Employment of English. Michael Berube

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Employment of English - Michael Berube


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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.

      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.

      Bruce


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