Jacques Barzun
Weslyan University Press, 1989; 183 pp.
Michael G. Becker
English
Montana State University
"Exeunt the Humanities, for the time being."
A title like The Culture We Deserve surely has a critical, even an aggressive ring, calling up melancholy fin de siècle visions of the Western World and its youth, surfeited by videos and bored with violence, sex, and endless love. But at this writing the Japanese have tagged us again as lazy, illiterate workers, and the LA school system has just announced free distribution of condoms to combat AIDS, because as one fifteen-year-old girl remarks, "no one can expect us not to be sexually active." In this cultural context, part of the epigraph to Jacques Barzun's collection of essays appears at least topically opportune, Voltaire's line that "Decadence was brought about by doing work too easily and being too lazy to do it well, by a surfeit of fine art and a love of the bizarre."
The Culture We Deserve is not shrill and assuredly not wholly pessimistic, although Mr. Barzun after a long and distinguished career in academic life has much to say about the battered original idea of the university, unrecoverable he thinks for a long time into the future. He is also fond of saying that to diagnose is not to condemn, at which he sometimes succeeds. Often I wanted to add, however, throughout this relatively slim volume, that to diagnose merely is not enough: we need more here from his invaluable perspective in order to find direction and exorcise self-consciousness. As I turned these pages, the first line of Carlyle's famous essay of 1832, "Characteristics," written to the self-conscious body politic of the Industrial Revolution, kept chiming. "The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick." Carlyle's blessedness, "To know what to toil at," seems no clearer today. So I doubt this genteel book will change much in the academy or in the culture at large, but Mr. Barzun's temperate yet relentless indictment of our "bleating about...the search for excellence" commends it to all of us who labor in the vineyard. We recognize at once the topics and sources of his concern and move through his book as easily as gliding down the snow of some Absaroka mountainside.
Twelve essays, not always felicitously arranged, compose the volume. The first three deal with the products of culture, our "conversion of culture into industry." Herein he anatomizes
The next four essays purport to deal with society's "consciousness of itself":
These ills Barzun demonstrates are real but perennial, awaiting the swing of the moral pendulum in a world where "the individual and his conscience have taken precedence over the claims of community," yet a world whose "laws and habits in the West in the twentieth century are infinitely superior ethically to the practices of the great ages of religion." No great decay of hope here.
The penultimate group of two essays holds a poor match: the first, a rousing effort ("Exeunt the Humanities") to determine if there are any absolutes of our profession, in our professing of the Humanities, is matched incongruously with another lament over the alleged glut of art and the ill-distribution of public funds, funds that ought to support "acknowledged public institutions" (the author, we note, resides in art-rich New York City, not Two Dot, Montana). I'll return to the former essay in a moment; but the final group of the three essays that consider "the plausible signs that civilization is in decline" again instances the subjects of the earlier essays--indeed the concerns of Professor Barzun's entire career as critic-historian as I have followed it. The first, "The Fallacy of the Single Cause," sees history as more cogent and readable when written and taught as a spectacle of narrative, history made palpable not by system of "slices of the past" or one inclusive principle but by affirming the "importance" and "reality" of "active men and women" whose presence makes a difference in the life of a civilization. The second essay, "License to Corrupt," deplores the influence of new Rhetoric and modern grammars in their scramble (shared, in his opinion, by every scholarly discipline now) to "earn or snatch the label scientific." In language arts this move has been disastrous, he believes, for linguists' claims to new rigor, complex taxonomy, and objective certainty in the study of language's changefulness have led educators to refuse to engage in fault-finding (the "no fault is serious because no fault is really a fault" and the "no native speaker can make a mistake" factions), although clearly "during the life of a language it is at times better--more uniform, elegant, flexible--than at other times." Today, it's made clear, is one of those "other times."
