On the best days, of which there are now so few, “professionalism” is an unwholesome aspiration. Admire it as much as you wish in your mechanic, your family therapist, your oncology nurse. At even the least distance from these more high-wire enterprises, the matter scans less nobly. Efficiency in the name of someone else’s profit, a quasi-robotic optimization, a disciplined adherence to the way things are done—who wants to celebrate such things?
As anyone who has had the job can attest, the enterprise of being chair of an English department—or, in my case, “head,” a term meant to designate a role still more managerial—comes with more than its share of these scenes of demoralized compliance and low-grade surrender. “A two-fisted engine of aggravation and despair” is how I recently described the gig to a friend, and it’s hard to find anyone who would disagree. So imagine my surprise, my wonder even, in having found for myself a nourishing antidote to all the in-built tedium, joylessness, and metastatic irritation. Yoga? Hypnosis? Ketamine? No. It has appeared in nothing so much as the revelation that my colleagues are, in ways and degrees I hadn’t quite grasped, extraordinarily good at what they do.
I don’t just mean that they write beautiful and field-shifting books that widen the circumference of humanist knowledge and proffer solace and delight. I mean something else. For instance: do you have any idea what kinds of foresight, acuity, and procedural fluency are required to run, say, a program designed to teach collegiate writing to thousands of new students previously unfamiliar with the concept? Can you imagine the resolve, the patience, and the extremes of pedagogical inventiveness necessary to keep lessons lively rather than rote, to make the axiomatically laborious and frustrating enterprise of learning how to write a scene of curiosity, imagination, even nourishment? Don’t even get me started about the obscure algebraic gymnastics entailed in distributing courses across a compact grid, controlling for enrollment, preference, major, and college and university requirement, conflicts in topic, conflicts in staffing, and a physical footprint under ever-shifting conditions of repair. These are, each and all, the household miracles of university administrative life.
I had known of these things for a while, in the dim way of a person preoccupied by his own labors at the institution. Become chair, though, and you will be afforded a considerably more granular sense of how skillfully your colleagues do the unbelievably difficult things they are asked to do. When you write it all up—as, in your role as head, you are forever required to do—you find yourself broaching phrases like accomplished expertise and household miracles and, yes, sterling professionalism a great deal, and with less and less in the way of misgiving.
But not to worry. Your misgiving still has room to flourish. When it comes now, with its gasp of panic, it is mostly to do with the desolate sense of how little any of the above is likely to matter. You’ll find it in the recollection of the extremely nonzero chance that none of it—the generosity, the devotion, the worlds they serve and make—will, in the reach of years, survive.
The story of the decimation of higher education over the past decades is well-told, as is the inset story of the decimation of the humanities. A massive contraction in state and federal funds, accelerated by the cascading disasters of 2008; a tech-inflected drive toward evermore foggy conceptions of “innovation,” keyed toward STEM fields in their most “disruptive” modes; a vast retrenchment, rationalized now as fiduciary responsibility and technocratic rightsizing, now as rebuke to a plague of alleged “wokeness,” and all of it part of the calculated annihilation of any value conceivably public in orientation, “the swamping” (in David Roth’s fine phrasing) “of any collective effort or any nascent social consciousness in favor of individuals assiduously optimizing and competing and refining and selling themselves, not so much alongside the rest of humanity as in constant competition with all of it.”1Pretty much everybody knows how to sing these songs by now, chorus to verse to out-chorus.
Not that it is a story without tremendous perspectival distortions. Speaking for myself, I can say that if I never again read a glossy feature about the dining options at the private colleges of New England, or about what is and is not being taught at Harvard, or really about any of the other dilemmas proper to institutions whose clientele is drawn so massively from the planetary overclass, I won’t be mad about it. I taught for many years at one such place, and this has left me with a perhaps overdeveloped sense of all that gets misapprehended in brisk, homogenizing accounts of a singular entity called “higher ed.”
