The great PhD scam

Part 5

by Jordan Ellenberg

The 10,000 scholars here in DC are united in a difficult, invaluable, sometimes exciting communal project. Just by reading books (and movies, and menus, and Steve Martin songs) they're finding out things about how people live -- and about what people are, and how people decide what they are -- that laymen like me don't know, and can't fully understand. But the scholars seem to labor under an unremitting fear that everything they do is worthless. You can see that fear in the protective secret language of cultural studies. You can see it in Murder at the MLA, in which the kind of knowledge English professors have turns out to be the kind that solves crimes. You can see it in the humanities' conflicted relationship with the sciences. You can see it in the academy's failure to mount any forceful response to the conservative critics of the early '90s and to the administration "streamliners" of today.

John Guillory, an English professor at Johns Hopkins, spoke Saturday morning on "Rationales for Literary Study." Guillory, whose book Cultural Capital has made him an authority on the way academic knowledge is produced and consumed, told a polite crowd that they had to quit worrying about being useful. The problems of the academy, he said, wouldn't be solved until English professors (and then the public) found a way to value literary knowledge for itself, the way we value, say, knowledge about mathematics.

He didn't seem to make a big impression, but it's Guillory I'm thinking about on Sunday afternoon, with the conference winding to a close, as I sit in a little panel room waiting for a hopeful Renaissancist grad student to start his piece on Donne. A woman behind me says, "Don't spread the word about the Thackeray revival. Right now I am the Thackeray revival." I'm trying to imagine a world where English was more like mathematics. A reporter's job at the MLA wouldn't be to pass judgment on the field but to relay, with suitable deference, the past year's breakthroughs. People would say things to English professors like "I don't know how you do it -- I never got the hang of reading." Literary study would have its own E.O. Wilsons and Stephen Hawkings, beloved public shamans with stacks of honorary degrees. And with the rise in public standing would come kibbitzers and hangers-on; maybe Camille Paglia's a first glimmering of that.

It would be different. The last of Cary Nelson's 12 steps is "Popularize the Achievements of the Academy." He's right about that -- it's the only way to keep cost-cutting legislators at bay. But I'm not sure the scholars want to be popular. Like sensitive, dance-shy teens, they know you lose something, too. As the discourse becomes public, it coarsens and shrinks; it has to fit inside an op-ed piece or a New Yorker cartoon. Is that a price the scholars will be willing to pay? I can't tell, but I think they'll have to decide soon.

Out in the hall, the exhibitors are packing up. As the room settles into attention, I get up to go -- I have somewhere to be, across town.

"I think we can begin," the moderator says.

Jordan Ellenberg is a writer living in Somerville.