Employment of English. Michael Berube
of their English majors relative to the total number of undergraduates at their institutions. On one fine December morning I managed to go from an interview at Williams College, with more than 250 English majors among 1500 upper-division students, to Auburn University in Alabama, with an undergraduate enrollment of 21,000 and 120 English majors. Those numbers alone, it should be noted, determine much of the working conditions of faculty in English at both institutions: faculty at Williams are invited and expected to teach in the area of their “specialization,” and though their school generally values their teaching more highly than their research, the number of English majors enables the college to institutionalize a diverse array of advanced courses in English, whether these be courses in Restoration drama, film noir, or postcolonial theory. At Auburn, by contrast, the range of advanced courses is limited not by the research interests of the faculty but by the cultural capital of English at Auburn, and faculty accordingly teach more courses than their counterparts at Williams—and many more introductory courses, including courses in basic writing. Even at individual institutions, then, the content of the curriculum is determined largely by the status of English as cultural capital—or, more accurately, cultural capital is realized and invested as cultural capital precisely by means of individual institutions operating dynamically within larger institutions.
On one hand, the implications of this point are trivial, and everyone in English knows about them—just as everyone knows that the teaching load at Williams differs from the teaching load at Auburn. One might say, for instance, that Cain, Posnock, and Levine are worried about something that can be an issue only at relatively “elite” institutions, where cultural studies appears as a curricular option unavailable to colleges whose English curriculum is weighted heavily toward introductory courses, and where the question is not “how can we get our students to stop reverencing literature and start paying attention to the social text,” but “how can we get our students to pay attention to literature in the first place?” But on the other hand the point is fundamental to the role of cultural studies in English, insofar as cultural studies does not have to be confined to elite institutions, and can be as central to an introductory curriculum as to an advanced course of study; similarly, the point is fundamental to the constitution of English departments in the United States, insofar as the franchise of English depends on the institutional capital of English in specific institutional locations.
I will return to these issues in the chapters that follow, as I turn to the employment of English in specific institutional locations. For now, though, I want briefly to address the status of cultural studies as cultural capital. Guillory’s analysis takes for granted one of the premises of the New Right as articulated most clearly in William Bennett’s To Reclaim a Legacy, namely, that the humanities are in decline. Guillory rightly argues that this alleged decline of the humanities has nothing to do with the introduction of noncanonical works to the literature syllabus, and everything to do with the cultural capital of literary study and its relation to productive capital (that is, money) for college students. Hence Guillory’s attribution to the aspiring professional-managerial class of the sense that “the reading of great works is not worth the investment of very much time or money.” But what happens if we contest the narrative of decline at the outset, and try to account for the resurgence of undergraduate interest in the English major in the 1980s and 1990s?2 Surely it would be tempting but wrong (in Guillory’s terms and in mine) to attribute that resurgence solely or chiefly to the newer multicultural curricula in English.3 Perhaps instead we might point to two general economic factors that may have swelled enrollments in English in the past ten years—first, the widespread (but ultimately mistaken) belief that there would be a “faculty shortage” in the 1990s, such that employment in colleges (of great concern for graduate study) and secondary schools (of great concern for undergraduate study) would be a likely prospect even for people who received degrees in the humanities; and second, the widespread (and ultimately well founded) belief that the global economy was producing jobs that were less stable, less secure than the jobs of forty years ago, such that for some areas of nonacademic employment, a general liberal arts degree might be seen by prospective employers as more attractive than a degree that signified a college career of technical-vocational training.
Let me add to these observations the following questions: who, exactly, was “credentialed” by universities back in the days when the humanities were not in crisis? For whom was literary study a form of cultural capital? Might it not be the case, as Francis Oakley has suggested, that the rise in professional-vocational courses of training since 1970 (and the relative “decline” of the humanities) coincides with the arrival at universities of vastly more diverse student populations (particularly more diverse with regard to class origins) beginning in the late 1960s? My hope in raising these questions is not to claim that we’re just fine in the humanities these days, thank you, despite everything you’ve heard to the contrary. Rather, my hope is to raise questions about Guillory’s account of the relation between literary studies and cultural capital just as Guillory has raised questions about the relation between cultural capital and the canon. If it is true, as Guillory claims (as I would claim as well), that the status of literary studies as cultural capital does not depend, solely or chiefly, on the curricular content of literary studies, it may also be true that there is some degree of independence between the status of literary studies as cultural capital and the employability of a degree in English. It is possible, I am claiming, that “literature” may indeed have declined in cultural authority but “English” remains a potentially valuable career asset. To put this in more colloquial terms: whatever the status of “literature” as an index of cultivation and class status, degrees in English may still be convertible into gainful employment—not because they mark their recipients as literate, well-rounded young men and women who can allude to Shakespeare in business memos, but because they mark their recipients as people who can potentially negotiate a wide range of intellectual tasks and handle (in various ways) disparate kinds of “textual” material, from memos, legal briefs, and white papers to ad campaigns, databases, and electronic newsmagazines.
And if we want to gauge the relative status (as cultural capital) of literature and cultural studies, we should have yet one more question for Guillory’s account of the field. If, as Cultural Capital claims, the new professional-managerial class no longer requires the old cultural capital of the bourgeoisie, then it is not clear whether all kinds of cultural capital are now utterly superfluous to the accumulation and distribution of productive capital (as Bill Readings emphatically argues in The University in Ruins), or, by contrast, whether a redesigned curriculum in the humanities might actually be of greater use to the credentialization of the professional-managerial class. In forwarding the latter suggestion (since I disagree strongly with the former),4 I do not want to be understood assaying anything so simpleminded as “we must substitute Toni Morrison’s Beloved for Milton’s Lycidas because this is what the new global economy requires”; to date I have heard of only one employer who asks such things of his job applicants: Milton Rosenberg of Chicago, who quizzes prospective college interns for his radio program as to whether they can name three nineteenth-century British novelists. (When I asked him whether it might not be more pertinent to a job in mass media that students be able to name three contemporary non-American novelists writing in English, I was dismissed in somewhat predictable terms, but I do not generalize from this that William Thackeray and Elizabeth Glaspell are necessarily more conducive to mass media employment than Margaret Atwood and Chinua Achebe.) Rather, I want to ask whether the advent of cultural studies can be understood as a response to the market value of literary study. This is not simply a question of whether English professors are offering courses on music video in order to remain somehow “relevant” to the cultural lives of their students (though it does participate in that question to some extent); more fundamentally, it is a question of whether the distribution of cultural capital serves a purely discriminating function, to naturalize and legitimate socioeconomic inequality, or whether the content of cultural capital might matter in some substantive way to the traditional liberal-progressive project of “critical thinking.”
Bruce