Introduction — § 1

Critique-al humanities — the knowledges that aim at educating citizens for an inclusive democracy with equal social and economic access for all — have increasingly come under attack by contemporary conservativism and transnational business forces. Conservatives have not only attacked critique-al humanities culturally (as “political correctness” inflicted on the public by “tenured radicals") but, more important, in alliance with global corporate lobbyists, they have also put economic pressure on the critique-al humanities through various legislative and administrative maneuvers, such as cutting their budgets, limiting new hiring, increasing the teaching loads of their faculty, suspending admissions to their graduate programs or eliminating them altogether, and substituting part-time, contingent knowledge workers for full-time positions. My purpose in this text, however, is not to rehearse these fairly familiar anti-critique-al practices of transnational business and their allies in the culture industry outside the university.[2] Instead, I will analyze their operation inside the university itself and show how global business and its agents among university administrators and faculty are working to privatize public education and, among other things, marginalize critique-al practices that question the priority of “profit” in contemporary society.

Most discussions of the conservative antagonism towards critique-al humanities have taken a broad scope and addressed the humanities in general. However, I will be locating these antagonisms and their consequences for critique-al citizenship in a specific historical setting. I have, thus, focused on one institution, the State University of New York at Albany, and have anchored my text in the recent events in its Department of English.

English Departments are perhaps the most effective sites for such micro-institutional analysis because, traditionally, they have been both the focal point and the institutionally most influential site for the study of the humanities in the contemporary (Anglo-American) university, and also because they enact in their curriculum some of the most radical changes taking place in the relation between the “state” and “civil society” in the emerging post-national world. As transnational capitalism becomes more powerful, the role of the (nation-)state decreases, thereby diminishing the situation of “national” university itself and changing the place of “national” language/literature departments (such as “English” in the United States). In this new postnational situation, the traditional justifications for the humanities have lost their historical persuasiveness, and, in fact, part of the current “crisis” of the humanities is caused by the collapse of these traditional “defenses." Whether founded, conventionally, on the idea of the stable subject of transhistorical “values” (as in the writings of Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflict Can Revitalize American Education), or on an anti-foundationalist “pragmatism” (as in Richard Rorty, “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature” or Bill Readings, The University in Ruins) or less conventionally in a more sustained posthumanist analytics (such as Spanos, The End of Education)— these “defenses” no longer provide convincing reasons for the continued existence of the humanities because they do not face the material shifts in cultural practices brought about by the globalization of labor and capital. Some writers such as Michael Bérubé (in his “Standard Deviations: Skyrocketing Job Requirements Inflame Political Tensions") and Cary Nelson (in such texts as, “Lessons from the Job Wars: Late Capitalism Arrives on Campus” and “Lessons from the Job Wars: What is to be Done?") are not so much engaging an understanding of the humanities in the space of the materialist contradictions between capital and labor as they are reviving a more or less old-fashioned “trade unionism” (what Lenin called “pre-political” practices). Their concern is a populist one: how to improve the situation of the humanities within the existing material structures rather than transforming those material structures. They, like Rorty (whose politics they at times oppose), are “pragmatist” reformers helping the system to correct itself and, in effect, positing that, in spite of all its defects and shortcomings, no other system can be shown to be “better” than the existing one.

In the new situation, the only justification for the “humanities” that is proving to be persuasive for the corporate university, the culture industry/media and the public, at large, is what might be called the “de-definition” of the humanities into “communications skills” at the insistence of transnational business. These skills, which are developed with the aid of cybertechnologies, are useful practices for an efficient multinational workforce. Part of the “persuasiveness” of this de-definition, of course, derives from the willingness of transnational corporations to invest in the posthumanities (as communication skills) by providing grants, free technologies, experts and other forms of financial aid to the university. Increasing corporate financing of the university — at a time when conservative allies of transnational business in the legislative bodies (national, state and local) are cutting the budgets of colleges—effectively makes the corporate de-definition of the humanities the operative definition. Administrators, Republican-appointed boards of trustees (as in New York State), corporate executives and legislators, as well as their allies among faculty, regard this “de-definition” of the humanities to be a progressive act that demonstrates the usefulness of the university to the public (i.e. business community) and represent it as the “wave of the future." Representing the marginalization of the critique-al humanities as a progressive act has become part of the new conservative populism on campus. It is the new “truth” of the postnational academy because “it works," and “it works” because it “brings in the money."

One of the symptoms of this corporate de-definition of the humanities as communication skills is the closing or marginalization of humanities Departments. At SUNY-Albany, for example, not only was the German Department recently abolished and various modern languages departments collapsed into one department but also attempts were made, by some members of the administration and its conservative allies on the faculty, to break-up the English Department and put in its place a new more resource-full “Department of Writing Studies." The plan for splitting and marginalizing the English Department, however, has temporarily been shelved because of the contradictions that could not be contained even by the Consultants hired by the Administration. These contradictions are part of the global trend in knowledge practices in late capitalism and have to do (as I will discuss later) with the transition of national capitalism into transnational monopoly capitalism.

