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I'm basically describing a train wreck with no survivors.
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. . .what anyone would describe it as just an unremittingly bleak account of the university.
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I forget what editor said, um, that if you want
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that if you want to write a best selling book just make sure to include "death" in the title.
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This was adapted, of course, as a joke in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall,"
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but if you're characterizing the death of anything
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then people will be interested, because people like extinction as a trope.
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And, so, they look at the title of my book and they expect that
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this is gonna be apocalyptic--and in a lot of ways it is, because I don't really offer solutions.
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I think a lot of it has to do with a lack of happy ending.
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I think that makes people want to read the book and also argue against it.
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I mean, there are more people who are dissatisfied or bothered by what I'm saying
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than who read it and say, "Yeah! That's right!" 'Cause it's not a really cheerful message.
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I never considered a question mark
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and I think that most people who would want to put a question mark at the end of the book
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would propose solutions that I just don't have any faith in.
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The most frustrating responses, and there are quite a few of them,
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are complaints that there's no happy ending
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and everybody wants me to supply some kind of conclusion that's uplifting.
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And the fact that I don't do it--it bothers them,
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but I don't supply a happy ending just because I don't see one.
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I didn't feel the need to concoct one just for the benefit of those hopeful readers.
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Well, there's really only one, which is a call for unionization.
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I think that makes a lot of sense for graduate students and for adjuncts,
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but if professors were to unionize in force--in large numbers--
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that means, I think, that everything about their jobs would then be negotiable.
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And if that were the case, then I think the first thing to be negotiated out of existence would be tenure
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and with it would go any academic freedom that tenured professors enjoy.
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When those two things go, I mean, you'll still have the last professors.
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It would have to come from the bottom up, I think.
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If enough graduate students and adjuncts want really strong unions
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and took universities, um, really took universities on,
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that might really force faculty to make a decision one way or another.
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No one has ever asked me--when I just kind of articulate the thesis of The Last Professors--
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no one's ever asked me: is this necessarily a bad thing?
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--that professors are disappearing--
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no one's willing to go the whole nine yards and say,
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"Okay, well, why does--why does knowledge of the humanities have to originate and be disseminated in universities?
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Why should it even be part of the college curriculum?
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Why shouldn't there be--why shouldn't professors disappear?"
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No one's wanted to engage me in that debate--
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I'd love to have it, because I don't know that I have an answer,
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so it would be an interesting conversation just because I don't have a position.
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I don't necessarily believe that the humanities has to emanate from universities
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and be profligated by professors, so I'm not even sure that the idea
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of the last professors is necessarily tragic. No one's asked me.
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I don't think there'll be as many humanities options 30--40 years from now.
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I can imagine even an university like Ohio State, if you go fourty years out from now--
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when I'm 90--it wouldn't surprise me if Ohio State had a single department of language arts and culture.
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No English, no history, no romance languages,
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maybe not even philosophy. Humanities would just be condensed into one unit
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and there really wouldn't be an option for a college education of four years.
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College would then become something that provide students with an education passport
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where they take a few courses at one institution.
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Maybe apply that crediential on a job then go back to school for more training of a different kind
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get a crediential for that, go back to school for a different kind of training
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get a crediential for that.
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They'd end up with a whole bunch of certifications--not necessarily even from the same institution
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and I don't think that people will be going to college to study the humanitites.
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Except for a rare few. I think there'll always be an Ivy league--an Ivy league-type institution--
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to which people go and they go and major in subjects in the humanities--traditional liberal arts subjects--
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knowing full well that doing that means that they're just taking a prerequisite step towards an advanced degree
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either a PhD or a JD or something like that.
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And if you have the money and the luxury to spend that much time
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getting to the point where you can practice a profession
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--4 years of college, 6 years of graduate school; 4 years of college, 3 years of law schoool--
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well, the only people who will be able to afford that,
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assuming nothing changes forty years from now, will be the very wealthy.
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Yeah, I've claimed in my book that the Ivy league will be the "Alamo" of the humanities.
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That's the last place it'll thrive and the last place that it will exist.
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When it's disappeared or morphed into something unrecognizable at institutions like Ohio State,
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there'll still be classics courses at Harvard.
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I always go back to Kenneth Burke's great locution about literature being equipment for living.
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I think way too many people have taken the Matthew Arnold position
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that reading literature will make you a better person
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and that just seems to be bound up with a whole ethical program that I cannot subscribe to.
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It just seems to me false and pretentious to push on students.
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Somewhere embedded in the argument defending the humanities
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is "this will make you a better person. Reading novels, reading philosophy will make you a better person
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--will prove your character." I don't believe that.
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I think we should be making the argument that reading literature, reading philosophy will make you a smarter person.
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What you do with that is up to you.
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