fertile forest. Having had more good experiences than bad ones, I love the profession. But such generalizations depend also on the interpretation of evidence. Is the tree with a storm-damaged branch triumphing over adversity or scarred by the elements? Different ways of perceiving encourage different views of the forest.
Generalizations and the interpretations that construct them serve both individual psychic purposes and larger ends. They tell a truth different from that of particularities. If they obscure the truth of perplexing contradiction, even facile generalizations can tell the truth of possibility. Negative generalizations may reveal our sense of inadequacy or failure; positive ones remind us of our goals, recall the point of our endeavor. They speak of what we believe and of how we imagine. Positive generalizations about our profession, I would maintain, provide a standard by which to assess our day-to-day work experience. False in the way of all generality, they also contain the truth of the general, a distillation of specificities. They invite us to see the best in the work we do and in those with whom we work, but they also remind us forcefully of what is betrayed when members of the profession neglect their obligations. Those of us perceived as having power within the profession often suffer from a sense of our own powerlessness: we can't, for instance, provide jobs for all who deserve them. Yet we feel the urgent need to make professional structures and systems more humane, more inclusive. Our idealistic generalizations can help us keep the faith as we contend with administrations committed more to cutting costs than to enriching education. The unfashionable idealistic view of the profession functions better than its opposite to keep us struggling in productive ways.
Many, many people struggle thus. I feel genuinely, not just rhetorically, humble at receiving the March Award. It's not that I think myself unworthy, exactly: I have indeed offered a reasonable quantity of service to the profession. But I know I am far from unique in this respect. The profession we serve is well served, by countless men and women who neither expect nor receive recognition for what they do. Their selfless effort helps make the profession worth serving.
The author is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. This paper was presented on the occasion of Spacks's receiving the ADE Francis Andrew March Award at the 1996 MLA convention in Washington, DC.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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