It is symptomatic of these unresolved contradictions at SUNY-Albany that the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences appointed a task force to restructure the humanities. One of the proposals “de-forms” the humanities into two “mega-departments” by collapsing nearly all the existing humanities departments into one unit and then proposing to build a second, new mega-department for "writing studies," cybermedia and information technologies. This proposal for combined writing-cyberstudies again reproduces a discredited logocentric model in which the "represented” is put in a binary opposition to “representational” practices. If this project should fail, it will not be because the Dean, the Administration or their faculty allies have come to a new understanding of the role of critique-al humanities in a democratic society but because this particular strategy has not proved effective enough in dealing with the contradictions of this transitional stage in the relation between global capital and the university. They will soon try another, more complex strategy for implementing the de-definition of the humanities as writing-media-cyberstudies. Such displacing of the “humanities” with “writing studies” is, of course, taking place on a large scale (I shall discuss some exemplary cases below).

I have taken as my tutor texts, the texts and practices of some of the faculty and administrators of SUNY-Albany who have been at the forefront of the attack on critique-al humanities. For an extensive analysis of the issues, I have focused more specifically on two exemplary texts by the Vice-President for Academic Affairs at SUNY-Albany, Judy L. Genshaft, as well as on some of her recent practices which enact the educational views articulated in those texts. In May 1996, in response to progressive changes in the English Department at SUNY-Albany, the Vice-President annulled the results of a democratic election in the English Department, overthrew its duly elected new chair and, on June 1, 1996, took control of the Department through a surrogate chair appointed from outside the Department. In her texts of May 7, 1996 [see May 7, 1996 (From: Interim Vice President Judy L. Genshaft)] and May 16, 1996 [see May 16, 1996 (Judy L. Genshaft)], the Vice President offers her “reasons” and her educational “philosophy” for these actions.

My focus is not on “persons” or the “personal” but on texts and practices that articulate theories of the humanities (as part of larger theories of knowledge) and the idea(ologies) that justify the institutional practices founded upon these theories. Therefore, I shall refer (as much as is rhetorically possible) to the authors of these texts and their practices by their institutional titles — “President," “Vice-President," “Dean” — and to the hegemonic faculty, who, with the support of the Administration, has constituted the power elite in the English Department, by the collective designation the “Group." I engage the texts and practices of administrators and faculty alike in their capacity as public officers of a public university accountable to the public.

I have read their texts and practices not in isolation but relationally in connection with their other texts and practices. It is only through such relational readings that the contradictions maintaining the hegemony of the Group and its pro-business ideologies can be foregrounded. Isolating “local” texts and practices as distinct from each other simply continues to conceal and contain the contradictions — contradictions that mark the special interests these texts serve by excluding the interests of the public at large. What, for example, is the “relation” between the Vice-President's “public” radio talk show, “The Best of Our Knowledge," and the views that she puts forth as the policy of a public university? How do the practices of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences relate to his other texts as a public pedagogue, such as Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy? What is the “un-said” of the institutional politics of pedagogues who profess “feminism” in their classes and formally advocate a harassment-free workplace but vote against a motion to condemn harassing acts such as writing graffiti on office walls to silence and intimidate a radical woman professor whose pedagogy is aimed at the critique of capitalism? If these acts are taken in isolation ("regionally") and not read in relation to one another ("globally"), their institutional pro-business politics will continue to remain invisible, as if they were “natural” rather than ideological practices aimed at privileging the “free market” by installing what I have called “retrohumanities”. An examination of these contradictions will make it possible to analyze how transnational business and its allies in the university deploy “retrohumanities” to block progressive knowledges in the humanities and de-form critique-al humanities into the skills and practices useful for big business. What are some of the consequences of retrohumanities for the education of critique-al citizens?

The institutional situation in which I am writing reflects the triumphalist spirit of big business in the post-cold war era. It has become so hostile to critique-al intellectual work that in this text I have had to go back to the beginning: a defense of the most basic democratic rights of critique-al knowledge workers as citizens. Thus, contrary to how some may represent this text (in order to spread panic stories), this is not a “radical” text, nor is it a call for any “radical” transformation. On the contrary, it is a modest argument for the restoration of basic democratic processes to this and other universities, particularly to enable them to engage in critical debates on the necessity of critique-al humanities at a time when they are under increasing pressure, from transnational business and their allies in the academy, to abandon critique-al work. What is “radical” in my text (given the cynical climate of our times), is that I have acted without cynicism. I have taken democracy seriously. I have taken intellectual work seriously. I have taken critique-al pedagogy seriously and acted as a public pedagogue and critique-al citizen in defense of the basic principles for constructing a “good society." I have taken seriously the idea of the “good society” (which has now become a subject of jokes for opportunists and careerist academics).

My text is a defense of the university against those whose interests lie in marginalizing its role as a critique-al space in the emerging cybercommercial culture: those who are imposing the rules of entrepreneurial profit-making on the university. My text is a resistance against de-forming the university into zones of free enterprise and thus depriving democracy of its access to critique-al knowledges that are fundamental to democracy. Without cynicism my text takes seriously the “Mission Statement” of the University at Albany which declares its “commitment to freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression, and to the rights and obligations of faculty and students to pursue knowledge, wherever it may lead" ("Mission Statement," University at Albany Faculty Handbook, emphasis added). But my non-cynical approach itself will be marginalized because it will be read as aggressive rhetoric, belligerent in tone and... (supply your own epithet). This is, of course, the “fate” of critique in an age of cynicism.