"I didn't care much for professors as a class. . ."

"They haven't had much to offer us in the unbearable century now ending."

-- Saul Bellow's fictional alter ego Chick, in Ravelstein

I've recently been following an interesting and remarkably polite exchange between Professor Michael Drout (Medievalist, Tolkien scholar extraordinaire, and blogger/proprietor of Wormtalk and Slugpeak) and Rose Nunez (writer of the outstanding blog No Credentials). In their conversation (recapped here by Professor Drout) about the current state of academia and the professoriate, Professor Drout and Ms. Nunez appear to agree about the intellectual "overreach" practiced by many academics, especially when they make pronouncements as "public intellectuals" which are outside of their area of expertise. Professor Drout, however, makes a plea for the good faith of most academics and the value of studying the humanities:

"Readers of this blog will not be surprised to find that I am very much in agreement with her [Nunez's] critique. Over-reaching academics drive me crazy. There are way too many people who comment on things they know nothing about. One of my earliest posts took Toni Morrison to task for ignorant comments about Beowulf. And Rose is right that being an expert in one field does not make one and expert in another. I think this is particularly true when someone is attempting to comment in areas that are politically contentious: it's very, very easy to think that because you are smart (and all academic think they are smart) and because you possess some analytical tools, you are going to be correct about anything you turn your attention to. This is mistake.

And yet. [You knew there would be an 'and yet,']. There's a sentiment lurking in the blogosphere (for example in occasional comments on Roger L. Simon's blog) that professors--at least in the humanities--are on the whole mendacious and manipulative and should not be trusted to comment on issues of current concern. I don't agree, because, as an unabashed partisan of the humanities, I believe in the immense value of the things that humanists study and in the value they add to this enterprise. If you follow Rose's (and my) critique to its logical extreme, you end up with people all inside little, specialist boxes, unable to criticize anything outside their own particular (to use Rose's word) fiefs.

This is one of those very tangled questions. Noam Chomsky, for example, claims that his political work has nothing to do with his linguistics work, but that is completely bogus and disingenuous, because no one would pay any more attention to Chomsky than to any other citizen except for his fame from his linguistics. (True, now he may be equally or more well known for the politics, but he would never have gotten that soapbox if not for the unrelated language work). Are all academics similarly manipulative and dishonest when they comment beyond their fields of expertise? I don't think so. And because I think that the deep study of literature and culture contributes to a better understanding of humanity and the world, it is at least possible that people who have deeply studied literature and culture might have useful things to say about the questions of the day. "

As a refugee from graduate study in English literature, I maintain a strong belief in "the immense value of the things that humanists study." Unlike Professor Drout, however, I am rather less sanguine about "the value they [the humanists] add to this enterprise." That's where the Bellow quotation comes in, because it suggests an empiricist critique of the record of the professoriate in the "unbearable century now ending" -- a critique that is aimed at the evidence of their inefficacy and not at their good faith intentions. In other words, most of the evidence weighs against them. And while it is certainly true that "it is at least possible that people who have deeply studied literature and culture might have useful things to say about the questions of the day," it seems to me also inescapably true that scholars of literature and culture have done much more harm than good in the last century, both in their capacity as "public intellectuals" and in their support for institutions which have become increasingly powerless even to articulate a reason to study literature and culture in the first place. Thus, I think Professor Drout's characterization of the anti-academic sentiment in the blogosphere is slightly tone deaf; it's not that professors are "on the whole mendacious and manipulative" and therefore untrustworthy, but rather that their pronouncements should be treated with the skepticism that their record has earned.

I have had many brilliant and wonderful humanities professors in my academic career, but unfortunately my impression of professors "as a class" and with respect to their influence on the culture is completely in line with Bellow's narrator. Professor Drout -- who has had the courage to buck the entrenched anti-Tolkien snobbery of the academy -- is, of course, in a class of his own.