This is part three of my blog series on the English department as a model postmodern community. I wrote in my July 14 installment that politicized postmodernism has rendered English incoherent by effectively vaporizing the content of the field. In this installment, I address how politicized postmodernism corrupts graduate education. In the next and final installment, I will talk about professional literary study as a whole, drawing together the various threads of my argument to suggest both how politicized postmodernism has damaged English beyond repair and how it allows English to persist, and even to thrive, despite its deeply crippled state.

Just as politicized postmodernism undermines English by discrediting the concepts of literature, tradition, beauty, and aesthetic judgement, so it also undermines the quality of the work that is done under its aegis. The reason for this is simple: you cannot have consistent or reliable standards in a field that rejects the very basis for them. Standards are incompatible with politicized postmodernism: the postmodern part of the equation denies the existence of objective measures of quality or truth; the politicized part of it replaces disinterested assessment with an ideological agenda masquerading as fair criteria.

In the relativistic economy of the politicized postmodern English department, you can't really do things like grade your students' work, or assess that of a job candidate or a junior colleague when they come up for tenure, or even require that the people working in the field work in the field. (This is a major reason why so many English profs write about things that have nothing to do with literature, like sexuality, imperialism, the body, the politics of identity, medical history [my own former faux pas], consumption, nationalism, and so on.) Of course, English still maintains the ruse of standards and puts its Ph.D. students through numerous rituals of assessment--graded coursework, qualifying exams, language exams, the dissertation, the defense. But these moments are marked more as rites of professional passage than as occasions for serious and scrupulous judgement. As long as you observe the proper forms, you cannot fail.

The hardest thing, indeed, about getting a Ph.D. in English is getting into a "top" program. At the elite schools (in this business you have to attend an elite school if you want a chance at a rare tenure-track job), hundreds of applications come in every year for 10-15 entering spots. That's a tough and often arbitrary cut. But if you can make it past the cut, you are home free. Complete your work, take your exams, cover 200 pages with something resembling an analysis of something, and in a mere five to seven years you will be the proud owner of a Ph.D. in English, a certified politicized postmodern scholar of everything in general and nothing in particular.

To earn the degree, you don't have to do original work, or even good work, just work that fits in nicely with the dominant ideologies in the field. You do get more points for inhabiting the politicized postmodern paradigm with flair; your profs will like you better and your fellow students will envy you more if you can come up with a neat twist on the current intellectual fashion. But there is no need to do that. Becoming a clone works just fine for most people. It will get you a transcript covered with A's (you have to work awfully hard not to get all A's in this branch of grad school). It will get you faculty support (providing you are also fairly personable). It might might even get you a job (if your stars line up just so). You can make an entire career out of being a Jameson knock-off or a second-hand Homi Bhabha or a Judith Butler wanna-be. Departments that can't afford the real thing are eager to hire cheap imitations fresh out of school, and it is an accepted truth that the best way to prepare oneself professionally for life as an English professor is not to actually learn your literature and become skilled at teaching it, but to write a dissertation that puts your personal stamp, such as it is, on a reigning hot topic.

The only way you can really run into difficulty in graduate school is if you are on a different ideological channel than everyone else. You can do shoddy work, you can teach poorly, you turn work in weeks, months, sometimes even years late. You can show absolutely no talent; you can learn absolutely nothing of substance. I've even seen people get caught plagiarizing. None of these things will matter much in the end as long as you slog on through and keep yourself in line with everyone else. Refusing the party line, though, is a different story altogether. If you approach your Ph.D. program from a liberal humanist perspective, for example, you will be mocked by your peers and you will be raked over the coals by your professors, who will bring your "naivete" to your attention and will advise you to acquire the necessary (i.e., postmodernist) tools for what they consider to be "sophisticated" thought.

