Published Winter 2005
 
Culture and Policy:
An Interview with Mark Bauerlein
Mark Bauerlein has been Director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for the past two years, notably overseeing its report "Reading at Risk." Outside the beltway, Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and has published widely on nineteenth century American literature and literary theory. His books include Whitman and the American Idiom (Cambridge UP, 1992); an attack on the presumptions of theory, Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (U of Pennsylvania P, 1997); a revision of pragmatism, The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief (Duke UP, 1997); and an engaging retelling of early twentieth century race politics, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (Encounter Books, 2001). He has also edited two posthumous collections of writings by Joseph Riddel, his mentor at UCLA, entitled Purloined Letters: Originality and Repetition in American Literature (LSU P, 1995) and The Turning Word: American Literary Modernism and Continental Theory (U of Pennsylvania P, 1996), and he is one of the authors, with (NEA director Dana Gioia and X.J. Kennedy, of Handbook of Literary Terms (Longman, 2004). One might also consult Bauerlein's version of the "tenured radicals" argument, "Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual," in The Chronicle of Higher Education (12 Nov. 2004), and the NEA's report, "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America," www.arts.gov.
This interview took place on 7 December 2004 in Bauerlein's office at the (NEA in Washington, DC. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams, editor of this magazine, and researched and transcribed by Emiel Blum, a graduate student in the literary and cultural studies program at Carnegie Mellon University.
Williams: The first thing to ask about is the "Reading at Risk" report, which has bad news about literary reading in America and which, as Director of Research at the NEA now, you had a sizeable hand in creating. What's the report about?
Bauerlein: "Reading at Risk" is a large population survey of rudimentary interests that people have in literary reading specifically and book reading in general. We asked 17,000 people with in-house interviews, and also telephone follow-up calls, to tell us whether they read any fiction, any poetry, any drama, and also whether they read any book. This was getting raw data on just what role literary works play in people's leisure time.
Williams: Where did you get the 17,000 people?
Bauerlein: The census bureau does, every month, a crime survey and an employment survey, gathering economic data—it's what we see in the news with unemployment statistics. They identify households that are demographically proportionate to the general population, so that if you have 13% Hispanic in the general population, you’ll have 13% in the census bureau's survey. We were able to piggyback onto that survey. We gave the census bureau our questionnaire and we were able to identify a huge survey pool. As you know from most polls in consumer research or politics, you have 1500 people (at most) with a sampling error plus or minus four percentage points, but this one had 17,135 people, giving us a sampling error of about half a percentage point. We felt that it was very reliable and gave us a pretty sound snapshot of the basic role that literature and books play in people's lives.
Comparing the 2002 data with the 1992 survey and the 1982 survey we saw a trend developing that shows a ten point drop from 1982 to 2002 of the percentage of people reading literature. That ten points represents twenty million potential readers. If Americans were reading at the same rate today as they were in 1982, we would have twenty million more people reading a single poem, short story, or novel in a given year. Now, if you're doing consumer research, you would look at numbers like this and see a commodity heading into extinction. That's not going to happen, of course; we're always going to have some level of serious book readers and literary readers. But the numbers look like they are going to continue declining until we reach a point in the next twenty or thirty years when we may only have 20% of people ever reading books or literature. Among young people, especially young males, we're hitting down in the twenty percentile range at this point.
Williams: What motivated the report? Is it for an altruistic concern for literature and culture? Or is it also a marketing concern for book publishing?
Bauerlein: In the survey we asked people how often they participate in certain art-forms—how often do they go to a museum or gallery; how often do they go to the theatre; how often do they listen to opera or jazz; how often do they attend a dance performance; and how often do they read fiction, poetry, and drama? Those art-forms were selected because those are largely the art-forms that we fund here at the Endowment. When we got the numbers in 2002, we found that most had changed about half a percentage point, usually going down. But the literature figures were anomalous, where we saw a ten point drop. That led us to cull the literature data out of the bigger report and expand it into a separate report of its own. We weren't looking to document a decline in reading; we really found these numbers unexpectedly. I think what surprised people was the extent of the drop and that it could be so precisely measured to produce a double digit decline.
Williams: The decline has a lot of causes, and I'm sure you've had many people diagnosing them. One of the obvious causes people mention is technology, especially TV, but that's one you actually debunk in the report.
Bauerlein: Reading is such a fundamental and diverse activity that any change in reading rates is going to have diverse causes, and one could point to factors such as young people working more jobs after school and over vacations. Commuter times are longer now than they used to be, leaving parents with less leisure time to spend with their kids reading, and often parents will then, while they are making dinner, put the kids in front of the TV. Library budgets have gone down, leading a lot of libraries to close for more hours. For example, I live in Washington, DC, in Cleveland Park, and my branch is only open three days a week. Cuts in libraries and cuts in access to reading in the communities, especially poor communities, no doubt contributes.