The case of my current place of employment is illustrative, but not because it generalizes any easier. Its uniqueness works the other way. As head of a big humanist department in a gigantic urban public university, I get asked more than you might guess to explain what it is we’re doing, and by now I have a ready answer. Every last thing we do here, I say, rests upon the conviction that our job is to bring the highest-caliber literary education imaginable—comprising the best of what has been said and written and argued—to a student body selected with as little regard for the distinctions of status, wealth, background, color, and need as can be found at any major institution of higher learning. Lots of places (especially rich places) like to say they do that, as a kind of advertising—or, more cynically, as a mitigating counterpoint to the less savory fact of how entirely their student bodies are drawn from the top economic quintile. At UIC, where I am, it is by contrast a lived daily reality. We’re by far the largest school in Chicago, with an enrollment over thirty thousand and growing; we’re about two thirds nonwhite, and something like 60 percent Pell grant–eligible—which is to say that our job is to bring the heaviest-duty R1 education you can find to an urban, diverse, hugely dynamic, and overwhelmingly working-class student body.
There is not a lot of this out in the world. If the task at my old job was, as we used to joke, to paint a thin veneer of culture on tomorrow’s ruling classes, here it is to catapult kids into, or at least nearer to the frayed edges of, the middle class—and to do so at enormous, city-serving scale, and at a cost liable to make prestige private institutions gawp and blush. We’re more like our brethren at Wayne State or CUNY or UC Riverside than we are like Brown or Bowdoin, even if the knowledge we all endeavor to produce can reasonably be aggregated under the heading “humanist.”
And we are producing knowledge. Despite our austerity-strickenness, despite permanently close-to-the-bone finances, and despite a memorable year and a half held hostage by a Tea Party governor, with our budget zeroed out, the work carries on. Permit me the gracelessness of stanning my colleagues for a moment. Over the brief span that I’ve been head, members of the department have won a PEN Award, published a best-selling novel, had some dozen books appear from presses playing up and down the public-academic divide, and have been invited to present that work across the country and indeed the world. Our graduate students, specializing in everything from Marxist aesthetics to creative writing to American modernism, have landed permanent gigs in Texas, New York, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, and here in Illinois. One happy week last spring, on the very day one colleague had her monograph reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, a recent PhD graduate had a piece published on the Sunday Op-Ed page, in relation to her new and already celebrated memoir.
In terms of productivity, vitality, and breadth of intellectual achievement, this is a record I’d very happily set alongside that of any English department, anywhere at all. But this is, in truth, only half the story of English at UIC. What’s equally remarkable is that we have also taught an astonishing number of students. You’ll have read all the think pieces about Covid contraction, the distracted youth, and the general decline of the English major. OK. Meanwhile, over the past few years we in English have seen a steady increase in enrollments. (For the spreadsheet fetishists: these totals go from 9,944 in ’20–21 to 10,565 in ’21–22 to 10,857 in ’22–23 to a startling 11,136 in ’23–24—all excluding summer enrollments). Every student who comes to this massive and growing urban university needs to be taught what collegiate writing is. We do that, through a dedicated program (and in concert with a standard-setting writing center) that, despite its vastness and the intricacy of its task, functions with outrageous proficiency. What’s more, as enrollments to the college itself have declined, we have seen an increase not only in enrollments but in majors, up about 15 percent from a post-pandemic low. News of the death of the study of English has not arrived here, or not quite.
So if you ask me about the signature strength of the department where I work, I will tell you. It is world-caliber field-defining research, wedded to a fantastically dynamic practice of instruction, accomplished at nothing less than the scale of the institution itself—all of it operating inside financial margins so narrow, at such absurdly low cost relative to its peers, you can hardly believe it.
