(Elon, NC) Elizabeth Lynn has published an important paper entitled State Councils, The Humanities, and the American Public. It tells the story of the formation of the National Endowment for the Humanities as a means to fund high scholarship, the almost accidental creation of state humanities councils (composed of laypeople as well as scholars), and how those councils helped save and strengthen the NEH from the grassroots up.

I contribute a relatively long preface that tells a story of its own. In brief summary, these are the stages in my story:

The humanities were invented by the ancient Sophists and then reinvented in the Renaissance to teach rhetoric, practical reasoning, and other skills for public life.

Professional humanists uncovered truths about the texts they studied that tended to reduce their immediate relevance to current public life. For example, they first mined classical history for models of virtue and wisdom, but the more they understood the past, the more complex, distant, and even irrelevant it seemed.

Humanism as professional expertise reached is apogee in Germany, and many of the greatest German scholars migrated to the United States because of Hitler. In the immediate post-war period, those exiles coexisted pretty comfortably in elite American universities with Anglophone public intellectuals who wrote appreciative essays on high culture for relatively broad audiences. Together, they produced scholarship that was widely respected and reasonably noncontroversial.

At around the same time, the federal government attained peak levels of public trust and frequently allocated public funds and decision-making power to specialized groups–military officers, business and union leaders, and scientists–who also had the public’s trust. Thus it was natural for Congress to appropriate funds for the humanities and turn the cash over to distinguished professional humanists in elite universities.

But all that collapsed as the public lost trust in government and specialized experts of all types, and as the calm consensus within the humanities gave way to intense and abstruse controversies, often with a political edge.

Today, even if you want to use public funds to support high scholarship in the humanities, you’ve got to think about strategies that tie scholarship to laypeople’s concerns. Elizabeth Lynn depicts the state humanities councils as means to that end. By the way, we are working with her and the Indiana state council (now known as “Indiana Humanities”) on an empirical study of the public humanities in that state. I hope it will demonstrate the breadth and robustness of the network.

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The National Journal’s Fawn Johnson writes, “President Obama landed on some sweet talking points in his recent, somewhat rehashed, proposals to make colleges more affordable and more targeted on graduation and employment. “Higher education should not be a luxury,” Obama said in Syracuse, N.Y. “If a higher education is still the best ticket to upward mobility in America–and it is–then we’ve got to make sure it’s within reach.”

Johnson asks, “What’s not to like?”

I begin my invited response:

We in higher education deserve criticism for high costs and low graduation rates. But I have grave doubts about the goals and the solutions that President Obama proposes.

Consider two colleges. The first, which I will call “Harvard” (because that’s its real name), places almost all of its graduates in jobs or graduate schools. … The second college, which I will call “Local State,” enrolls students who live at home or off campus.  …. Completing a degree typically takes many years, if one manages to graduate at all. … Local State is the college we should subsidize and support.

The rest is on the National Journal’s Education Insider’s blog.

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In The New Republic, Russell Jacoby names Stanley Fish as the academic who “raised careerism to a worldview.” “His writings incarnate the cheerful, expedient self-involvement that is part and parcel of contemporary life: everyone is out for himself. Fish has burnished this credo for the professoriate.”

I do not know if that is fair to Fish, but I do observe plenty of academic careerism. Here are ten signs of it:

1. You want famous academics to know what you’ve done, but you don’t know or care what laypeople think about the topics you study.
2. You can recite the professional achievements and setbacks of colleagues but don’t quite remember their arguments and findings.
3. If you could continue to accumulate praise and rewards without learning anything new, you would stop learning.
4. If you had a choice between a job where you could do better work and a job that had higher prestige, you would pick the latter.
5. You are primarily interested in who holds each theory, not whether it is right. And you mainly select topics to study because prominent scholars are currently interested in them.
6. You are most impressed by scholarly work that requires especially difficult techniques. You do not consider impact when you assess scholarship.
7. You can explain what you know and how you know it, but not why it’s worth knowing.
8. For you, a “good” university is one that attracts students and faculty who are already accomplished before they arrive.
9. You think that fully successful students are those who become professors in your field.
10. Like Fish, you don’t think taxpayers, students, and other laypeople have any right to judge your work.

It is a privilege to be paid to read, talk, and write. Many talented young people strive for a chance to join the academy but can’t find jobs. If you hold an academic position and have turned into a careerist, I believe you should quit and get out of the way.

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