But where we tended to focus our discussion of the etiology of the decline was in the proliferation of digital entertainment in the last ten years. The rise of video games, the internet, instant messaging, different kinds of email, downloading music, weblogs—these have pulled away from literary reading and book reading in general. The video game industry last year was a seven billion dollar industry, this year it's a twelve billion dollar a year industry. We have an extraordinary explosion of digital technologies.
Television watching has been pretty constant for the last twenty years. While television time remains the same—roughly three hours of leisure time per day, on average—more and more time is taken up with the digital world, and less time with reading. Also, it's less time not only with book reading but magazine and newspaper reading. Newspaper circulation has been dropping, especially among young people. Young people reading newspapers has been cut by more than half in the last thirty years. In 1972, 46% of college age adults read a newspaper everyday. Today it's 21%.
Williams: Part of that is because they go online...
Bauerlein: Well, newspaper reading would include online reading of newspapers. Young people actually don't go online much for that information. Surveys show only 11% list news information as a reason to log on. The majority do email, and, although this didn't come up, one could probably also add pornography to young people's online time as well.
Williams: That brings up a question about what counts as reading. The young people I see and talk to seem immensely literate today, but they are just literate in different ways than you and I were trained to be literate.
Bauerlein: There is no doubt that there are different kinds of literacies that are developing. The way people read on the web is a kind of literacy and is also distinct from the way they read books. In 1997, Sun Microsystems did a study to see how people use the internet and how we should design web-pages in order to maximize their use. This study had the title "How Users Read On The Web," and the first sentence was "They don't." Instead, users scan the page; 16% percent of the subjects read word by word, linearly, which is what they meant by reading. Scanning the page, the other 84% look for visual clues, and key words. They read a phrase and then they jump down lower on the page to read another phrase. So it is more a kind of identification of clues and cues, verbal and visual, that lead them to the information that they want. Web designers have laws such as "The Three-Second Rule," which says that if you don't get a user's attention in three seconds they move on to another page. It's a more accelerated processing of different kinds of signs and text than we get with book reading.
Now that is certainly useful for one kind of activity, but if we're looking for analytical skills, reading comprehension skills, the kind where you give someone three paragraphs of text and say, "tell us what this text has as its thesis" and "how do the sentences develop it?" those are the skills that we don't see cultivated by internet reading.
This is not only what educators are saying but the business community is saying as well. A few years ago American Express did its survey on small businesses and asked what they need in their employees. Number one was communication skills—reading and writing and speaking skills. Number two was interpersonal skills. Far down the list were technological and computer skills. A year later the National Association of Manufacturers asked its members what are the skills in the workplace that are most needed. Number one was employability skills, which include attendance, co-operating with other employees, but number two was reading comprehension. They didn't mean computer literacy, they meant reading comprehension skills of a very rudimentary kind. We do see a lot of digital literacies developing and some of these young people are extraordinarily adept in the internet environment, but we're just not sure that this kind of behavior is breeding the skills and knowledges that go along with productivity and innovation, speaking in terms of the workplace, and also the kinds of creativity skills that a lot of employers are looking for now.
Williams: An irony is that novel reading was first denounced, in the eighteenth century, as wasting time or as a kind of masturbatory activity, whereas now it would count as literature.
Bauerlein: We accepted in our study any novels of any quality, in any language, of any length in any medium, including reading online. We took nursery rhymes as well as ancient epics.
Williams: So a broad sense of literature, as cultural studies would use?
Bauerlein: We wanted to see the imaginative writing of any kind that people read in their lives. We need more research on the qualitative aspects of reading, for instance, what is the difference between reading a heavily coded, conventionalized genre such as romance novels, of which people sometimes read twenty in a month, versus reading a challenging work like Moby Dick? What kind of readers does one find in each category? And what skills and knowledges go into each of those experiences?
Williams: It strikes me that one reason why reading has declined is economic. This is where it relates directly to politics. When we were in college in the late 70s, there were more social programs—the fruits of the Great Society—and college was much more affordable, and young adults had more leisure time. From the eighties on, that's declined. Now, with Generation X and Y, people might have to work at minimum wage or intern for five years before they get a decent job.
Bauerlein: I would add that if you look at the pace of reading activities online versus the pace of reading a book, book reading is slower. You sit on a chair on a Sunday afternoon and you read a book, and after two or three hours, what have you done? You have read a book, but there are serious pressures on young people to maximize their time, to focus more in terms of goals. The rhetoric of the schools, the rhetoric of the workplace, is focused on achievement. What that does is instrumentalize their time: it intrumentalizes their leisure time, their school time, their work time. And, for many of them, they just don't see the accomplishment, the payoff, in sitting for three hours reading a book. They do see a payoff in going on the internet. I think that in today's economic climate for young people, this focus on achievement and development leaves book reading, literary reading, out. They have to maximize and utilize every hour. Reading is slow. Like the slow food movement that's catching on, we need a slow reading movement.
