Marantz Cohen:
Consider academia’s contrasting treatment of Erich Segal in the 1970s and Cornel West today.
Forty-five
years ago, a Yale assistant professor of classics named Erich Segal published a
best-selling romantic novel after completing his academic opus on Roman comedy.
Although the book on Roman comedy was widely and positively reviewed in
academic journals, Segal was denied tenure. Whether the success of his novel
“Love Story”—which also became a blockbuster film in 1970—accounted for the denial,
the perception within academia was that it did. The division between high and
low in the humanities was then strictly enforced: A scholar didn’t stoop to
writing popular fiction.
Today,
Segal’s success would be applauded as a sign of savvy entrepreneurship, and his
university would no doubt welcome the publicity. He could then spend the rest
of his career analyzing the semiotics of his success, connecting “Love Story”
to classical narratives, hosting a blog on the afterlife of the protagonist, Oliver
Barrett IV, and parsing the meme: “Love means never having to say you’re
sorry.”
For an
actual example of how things have changed since 1970, consider the 2001 case of
philosopher Cornel West, who was
chastised by then-Harvard President
Larry Summers for recording a rap CD and writing the kinds of books
reviewed in newspapers rather than in serious academic journals. Incensed, Mr.
West decamped for Princeton, where he was embraced by that university’s
president, Shirley Tilghman. Mr. West
has since amicably parted ways with Princeton and is now employed by the Union
Theological Seminary, where he has continued to write popular books and articles
and appear on talk shows.
What
happened in the interval between Segal, who died in 2010, and Mr. West?
By the
end of the 20th century, the humanities departments in universities had become
closed enclaves. The writing of scholars in these disciplines had grown
increasingly dense and jargon-filled, inaccessible to anyone without years of
graduate study. For some academics, this enforced isolation became stifling.
They sought new forms of expression. Thus literary theorists Wendy Steiner, Frank Lentricchia and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have turned to opera
librettos, mystery novels and PBS documentaries. Harold Bloom and Stephen Greenblatt have largely abandoned
scholarship for popular nonfiction, while others have escaped into blogging and
personal memoir.
Driving
this change is the emergence of a new media landscape. An academic book in the
humanities from a good press used to have guaranteed sales to most university
libraries and a solid readership among scholars in the field. Now, as fields
have splintered and libraries have cut back on print acquisitions, an academic
author, even a well-regarded one, is lucky to sell 300 copies of a book that
may have taken years to write. Only the most masochistic scholar would
cheerfully submit to that process.
Another
motor of change has been the growth of creative-writing programs. To be a
creative writer now doesn’t impinge on being an academic. In fact, an MFA in
creative writing can sometimes provide a better route to a university position
than a Ph.D., as students clamor to take courses in which they can write their
own work rather than read the work of others.
A
recent issue of PMLA, the official scholarly journal of the Modern Language
Association, devotes a number of its pages to what it calls “The Semipublic
Intellectual: Academia, Criticism, and the Internet Age.” The articles under
this heading concede that online writing and reviewing (forms in which
footnotes and theory are minimal) will soon have to be considered in tenure and
promotion evaluation. PMLA, in short, is acknowledging its own imminent
obsolescence.
There
was once a generally agreed-upon hierarchy of what was considered original and
important. Serious books were at the top, and television was at the bottom. (In
the 1950s, the radio comedian Fred Allen
quipped that “imitation is the sincerest form of television.”) That hierarchy
has mutated. Check out the repetitive subject matter and the duplication of references
in books from the most-prestigious university presses. Television, on the other
hand, has become an enormously creative medium. There are now many TV series
available—from “The Wire” to “Blunt Talk”—that can surprise and delight a
viewer with their insight and wit.
Academics
my age have passed through two eras. We grew up revering great books and good
writing. We then saw the books we loved become fodder for deconstructionist
theory and politicization while the writing in our fields grew ugly. No wonder
that many of us have turned to other forms of expression, connected to personal
experiences and popular culture rather than the great tradition we were trained
to study.
The
future of the humanities seems to depend on finding our way to the following: a
curriculum of serious reading that conforms to what Matthew Arnold called “the
best which has been thought and said in the world”; a support for
research-driven and critical writing that is accessible and graceful; and a
perspective on popular culture that is intelligently appreciative when
warranted. (This is what the eminent literary critic Christopher Ricks has done
with his 2003 book on Bob Dylan, “Dylan’s Visions of Sin.”)
The
challenges to getting to such a place are considerable, given where we are. But
I hope the next generation of humanities scholars—recognizing the value of
inspiring students to read great work and write eloquently about it—will take
on the mission of renovating their disciplines.
