How Michael Bérubé made me stop blogging for a while

This is sort of a review, in two parts, of Bérubé's new book, What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, along with a pathetic explanation of my absence from blogging for the last week or so.

As I was reading, I kept thinking "who is Michael writing this thing for?" On the one hand, it's a somewhat polemical and very erudite (but accessible! and funny!) rejection of the right-wing bullshit about liberal indoctrination in the universities. Enjoyable for me to read, but do I really need to be reading it? I thought. I mean, I already know that the right-wing bullshit is bullshit; I hardly need to be convinced on this point. And it's clearly not really directed at Horowitz or my dittohead Uncle; the polemic, while funny, is precisely the kind of thing that those who aren't already in the choir will dismiss as, well, polemic. Is it aimed at my dad, who's politically liberal but has no clue what goes on in universities? My mom, who prides herself on being "smarter than the average bear," and mortifies me fairly often by pretending to know what goes on in universities without actually doing so? My aunt, the retired school teacher and Ph.D., who's suspicious of "theory" but equally impatient with arguments about right-wing takeover of education?

I couldn't figure the answer to the question out. Mind you, I really liked the book: Bérubé has a knack for writing stuff that I read thinking "yes, yes, of course, yes." He manages to flatter my intelligence by saying complex things very clearly; I always feel like I could have written this my own damn self if I weren't so lazy, and damn him for being so prolific and important while I'm not! I had a similar experience, btw, at the first MLA I ever attended (before I went on the market--I was just dropping in to check out the scene, man). I happened to decide to go to a panel he was on and came out of it thinking, that Bérubé guy knows how to give an MLA paper that actually presents an argument (as opposed to just describing interesting primary material, which is another conference paper format I really like) while making the argument comprehensible and interesting (which is the downfall of most of the more theoretically sophisticated conference papers I've seen). So despite being confused about the intended readership, I found myself jotting notes about things I want to ask him about when I see him at the end of the month in Philadephia.

Of course, I also found myself arguing with things in the margins, e.g. the entire opposition between "the good" and the "moral imagination," on the one hand, and the idea of an innate universal sense of moral truth, on the other that he talks about in the chapter about postmodernism and how he teaches it. But of course, clever bastard, he ends up leading a recalcitrant student (and hence, the reader) through the argument by acknowledging that this opposition seems inherently paradoxical and then saying that of course that doesn't mean that there's some universal moral truth; it just means that each individual has his own idea of what constitutes "the good," and the entire goal is to argue about it.

In other words, Bérubé turns out (in this chapter, at least) to be arguing--I think--that the liberalism of the liberal arts is primarily what I would describe as formalism: a liberalism that's dedicated to the method of argument, rather than to any particular content. Being as I enjoy formalism my own damn self, I'm inclined to like this claim. I'm also inclined to like books that present me with a conundrum that causes me to jot furiously in the margins "but, but" and then ten pages later resolve the conundrum by acknowledging precisely the objection I've been gnawing on. And of course, one realizes as one works through Bérubé's own method here that the man is a darn good teacher--not just because of what he describes in his classroom, which (again), uses methods I recognize and think "yes, I do that too" about, but because he is, blast him, teaching me something as I read, and doing it in a seductively witty and gratifying way, by making me think that I'm coming up with the very arguments he's presenting on my own, rather than because I'm being led to them.

Which, you know, is part of why the right wing dislikes good teachers like Bérubé (and myself). Bérubé says this is because higher education actually works (on which more in the second part); I think it's because good teachers are essentially formalists, which is to say we teach well, part of which means leading students to come to their own conclusions. Dangerous stuff, that, because conclusions one reaches on one's own are more enduring than the simple content dump that conservative educational reformers want us to be doing (on the one hand) and accuse us of doing (on the other): that is, we're not supposed to be indoctrinating students, but merely giving them neutral information; the problem with us (liberal academics) is that we're giving them liberal information and therefore indoctrinating them. It's a stupid and easily refuted argument--as Bérubé cites a colleague saying, we wish we had the power just to get them to do the reading, let alone indoctrinate them. But because it's so stupid, it's kinda easy to blow off. We worry about the effects of this argument on things like political funding for higher ed, but we don't worry about the content of the argument much.