The final essay, "Toward the Twenty-First Century," surveys the signs of decline that now "mark the end of the liberal ideal": while stressing that the idea of societal decline is endemic in every age (and in most of us middle-aged professors, perhaps?), he sees it in this age's self-conscious extremes, in its breadth of information ("which gives us no respite to enjoy the present"), in the "peculiarity" of its art (which tenders the beholder only "the despair and disharmonies of his own life"), in the "bleakness" of its science, and, finally, in the "fears that our great cleverness has raised up"--fears of nuclear privatization, of overpopulation and disease, of environmental ruin, in short in our feelings of "impotence in the midst of technique." We are witnessing in the longest perspective "the last phase of the great emancipation promoted in the eighteenth century": we see the signs of breakup in our society's virtual hatred of politics and the state, in the breakdown in the administration of law, in the "uglification of our cities" and their pollutions (pity the poor city planner in the Gallatin Valley!), in the "antinomian passion which is the deepest drive of the age." How deep goes the disbelief in what we do? Is our collective life, which we rightly call our civilization, still a going concern? In the face of Japan's collective life and economic hegemony? In the face of the European Community's abrupt cohesion? Although he does not front those challenges by name, Barzun reminds us history shows both "big and little decadences" but one continuous phenomenon: "Entire civilizations do perish." It's a fact: "Civilization is not identical with our civilization."
In fine, Mr. Barzun's hope somehow still rests with the institutions of higher learning and in his hope for "an open conspiracy of genuine Young Turks who will turn their backs on analysis and criticism" and reinvent "the idea of a university, and show what it can do; who, seeing that bureaucracy is inevitable, will rethink the art of administration and make it work."
There are precendential models for such transformations, I think. The Renaissance of the 16th century, for example, flourished under the leadership of the universities, with large "grants-in-aid" from princely courts, and revivified the hidebound late-medieval world, a "distant mirror" of our own century in its disorders and perils and ingrown institutions. This new Humanism, a flourishing of both letters and scientific learning, was an attitude of thought, however, not a "strategy" or a "system"; it valued religion, science, and letters first for their relationship to the well being of people. Today, misdirected as they often are about the undergraduate education that must suffice most people, universities still do both mirror and create the texture of society, which is profoundly competitive and careless of its rich legacies. The mix is most evident in their imitation of capitalistic management style and in their fostering of narrow career training rather than broader humanistic curricula (in spite of the fact that even a sophomore will tell you she thinks a graduate degree today is worth in the job market what a college degree was thirty years ago). The managerial mentality in academia is so pervasive we do not really see it anymore; there are now college "annual reports" to faculty; tiers of exhaustive reviews at dizzying short intervals (even workshops on how to write reviews); "productivity" compilations of apples with oranges; layers of administrative salaries, at inordinate premiums to the amount on-line workers receive--just like their American (but not Japanese) corporate counterparts; computer rankings of one-dimensional teaching evaluations that measure "consumer" satisfaction; advertising and marketing of pieties and efficiencies modeled on selling cars, because funding derives not from a university's or a department's educational role but from student head count; etc., etc. What is missing, of course, in this parody of capitalism is obvious: there is no earnings-per-share, the "bottom line" of product and "value-added" upon which basis corporate America either competes or declines into Chapter 11. What would the lecture hall, campus, and library look like if schools competed, if rewards were apportioned, on the basis of value added?
Barzun suggests something of this sort when he observes that "we give degrees that supposedly certify excellence and then require stacks of letters of recommendation in order to distinguish real merit from the rest. It has to be assumed, too, that among the letters there will be a truthful one.... And still not content, we also ask for figures based on so-called objective tests. In short we cannot tell a good man when we see one." (He might have included faculty here also, who after working with, and giving papers to, critical peers for years must provide to tiers of review panels, some comprised of people from wholly unrelated disciplines, stacks of numerically ranked teaching evaluations and stacks of "objective outside reviews" of already published scholarship, the latter so onerous and arbitrary a task many faculty now have to be paid something to write them. We rarely ask why such things are done, for we don't often institute or change anything without first checking on regional or national mores; alas, we don't ever say, "let's do this thing and let everybody else follow us.") The upshot is we once had a good idea in academe--accountability, as free as possible from impressionism and therefore from litigation--but now the idea's got us. Perhaps we can still tell a good man or woman when we see one, but it is becoming harder to prove it. Maybe this is the academic culture we deserve?