Williams: If the market is god of everything, then it makes sense why kids would not be keen on reading, since there's no profit (money) in it. It's hard not to relate the decline of reading to the tenor of current politics, whereby we have major leaders—and I know that you're a political appointee, so this might be a touchy question—who discount reading and who seem to be visibly anti-intellectual.
Bauerlein: If you look at President Bush, obviously his focus is elsewhere. Laura Bush is a strong supporter of reading and literature.
Williams: But she is not President.
Bauerlein: She is not President, but take a look at President Bush's appointments to the cultural agencies. I think we can say this: Dana Gioia, my boss here at the Endowment, is an accomplished poet, a skillful essayist, a translator of Latin, a translator of Italian poetry—very strong intellectual appointment there. At NEH, the appointment is Bruce Cole, who is an art historian and who has written five books on Renaissance art, so he brings a scholarly heft to that agency. We do need intellectuals in the political sphere...
Williams: But there's a nerd factor at the NEH and the NEH, where you can have literary and arts types that you don't have at the other branches of government.
Bauerlein: True, but the National Endowment for the Arts serves a very important political purpose in this country. Often cultural issues, arts issues, scholarly issues are not part of the political conversation, and I think they should be. And I think that political leaders should be measured on their cultural values and their cultural policies as well as on their other policies.
The Endowments, humanities and the arts, provide a forum in which people air debate cultural values in the political sphere. The Endowments should be places where issues can be debated as they were during the culture wars. People look back upon the culture wars surrounding the National Endowment for the Humanities, when Bill Bennett and Lynne Cheney were heading the NEH and the NEH funded the Mapplethorpe and Serrano photographs—I think that was a long time ago, in 1987—and I don't think that that was really a bad thing to have happened. We had spirited debates.
Unfortunately, the outcome of those culture wars was that the constituents under attack, the humanities and the arts communities, did not come back with a sound public representation of themselves. In the public sphere, the humanities professors and the artists did not win very many arguments or gain very many allies among the laymen. I don't think that was because they didn't have a case to make; I think it's because they were coming out of a world that was already cut off from the public sphere, so when their way of speaking, their values, their beliefs came out in the public sphere, they didn't have a language to articulate them. While I do believe the argument was, broadly speaking, a healthy thing to have happened, I think the outcome was too much of a retrenchment of the academic and the arts communities, a withdrawal from the public sphere, because they didn't have the language to address the public effectively.
Williams: To go back to the "Reading at Risk" report, what criticisms have you heard that you think are unfair or off-target? On the other hand, what arguments do you think are fair and will make you revise it?
Bauerlein: First, a couple of criticisms that I think are fair. One, we need a broader assessment of other genres of writing. People ask why you didn't include memoir, biography, historical narrative. We need research in that area, and we are trying to craft another survey in which we incorporate several other genres into the profile of reading.
Another fair criticism that I think is sometimes misapplied is that we did not explore the nature of internet activity. We did not explore the question, "What are people reading on the internet?" We did ask a couple of questions whether they do literary research on the internet, but what else are they reading on the internet? We all know that there are fantastic things on the internet. One can find sophisticated information and challenging discussions all the time. But are young people going to those sites? Are those sites managed by people who have grown up in an internet environment, or are they managed by people who have been brought up in a print environment, who have a lot of the book reading skills, the analytical comprehension skills to allow them to navigate in an internet environment in a discriminating fashion, to find the solid information and filter out the weak? This is what has to be done further.
What I will say is that the assertion that young people are doing wonderful, sophisticated things on the internet I can only accept as anecdotal information. If we look at the historical, civic, and cultural knowledge of young people today, many of whom were reared on Google—some sociologists call them "generation.net," the 15-26 year old generation—there is a cultural crisis. In civics right now, the NAEP scores show only one in twenty-five high school graduates is able to reach advanced. There was a study a few years ago of college seniors at the top fifty-five universities who were given a high school test in history, and 19% scored a C or above, 81% a D or an F. These were students at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Michigan, Berkeley. The National Conference of State Legislators did a survey of people for their understanding of government and politics and what they found was, when they asked basic questions such as "Who is the Speaker of the US House?" they were getting results in the 10 to 20% range. When they asked them, "What is the town in the Simpsons?" they were up in the 80% range. Young people are six and a half time more likely to know who the American Idol is than who the Speaker of the US House is.
The youth vote was a big issue last month, and we had many efforts to bring out the youth vote such as "Rock the Vote." Now, there was a bounce in the youth vote—roughly 52% of the 18-24 year-olds did vote, which was up—but every other group went up as well. The youth vote was about 7% of the 2000 election, and it was about 7% of the 2004 election, despite all the effort to mobilize it. I would analyze that in part by saying that you can't ask a non-voter to turn into a voter without giving that non-voter a deeper sense of citizenship. They have to have some awareness of political tradition, of what it means to be a citizen, of what it means to have the vote, of what the US Constitution means in terms of political freedom and the structure of government and other elements of civic understanding. Young people simply lack that depth of citizenship knowledge, and this is largely due to mass culture, which has very little to do with citizenship. It has to do with the decline of civics in K-12 curriculum and the loss of requirements in US government and US history in higher education.
