and the sun is a hot ball of gas
Cross-posted on CliopatriaThis is a major news flash, I know, but Victor Davis Hanson has written something dumb. The fun part is that he wrote something dumb in response (or in "response," since he doesn't really bother to respond) to a question I asked him:
In a March answer to a reader, you wrote on your website that "race studies,” queer studies, gender studies, etc." have become "the establishment" on university campuses, resulting in the destruction of the "old liberal arts curriculum." A New York Times story on April 24, 2005 reports on the most common and least common majors on contemporary campuses. At the University of California at San Diego, for example, 3,368 students are majoring in biology; 1,787 are majoring in economics; and a whopping 23 are majoring in critical gender studies.Hanson's response is yet another regurgitation of the same-old same-old, and go ahead and place your bets on whether or not he mentions Ward Churchill. (Ward Churchill now singlehandedly comprises fifty percent of all known American academics.)
Isn't it possible that you've overstated the significance of "studies" programs? I apologize for challenging your declensionist worldview with actual facts.
Backing up the claim that race/class/gender/sexuality "studies" have taken over the academy, Hanson now writes:
All these 'studies' programs have no popular appeal to students at all, who rarely major in them, or take more than one (required) course. But their influence is nevertheless enormous and hardly to be measured simply by official majors.So the new "establishment" on American university campuses is a set of programs that students don't find appealing or useful at all. Supermarket X has no loyal customers, and therefore is the leader in the supermarket industry.
First, most campuses now have some sort of requirement in the General Education curriculum for an ethnic or gender studies class; and these courses, unlike most others, thus reach most of the student body .
Note also that "studies" programs "have no popular appeal to students at all," but somehow are full of snarky grad students and politically correct professors. And where do grad students and professors come from? Not from the undergraduate population, apparently. Maybe universities are raising these professor types in some sort of kooky left-wing test tubes.
Finally, I love that "studies" programs have taken over the academy and destroyed the traditional curriculum because many universities now require students to take "one (required) course" in those programs. At UCLA, where we're on the quarter system, an undergraduate needs 160 credits -- at four credits per class -- to graduate. That means 40 classes for a B.A. At Pitzer College, where I was an undergrad, we needed 32 semester-long classes to graduate. So one required class in a race/class/gender/sexuality topic would comprise either 1/40th or 1/32nd of an undergraduate education -- and heaven forbid that a student spend 1/40th an education thinking about women, African Americans, or homosexuality. They should stick to, you know, normal topics.
Hanson continues:
Second, the class/race/gender fixation insidiously transcends these titled courses proper; thus former Revolutionary war classes might now be in fact studies of the 'other' during colonial times; a class nominally on some of Shakespeare's plays turns out to be deconstructing gender, or a history of Latin America often becomes a melodrama about European pathology and culpability.Well, sure. What's all this discussion of European culpability doing in Latin American history courses? If we have any readers in the Fresno area, someone might want to ask Victor Davis Hanson why people in Latin America speak Spanish and Portugese, which are widely believed (by leftist academics) to be European languages. How on earth would one design a class on Latin America without referencing the presence of European colonizers? Why is the inclusion of this presence a radical choice?
And finally, Hanson writes:
Fourth, the politically-correct emphasis on race/class/gender studies puts enormous pressure on untenured faculty to publish in these areas and upon graduate students to steer their research in this direction — and to serve obsequiously those faculty who, they sense, have gravitated in these directions and thus will have greater clout when it comes time to parcel out fellowships, teaching assignments, and recommendations for jobs. Perusal of the Modern Language Association's, American Historical Association's, or American Philological Association's lists of PhD dissertation titles or annual convention talks bears out this over-concentration...I have suggested before that the AHA's list of dissertations in progress proves that Hanson and others like him are mostly full of hot air, and I'll say it again: Go look for yourself. Yes, you will find titles that focus on race/class/gender/sexuality themes. Yes, some will sound silly. Most will not. Some of those that sound silly will actually contain good scholarship; some of those that sound smart and "traditional" will actually contain poor scholarship.
Were the world anywhere near as simple as Victor Davis Hanson makes it out to be, we would all be drawn in crayon.
posted by Chris Bray @ 9:20 PM
5 Comments:
My moment of jaw-hits-floor was when he complained that there were more Chicano studies classes than on the Civil War at a certain college. Well (guessing that he meant the *American* Civil War because Americans always do, like nobody else ever had one of those... *Brit snark*), so what? Chicano Studies is an interdisciplinary field of study; the (American) Civil War is a particular short-term set of events in one nation's history (of only moderate significance to most of the rest of the world). They are not remotely commensurate. It's a bit like complaining that there are more classes on English Literature than the Civil War.
Chris,
I always appreciate and am largely sympathetic to your posts, both here and on HNN, but at times you've become so stubborn in your opposition to the VDH's of the world that you're replicating their overly simplified views. I have two non-related nitpicks with your post I'd like to share.