Although they have always claimed to teach there is a brighter good than self-interest in human life, to expect the humanities to counter, or to be untainted by, the quantification, specialism, and materialism of our age is pure naïveté, and as Barzun often cautions, "it will not do to idealize" the universities of times-past--so much depended upon "the coincidence of a true teacher with apt student." For years we've argued to exhaustion the student side of the equation; and in open enrollment institutions like Montana's, student aptness is sometimes, as the jargon goes, "problematical." Now, the flip side of the equation may be more to the point: we who take pride in teaching "thinking" skills (often to the detriment, I suspect, of "emotional" or "imaginative" skills) and deconstructing ironies in language and conduct may be failing our critical office. In Barzun's fine phrase, that office is "to compare pretension with performance,...to preserve whole and clear certain words, meanings, and standards."
Some examples: in literature today it is critical theory, not the "shining text" that is truly "privileged"; in discussions of canonicity, unlike the bleating about excellence elsewhere, we refuse to "valorize" one text or artist over another; in our arcane professional discourse, we prevent the common reader from even entering the dialogue; in our teaching, we have acquiesced in minimal annotation and conversation (Barzun observes: "the current failure of the schools to 'teach thinking' has been plausibly traced to the advent of multiple-choice testing which has replaced essay writing"--and, he might have gone further, could be plausibly traced also to the economic efficiencies of large classes in the humanities and to the bench-press of career demands); further, in our preparing of teachers, we have allowed, in the main, self-selection and retention of candidates, and in a time of oversupply; and, perhaps most debilitating of all, in our dazzlement at the success of the natural sciences we have used the fruits of culture to teach our research in the name of broadening--as Barzun notes of the late Victorian universities, "when the classical curriculum tried to compete with the sciences by becoming 'scientific' too, it signed its own death warrant." To this we can add, when in the last third of this century they tried to mime the academic reward systems of the sciences, the humanities sold out what was their strength and function in a culture, the affirming of life by giving values and beauty to it.
To find specific directives for getting undergraduate education on track, the reader piqued by The Culture We Deserve will have to search out some of Mr. Barzun's other books and reviews. In Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (U. of Chicago, 1991), Mr. Barzun starts with the premises of the higher education enterprise, whose effective working
presupposes agreement about two things: the contents of the tradition being handed down and extended by research and the limits of the portion suitable for undergraduate instruction--the curriculum. At this moment, no such agreement exists, which is one reason why college is so unsatisfactory and why schools and departments regard one another across campus with barely concealed envy and contempt.
After we decide what it is we are doing, he follows with the logical next step, the disposition of funds:
The money at the institution's disposal should go to those who teach and who also work hard at either freely motivated research or the many quasi-administrative duties the place requires. It should go next to the libraries and laboratories and stop there.
And in a revised preface to his Teacher in America (Liberty Press, 1982), we find what not to do: the oft-repeated warning about a "flight from teaching" which has created the critical need to "restore competence and respect to teaching"--the "great teacher awards" mean only "tokenism and lip service" and are an "ironic commentary on the reality." Scholastic life under these conditions has produced a "a tacitly lowered standard, by means of which instructors maintain their rating on the annual student evaluations and the students themselves ensure the needed grades in the credentials game."
New directions--toward a shorter, clearer, and more solid curriculum, better teaching and research and creative activities that will improve education as well as maintain professional esprit and extend learning--all of these will mandate a radical shift in the rewards structure of the university and a redirection of a large portion of the faculty's energies and professional priorities. (A recent case in point might be the valuable "writing across the curriculum" initiative, which, like teaching well, cannot be legislated but must rely on the moral imperatives of the faculty.) As Mr. Barzun notes, these new directions "will have to be taken by several institutions in concert," who at first will be "misrepresented and denounced in the ordinary heedless way" but to whom public support in money will soon flow by "sheer economic preference."
For the time being, however, such a renaissance in undergraduate education is still at the national discussion stage. Mr. Barzun has contributed as much as anyone to this debate and he is as realistic as the most disenchanted member of the profession. He sees we have ruins "barely concealed by ivy": for the faculty, "salaries dropping fast under the inflation that also raises the cost of operation and tuition"; for the administration, "nothing but the harried life among demands, protests, and regulations." His conclusion is sobering but completely right: "To expect 'educational leadership' from men and women so circumstanced would be a cruel joke."