There is an enabling condition for this breadth of achievement, and it is not pricey consultancies or obscure rich-person patronage or sage leadership (alas). It’s the union. The lion’s share of writing instruction is done by lecturers and senior lecturers who, along with our graduate students (who are trained up through the first-year writing program), make up a formidably gifted body of scholar-teachers. We can attract such able and committed faculty, and we can retain them, because ours is a union of faculty across the tenure divide—we are, as our motto says, one faculty—and this means in practice not only a living wage for NTT colleagues but longer and more secure appointments, procedural clarity around renewal, and an articulated structure of professional advancement, keyed to pedagogical strength, service, and work in the field. Working conditions are learning conditions, we like to say, and it is so obviously true you want to tattoo it on your clavicle. All these union-secured structures make possible a degree of devotion, and for that matter an inspiriting and department-wide sense of collaborative purposiveness, without which our work would be far, far poorer.
Add it up—the knowledge production, the stupendous pedagogy, the shared devotion to the mission of public education—and what you get is something extraordinary, occasionally exhilarating, and rare.
And also, it turns out, fragile. In the less than three years I’ve been running things, ten people have left the department, most all of them retiring; a little predictive math suggests that maybe five more will follow before my term ends. That would be a reduction in tenure-line faculty of not quite 50 percent. Last summer, after submitting a request that mapped all this out in tedious administrative detail, the department was informed it would be granted precisely zero lines from the college. Positions may be forthcoming from other sources, or not; requested lines may be granted in the future, after renewed application, or not. Meanwhile, the task was to continue the work I’ve described above, in all its intricacy and scope, but with a massive reduction in faculty labor, expertise, and accumulated knowledge.
I should say that nobody in this series of institutional transactions is behaving maliciously or in a less-than-above-board way, at least not anyone with whom the department is in direct contact. Rather, the college itself, the largest in the university, is straining under what is called a “structural deficit,” growing with tumorlike acceleration each year, the causes of which are actually not especially mysterious. Factor for three variables and you’ve got it. First, and in line with national trends, there has been a moderate but real post-Covid decline in enrollments to the college of arts and sciences (whereas colleges that offer programs in any way related to computer science and, also, “business” have tended to grow). Second, a roughly 3 percent per annum rate of inflation over the past decade has meant that expenses, roughly keeping pace, have effectively skyrocketed. Third, the institution’s tuition—at $14,338, not quite one fifth that of our neighboring R1 institutions, and less than half that at Loyola and DePaul—has been held basically flat over the same period. (State funding has been reliable, thanks to our solidly Democratic governorship, though that money covers less than 20 percent of the budget, the rest derived in huge measure from tuition.) Expenses up and up, revenue holding and/or down: give or take some local exigencies, you do not really need to know much else.
Run the formula across these coordinates and what you get, in the context of an operating budget of about $140 million, is a deficit of around $20 million—a figure that, as my beloved friend and associate head of department Nasser likes to remind us, is humiliatingly small, a rounding error for many of our private peer institutions, and probably for a few of their employees. (For clarifying scale, ask me how much the city shelled out to the CPD in overtime alone to run security for last summer’s Democratic National Convention.) This is one of the ways contraction arrives to the large, mission-driven, research-forward, working-class university.
Austerity means getting the same quantity of labor from fewer persons, with less money, and a declining commitment to future expenditure. Everybody with whom I am in direct administrative contact knows this. It is thus an ongoing sort of pain to me to see my colleagues in the dean’s office—most all of them former faculty, veterans of the union, scholars and teachers genuinely committed to the best possibilities of a vigorously public education—tasked with scouring the inner structures of the college for “efficiencies,” like flatmates hunting in the couch cushions for derelict rent. They are in deadly earnest when they say the goal is to close this fiscal gap on our own terms, before the job is given to provosts and CFOs and independently contracted consultants, with their appreciably blunter, bloodier instruments.