Williams: They are also working too much. Some students work thirty or more hours a week, which is unforgiveable.
Bauerlein: And they're working too much, yes. I have to mention a couple of other studies. National Geographic did a survey of young adults in fifteen countries for their geographic knowledge in 2002. Of the fifteen countries, the US came in fourteenth. Mexico was fifteenth. 70% of those surveyed could find the Pacific Ocean on a map. 15% could find Iraq, Afghanistan, or Israel on a map.
Williams: Did they know those things forty years ago, or eighty years ago?
Bauerlein: Well, I don't know of studies in those areas, but if you do look at the tests that were given in history, in civics, they were much more demanding than they are today. The habits that young people engage in today do not help their reading skills. All you have to do is go to any university administrator who has worked in English composition. You'll find that more and more students are having to undergo more remedial education, 53% and climbing, and most of it is for writing.
Williams: You seem to know relevant studies to all of this, and what you say is compelling, but my sense is not quite the same as the horrific statistics tell. In what I observe, kids are just as smart as they ever were, and the danger is laying it on their shoulders—the kids are delinquents. I think the historical question is the key one, and the problem is a consequence of post-Fordism and the logic of capitalist markets.
Bauerlein: Kids are just as smart as they were before; it's not an intelligence decline. I would attribute a lot of it to a reading decline, in which kids do not practice their intelligence in ways that will produce better readers and better writers.
The odd thing is that for academics in the last twenty years there has been a strong push to the slogan "always historicize," to understand historical contexts, to understand the politics of different settings, and yet, when we look at the education system, we are not seeing that historical understanding and that political understanding coming to the students.
There is one area that students have deep knowledge, and that is mass culture. They know extraordinary things about sports; the young male viewership of ESPN is massive. The world of sports, the world of entertainment, the world of celebrities, the world of popular music—there you will get an amazing depth of knowledge. But when you get outside those areas, things get real thin, real fast.
Williams: I too am curious if Nick and Jessica will stay together...
Bauerlein: I think I saw a headline at the supermarket that Jessica may be stepping out with someone else...
Williams: What I am hearing is that the goal, then, is to change education. I guess my argument would be that if you provide the soil, the plants will grow. In other words, my prescription would be more directly economic—more liberal (in its root sense) funding for public education instead of privatization or donor-mongering.
Bauerlein: The work we can do in the education world is obviously crucial, but the education world is a hard world to change. Some call it the blob. What they mean by that is that you push when you are trying to get a reform and it just bounces back, or you lose your hand in it. Getting actual change in the education system is very difficult.
I would also point to the home. There are repeated studies of educational achievement to find what the determinants of success are. What they found was that the first determinant of success was a two-parent household. Obviously it is hard for a single parent to have the time to keep the young child focused on school work. The single parent comes home, has to work longer hours, has to cook dinner, and so the child often ends up in front of the TV, just for practical reasons.
The second determinant of academic success was the amount and quality of books in the home. This ranked higher than poverty. What they showed was that a poor child in a book rich environment has a better chance of academic success than a middle class child in a non-book environment. So I think that we need to work to build books in the home and to help single parents with adult and family literacy programs. And you have to get them young; if a child is behind by third grade, chances are slim that the child will ever catch up. So I would support more family programs, especially working with single mothers on raising children with literacy programs.
There are some very good ones, for example, one called "Reach Out and Read." It is run by a pediatricians network across the country, and what they do is have books in their waiting rooms that kids and parents can browse through. The child comes in for a check-up every six months and the pediatrician makes sure that the child leaves with a book. This really affects low-income populations.
Williams: That gives a good sense of what the stakes are with the "Reading at Risk" report. Now I want to shift to your own experience and maybe some of your background. First, I'm curious about the shift from being a Professor of English at Emory, of what it feels like to be "Mr. Bauerlein Goes to Washington." You came to the NEA a couple of years ago, I think?
Bauerlein: I came here a year and half ago. Two years ago, Dana Gioia called me and asked me if I wanted to come to the Endowment to work on education and research issues. I hesitated, and he said, "Just do it." So I said okay.
Williams: That was in 2003?
Bauerlein: That was fall 2003, and my university was very kind in giving me leave and the flexibility to stay here for a few years to work on some national issues for the Endowment, especially in the areas of education. I came up and I have to say there was an adjustment period. Academia—and this goes back hundreds of years—is an insulated environment, and whenever you have an insulated professional environment, you're going to have a set of mores, mannerisms, and verbal habits that develop among the group.
