The long-term social and
institutional dislocations likely to be caused by the current medical pandemic
are by no means all predictable, but they certainly will involve higher
education. Just as the medical crisis
has brought to the surface and made visible numerous imperfections and weak
points in the social fabric, such as a dangerously low national level of family
financial savings, so also has it thrown light upon the highly iffy finances of
many of our colleges, quite a few of which are simply going to go belly
up. No such fate awaits the rich
ones—some of them, like my own, almost obscenely rich—but they, too, are likely
to experience significant change. I
suspect that one crisis area will be post-graduate education in the humanities:
historical studies, language and literature, the arts.
Around 1960, on the sand dunes of
Lake Michigan (at a retreat conference of Danforth Fellows) I heard a once-famous
dean of Harvard College explain that the daunting challenge facing the
humanities departments of our great graduate institutions for the rest of the
twentieth century would be producing Ph. D. scholar-teachers fast enough, and
in sufficient quantity, to supply a rapidly expanding academic “market” of
indefinite duration. This was the
orthodoxy of the day, and it commanded a huge expansion in humanities graduate
programs. In retrospect, this sort of
thing is why people want to ask college professors, “If you’re so smart, why
aren’t you rich?” In my first year of
teaching, 1963-1964, I believe I was one of eight
beginning “hires” in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin. These days if one in eight finishing graduate students gets an academic appointment
commensurate with her training, it is regarded as a good year for the
credentialing department. In economic
terms, supply vastly exceeds demand. It
has been this way for many years now.
We are likely to see a significant
and difficult reduction in the size and number of graduate humanities
departments—difficult because of entrenched faculty expectations and because so
many institutions have depended on graduate students to do the heavy lifting of
large undergraduate courses. I am leery of making specific predictions,
but I allow myself to dream of the return of the amateur scholar and poet.
Want to be a famous intellectual and literary person? Well, instead of mastering a dialect of opaque
jargon in a Ph. D. program in literature at Yale or sitting around pretentious
workshops in your M.F.A. program at Iowa, how about getting a good liberal arts
bachelor’s degree at a prestigious university in Boston and follow that up with
a career in the insurance business? It
is perhaps not likely that you will gain the scholarly fame of Benjamin Lee
Whorf or the literary celebrity of Wallace Stevens, but a man’s reach should
exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
Whorf
(1897-1941), perhaps the most important theoretical linguist America has ever
produced, took an engineering degree at MIT and put it to good social and
personal use as an expert in fire prevention at a large insurance company. That is, he increased public safety and he
kept bread on his table. On the side and
of an evening he studied old and new languages and, more importantly, thought
profoundly about the nature and implications of human language itself. I have only recently come to appreciate the
importance of his revolutionary thinking through my highly credentialed
linguistically anthropological son Luke.
If this interests you, check out the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of Linguistic Relativity.”
It is impossible to imagine American
poetry of the twentieth century without Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). He did study a good deal of literature as an
undergraduate at Harvard, and he did take a graduate degree (Law) at NYU, but
he spent most of the daylight hours of his adult life in an executive office at
the Hartford Accident and Indemnity company.
It is worth pointing out that neither Whorf nor Stevens thought of their
day jobs in the spirit of the star-struck would-be actress “temporarily”
waitressing until her big break comes along.
Both of these guys were really into insurance. They were no less into linguistic theory and
poetry, but didn’t seem to think that it had to be a “professional” activity.
Both
the professional poet and the professional scholar—especially the latter—are
relatively new cultural developments.
There have doubtless been bards, scops,
and singers of tales since time immemorial; but few of these were without a
real day job. And in the Old World deep,
scholarly learning was generally ancillary to religious vocation. There is some debate about the identity of
the first English professional man of letters, one plausible candidate being
Doctor Johnson in the eighteenth century.
The English woman of letters
must appear considerably later, after a series of brilliant female amateurs had
in effect created the novel. It is not
easy to imagine Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte applying for a Guggenheim grant. Charles Dickens, it is true, was a commercial
writer in something like the modern sense.
He was an early “famous author” who milked the lecture and reading
circuit for all it was worth. But Anthony
Trollope, who was as fully invested in the fiscal bottom line as was Dickens,
did his prodigious writing in the early morning hours so as to be able each day
to be at his desk in the Post Office on time.
So also was it with scholars, most of whom either enjoyed the benefits
of family money or were gainfully employed in decorous professions of Church or
State.
Most
of the huge efflorescence of scholarship in nineteenth-century England,
humanistic and scientific alike, was the work of amateurs working outside any
formal academic setting. The amateur
scholarly work of possibly underemployed Anglican clergymen alone was
staggering. Their contributions to my
special bailiwick, medieval English literature, really created the “field,” but
amateur scholarly erudition was no clerical monopoly. We might consider the example of Sir E. K.
Chambers (1866-1954), for instance, among the greatest literary scholars who
ever lived. He was a parson’s son with a
studious bent and a flair for research.
After an early rich education in a highly cultivated household he went
on to school at Marlborough College and took his undergraduate degree at Corpus
Christi, Oxford, about 1890. He very
early developed a special interest in Shakespeare, and while still at Oxford
brought out an edition of Richard II. Though he would today be thought a natural for
a professional academic career, his thoroughly Victorian view was that the
highly pleasurable activity of literary study was an amateur avocation, not a
profession. He made his career as a
civil servant with the Board of Education, rising, by the time of his
retirement, to be its second-in-command.
In the evenings and on week-ends, he did very little else than read and
write, producing among many other things stunningly erudite studies of The Medieval Stage (2 vols., 1903), The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, 1923), and
William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and
Problems (2 vols. 1930)—and these are only the encyclopedic works. He also excelled at editing, at criticism,
and at literary biography. As the first
President of the Malone Society, he was a major force in Shakespeare
scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century. Chambers had no Ph. D. and didn’t need
one. After all Shakespeare, the object
of his life-long researches, didn’t even have a B.A., and he turned out OK.
We
know from the memoirs of various friends that when the Chamberses entertained,
as they not infrequently did, Sir Edmund would join his wife and guests for a
single glass of sherry in the library before going into dinner. When the dessert course was ready to be
served he would say to his guests: “I hope you will now excuse me. I leave you to be entertained by my excellent
wife.” He then retreated for three or
four hours to his research and writing.
By all accounts Lady Eleanor was indeed excellent, and most entertaining,
eager to conspire in her husband’s amateur exertions, knowing that
existentially as etymologically what is amateur
is motivated by love.