These are serious, scrupulous, professional people, and I take the point. But I worry just as much that the hard labor of micro-optimizing leaves us all littler room than we might wish to make a different kind of argument to our overseers, which is that the budgets amassed over the past years describe nothing so much as the actual cost, still astonishingly fucking low, of giving a world-class education to our kids, the population that makes up the UIC student body; and that accordingly it might be their jobs, as the highest-ranking executives of the university, to state with all needed implacability that budgets are direct expressions of an institution’s values, so that an unwillingness to meet that cost, still astonishingly fucking low, is as good as declaring that working-class kids do not rate, do not deserve an education of as high a caliber as that of their whiter and wealthier peers, and ought to get by with a replica, a cheapened facsimile.
It is here that the frame breaks. I’ve told you how this plays out where I work but I do so in full confidence that you know your own version of it, wherever you are—and if you didn’t a few months ago, you do now. It’s startling, the velocity with which a decades-long crisis in the humanities has, with the flourish of a few quick Executive Orders, become a crisis of the university, full stop. As promised by the feverish Project 2025 document, the full-scale war on the institutions of American higher education has kicked into its blitzkrieg phase. No one knows where it will end, or what will end with it. The aim, clearly, is scalar ruin. Meanwhile, we in the battered and bruised humanities suddenly find ourselves shoulder to shoulder with a lot of new-convert comrades. Friends one and all: welcome.
Pleasing as it would be to blame the whole unfolding calamity on Trump, Musk, and the squadron of billionaire looters they so ably represent, I would maybe not be so presentist, whatever the impressive breadth of the new horrors. The expressed conviction that the greatest goods of civic life belong by right to the winning classes, and to everyone else go the knockoff approximations, actually precedes our present-day authoritarian vandals by decades. We do better perhaps to say that these men inherit, refigure, and then deliriously hyperbolize such long-germinating convictions, even while preying with vulpine cunning on the poisoned lifeworlds those values have left in their wake—environments despoiled, work made evermore precarious, the slenderest possibilities for some brighter futurity blinking out one by one. Fertile ground for the making of new-sprung fascisms, and fascist apologists.
We all live inside this brutal, loud, limitlessly stupid soap opera now, where each and every institution you might have valued, with whatever misgiving, can be seen sliding toward a ruined and more or less unviable version of itself. Call it neoliberalism’s apotheosis, a lesser scholasticide, the billionaire’s last banquet, whatever. You will in all cases know what it is to feel something cherished wrenched and jolted into something less, and then less, and then less.
When I complain about how exasperating I find the job of being head, some gracious interlocutors will say, “But you also really do love the place—so I bet you’re good at it.” This is kindness and, also, error. If a good chair does nothing else, they secure the minimal required resources for their home department to flourish; they prevent its deterioration, and endeavor to build a kind of firewall around all that’s best there. The cold fact, which is as clear to me as the wintry Chicago light, is that by these straightforward measures I am doing one thing only, which is failing. There is delusion and grandiosity in this, I know. (The enemy of neoliberal decimation is not the lone accomplished chair.) But there’s also the unshakeable sense that, by not yet devising some collaborative path for us through all this, some roadmap to large-scale and unignorable mobilization, I am letting down colleagues I admire, institutions that have nourished me, and students who deserve the world and not a millimeter less.
Crisis will unfold differently across different locales, scaled largely by proximity to enormous reserves of money. In richer places, some semblance of humanist knowledge production will continue for a while, even after the current war on education has done its annihilating work. (This is so not least because, as Adam Kotsko noted some time back, the constituencies cheerleading this devastation “have often benefited from such an education themselves and are happy to provide it for their own children—including at elite Ivy League schools that do not even have the kind of vocational programs that they recommend so fervently for everyone else.”2) But it’s clear by now that even those places will not be immune. Graduate classes will shrink or vanish, programs will wither, money will be shunted in even greater proportion away from what rightist assholes call “divisive” or “contested” fields, which touch in any glancing degree upon gender, or race, or empire.
Then, too, some places will be shuttered entirely.