Williams: I've found that in every world I've worked in. I had a civil service job once, and it was as insular as academe. Inside the beltway has its own world too, and politics can be an insular profession.
Bauerlein: But it has a different perspective on things, and it's very important to get outside the beltway and talk to people out in the field. For me, making the shift from doing something like giving a talk to a group of professors on an academic subject to giving a talk to a group of business leaders on the economic costs of non-reading is not a simple step. It requires not only a re-training in the kind of evidence that you use and the kind of language that you use, but also a shift in your deeper identity. When you become an academic you've undergone six years of graduate school, you've gone through oral exams, you've written a dissertation, negotiated the job market, and then, as an assistant professor, attended meetings and served on committees. There are a thousand rituals that you pass through, and those rituals have advanced protocols to them. It's such a long process, it reaches deep into who you are, who you conceive yourself to be. Who am I when I stand in front of a group and speak? That has to be assumed when you give a talk at an MLA. You can't have that identity when you get up and talk in front of a parent group; when you talk to school administrators in a district in Ohio, you have to alter your identity, and I did find that was hard.
In Washington you have to learn a different way of speaking and to pick your battles more carefully. And, if you're a political appointment, you have a mission. A political appointment comes in with the administration, and so your boss, Dana Gioia here at the Endowment, a cabinet level appointment, has his goals.
Williams: He has been a proponent of poetry for a long time, at least since his famous piece back in the early 90s, "Can Poetry Matter?"
Bauerlein: Right. The pressure of really accomplishing something in a few years time, actually getting a policy in place, an idea converted from a meeting in DC to the field out in Idaho, that process you want to complete before you leave. That forces you to be much more tactical in the people you talk to, in the arguments that you make, in the research that you do. In academia things tend to be pretty individual—"your" work, "your" research, you're in the library alone. In a research institution one strives to be a decent teacher but also to build up a body of research that is able to get you a promotion. In the public sphere, in the federal government, your goal is to accomplish your mission. And the mission really derives from the position of the chairman and the particular skills that you can bring to help him realize that vision.
Now, I will say that one appreciates the scholarly world when one leaves it. The scholarly world is a precious enclave in which one should have time to reflect and to ruminate, to go into a library and do in-depth research that is directed toward a long term project.
Williams: You were criticizing the academic world before for being cut off and insular, but now you're saying that its being cut off as an enclave is precisely its virtue.
Bauerlein: I think it is its virtue. I think that academic freedom is something that should be treasured by people within the academy and people outside the academy. The whole point of the campus being a unique enclave is that there people have time to read, to write, to argue in ways that the ordinary political, commercial, and social constraints don't always allow. Sometimes academia is accused of not having a bottom line. I think that it shouldn't have a bottom line because the measurement that will be used to assess academic value will end up jeopardizing intellectual values. It will instrumentalize education so that the campus is solely understood as preparation for the workplace. That can be an aspect of the campus, but there are forms of knowledge that should be cultivated that are not tied to commercial value.
Williams: If you look at the statistics about majors, humanities majors have declined almost in half, for instance philosophy from something like 6% in the 60s to about 2% now, and over 20% of undergraduates are business majors. Fifty years ago, or before World War II, most universities didn't even have a busines major; it was a graduate degree, but the undergraduate degree would've been in more traditional fields.
Bauerlein: It is interesting that, if you ask a lot of business leaders what they want, at least in their top-level employees, they want forms of imagination, conceptual, higher-order thinking skills. They want people who have interpretative flexibility, and these are not skills that are cultivated by an undergraduate business major. You will find many CEOs have a great deal of respect for the humanities. I think that sometimes academics in the humanities underestimate how much the business world admires literary culture and literary knowledge.
Williams: What you said about academe as an enclave seems to contradict your recent Chronicle piece, where you state that, according to some surveys, there are far more liberals (as many as seven to one) than conservatives in academe, and you implied that academe should be more representative. I'm not certain that's so for all fields; even if it's true for the humanities, I doubt it is for business, for instance. Also, if academe is an enclave, perhaps we shouldn't have to worry about those political differentiations.
Bauerlein: Well, I would say that academia is an enclave and it should be honored as an enclave in which separate rules apply in order to maintain academic freedom, in order to provide an area within our society where, again, the ordinary political and commercial constraints don't apply. We need a place for that in our society. The problem is if the enclave becomes a place that's insulated on the intellectual level, so that there may be a lot of ideas circulating outside the enclave that have been very influential but not sufficiently represented within the enclave. That impoverishes the intellectual environment within. The enclave should not be cut off intellectually from the larger world; the enclave should be the place where you have the most freedom of opinion, where you have the biggest marketplace of ideas.
