This is the final installment of my blog series on the politicized postmodernism of the English department.

The public outcry against the leftist postmodernism of the academy is often accompanied by the demand that radical postmodernists be replaced--or at least counterbalanced--by more moderate scholars whose priorities are what they should be: to teach the field and to write knowledgeably and well about it. But this is a naive--if understandable--wish. Postmodernism cannot be excised from academe as if it were a wart or a mole. It's built in. It's systemic. There is no going back. It's what just about everyone under the age of fifty-five is doing; it's what graduate students have, for the past twenty years or so, been trained to do. You can't find very many people who can teach literature qua literature anymore, nor can you find very many people who want to. Many of the people working in English today are not there for the sake of literature. They are there for the sake of politicized postmodernism: they are there for the cultural capital they accrue--if only among themselves--by "theorizing" the "political," for the smalltime snobbish rush of insular pseudo-intellectualism. Take away the ego-gratification and the pomp and circumstance, and they won't want what's left. Though they are technically English teachers, many of them do not identify with the essentially modest, deeply traditional aims of the field. They don't want to teach writing, and can't write well themselves. And too often they are not even people who genuinely cherish literature, who treasure it for its aesthetic power and noble tradition, who feel a vocation to spend their lives as curators of that tradition, helping to keep it alive, making it accessible, giving students the skills to understand and appreciate it, instilling in them the ability to value art--to study it, to preserve and sponsor it, to be moved by it--throughout their lives. Too often, these are people who want to tell you what to think and what to believe. Too often, these are people who are so entranced by their own lies that they cannot even recognize that this is what they are doing.

This is why they can't, don't, or won't recognize that their cherished politicized postmodernism--the thing they believe gives them a special oppositional consciousness; the thing they believe purifies them morally and politically; the thing they rely on to resist institutionalized oppression in all its forms--plays perfectly into the penny-pinching hands of the corporate university. How? By turning the core content of the field into an easily mastered set of interpretive paradigms and declaring expertise to be identical to mastery of these paradigms. Over the past twenty years, English has become the intellectual equivalent of the industrial assembly line; formulaic politicized postmodernism has cheapened the Ph.D. in English, producing docile drones instead of fearlessly independent thinkers. It's been deadly within English. But it's been a dream come true for university administrators.

Here's how this works.

Most people undertake the Ph.D. when they are quite young. They are in their early to mid-twenties, many are fresh out of college. They are expected to finish in 5-6 years; their funding packages typically evaporate at the end of this time. In practice, this means that people who are frankly too young and too inexperienced to have read much, or to know much about the world, or to have developed a distinctive perspective on it are expected to become not just experts in literature, but theorists of culture in a matter of a very few years--three of which are spent doing the infantilizing remedial work commonly known as "graduate coursework." Because the first two years of college are also largely remedial, and because the undergraduate English major has softened considerably in the wake of politicized postmodernism, today's Ph.D. students don't generally come to graduate study well grounded in literature, history, philosophy, or even their own lingua franca, postmodern theory. They need remediation. But they do not get it because graduate course offerings tend to be too specialized and too theoretical to provide the broad, basic coverage many students need; because students are trying to get a jump on their dissertations by specializing early; and because no one--not the faculty, and certainly not the students--is willing to admit that many doctoral students are not in command of the basics. To do so would be to topple the fragile edifice of graduate education. Instead, a scholarly game of emperor's new clothes prevails in which everyone pretends that graduate students, taken as a group, are always already well-rounded, and no one admits--not publicly anyway--the plainly visible truth: that the emperor has no book learning.

But like any good god, politicized postmodernism giveth what it taketh away. It ministers to the problem it produces by giving graduate students--and junior faculty, and increasingly senior faculty--a surefire critical formula they can plug into any text, any time, anywhere. It goes something like this:

1. Identify text, author, genre, object, entity, or period for study.
2. Determine political angle on text, author, genre, object, entity, or period. Decide whether your topic reflects or resists the dominant culture. Decide whether it interrogates or subverts the dominant culture. Extra points if you can show that it is doing all of these at once.
3. Determine proper critical matrix. Choose among the following: feminist, postcolonialist, marxist, deconstructionist, cultural materialist, psychoanalytic, queer, Foucauldian. Extra points if you can use all of these at once.
3. Assemble according to standard instructions for your chosen critical matrix.
4. Employ concepts such as ideology, hegemony, identity, subjectivity, power, discourse, textuality, and cultural formation. Optional, only for the advanced: define these concepts and explain where they come from.
5. Pay special attention to categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Extra points for using them all at the same time.
6. Affix properly grandiose title, preferably involving a pun, a quote, or a colon: extra points for using all three.

This all-purpose recipe works for scholarship and for teaching. It allows you to get on the publish or perish bandwagon early, and it also allows you to teach without a deep feeling for literature and without much knowledge of literary form, historical context, or authors' lives. With the politicized postmodernist instant crit kit all you need to know is how to plug the text of the day into the framework of the hour, and you and your students can have what appears to be endless numbers of substantive discussions. By the time undergrads realize they are having pretty much the same discussion in every course, no matter what the material is or who is teaching it, they'll be graduating and you'll have moved on to a new crop of absorbent, trusting minds.

