In a recently-posted opinion piece USC English professor Judith Halberstam argues for “The Death of English” to be acknowledged as a done deal, calling for the academic field of English to regain its relevance by admitting its current irrelevance and reconstituting itself into new interdisciplinary fields that might run job searches for, for example, “the poetries of industrialization” rather than “romanticism.” In part a response to Spivak’s Death of a Discipline, Halberstam’s piece provoked a good number of comments, comments I found shocking in their predictability. “The culture wars” --*sigh*-- are not dead.

For starters, I simply have to say that the sense of crisis, both in Halberstam’s article and in the responses to it, seems unwarranted. Halberstam’s claim that: “Nowadays, some English departments and most comparative literature departments are beset by massive declines in enrollment and petty squabbles within the ranks” might be true: surely some departments have these problems, but that didn’t start being true the day before nowadays. On the whole, however, enrollments are up over the last twenty years, as Michael Berube points out in a recent blog –up well over 50% in total enrollment, but also up in terms of overall percentage of B.A.s awarded. If English is dead or dying, it doesn’t seem to be in any bodily sense.

Still, canon-smashers and preservers-of-the-way alike seem to feel the house is on fire, that there’s a war on, a revolution, a rupture if not a rapture –the end of Western civilization, hooray or alas. And so it must be admitted that there can’t exactly be a false sense of crisis. As Moe the bartender on The Simpsons once said: “Rich people aren’t really happy; they just think they are --from the minute they’re born, until the day they die.” If so many people both in and outside of academia feel that the Humanities are in a state of crisis, then their thinking makes it so. Part of the problem is a sense –an incorrect sense, I think—that culture is a zero-sum game. The sanctity of Shakespeare, somewhat like that of heterosexual marriage, is threatened by the existence of the queer theory course down the hall. (In such cases it is hard for me to believe such people have read Shakespeare –or ever met a straight person-- even though I know they have). Conversely, but far less commonly, some feel that a day spent on Milton’s meters is a loss if not a blow to social justice.

The problem is at least for now irresolvable precisely because in so many ways it isn’t real. Or, slightly better: the problem lies not in what the humanities are but in what we want them to be, in what we imagine they used to be, in what we hope they might do –which is why so many people who are outside of the university (including many who seem to know very little about it) seem to care so much. Like Art in the previous century, the University has become the site of a concentrated projection of hopes, fears, fantasies, revolutionary aspirations and rage. It seems a place where humanity might be reinvented. While conservative critics mock –sometimes rightly so, I hasten to add!—the inflated rhetoric and radical pretensions of much of academic discourse over the past twenty or thirty years, it should be apparent that it is precisely those conservatives who believe most strongly in the power of books and ideas to shape society.

Most Americans seem both to think very little of literature professors and to expect the world of them. The responses generated by Halberstam’s article reveal a cross-section of the overdetermined and contradictory mess of expectations tied to a liberal arts education. Today’s professor is both elitist and mired in pop culture dreck. S/he is politically correct --but irrelevant to contemporary concerns. The professoriate is impotent, but corrupting the nation’s youth on a mass scale. Americans want the Humanities to be practical, training students to face real problems in the real world. But they also want the Humanities to discuss works of art as works of art, without the distractions of politics, history, race, class, gender or other such hooey. At the same time, literature should teach moral values. And parents should feel they are getting their money’s worth. Failure to meet not only any, but all of the above criteria results in moral decay --and in not being “relevant,” which professors aren’t supposed to care about anyway, unless they’re not.

The logic of the “conservative” side of the debate is echoed by the proliferation of “Support Our Troops” magnets. Common sense would seem to dictate that “supporting” these troops would entail paying them well, training them properly, not over-extending their tours of duty, giving them decent health care, and of course not unnecessarily sending them to war. No doubt for many people –especially for people who have direct personal connections to those troops— this is this case. But by and large “Support Our Troops” seems to mean “Support Our President (Even at the Expense of the Troops),” or simply: “Shut Up.” If they are critical of the war or the president actual soldiers and soldiers’ families are denounced as unpatriotic.

Let me be clear: I in no way wish to compare the situations of actual soldiers and actual professors. Rather, I am suggesting that, as is the case with “the troops,” those who most vociferously support a good, solid, traditional education are often those who know the least about it and are least willing to make any of the sacrifices necessary to support it. But this is precisely why we need to understand what these calls mean. This past Sunday’s New York Times quotes Matt Bennett, founder of the Christian Union (an organization dedicated to “advancing the kingdom of Jesus Christ in the Ivy League”) expressing his anguish: “I love these universities - Princeton and all the others, my alma mater, Cornell - but it really grieves me and really hurts me to think of where they are now.” For most, I think, the source of the pain people feel at the perceived failure of the University is different, but what is it? If most people are not themselves reading Euripides and Bacon and Hazlitt, why is it so important to them that others do? Why are they so angry and even hurt when they think those others aren’t? More to the point, why has the symbolic function of the Humanities become so supercharged that any actual program can only disappoint? When so many people (literally) and institutions (figuratively) are dying, why do we keep collectively rehearsing the spectacle of the death of “English”?

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