That doesn't mean any idea is acceptable. We do have intellectual standards that ideas have to meet. If an idea has been exploded by historical events or by logical argument, it doesn't need to be brought back out of a call for intellectual diversity. But that enclave only remains a special place honored by people outside the enclave so long as it looks like a vibrant and catholic setting where perspectives are debated in an honest and rigorous fashion. We have to understand the separation between the campus and the larger society is an agreement between the larger society and the campus. The larger society is willing to accept something such as tenure, which is a remarkable thing for people outside the academy, only on certain terms.
Williams: Civil service workers, like police officers or IRS workers or librarians, effectively have tenure.
Bauerlein: These things aren't unique to the academy, as you say, but the campus environment is allowed to be separate from the rest of society. You have a different set of rules regarding behavior, a different legal status in terms of policing the campus, you have the idea of unpopular opinions being freely stated on campus the way that they would not be accepted in the realms you mention.
Williams: That's fairly unobjectionable, but calling for a catholic range of ideas is not the same as calling for the equal representation of political positions. And it might be true that there's a certain tired consensus on campuses, but people on the left have criticized this as well, for instance Edward Said, although he attributed it simply to professionalism. Also, I think that most bureaucracies work like that.
Bauerlein: I would say that we should have higher standards for the university than we have for other kinds of bureaucracies. What I found dismaying in my graduate training, and now as I look at syllabi of graduate courses in the humanities at other schools, is that I tend to see the same names over and over again. I can't tell you how many courses I took in graduate school in which I read the same Foucault, the same Derrida. Now, those works should be read, but in the last few years I have encountered a lot of other books that explore social and cultural issues that have had a huge influence on larger society but have never appeared on a humanities syllabus that I have seen.
Williams: One could say that theorists like Derrida deal with literature quite a bit, whereas someone like Hayek does not.
Bauerlein: Overall, that's true. But Hayek has a book called The Counter Revolution of Science, which he wrote in the early 50s. It is actually a very philosophical study; it begins with a theory of perception and builds up to a theory of society, then toward a conception of limited state government. Its early chapters are on the same topics that Foucault writes on in works such as Discipline and Punish. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia is just as philosophical in a Rousseau-ist tradition as some of Bourdieu's social philosophy. I think that the parochialism of the graduate syllabus is where I would point to the problem, not that we don't have enough conservative academics on the faculty. I wouldn't mess with that.
Williams: I think that is how your argument will be taken, though.
Bauerlein: Well, at the end I said that affirmative action for conservatives is a bad thing. We do not want to create hiring mechanisms to bring in conservatives; what we do want is to broaden the intellectual horizon. That is really what, to me, is the problem with the humanities. The acculturation seems to be getting ever more narrow, in terms not only of academic behavior but of the texts that people are familiar with.
Williams: Nobody would argue for parochialism, and I actually agree that we always need to know more, but its seems to me that it's partly a paradox of professionalism and partly a generational issue. There is the usual argument that we used to be wide and now we're narrow, but if you look at the philologists of the 1920s, they dealt with quite arcane texts and very narrow theories, and theory was far more intellectually capacious than that. Part is the problem of expertise, and simply the ground that one can cover. I think there's also the question of the ceding of the 60s and 70s generation.
Bauerlein: Yes, I think I would relate it to generations. In the 60s or 70s you had a wider intellectual ferment. In the late 60s or 70, 71, the journal diacritics was in its first years, also Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, and boundary 2. They were clearly coming into a world that wasn't ready for them. Compare the first articles in diacritics with PMLA at the same time. One of the first diacritics had a biting exchange between Foucault and George Steiner. Steiner was, in cultural terms, very conservative; Foucault was a cultural anarchist at the time. It was fresh, it was nasty—believe me, Foucault was ruthless to Steiner. I don't think you have that kind of clash in the academy today.
What great conflicts are there in the humanities right now? I think that a professor with a hardcore leftist commitment who comes in and teaches a course in Marxist thought and includes Hayek's The Road to Serfdom—that's a great thing to do. And if the professor says, "I think this is a terrible book, I think it had bad ideas, I want all of you to read this book, and I want all of you to argue for it. Defend this book," that is the kind of engagement that I would like to see with a broader range of texts.
One thing that we have lost in the classroom is the teacher who really challenges the students—the teacher saying, "you're wrong, you have to argue for that better." I think classroom debate has sometimes been a little bit tame, a little bit domesticated, for a variety of reasons. But we shouldn't allow the pursuit of intellectual diversity to domesticate political, cultural, and social debate in the classroom. It should be done out of respect and it should be done on the basis of evidence, but there should be challenge all the time.
Williams: So your piece in the Chronicle is a recommendation for spurring the classroom. However, since you have a significant position at the NEA, it seems more like a political pronouncement.
Bauerlein: When I'm speaking there, I'm speaking only as a private citizen. My NEA work actually has nothing to do with the academy. Here in the office we do population surveys, so it's a strictly separate issue.
Williams: Are you interested in going back to academe or are you interested in staying in government?
Bauerlein: I'll return to the academic world. I'll return to Emory, and what I'll do is continue working on public issues and public projects. One can always work as a consultant or a contractor to the federal government.
