Marxism and the Crisis of Humanities Education Ron StricklandEnglish DepartmentSeptember 30, 1997Abstract:During the 1990’s the humanities have undergone a crisis of identity. From within the academy many traditional assumptions of the humanities have been challenged by postmodern critical theory, producing a very productive intellectual ferment but also creating a climate of schism and dissension. From without, the humanities have been attacked by conservative journalists and political commentators as the principal source of egregious ideologies of political correctness, feminism and multiculturalism. And, along with other academic fields,the humanities have faced intensified public and governmental pressures for down-sizing programs, increasing teaching loads, abandoning tenure, and instituting reductive standards of assessment and accountability. Though these challenges may seem to come from different sources they are all symptoms of the pressure for the humanities to be redefined in order to meet the needs of an emergent transnational capitalism. In the past few years there have been some tentative efforts among marxist and leftist cultural studies scholars to seize this moment of crisis as a window of opportunity for revealing the contradictions of capitalist ideology and building the foundation for socialism. I have contributed to this marxist response with several published essays and a co-edited book on topics including marxist confrontational pedagogy, curriculum reform, re-defining accountability, political correctness, and cultural studies. I am now at the point of collecting several of these writings together as a book on the possibilities for marxist interventions in the humanities during this current period of crisis and transition. The core chapters of this book are already written, but I need to write an introductory chapter reviewing and analyzing the arguments and proposals of other marxistscholars, and reflecting upon my own earlier contributions, in order to situate my work in relation to that discourse. This grant proposal seeks a stipend for one month’s salary replacement in order to write that chapter.Strickland/2 Problem Statement: The Humanities in Crisis"As Marx said, every child knows that a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced wouldnot last a year. The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production." (Louis Althusser, from Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays)A society in which revolution is necessary is a society in which the incorporation of all its people, as whole human beings, is in practice impossible without a change in its fundamental form of relationships. . . . Revolution remains necessary, in these circumstances, not only because some people desire it, but because there can be no acceptable human order while the full humanity of any class of men is in practice denied.(Raymond Williams, from Modern Tragedy)Marxist critics have long recognized the role of humanities education in reproducing the conditions of production by producing graduates whose cultural values and assumptions fit them for various slots in thecorporate systems of late capitalism. As marxist scholars like Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Terry Eagleton, and Evan Watkins have demonstrated, this process cannot be understood simply as a matter of exposing students to a particular canon of cultural texts. It must be understood more broadly as an effect of an ensemble of conditions--the teaching practices, relations between teachers and students, assumptions about the goals of teaching, and anxieties about the relationship of cultural texts to interpretive analysis and scholarly research--that werenaturalized and ossified during a long period of unquestioned hegemony for liberal humanist ideology. Understanding the humanities as a repository of freedom unbounded by specific historicalsituations, liberal humanists tend to assume that teaching the humanities will have an automatic liberatory effect upon students. One of the reasons that antifoundationalist postmodern theory was so passionately resisted during the 1980's--especially among rank and file members of the profession--was that many, if not most, liberal humanists saw themselves as liberatory teachers and were particularly stung by charges of oppression and authoritarianism leveled against them. Similarly, the neoconservative attacks against theory-oriented oppositional pedagogues as indoctrinators of "politicalcorrectness" appealed to many liberal humanists precisely because it enabled them to redirect anxieties about their own authoritarianism.Strickland/3But the institutional success of postmodern theory and the backlash against “political correctness” are both symptoms of the humanities’ uneasy relationship to a new set of conditions for humanistic study emerging in the 1990’s in the context of a “new world order” for globalcapitalism. Together with the legislative and administrative attempts to erode faculty autonomy by downsizing programs in the humanities, increasing teaching loads, and instituting reductive standards of assessment and accountability, these unfavorable conditions nonetheless present opportunities for revealing the contradictions of capitalism in an awkward period of transition and opportunities for redefining the role of the academic humanities as a focal point for what Raymond Williams called the “long revolution”; the struggle for a socially just and radically democratic society. Briefly, the effect upon the humanities of the new transnational capitalist order can be summarized as follows: (1) Postmodernism and Transnational CapitalismAs Robert Reich and others have argued in great detail, postnational and postindustrial capitalism requires somewhat different assumptionsand attitudes from its prospective workers than did the mid-twentieth-century corporations served by liberal humanism in the academy. Cultural attitudes like multiculturalism, for instance, and knowledge skills emphasizing critical thinking, habits of flexible adaptation and synthesizing are in increasingly high demand. Postmodern critical theory has been enlisted in the service of these goals; perhaps most often unwittingly, but sometimes self-consciously, as in Carnegie Mellon’s English department’s curricular reform of the late 1980’s when Gary Waller was head of that department.