According to Republican lawmakers in Georgia and the Christian Coalition, queer theory is not a legitimate course of study.

On CNN’s American Morning today, Carol Costello reported on Georgia’s recent variation of the age-old debate over what should be taught in our schools. Georgia State University is under fire for employing professors who are listed in an annual faculty guide as experts in ‘Oral Sex’ and ‘Male Prostitution.’ State Representative Charlice Byrd announced on February 4 that she is starting a “grassroots” effort to oust these professors, AP reported.

[. . .]

Calvin Hill, another State Representative, took issue with the University of Georgia’s graduate program on queer theory. “Our job is to educate our people in sciences, business, math,” said Hill, a vice chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee. He said professors aren’t going to meet those needs “by teaching a class in queer theory.” (read the whole thing)

My favorite part is that the goal of universities is, according to Hill, to “educate our people in sciences, business, math.” There is no room for humanities research or teaching with a variety of methodologies and epistemologies.

But this brings up all sorts of questions — questions which keep coming up. What is the role of the humanities, and how do humanities scholars convey that role to the public (or to a variety of publics)? This is particularly true of fields like English, which is misread as being about studying “great books”; queer theory, which, as Lisa Duggan points out, is often not recognizable as legitimate in liberal discourses; composition, which is painted as being about “fixing” basic writers; and rhetoric, which has all too often been relegated to simply problem solving (as Vatz argues).

UPDATED: I ended this post quickly, as I had to finish reading something, so I wound up leaving this post with only a few questions of the “all sorts” that I mentioned. Someone else on the listserv I’m on suggested that this says nothing about Georgia or about higher education, but rather about the scapegoating and attacks against LGBTQ folks across this country. I somewhat agree. In fact, I completely agree that this says nothing about Georgia per se (my twitter update, in which I announced I don’t want to teach in Georgia, aside). And I agree that this is part of a general trend in this country by conservatives to use queers as scapegoats and targets of verbal (and physical!) assaults. That seems obvious. But I think it does say something about public views of higher ed, and also public views of queer epistemology. Jonathan Alexander (I think it was) has written (somewhere!) about how when he comes out to his students, his epistemology becomes suspect: students cannot trust his interpretation of things like they could before he comes out. Certain ways of knowing and interpretive acts are suspect in our society, and deemed not credible for academia. Of course, the assault on queers and on disciplinary/methodological plurality are intricately linked. (Note that it is much less likely that a “straight”-forward science experiment about oral sex would not be critiqued in the same way as a Mindy Stombler’s research on the connections between oral sex practices and public discourse is critiqued and dismissed.) Too, there is the connection made by conservative forces in this country between academia and a “liberal, leftist elite” that also makes this critique much more salient. Also, I need to go get lunch, so I’ll end here.

I love the digital, but prefer print for sustained academic reading. On the bright side, this looks like one of the most interesting issues I’ve seen (judging from the titles of articles).

• According to Queers United, Winq has become the first ever global queer culture magazine, though it appears to be mainly gay and bi male focuses. QU notes that it’s more influenced by queer theory than most other LGBTQ publications.

• CFP: The Palin Factor: Political Mothers and Public Motherhood in the 21st Century. Sounds pretty interesting.

• via Orosco, this Pinky Show episode discusses the ways in which museums construct our experiences while visiting them and create value.

• via The Blogora and The Valve, Adam Kirsch’s piece The Deadly Jester, in which he critiques Zizek. I’m ambivalent about the piece.

• 365gay.com: Gay Rights in a Post Modern World. There are some pretty screwed up ideas in this (like, that racism is over, according to some).

• The ReadWrite Web: The end of online anonymity. Hmmm…

• Hugh McGuire at the Huffington Post: Why Academics Should Blog

And that ends my link dump!

Of course, the IHE article provides more context and more egregious problems that these. Do many academics actually not read the texts they cite? I found the article interesting. However, one suggestion made by Armstrong and Wright (2008) — the study that the IHE article reports about — seems highly problematic:

“When an author uses prior research that is relevant to a finding, that author should make an attempt to contact the original authors to ensure that the citation is properly used,” they write.