To come back to the enclave issue, I do think that professors should get off campus more and get involved in public work. By that, I mean things such as English professors going to their school districts and attending school board meetings and trying to represent literary, interpretative values to the school board. Or going to the state Department of Education and examining the standards for English language arts, and making a case that we have students coming into school who are not prepared for college. A quick look at the writing skills of entering students shows that something is wrong with the standards and the way they are being taught at the K-12 level.
There are a lot of active courses open to faculty who sometimes don't realize that they could be a resource in the social and political sphere if they would get involved in public arenas that affect their work quite directly. This is the best way to overcome the narrow protocols of academic life—bring your academic life into the public sphere. Try and write op eds in your local newspapers. It will require you to address the public, which means it will require you to understand public concerns and find ways of responding while maintaining your own point of view.
Williams: I want to ask one more thing about academe versus the beltway. You said that the deficit of academe is that it's sometimes provincial, but the benefit is that it is an enclave. You could say the same thing, I think, about the world inside the beltway. What are the virtues of each and what are the deficits, and what do each have to offer?
Bauerlein: If you are working in the beltway for one of the cultural agencies, obviously you become involved in bureaucratic administrative issues and so you lack the time to read and reflect. That's actually not a good thing when you are working on policies. Ideally one brings to policy-making a background of study and research and experience so that the policy isn't a waste of taxpayers' money—one is constantly aware of a duty to the public at large. Also, one wants to make sure that, as one crafts policies, one responds not simply to topical concerns, not just to political concerns, but to good evidence and good research and experience.
An academic background can be useful for entering into the public sphere. The skills of deliberation and reflection and study, and your own cultural knowledge and experience, can go a long way in this world because a lot of people who work in Washington don't have that. I think this is one reason why the think tanks in Washington have been so successful—a lot of them conservative, but some moderate, like the Brookings Institution. What they do is create a small campus with a tight focus on public policy. If you've been to the Heritage Foundation or AEI, they have their own little world there—cafeterias, offices, research bases, libraries, and auditorium—what they do is bring the campus environment into the political world. They have fellows working as scholars, but they work on projects and then they convene a symposium to explore the project. To announce a report that they are producing, they ask four or five people in the field, some of them in political worlds, to respond to it. If you measure the influence of these very small think tanks with pretty limited resources compared to, say, the Ford Foundation, you find intellectuals doing research having direct impact on public policy.
It's unfortunate that the universities can't play a larger role like that. I think a lot of universities are actually trying to promote research that has direct community effects, especially the private institutions, but I'm not sure how successful those efforts are. What we need out of administrations are incentives for faculty to do this. So, if the faculty want to get involved with local school boards and prove to be effective in doing so, then that should be part of the record for that faculty member. Properly, it would be post-tenure, though; for tenure one has to provide the scholarly work.
Williams: I want to ask you about your own work and how you came to do the work you do. You mentioned at lunch that you went to UCLA for graduate work in the mid 1980s. You also mentioned that you grew up here in Washington and that your father had been a math teacher. Where did you go for undergrad?
Bauerlein: UCLA also. We moved to California and I went to high school for one year there, and then went to UCLA for undergraduate study. I went to graduate school not because I wanted to make a career out of being an academic or had any notion of becoming a professor. I just kept going to school because I felt I needed to read a lot more and wanted to keep studying.
Williams: In graduate school I assume the field you specialized in was nineteenth century American literature.
Bauerlein: For the most part. I did fall into a theory spin and immersed myself in Derrida and Heidegger and Nietzsche and some of the philosophical tradition behind those figures.
Williams: You said your mentor was Joseph Riddel, who is probably not as well-known now as poststructuralists like Hillis Miller, but who was a key proponent of theory in the 70s.
Bauerlein: He was a well-known figure, important in scholarship in modern American poetry. The Inverted Bell was one of the first Derridian readings of literature, a study of William Carlos Williams' poetry. The interesting thing about Riddel was that his work had evolved from being a philosophical New Critic into a full-scale deconstructionist critic. But he also was very much attuned to the different intellectual currents taking place throughout the 60s and 70s. I can say that because Joe made sure that his students understood not only the texts in deconstruction but the intellectual currents going back thirty years before, that shaped theory and that shaped the profession. Part of that would be understanding different schools of thought, not just the Yale School but what was going on with comparative literature at John Hopkins with people like Leo Spitzer. Joe made sure that you not only read Derrida and the leading Derridian disciples in this country, but you had to know your New Critics, you had to know Lionel Trilling, you had to know old-school Americanists such as Granville Hicks.
I would sit down for long sessions with Joe every week, and he would talk about the profession in intellectual terms—not as gossip, but as history. Why did the profession go in this direction? Why did it hit this or that dead end? Why was Foucault important in the early 70s in this way, and then in the early 80s in that way? You had to read all the texts first of all—Joe didn't have much patience for scanning—and you had to understand them in terms of institutional and intellectual evolution.
