I'll be posting "Freedom of Dissociation," part two of my series on student groups, soon. In the meantime, I wanted to flag a short piece by contrarian Camille Paglia on the sorry state of American higher education. The occasion for the piece is a letter to the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer that appeared earlier this month. Written by appalled parent Michael Mayer, the letter speaks to the system of financial extortion that has become the collegiate experience in this country. It is an especially strong indictment of both the inefficiency of college (why is it that you can become a jet-engine mechanic in less than one year but it takes four years to graduate with a degree in English? he asks), and the wrongheadedness of higher ed's present disingenuous emphasis on "well-roundedness" (when college costs as much or more than a house, it's unreasonable to require students to spend a good chunk of that money mucking about in liberal artsy sorts of courses just so they can satisfy a set of superficial and misguided distribution requirements designed to give them "depth"). Paglia's piece takes the form of a letter as well: she writes to David Horowitz, editor of Front Page Magazine and long-time critic of higher education, drawing the other letter to Horowitz's attention and voicing a few choice observations about higher ed herself.

Paglia touches on the "bankrupting cost of American higher education" (noting that Mayer has founded Parents for Education Reform, and can be reached at ParEdReform@aol.com). She records her dismay that the Democratic Party, of which she is a registered member, has utterly failed to address the "major systemic problems in primary and secondary education." She notes that we need to "revaloriz[e] the trades," pointing out that it is a massive social and economic mistake to try to track all kids, no matter what their abilities, interests, and proclivities, for college. She notes that the post-WWII American project of making college effectively compulsory for all middle-class kids has not only failed those kids, but has resulted in bloated, inefficient, self-serving college administrations whose resident bureaucrats make far more than the faculty (amen) and who are typically more concerned with PR and fund-raising than with education per se. She notes that competition among colleges has turned many of them into pseudo-intellectual resorts--parents and students expect that their exhorbitant tuition tab will buy them certain amenities, among them a not-too-difficult curriculum that distributes a vast number of high grades and a minimum of harsh criticism. Paglia notes, too, that the competition for admission to top schools is now such that high school students are living under unreasonable amounts of pressure to excel, to do, and to achieve. She calls today's upper middle-class students "hamsters on a wheel."

It's harsh stuff, all the more so because she is so right, and because the truths she tells are truths that are denied by so many of the people who are part of the system she berates. Paglia reserves especially harsh words for the academic humanities, which she locates as the scene of an abominable and long-standing bad faith:

As a career educator for 31 years, I have watched with dismay as public schools have degenerated and as the humanities programs of colleges and universities have veered away from art and toward a shallow pretense of politics--a politics without authentic political science or knowledge of history. Learning and cultivation are no longer criteria for recruitment and promotion in the humanities. The end result is a lost generation of graduate students. Our best and brightest are no longer going into humanities teaching.

Ten years ago I would have rejected this characterization. I would have thrown the weight of all my politicized marxistfeministmaterialistpoststructuralist righteous theorization at it, and I would have smugly watched Paglia's reactionaryessentialistahistoricalapolitical accusation evaporate in a puff of deconstructed counterhegemonic smoke. Ah, but then I would have had to. I was in grad school then, entirely committted to becoming part of Paglia's "lost generation." By definition, I could not have agreed with her, or even seen her point. I was smart, by god! And I was going to theorize culture!

If I had read Paglia's words five years ago, I would have equivocated. I would have acknowledged that Paglia's was indeed a point of view (though I would not necessarily have admitted that it was a legitimate point of view--just an existing point of view, a point of view that it was possible to have). But I would have come down on the side of the the humanities' progressive project. I would have defended the right of the humanist scholar to abandon art and instead to write authoritatively about the politics of everything else--the body, the nation, imperialism, gender formation, identity, oppression. Ah, but then I would have had to. I was trying to earn tenure then, and my whole career rode on whether I could turn my non-literary extremely political dissertation about diseased Victorian bodies into a viable book and sell it to a top-rated press. I was a body critic, by god! I was interdisciplinary! And transgressive! And I was going to ride that scholarly identity, such as it was, as hard as I could, as far as it would take me.

Today, I read Paglia's words from the standpoint of one who is now free to admit their truth. She is right about the humanities. She is right that in their present ill-informed pretensions to "theorize the political," the humanities are utterly and absolutely off their radical little rocker, that taken collectively, today's humanist scholars are committers of massive professional and pedagogical malpractice and little more. She is right that the sad, sad, result of this is a lost generation of graduate students. The best and brightest are not, as a rule, going into humanities teaching. And those who do are very, very poorly trained, both as scholars and teachers. It takes years to be able to admit this from within the humanities, because it involves looking at your own education with devastatingly critical eyes. It involves sweeping away the pomp and circumstance with which the culture of academic humanism swaddles its members from day one of grad school, and looking at what's left when all the self-congratulation and all the self-justification are gone. It involves admitting, when all is said and done, that the Ph.D. in English has largely become a vanity degree, the rightful badge of membership in a profession that, for all its sound and fury, signifies next to nothing.