The fate of the school where I work tracks uncertainly between these eventualities. We’re an already poor, urban, minority-serving institution, and none of that is going to lessen our vulnerability. Then again, we have going for us long experience in faculty solidarity, cross-disciplinary organization, and, when needed, practiced labor militancy. This is a pretty estimable advantage, I think. We are going to need it.
But that’s not all we have. No one is less convinced than I am of the efficacy of “persuasion,” at least not in the context of capital contraction and fascist ascendancy, which require more strident and material counteractions. But that will not stop me from saying as loudly as I can (as a preliminary mode of organizing, if nothing else) that what we do, what my colleagues accomplish with such tenacity and devotion and—yes—admirable professionalism, is invaluable.
“Professor,” I get asked, “what does a degree in English even buy you?” I always respond with three answers, clustered around one another in concentric rings. For the practical-minded, nothing is plainer than the fact that training in English outfits students with an extraordinary range of adaptive skills, coveted by employers across sectors. Facility with language, interpretive agility, a live-minded responsiveness to conditions of ambiguity, multiplicity, contradiction, and above all an ability to write: these are aptitudes essential to work in tech, media, education, law, politics, medicine, and much else. Bank on it.
But while you’re doing your banking, look up. Look around. See this wreckage? The work we do can help you speak up, not just for the utility of all those practical aptitudes, but for the concatenated values they incubate—the sorts of conscience-prickling discernments that might allow you to mark the crucial differences between “success” and, say, acquisition, between “innovation” and mere destructiveness, or between “freedom” and the latitude to exploit. Humanist inquiry of the sort we pursue, with its situated knowledges and its cultural attunements and its fine-grained attentiveness to the shifting complexity of ethical and moral life, can give restorative heft to even the most tarnished of these ideals. You might need them.
But even that is not the end of it. To students, to colleagues, and to basically anybody who has found outsized nourishment in a book, I like to offer a different reminder, half-polemic and half statement of the blindingly obvious. It’s just this: whatever its other graces, serious work in English prepares its participants, as I think almost nothing else can, for the perplexities, anguishes, and errant joys of being alive in the world. What does work in the humanities testify to, if not the painful wonder of being a person, being human, among other persons? Spend time with them and you’ll come to find there’s a strange and potent magic in things like novels and poems. They won’t offer you a ready-made blueprint for a world less ruinous, alas; that’s really not their remit. But reading them, investing our imaginations in them, fighting about them, puzzling through them in collaboration with colleagues and comrades and students and friends—this, I think, does an awful lot to adhere us to life, to fortify our attachments to one another and thus to the world itself, even in its bleakest configurations.
The current overclass wishes to destroy this world of thinking because they’re feckless and venal and almost inconceivably greedy, a battalion of the oiliest smash-and-grab conmen and bigots and sociopathic ghouls you could ever imagine, but not because they’re afraid of anything that might be fomented there. They hate us, and the whole of the world we inhabit, but that’s different from saying they regard us as, say, a threat. Our best ambitions, to their way of thinking, are provincial and weird and contemptibly nonremunerative, so why would they? We’re more an inconvenience—a minor drag on the fantasy of frictionless profit and dominion—and thus just another dole-fattened workforce to be brought to heel.
Maybe. But then I think of the legions of young people who come through campus semester after semester. I think of their devotion, their drive. With fixed concentration, I try to think especially closely of the tenacity—the bare and indestructible hunger to learn—that got them here and, in turn, keeps them here. It’s useful. It reminds me that, however contused by the contemporary moment, this place we share remains a kind of living astonishment, maybe not itself indestructible but built up around human impulses and aspirations whose tensile strength you would be very, very foolish to underestimate.
In this way, I start to think differently as well about that grasping and felonious overclass, the one that looks at us and sees only something small, helpless, as good as servile. I don’t know what gets you out of bed in the morning. The hope that they might one day learn to spell out the gravity of their error, in letters of blood and fire, works pretty well for me.
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