Williams: You've obviously been busy since graduate school. You started with a book on American poetry, on Whitman, where I can see Riddel's influence. And one of your interests is pragmatism—you have a book in the Duke New Americanists series that recovers Peirce, among others. Your most recent book is Negrophobia, again in Americanist terrain but which surprised me because it's really an historical account of the Atlanta race riots of 1906, that covers the events in an almost novelistic way, minute-by-minute. It's in a different register than your other books.
Bauerlein: The book is an attempt at narrative history, with lots of archival work behind it. The goal was to write a story and to give an accurate rendition of one of the most dramatic and disgusting episodes in US history. In Atlanta, white mobs took over downtown for about three days, with lots of Black victims, lots of murders, before order was restored.
The goal was also to bring it to a wider public, a popular audience, and to see if this story could have some public presence in the city. There is nothing unusual about that ambition, but what inspired me was that I was living in a neighborhood where a lot of the action took place. I had just moved into that neighborhood—it is just a couple of blocks from the Martin Luther King Center—and I thought that matching my scholarship to the place in which I lived, and giving historical memory to those city blocks would provide for a richer experience of the city for other people living in Atlanta. I was in the archives for about three years, looking at old court records, municipal committee books, reading letters from the state national guard moving troops into the city, tracking news stories, etc. Atlanta, like many cities that exploded in the post-WWII era, has very little sense of its historical background.
Williams: Would you say that the course of your own work moves from traditional scholarship and theory, moving through a sort of renunciation of theory in Literary Criticism: An Autopsy, to more public writing, especially in the last book?
Bauerlein: One's intellectual formation comes from what's going on in and around you. Again, we spend all these years struggling through graduate school to enter an institution, and with the way things work in academia, it really becomes your life. But as you earn tenure, as you reach your thirties and forties, you begin to wonder if this institution really fulfills all of the motives that you had in the first place. What I see when I look at the Chronicle or when I talk to other people is just how much dissatisfaction there is among the professors. Not that they want to get out of the profession—they still care about their work, they still care about teaching—but a lot of the circumstances that go along with it seem filled with malaise. I think faculty are looking for different outlets for their intellectual energies, and I think that's a healthy thing.
I assume that the English department is going to look much different in twenty years than it does today. There are strong economic pressures coming from administrations that will end up steering departments more toward composition training. Not only do you have the instrumentalization of English literature learning, but you also have employment issues with more and more adjuncts being hired. Sometimes one wonders if interdisciplinarity might not be a tactic used by administrators to consolidate resources. I think it's up to English professors to ask if there isn't some intellectual loss taking place now as the English department evolves into cultural studies, composition studies, and elsewhere. Something should be conserved. We should examine the changes that are taking place and see if we might take a shaping role in those changes, because if we don’t take a shaping role in those changes, others will. And it's unlikely that the others who make those changes are going to share the values of the English professors.
Williams: As a closing question, what does the future hold for you, at the NEA or after? What are you looking forward to working on?
Bauerlein: Political appointments last only a few years. You even see that when you have the same administration re-elected. People leave because it can be an exhausting schedule and the burdens of the mission can weigh heavily.
Williams: I know you travel a lot, and you mentioned earlier that you just got back from Dallas, and you've been to three or four other places in the past few weeks, to about the "Reading at Risk" report.
Bauerlein: I think in the last five weeks I've been in twelve different cities giving talks or convening panels on "Reading at Risk," trying to foment the public awareness campaign. I've been doing editorials at different newspapers and radio shows wherever I can, simply to try to keep this problem of reading on the public radar as much as possible.
But about what would I do in the future, well, there are some serious debates taking place right now on the larger public stage—sometimes it's referred to as a culture war, sometimes as a political war, and the polarities have never been wider among the populace, red states pitted against blue states. One of the tasks for intellectuals, including academics, is to explore the nature of this current polarization. They need to look at what conservatism has been evolving into (its offshoots, neoconservativism, liberatarianism), and what liberalism has been evolving into. What is the fate of identity politics and multiculturalism in the twenty-first century? This is a crucial question.
I think there are lots of demands the world is not placing on humanists right now, and the main people picking up those demands and responding to them are journalists and people in the think tanks—those who craft policy and work at say, The New Republic, and The American Progressive on the left, and The Weekly Standard and The National Review on the right. They are having an influence on the meaning of terms and the value of different beliefs, and humanities professors right now play no active role in this process. They have the time, at least many of them who are tenured, and they have the background, and it's now up to them to get involved in the public sphere. That might mean beginning to attend different public events, follow political debates, and respond to them.
In my own work, I have a project unfolding on the consequences of one of the crucial developments of late 20th century intellectual history, when leaders of educational and cultural institutions lost faith in their own authority and in the tradition they represented. |