Which leads me to my second point, and the reason I said in my last post lo those many days ago that I realized that I my own damn self (and, by extension, you, dear reader) are the audience for this book. The most bothersome part of the right-wing attack on universities "because they work" (as Bérubé says) is (he doesn't say this; this is me musing after finishing his book) the extent to which we, the professoriate, have swallowed the kool-aid. We are the university; we and the students. We know we're not indoctrinating them, and they know (most of them) that we're not indoctrinating them.

But. We've gotten so defensive about the right-wing criticism that professing is a cushy job that we've psyched ourselves out. "Professors only work a few hours a week," someone claims. "I see my neighbor the college prof mowing her lawn every Friday just before lunchtime." Or, "You only teach three classes? Damn, high school teachers teach six." And instead of smiling and saying, "yes, it is a great job," we get defensive about how our time "off" is, after all, working time, and how hard it is to research and write, and how a lot of the "work" going into writing doesn't look like work, but when I'm out there mowing the lawn on Friday I'm thinking about this intractable problem in my research and how in the world can I account for these unexpected results?

All of which is fine, sort of. At least, inasmuch as the right-wing attack is that professors have it easy, and therefore there is something wrong with higher ed, we're right to argue.

But we're arguing with the wrong half of the attack. The fact is, professor's lives are easy; and this shows that there's a lot right with higher ed. What, after all, is the point of spending half your life reading and writing and thinking, and the other half teaching, if doing so isn't a good thing to do? And I don't mean good in the sense of noble sacrifice; I mean good in the sense of, it's enjoyable. It isn't work, in the pejorative sense of its being a burden, to stand around and talk with my students after class; I like talking to students. It isn't onerous to read; I like reading. It certainly isn't drudgery to argue; few things are more fun than explaining an idea.

And all of these (god, I sound like a reactionary) are the reasons why education is a good thing. By focusing so much on "proving" that we "work hard," we've managed to convince ourselves that it's a drag; and this, even more than anything David Horowitz says, risks convincing our students that knowledge and learning are a waste of time. If they believe us, they might as well drop out and get a job where they can watch tv after 5 pm, instead of doing even more of that awful, difficult thinking. If they look at us bitching and griping and say "bullshit; all this reading and writing look like fun, but all you do is gripe about how menial and dull it all is," then they're likely to decide, at best, that we're ill-qualified to be doing our jobs, and should be replaced by people who actually like teaching and learning; or, alternatively, that the end effect of education is to turn people into malcontents.

Yes, there are things that are frustrating about higher ed, just as there are things that are frustrating about any big group effort. But the funding cuts and higher teaching loads and adjunct outsourcing and such are frustrating because they get in the way of our being able to read and think and write and teach. That is to say, the essence of the job--reading, thinking, writing, teaching--is a good one. And we should say so, and we should defend that idea as being, after all, the entire point of the American Dream: we've found the good life, we should be able to pursue it. We--all of us, not just the professoriate, but the rest of the country and damnit, while we're at it, the rest of the world--should be able to assert without apology that leisure to think is a good thing, one of the primary advantages of being American (that is to say, living in a society in which our basic needs are basically met for most of us).

So in conclusion (as my students would write, but I have to go pick PK up in eight minutes and have put off writing this post long enough), What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts turns out to have a pretty broad audience: people who are smart and like thinking and want to take a seminar on literary theory and/or contemporary politics and/or the state of higher education for about $27.

Unfortunately, having scribbled in the margins of my own copy, I'm going to have to actually buy a couple more copies for Christmas gifts. I expect that these purchases, along with the fact that I have finally purchased a plane ticket to the MLA, thankyouverymuch, will cause Professor Bérubé to reconsider his statement that I'm "way teh lame" for having put off said ticket purchasing until just a few days ago. Ironically, though, despite his teasing, he's more right than he probably realizes (as usual, the bastard): one reason I put it off, just as I put off finishing this review, is that I have internalized a lot of stupid anxiety about "work" and academe, and said anxiety leads to procrastination. However, newly emboldened by my realization that in order to reject (and prove wrong) reactionary nonsense about the value of what I do, I need to stop worrying about impressing people like Bérubé, anonymous editors, and unknown MLA auditors, and just have fun with this shit. Because, you know, it is kinda fun.

And if you're going to make an ass of yourself by saying something stupid, where better to do it than at the MLA?

Way teh lame, here I come.