As some commenters on the post note, this is simply not possible. One notes that Bruno Latour wouldn’t have time to answer all these requests, and that it’s impossible to email Derrida. Of course, practicality aside, it’s just not theoretically sound. Shouldn’t something put out in public speak for itself? Certainly, asking an author via email for clarification is not a bad idea, but if something’s out in public, it is the text, not the author. To rely so much on intent, to try to get at exactly what the author meant…. Author Function, anyone? Additionally, some concepts are redeployed or used in contexts that authors may disagree with.

That point aside, though, Armstrong and Wright bring up some pretty valid concerns (though not new concerns, I gather).

• “The White Anti-Racist is an Oxymoron: An Open Letter to White ‘Anti-Racists’” by Kil Ja Kim at ChickenBones: A Journal

• Being “Diverse” in the Middle Ground: Thoughts on Racisms, Sexisms and the Many Phobias” by Tenured Radical

• Dismantling the Academic Industrial Complex at La Chola

• When Girls Will Be Boys at NYTimes

• What Is Rhetoric and Composition at Inside Higher Ed, in response to CCCC this year.

• What Is Rhet/Comp For? by Mark Bauerlein at the Chronicle. Perhaps this one isn’t even worth commenting on. Ugh.

• Living the Good Life by Jenny Rice. Fantastic response to CCCC and New Orleans.

• Thomas Beatie’s article The Advocate. You might also watch his appearance on Oprah at Queerty (I showed this in LGBT Studies) and this awful response to his Oprah appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

I’m not trying to state this out of an ad hominem attack (that there is something wrong with her character or her abilities or something); the point I am trying to convey is my history of frustration with her work. This brings me to what I read today. Via Spinuzzi, I read a response to boyd’s call to “boycott locked-down academic journals.”

Boyd writes:

I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I’d like to ask other academics to do the same.

[...]

• Young punk scholars: Publish only in open-access journals in protest, especially if you’re in a new field. This may cost you advancement or tenure, but you know it’s the right thing to do. If you’re an interdisciplinary scholar or in a new field, there aren’t “respected” journals in your space and so you’re going to have to defend yourself anyhow. You might as well use this opportunity to make the valued journals the open-access ones.
• More conservative young scholars: publish what you need to get tenure and then stop publishing in closed venues immediately upon acquiring tenure. I understand why you feel the need to follow the rules. This is fine, but make a point by stopping this practice the moment you don’t need it. (emphasis original)

Anne Galloway’s response is a smart one. She points out that boyd overstates the “lock-down” of academic journals (which she does), but most importantly:

danah’s overall tone is so patronising to academics that I can’t help but feel insulted. I mean, really, how do unsupported claims like this one – “If scholars are publishing for audiences of zero, no wonder no one respects them” – help our shared cause of reforming academic publishing?

I, like Galloway, fully support open-access publishing, and I think Galloway’s point about boyd’s tone is important.

However, I’d like to finally bring this around to my major objection to boyd’s claims. She’s upset because the general public cannot read her article she has published in a “lock-down” journal. What she fails to understand is the differences between and among various types of publics. In other words, she’s completely misunderstood audience here. She misunderstands who academics speak to in specific contexts. An academic does not always speak to the “general public,” but must speak to and help build dialogue within counterpublics (in Michael Warner’s sense — so not necessarily subaltern as Nancy Fraser uses the term). Certainly, there are problems with access to some journals even for academics — while I agree with her complaints that academic journals are too expensive, she also blows this out of proportion (if no academics subscribe to journals, as she claims, how is it that I subscribe to three as an instructor?) — but the solution isn’t boycotting those journals.

Part of boyd’s desire, it seems, is to have academic work open to the public. This is a good goal, but boyd conflates two important goals of academic writing: 1) influencing the “public” and 2) creating disciplinary knowledge. This is a matter of audience. While some academic pieces work for both the general public and for one’s discipline, others are meant solely for an academic audience. Boyd writes:

I think that scholars have a responsibility to make their work available as a public good. I believe that scholars should be valued for publishing influential material that is consumed by anyone who might find it relevant to their interests.

I agree. But some articles and books are about creating disciplinary knowledge, about discourse within an academic counterpublic, and making this work available to the public isn’t as useful because the general public isn’t part of that “discourse community” (a term I try to avoid). It should be available to the public, I believe, in the name of transparency, but this is another issue. Boyd, I believe, has missed the whole point of audience of academic writing.

