Thoughts on the Summer Whine

Our song is one long complaint. We’re overworked, undervalued and, of course underpaid. Last week, I found myself at a conference on universities at New York University. Well-informed professors spoke eloquently about the casualization of academic work and the rising threats to academic freedom, the destructive efforts of politicians and soi-disant reformers to transform the public schools and the difficulty of defending the humanities. I felt myself slipping into my familiar and satisfying state of despair at the condition of my profession.

But two of the speakers, neither of them a conventional American academic, made me see the error of my ways. Simon Head described the odd paralysis that has afflicted the British universities. There, complaint — and stronger responses — would be appropriate. The government is transforming academics’ working conditions in blood-freezingly stupid ways, and for the most part the universities are going along with it all in a state of astonishing docility. Endless measurement exercises now determine universities’ funding, and most academics have made little effort to protest, much less resist, the use of meaningless categories like “impact.” This category is now used to evaluate both the quality of journals and the effects of research on the public sphere. When the journal I help to edit was evaluated, we were graded both for selectivity and for circulation, though no one ever asked for data on either point.

Nicholas Lemann, the distinguished dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, pointed out that in the realm he left to join the academy — the world of metropolitan news media — many newsrooms have lost half their staffs in the last few years. When universities reached that point, he would admit that they faced a real crisis.

My illumination wasn’t quite as powerful as the bolt of lightning that struck Tom Wolfe at a 1965 panel discussion in Princeton, when he listened to Gunter Grass and Allen Ginsberg decrying America’s descent into fascism and declared that on the contrary, we were undergoing a happiness explosion. But it was strong enough. Suddenly I began to realize that in America even a humble humanist has a great deal to be thankful for.

Like most university professors these days, I believe in diversity — diversity in the academic staff and in the student body. And for all that we have failed to achieve, we have moved a long way in that regard. Universities still aren’t as diverse as — say — the military, and groups of different ethnic and social origins don’t mingle as much as some of us wish they would. But colleges and universities look much more like America now than they did when I began my studies in the late 1960s, and it’s good that they do.

Here’s one example among many. Like most humanists, I teach at least as many female students as male ones. Some of them hope to become scholars. And as one of them said to me the other day, for all the miseries of the job market and all the gender inequities in society, her life and career chances, as a female scholar, are better than they would have been at pretty much any time in the past. In those lazy, hazy days of the 1960s, when there were jobs for the taking, the boys — or rather the men with Ph.D.s — monopolized them. We no longer live in that world of academic plenty, but the resources that remain are shared more decently.

Like many of my colleagues, I am bothered by the flood of books and editorials about colleges and universities. Many of them, perhaps most, describe professors as theory-crazed buffoons who babble incomprehensibly on the rare occasions when they enter classrooms and waste the public’s money on frivolous activities like vacations in Tuscany (that’s how one recent and well-received book characterized our research). These barbs are not aimed at engineers or molecular biologists, who visibly spend long days in their labs, but at humanists, including historians like me.

At the moment, though, I’m president of the American Historical Association, and in that office I’m doing my best to find out what historians do all day. And I’m meeting a lot of scholars and teachers who are passionate about their research and constantly looking for better books to assign and more engaging forms of pedagogy. There are departments with excellent teaching cultures across the country. Many of them maintain small classes and active learning in the face of harsh budget cuts, and their students respond with wonderful enthusiasm about learning. The humanities, it turns out, are alive and well — and even, at most universities, paying their own way.

Injustices and inequities persist, here at Princeton and in every other college and university. The academic job market is in terrible shape and academic freedom is threatened. But for now, I find myself thinking with W.H. Auden, “Let your last thinks be thanks” — last for the moment, anyhow. It will be time enough to complain again next fall.

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.