Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson
of mediocre work, but the sheer quantity and inventiveness of the best work is remarkable. This scholarship has theoretical resources we have not yet used to examine either ourselves or the social formations in which we as academics are embedded. It is critical to do so collectively.
Secondly, here and there are sources of inspiration. In September of 1995 I had dinner with a group of graduate student union activists and their faculty supporters in New Haven; in May of 1996 I had a similar meal with student union leaders in San Diego. Both groups were rainbow coalitions of multiple races, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds. They were working together, sharing their varied pasts and their more parallel presents. The Yale and University of California administrations were gearing themselves up to threaten or fire these people. The administrators were unable to realize they are an inspiration, not only for New Haven and San Diego but also for America. Here was our multicultural present and future in miniature, and it worked. They were engaged in an alliance politics that extended from the classroom to the maintenance shop and the cafeteria. Yale or California may break these unions for now, but each one of these students has been turned into an agent of change. It is happening all across the country.
Higher education almost certainly faces if not a kind of meltdown, at least a future that is likely to be economically mean and brutish. It cannot be altogether resisted, but it can be partly blocked, and we can create communities that are in some important ways better than those we will lose. The difference between this partial success and failure will be the difference between a form of higher education that is and is not worth working in a decade from now.
For faculty members, higher education is a career that entails relearning your discipline as it changes over time. Many faculty members in fact remake themselves repeatedly in the course of their careers. If higher education becomes like high school, or like community college teaching, so thoroughly crammed with scheduled responsibilities that it offers little time for independent intellectual pursuit, then it will lose the difference that makes it what it is. In the false name of a repressive efficiency, corporate-style administration would make higher education pay people as little as possible and extract the maximum labor from them. It will be done in the service of several narratives, including, ironically, the need to compete in the global environment. Of course American higher education already attracts students from all over the world. But if current trends continue—such as the wholesale shift from tenure-track faculty to underpaid part-timers and adjuncts—quality will decline and we will no longer compete so effectively.
Meanwhile, higher education remains the only proven means of social mobility, the only antidote to poverty, and the only large-scale corrective for the ravages of capitalism. It is in short the only workable solution to some of America’s worst social problems. Yet many conservative politicians would drastically reduce its size and reduce student access to it at the same time. All these forces must be resisted, but faculty members cannot do so without collectively looking outward at the world for the first time in decades. The process can only succeed if we understand our disciplines in terms of their larger social meaning and prove ourselves worthy, as communities, of the respect and support we ask of the public. Using the discipline of English and my own historical specialization, modern poetry, as examples, Manifesto offers some prescriptions for how we might begin. My aim is to help make the book’s predictive warnings untrue.
Manifesto has benefited from thoughtful and suggestive comments from several readers, including Michael Berube, Karen Ford, Robert Parker, Matthew Hurt, Carine Melkom-Mardorossian, John Carlos Rowe, Paula A. Treichler, Richard Wheeler, and Eric Zinner. Earlier versions of portions of a number of the chapters, now revised and updated, appeared in Academe, American Literature, The Chronicle of Higher Education, College Literature, Illinois Law Review, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Profession, Social Text, and Works and Days, and in the collections Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates (ed. Dianne F. Sadoff and William E. Cain) and Changing Classroom Practices: Resources for Literary and Cultural Studies (ed. David Downing).
1 AGAINST ENGLISH AS IT WAS
THEORY AND THE POLITICS OF THE DISCIPLINE
Over the past century a series of cowbird eggs have been laid in the capacious university nest. A cowbird puts its egg in the nest of some other species. Being stronger and more aggressive than the other nestlings, the young cowbirds get more of the worms, grow faster, and may shove the other nestlings out of the nest or cause them to starve.
—David Perkins, “The Future of Keats Studies”
In the literature curriculum, Perkins allows, the nestlings that have been starving and are nearly dead are the canonical works of English literature. In each new cowbird invasion, a body of theory has not only demanded space for itself but also helped plant new and brutally opportunistic textual eggs in the true nest. A series of nonnative species has filled our good English trees. First it was modern philosophy and literature displacing classical studies; then in the 1930s Marxism helped clear the way for American literature. More recently, feminism, multiculturalism, and gay studies have laid their eggs in the nest; now John Keats is starving on the forest floor. The shorthand term for the force that has done all this recent damage is “theory.” Has it actually undermined the discipline, as Perkins believes, or has it kept it adaptable and enabled it to survive?
There is no question that admitting new texts or theories into the discipline has consequences. You admit Saussure or Freud, for example, and before too long you’ve got Derrida and Lacan on your hands. In other words, new admissions bring with them intellectual traditions that continue to develop or, in the nestling metaphor, grow and take up more space. Yet the discipline’s ability to adapt and to absorb new species has also kept it alive when other fields, more resistant to cultural change, have seen themselves diminish in size and influence. But disciplinary opportunism has not always led to admirable introspection or to social responsibility. Theory’s role here has been more mixed.
I want to open Manifesto by asking how theory has helped bring us to where we are in literary studies, and by suggesting that it has done both more and less to fulfill its promise than we might have guessed thirty years ago at the start of the theory revolution. While I cannot share Perkins’s nostalgia for a past that I consider racist, sexist, reactionary, and substantially anti-intellectual, I will grant the claim that provoked his search for avian infiltrators: Keats and the traditional canon may not be headed for extinction but they do occupy a lot less of our attention than they did a few decades ago.
If the brutally selective canon we studied then were merely a function of concern for quality or value, as Perkins believes, then a pervasive sense of loss might be justified. Yet I have no doubt whatsoever that this was not the case. As a literature major from 1963 to 1967—at Antioch College, arguably the most progressive college in the country—I read not a single work by an African American writer in any course and only a few works by women. I can in fact only remember being assigned Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. A number of us read other things on our own, but that was the extent of our assigned readings by women and minorities. Antioch did have a highly successful Black Students Association at the time, but its members focused on other issues. Even the black students themselves knew so little about the Afro-American literary heritage that they saw no reason to place any pressure on the literature curriculum. As for feminism, the contemporary movement did not begin to have an impact on the curriculum until the mid- to late 1970s.
My anecdotal evidence is supported by research Michael Berube reports in his Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers (1992). Except for some presentations on “Negro folk songs” delivered in the 1920s and 1930s, the Modern Language Association’s annual convention offered no papers on African American writing until one delivered in 1953; a decade passed before another such paper was presented. Similarly, by 1950 the annual MLA bibliography listed only two contemporary studies of African American writers, both being books on the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar (43–44). As late as the 1960s the mainstream anthologies published by Norton gave virtually no space to African American writers. So it is not surprising that African American writers