First, as a graduate student, I don't see how anyone can deny there's enormous pressure to pander to the race/class/gender philosophy of history. We would be lying to ourselves if we ignore the fact that academic success does lie partially in aligning our research with the prevailing fads at any given time. Do you deny there is at least some institutional pressure to cater to the winds of academic fashions? If not, does this not imply that there is at least some degree of pressure to conform in the academy (though perhaps not to the point of creating the "academic monoculture...")?
Second, you stridently oppose VDH at every turn, but your opposition never actually disagrees with his points. Rather, you make light of them, and point out evidence suggesting that it isn't quite as grave as he makes it out to be. Fair enough. But am I correct in thinking that you concede the fundamental facts to him, but merely believe it amounts to less of an immediate problem? That's really not much of a counter-argument at all. That's like arguing that we don't have to worry about global warming because, instead of a 4 degree rise in temperatures, in reality there's only been a 2 degree rise. That is, you rarely dispute the fundamental fact of the "academic monoculture," you merely argue it isn't such a crisis.
A better challenge would be to point out significant ways (and I think there are many) in which today's scholarship offers a large and balanced view of the world, one in which a narrow and trendy philosophy of history does not necessarily rule authoritatively over all others. Imagine how most people would react if somebody rejected race/class/gender as an explanatory framework of history in favor of, say, such archaic and unsophisticated concepts as "duty," "patriotism," and "sociability." Would that historian be taken seriously and given a prominent position? If not, does that not imply a process in which, over time, a department as a whole comes to largely agree with itself on everything (the first steps, it would seem, to an "academic monoculture")?
First, as a graduate student, I don't see how anyone can deny there's enormous pressure to pander to the race/class/gender philosophy of history.
I'll take a stab at denial.
1) I don't think that "race/class/gender" is a "philosophy of history." I do not even know of a work that has suggested that the concepts of race, class, and gender together form a total understanding of the past. It seems to me that race, class and gender are catagories that historians choose or choose not to analyze, and that they can analyze them in significantly different (even conservative ways). If you don't believe me, take a look at what VDH has done with race in Mexifornia.
2) I don't think the interest in race, class and gender either constitutes or is primarily the result of a political ideology. Historians are interested in finding new angles to study old questions. The rise of social history has been more than a "fad." It has been the outcome of highly inovative and succesfull research techniques that have changed the way we view the past.
So--there I go--I denied it.
Gonzalo,
I do agree that Hanson has correctly identified some of the prevailing trends in academia, and race/class/gender analysis is clearly the flavor of the day. But Hanson does a number of things that turn that reality into hash.
First, there certainly is, as you put it, "at least some degree of pressure to conform in the academy." Hanson makes this a development caused by 1960s radicalism, and something new. But there has always been at least some degree of pressure to conform in the academy. My favorite and easiest example is the Dunning school, which argued for fifty years that Reconstruction had failed because it had been an attempt to grant the rights of citizenship to a race that was incapable of using those rights.
William Dunning's one book, written in 1907, echoed through dozens (if not hundreds) of monographs, down through five decades. We could tell a similar story about Charles and Mary Beard and the progressive historians, or about the consensus historians, and on and on. Academic history is driven by historiography; like the courts, it looks to precedent. Change is slow, conformity unremarkable. The New Left did not invent academic "monoculture."
With that said, the Dunningites eventually faded away. They were challenged and displaced, just as race, class, and gender will eventually become less dominant categories of analysis. Our generation of grad students will reintroduce narrative history and political history, and incorporate social history into a new historiography. Hanson has made the 1960s generation the first to dominate the academy and set the agenda, and he has stopped the clock with them. Their agenda has a historical context.
Second, there's never any sense in Hanson's ranting that social history and the race/class/gender agenda are reactions to a history that genuinely excluded people from the narrative. He's just a little baffled that history isn't simply about statesmen and generals anymore -- witness the statement about catalogs having more classes on Chicano Studies than the Civil War, or the genuinely baffling statement about Latin American history courses including a discussion about European culpability. Some teaching in these areas is overheated and imbalanced, but you'd have to close your eyes to the last three hundred years to not see where it came from and why we have it. Hanson just clearly doesn't think Chicano history is real history, and is just as clearly unable to see how that very view perpetuates the perceived need for separate Chicano history courses. He's watching a reaction to a real history of exclusion and oppression. and wondering: What the hell is this all about?
I have more to say, but it'll have to wait. I have a wedding to prepare for, which is more interesting than cranky old VDH.
More later.
Oh: And I agree with Michael. Race, class, and gender analysis has produced some fantastic scholarship -- such as, for a recent example, Michael Fitzgerald's terrific book on intraracial conflict duing Reconstruction, or the recent Ed Ayers book on the social management of the meaning of the Civil War.
Forcing myself to stop typing...
The Victor Davis Hanson problem in a nutshell:
"The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not good they call the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best." --
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
Hanson is the guy who sees someone pull out a Zippo to light a cigarette, or throw another log in the fireplace, and calls 911 to report that the house is burning down. The premise is valid: There really is a fire. But the measurement is all wrong, and it matters.
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