What I am getting at is the material situation of our work. I share an office (which I think is great, because it’s less isolating), but it can be rather crowded, especially if both of us are talking with students. Additionally, the heater is so out-dated that the room is always either too hot or too cold. Couple this with the fact that the heater sometimes leaks condensation, so I have to watch where I sit things if I put them on the floor. Compound that with the fact that the heat is turned off over the weekend, which means that it’s too cold in my office to work there over the weekend.

And then there is one of the classrooms in our building, which had a leak or something over break and is now undergoing a major overhaul, leaving the room useless for the whole quarter. Today, MLK day, construction workers are re-modeling the room, which a) makes it too loud in here to get a lot done in my office, and b) reveals a clear distinction between classes in regards to labor, and who has the privilege to celebrate and honor diversity and social change: while academic labor gets the day off, physical labor continues on campus. Not that I get the day off; I’ll probably be putting in a near-full day grading.

And the building for English is in better shape than other buildings on campus, some of which have scaffolding to prevent the bricks from falling off and injuring passersby.

And let’s not forget adjunct pay.

And while this is a litany of complaints, I don’t mean to paint an image of abjection. I am really quite pleased with my situation as an instructor, and I love the department I’m in and the people and students I work with.

Note that what we’re talking about here is the study, not the production, of humanistic texts. The question I posed in the column was not do works of literature, philosophy and history have instrumental value, but does the academic analysis of works of literature, philosophy and history have instrumental value. When Jeffrey Sachs says that “in the real world” the distinction between the humanities and the sciences on the basis of utility does not hold because “philosophers have made important contributions to the sciences” and “the hard sciences have had a profound impact on the humanities,” he doesn’t come within 100 miles of refuting anything I say. Whatever does or does not happen in the “real world” is not the issue; the issue is what happens in the academic world, where the distinctions Sachs dismisses do hold. It may be, as George Mobus maintains, that “only in academia where you are supposed to be a specialist . . . do we parse the world into silos,” but the academic world is by definition parsed into silos and when the utility of one of them is questioned, it is not to any point to say that in some other world everything exists in some great big mix.

In my response, I argued that they do have utility: creating ethical frameworks (to summarize what I wrote).

But let’s go a bit further with this. After reading Fish’s comment, I had to pull out my (scanned, actually) copy of Christian Weisser’s Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition and the Public Sphere, which, as I recalled, had a discussion of Stanley Fish.

Weisser quotes Fish’s assertion from Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (which, unfortunately, I haven’t read):

A public intellectual is someone who takes as his or her subject matters of public concern, and has the public’s attention. Since one cannot gain that attention from the stage of the academy (except by some happy contingency) academics, by definition, are not candidates for the role of the public intellectual. Whatever the answer to the question “How does one get to be a public intellectual?” we know it won’t be “by joing the academy.” (Fish 118, quoted in Weisser 118)

The problem with this account, however, as Weisser points out, is a belief in a singular public sphere, and the outdated belief in the public intellectual as someone who speaks to the entire public. Weisser goes on to compare Fish to Habermas:

Both, for example, suggest that public discourse is only worthwhile if it reaches a large segment of the population who are able to act upon it in some way. Furthermore, they both seem to suggest that public discourse must address an eclectic audience, since speaking to an assorted constituency is the only way to bring about widespread changes in thinking and practice. In other words, they assume that public discourse must address the “general public,” and the term public is often taken to encompass all members of a society or at least a representative microcosm of them. (120)

But why do I bring in Weisser’s book, in particular his chapter on public intellectuals, into this dialogue on the worth of the humanities? It is because, in the passage I quote from Fish’s blog, he has continued the very fracture between academia and “the real world” that Weisser criticizes. Is not academia a counterpublic (though not subaltern)? That is, aren’t fields of academia public spaces for dialogue, though not the public as a singularity?

I’m exhausted (have some grading and reading left to do tonight), so I’m going to cut this short by a) quoting my own thesis (I know, lazy and egotistical, perhaps) in order to summarize Weisser’s point, and b) getting to the point I want to make here: that I think the Humanities does have a role in public outside of academia: to assist in ethical public dialogue, whether as public intellectuals speaking to people (as even Fish does), or in helping to create counterpublics.

