Want to know what drives a
revolution in an academic discipline? Ask a young searcher for truth what he
would rather have in his hand at the end of three years, a new statement of
truth or a letter from the dean granting him tenure.
OK, your subject may well plump
for the truth. That's nothing to sneeze at, a bona fide truth. But now do this:
substitute in his hand a statement of what might possibly be the truth and put around him peers who possibly won't,
or can't, recognize it as the truth. He could live alone with it, in an attic,
for decades. Put that against a grant
of tenure.
You there in the outside world,
struggling to hang onto your job, running the rat race, getting by on a smile
and a shoeshine, surely you understand the desire for tenure. I mean, a
lifetime hold on well-paid independence? a yearly three-month vacation? What's
not to understand? But still, you can under-estimate, you can fail to feel the
full strength of it, the belief in
it. Have you ever heard that awed
statement about the philosophy professor who had made himself into the purest
possible nihilist (believer in nothing)? "He believes only in tenure."
All right you've got that strong
desire for tenure. Now give those who don't have it only three or four years to
get it. Have them during those years teach some large lower-level courses. Give
them a few of the administrative jobs the tenured profs are sick of. Anything
to make sure a new Ph. D. doesn't have the time to sit back and think deeply —
the way nearly every other discoverer of a significant truth has had to do.
Then, a key provision: make publication in a refereed journal — a journal in
which our young searcher will have to compete with all those in his discipline who
have had the time to sit back and
think deeply — a condition of his obtaining tenure.
The young searcher knows about
learned journals. You get into them by stirring up truth. And he's got clear
eyes. He sees that he's churning garbage. What else can he do on his schedule?
Last, he's got a very reasonable human fear: that those deep thinkers, and
particularly the journal editors, are good enough at garbage detection to see
what he's doing. His only hope is that the distinction between truth and
garbage can be obscured long enough for his garbage to get past the editor and
onto the list the dean uses to grant tenure. And where does garbage most easily
get a pass? In a revolution. You know, like the thing Sigmund Freud pulled off.
But you've got to be sure of the
conditions. You don't want any garbage detectors coming down from the dean's
office, or one department raking over another department's garbage. So look for
department autonomy. Then if you can find a department that has successfully
rejected the tests for garbage, or disputed the category, or denied it had
distinguishing features, you're on the way. Your ideal, I think, is what
Sinclair Lewis called the state university of his time, "a vast department
store" — that is, a university from which the notion of a common academic
enterprise had been entirely removed.
You have to be careful in your
choice of a department. There's no hope in those fields where a new arrival can
go to a frontier of knowledge and, using established research methods, add, or
stir up, some recognizable truth. You want a field where there's no frontier,
or if there is one nobody agrees on where it is, or whether it's moving forward
or backward. Like in the arts and, often, the humanities.
You'll find a field of confusion
somewhere in there. Uncovering a good one is not nearly so hard as it was
before the German Ph. D. program became the model for everybody. Now there are
so many arts, crafts, skills, and sports made into "fields" with a
"graduate faculty" imposing "responsible standards," so
many young scholars wandering around looking for a non-existent frontier, so
much pointless rigor, so much free-floating scientism, so much confusion, that
you can start a revolution without half trying.
And, without too much effort, you
can keep it going — long enough, maybe (if you still haven't had time to really
think) to get a promotion out of it. It won't be hard if you've started right.
If you've got people revolting against predecessors whose position can be
easily, but not too obviously, caricatured; if they've chosen, as a latently
revolutionary father, someone who won't disown them when they give his
doctrines the necessary exaggeration; if they've introduced enough new
terminology to earn credit for new ideas (a vocabulary shift is a sign of a paradigm
shift, right?); and if they've managed to start a journal where display of
these things will be safe from non-revolutionary criticism, then, since the
criteria for promotion are pretty much the same as those for tenure, you'll
have no trouble.
The only thing your revolution
really has to fear is a revival of the Socratic tradition. When Socrates put
the pursuit of the good life at the center of the academic enterprise he
marginalized (to spear a good word out of one revolution) every specialty to come.
Specialists were the servants of those examining and, yes, enjoying, what was
good — the art, the craft, the skill, the sport. The philologist in this
tradition is prized for his service to the Chaucer story, the joy in it, not
for his philology.
Since your revolution presumes the
specialization of the Germanic tradition, with fields and disciplines and a
graduate faculty and publication, it's going to fall apart in any institution
that decenters (ah, another good word) it in favor of the Socratic tradition.
The center (or, more appropriately, the heart) will be in the undergraduate
classroom, or in the sculpt lab, or out on the track. With joy going for it.
You're not going to be able to build up much steam for a revolution out on the
margins.
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