Don't Worry Folks, I Came Up With a Plan to Save the Humanities

two plans in fact

I wrote about saving the humanities, particularly writing and reading, for Plough’s special issue on education. I wrote all this last summer. I reread it yesterday and thought “Hmm, I think I still agree with myself,” which doesn’t always happen with my essays.

The attentive reader will notice that I actually present two plans by which some version of mass humanities education can be saved. One of them is much better-advised than the other. The second one is in fact pretty last-ditch.

Funny enough, this posted on Plough’s website yesterday, and at about the time it posted, I was at a rally to stop the regents from cutting all the DEI staff positions and whatnot, something some regents are still denying their intention to do (to some people) while other regents go on Fox News and pretty much announce it. It was a rally, so the speeches were not what you’d call “nuanced,” but one person made the same point I tried to make in my post about all this a couple weeks ago: that student-facing DEI work can and does actually reduce the everyday tensions and misunderstandings that otherwise get publicly expressed as cancellations.

There’s one thing about the big New York Times story on DEI at Michigan that is occasioning (or that, on some rumors, the Regents seeded in order to occasion) all this. It’s a truth so obvious that I missed it for weeks. It’s this: All the really bad anecdotes in the story, the bits you’re meant to quote-tweet along with a link and a bit of verbal head-shaking, are things that have nothing to do with the university’s actual DEI infrastructure. They’re all cancellation attempts by individual students, acting on their own authority, using concepts and patterns of behavior that they obviously learned from social media, not from any workshop or bureaucrat. (We do hear one secondhand description of a CRLT workshop, but the CRLT — the Center for Research on Learning and Education — is the university’s pedagogy talk-shop and is not a DEI initiative at all. For obvious reasons, no sensible person would, or should, think of defunding the pedagogy dept. at a great university.) The DEI infrastructure at U of M is being threatened with defunding, in part, because left-liberal kids cancel professors, in the same way that right-wing rich kids rat their professors out to Charlie Kirk after getting an F for nonattendance. It’s just another modality, in a wildly consumerist society, for complaining about the service.¹

And if the vocabulary that students use, in complaining about the service, is a dumbed-down, tumblrized version of stuff that originated in an academic article (which was probably decorously attacked in turn by lots of academics), it’s still true that both the transmission vector of the ideas and the style of behavior, at this point, have nothing to do with anything sponsored by the university’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. ²

Which is one among many reasons why I hope the regents don’t cut it this Thursday.

1. Notice that you don’t hear as many stories about students at poor HBCUs or commuter colleges or community colleges subjecting their professors to Maoist inquisitions. Now, that could be happening and the NYT just doesn’t give a shit about those institutions and thus doesn’t cover them. But I suspect it simply isn’t happening to the same degree, because those students do not throw privileged hissy-fits. They may yell at you in public, as happened to me a couple times, but they cuss you out person-to-person, like people who believe in their bones that they have nothing to insist with, no levers to use, but themselves.

2. Someday, when the offending student has had a few more years to age into obscurity and non-doxxability, I will tell the story of my own attempted cancellation. It’s pretty funny in a grim way. Of course the kid in question was right-wing.