In short, far from the sophisticated analytical framework it claims to be, politicized postmodernism is frequently no more than an elaborate crutch. If it is what makes professors so frequently dogmatic and silly, it is also what enables them to function in an era when there are no clear guidelines about what does and does not constitute "English," and when, as a consequence, mastery of the field has become more elusive and more daunting than ever. Granted, there are some truly skilled postmodernist critics out there. But for your average English professor or grad student, politicized postmodernism does not signal skill so much as stand in for it. Vulgarized into the predictable, boilerplate forms it most often takes in research and teaching, it is less an indication of hardwon intellectual expertise than it is a demonstration of one's ability to perform the set moves of a stylized ideological tap dance.

University administrators know this, and they capitalize on it. Recognizing that what passes for "instruction" in the politicized postmodern classroom is hardly the rarified stuff of refined intellectual pursuit, administrators are increasingly unwilling to pay top dollar for a service that cheap and plentiful adjunct labor can provide at a fraction of the cost of a tenure-track faculty member. Thus does politicized postmodernism contribute to the governing problems of the field: the disappearance of tenure-track lines and the correspondingly terrible job market. Having abandoned its claim to know and value literature, having degraded the very concept of expertise, having turned the teaching of literature into something anyone with the ability to natter on about race, class, and gender can do, English has effectively played into the hands of the corporate university in the very moment of trying hardest to resist it.

Though the job market for English Ph.D.'s is and has been terrible for years, the number of Ph.D.'s being produced far exceeds the number of tenure-track jobs in English. Many English departments are actually losing tenure-track job lines; as older faculty retire, they are not replaced, and the faculty shrinks accordingly. Meanwhile, English remains a tremendously popular major, and it also remains responsible for staffing the huge remedial undertaking known as freshman English. Graduate students and part-time lecturers drawn from the vast pool of new-minted unemployed English Ph.D.'s fill in the void; standing faculty carry on with their standard teaching loads, unaffected by the squeeze.

The relation between the overproduction of Ph.D.'s, the shrinking number of tenure-track faculty positions, and the growing reliance on underpaid, uninsured wage-labor for undergraduate teaching has been the subject of much anguished and angry debate within English. Activist faculty and students wax political about the corporatization of higher education, the devaluation of the humanities, and the exploitation of grad student and adjunct labor. Unions form and ink is spilled (as with everything else, this problem must be theorized to be believed). Fingers are pointed, blame is assigned, discussions are had, measures are proposed, and protests are held. But despite this massive whirl of agitated activity, a simple truth has yet to be acknowledged. What no one admits (because as I noted above no one is willing to say that the emperor has no clothes) is that English has contributed immeasurably to its own problems. It's not just that English turns out far too many Ph.D.'s (some will concede this point, but not all), but that it turns out so many bad ones.

If English actually produced experts, it would be harder for administrators to justify cutting costs by hiring expendable adjuncts in lieu of full-time faculty. If English could make coherent, believable claims for the unique teaching abilities of those seasoned experts, it would be even harder for the admins to justify their tactics. If English produced far fewer Ph.D.'s, and if those Ph.D.s actually knew literature qua literature, and if they could teach what they knew well, and if the faculty at elite schools were actually willing to spend time on campus teaching it (as in, more than the two teach-in-your-sleep, quick-and-dirty courses a semester to which they are accustomed), administrators might have to think twice before farming the work out to the poor under-employed over-degreed souls who want university teaching work so badly that they will do it for what works out to be less than minimum wage.

If these leftover Ph.D.'s left academe in dignified disgust, that would help, too. What would help most of all is if departments didn't make so many redundant scholars-in-waiting in the first place, or if--radical thought--they trained Ph.D.'s in such a way as to make them attractive to non-academic employers, who at present regard them with a deep and appropriate skepticism. But that would involve change, and we've already seen how important it is to English departments to avoid change. It would also mean more work for everyone. Existing faculty would have to teach more classes, and they would have to teach composition (at many universities, composition is handled by graduate students, whose numbers are kept higher than the market can handle because the faculty don't want to do the "scut" work of teaching comp themselves). Faculty would also have to start preparing graduate students for non-academic careers, a problematically assimilationist project that would deprive professors of the narcissistic pleasures of training graduate students to be just like them. This is not convenient. And so it has not happened.

And here we have it: what works out best from the perspective of a short-sighted, self-serving faculty also works out best for the university (which can and does turn the degradation of the English Ph.D. to account). It's a stable economy at least for the time being. Faculty get what they want: a light teaching load free of the onerous duties of freshman writing, and administrations get what they want: plenty of cheap interchangeable teachers who make up in exploitability what they lack in competence. But it's also a fraudulent economy. Even as faculty and graduate students bemoan their fate at the hands of the evil, anti-intellectual, bean-counting administration, they are willing if unconscious collaborators in their own undoing. Politicized postmodernism underwrites it all. It may not be worth much intellectually, but it's one hell of a business plan.

For more on the politics of postmodernism, see Armed Liberal and Protein Wisdom. For an extended analysis of tenured academics as an American version of the fanatical Muslim imam, see Orson Scott Card's War Watch. And for some thoughts on what can be done to begin to reclaim American education, check out Jacob Proffitt's response to Card.