He [Weisser] writes that, contrary to a traditional concept, “[i]ntellectuals can take part in creating such counterpublics, and must also look for alternative sites in which to voice their opinions on social and political issues” (123). Intellectuals can promote and affect change “on the micro level of interaction,” in their classroom, through scholarship, and through public actions, and need not be an expert on all subjects, but should be able to “speak to any group outside of the academy” (123, 125).

Weisser believes that if we view the role of the public intellectual in this way, we might “see a variety of opportunities for work,” of which “[o]ur work in the classroom … might be seen as perhaps the most important and effective avenue of political and social change that is available to us” (127). Weisser sees the work of compositionists as necessarily public: it is our role to be scholars of public discourse and to help to foster links amongst different discourse communities (129). “We need,” he concludes, “as Ellen Cushman notes in The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change, ‘a deeper consideration of the civic purpose of our positions in the academy, of what we do with our knowledge, for whom, and by what means.’ Activist intellectuals might be then, quite simply, members of academe who take steps to bring more voices, more discourse, and a greater degree of communication to public debates, and in turn bring about social change” (131).

Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse has also written about this role of the public intellectual, noting that she “has a decisive preparatory function” for public debate. He writes, “education today is more than discussion, more than teaching and learning and writing. Unless and until it goes beyond the classroom, until and unless it goes beyond the college, the school, the university, it will remain powerless” (“Liberation” 285). If the work of an intellectual spreads to outside of schools, there is the need to help develop public spheres where others can speak and talk. The intellectual’s role (at least in the humanities), as I see it, then, is to not only offer counterdiscourse, but to help foster public arenas where others can speak — not to organize others, but to help foster democratic public spheres. (138-139)

EDIT: My friend Christian emailed me a smart response, which I’d like to excerpt and post here:

First, I agree. Duh, of course I do. Where you say “role” I suppose I say “responsibility.” Actually, pluralize that: “responsibilities.” There have to be more than one monolithic responsibility here, just as there may be more than one “role.”

[...] I say hey let’s just argue for the responsibility thing: the Humanities, personified in active agents, categorized in texts, owe it to publics to take on certain roles (read: earn certain roles and/or inherit certain roles), not simply “be in a role” as if it’s part and parcel with academia. Ought we to emphasize the responsibility, not the position (role)?

In the book, Bousqet doesn’t just lament the situation facing those on the job market, but questions how the market is defined. Just looking at jobs being filled and new Ph.D.’s entering the market, he writes, ignores larger realities: the way graduate students perform work for years before they are counted as “in the market,” and the differences in the qualities of the jobs being filled these days with those envisioned in the 1989 report. As a result, even generally optimistic reports about the job market miss the point, he argues.

Holding a doctoral degree in many ways represents a “disqualification” from academic work, Bousquet writes, because these degree holders’ post-Ph.D. employment is working as an adjunct without the possibilities of working on research, having health insurance or enjoying job security — which they may have (in varying degrees) as grad students.

I find Bousquet’s argument convincing (without having read the book), but I also like what Tim Mayers has to say in a comment on the article:

Much of Marc Bosquet’s analysis is astute and provocative. But with regard to one important aspect of the labor situation in college and university English departments, that analysis is sorely lacking.

Ph.D.-granting English departments nationwide contine to churn out specialists in literary interpretation; the number of such specialists is staggering in comparison to the number of specialists in writing and/or rhetoric. Yet most of the “cheap labor” provided by graduate students and adjuncts involves teaching writing, usually first-year composition. The issue, then, is not merely that so many college writing instructors are paid little and have no benefits and no job security. It’s that a stunning number of college writing instructors are unprepared and unqualified to teach writing. And many of them, quite frankly, have no real interest in teaching writing either; they do it to remain in academia while hoping they might eventually find “real” jobs as literature professors.

Behind all this lies the persistent bias of the MLA (and most English departments) that literary study is the fundamental focus and reason-for-being of English studies. A concerted effort to redefine English studies around literacy (as opposed to literature) is what’s needed. But that will take decades, if not longer.