There is indeed a powerful element of indoctrination at work in graduate training today. Students pursuing humanities Ph.D.'s are not, as a rule, given a solid grounding in either the Enlightenment tradition or the literary critical tradition that sprang from liberalism. Instead, they are told, from day one of graduate school, that the Enlightenment was bad, that liberalism is over, and that any self-respecting intellectual will recognize this immediately and sign on to the postmodern critical project. Ph.D. students are encouraged--often required--to take courses in "literary theory," "cultural theory," "poststructuralist theory," and so on. Typically, these are crash courses in pomo methodology, samplers of major postmodern works that neglect to situate those works within a wider philosophical and historical context. These courses do not generally function as courses "about" postmodern theory so much as they function as seminars in how to "do" postmodern theory. Discussion often centers on how to "use" or "apply" postmodern concepts, rather than on how those concepts fit into the Western intellectual tradition or on whether they have any real validity or value. There are cogent, convincing, and damning arguments against this sort of theory, and against a humanities oriented around this sort of theory. But they are dismissed out of hand as the hostile ravings of right-wing reactionaries--when their existence is acknowledged at all.

The unquestioned sanctity of postmodern thought is perhaps the single most invidious aspect of graduate training in the humanities: students are required to sign on to politicized postmodernism as a condition of doing acceptable work. It's a loyalty oath masquerading as scholarly method. Needless to say, persons for whom the far-left, in-your-face radical social constructivism of the English department poses an ethical problem--conservative Christians, for example--need not apply.

The result is very far from a thriving scholarly community with a vital and invigorating graduate program. Students trained under this system are trained to be something very far from independent, well-rounded critical thinkers. They tend, instead, to be sadly thwarted, their intellects narrow where they ought to be broad, their attitudes hostile where they ought to be tolerant, their ethics situational and pragmatic rather than heartfelt and constant. Within the mind of the new-minted politicized postmodernist, suspicion supplants curiosity; condescension and contempt stand in for reasoned refutation. The mind made by graduate training in English is a mind confused and even threatened by difference (even as it prides itself on celebrating difference). It is not a mind that has been taught to think in a free, unfettered, rigorous way. It is, conversely, a mind that has been taught what to think and how to think it.

One of the things this mind has been taught to think is that it has been liberated by the politicized postmodernism that has been forced upon it. This last lesson is driven home by the student's knowledge of what happens to those who dare to differ. It's not pretty, and it's career-ending, and the student knows this so deep in her bones that it is a part of her. It guides her choices without her even being aware of it. The student that has learned the lessons of postmodern necessity well is one who will fight tooth and nail to defend them. She cannot afford to do otherwise; she cannot afford to realize the extent of her ignorance or her deception. And so she becomes a perfectly socialized politicized postmodernist, ready to deconstruct and eager to please.

I've focussed on graduate education in this blog because it brings out two equally damning truths (yes, I use that word without scare quotes) about the contemporary English department and about the kind of ideal community that department is attempting to embody.

The first is that faculty operating from within a politicized postmodernist perspective have, as a group, utterly abdicated their responsibility to their students. While a 22-year-old first-year Ph.D. student may be forgiven for eagerly latching onto hip pseudo-scholarly trends, the professor who encourages her to do so--who, indeed, demands that she do so, and gives her no alternative but to do so--is committing the worst sort of pedagogical malpractice. This is a professor more interested in replicating herself than in helping a young scholar find her own feet; it is a professor who values conformity to her own beliefs over intellectual diversity; it is a professor who is totally exploiting her students, using their desire to please and their need for praise to lure them into embracing her own personal principles.

The second truth follows from the first. The Ph.D. students of today are the English professors of tomorrow. Their training does not bode well for the future of English or the education of their students. The evidence for this safe conjecture lies in today's English professors, a growing number of whom are products of the system described above (I am a product of that system myself; I bought it hook, line, and sinker for over a decade; recently, luckily, I woke up). The patterns I lay out here have been going on for several decades. There is hardly anyone in the profession under the age of fifty who wasn't bred to be a politicized postmodernist. It's been a case of the blind leading the blind for a long time now; with every passing generation of graduate students, the blind get a little bit blinder. Meanwhile, those few remaining souls who know another, better way--who are old enough to remember a field that was not dominated by politicking and agenda-driving--have by and large abandoned the field to the victors. They are getting old; they do not have the will or the energy to fight for the future of the field or the dignity of scholarly work. And so they quietly retire, taking with them the knowledge and experience that alone could launch a reclamation of the discipline. They are not missed.

to be continued....