TITANIC OPTIMISM - Shakespeare in Tempestuous Times

Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts, May 7th, 2024

In December 2021, a kerfuffle played out across the pages of The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The topic: two books that defend "Great Books" courses taught by generalists. Especially piqued was Louis Menand in The New Yorker who, according to Leonard Cassuto in the Chronicle, "lost his cool" by insisting on the superior importance of specialist research and pedagogy for these works. Academics badly need a conversation about this topic, says Cassuto: we face uncertain, possibly grim futures.

But, as is too often the case, debates about the current and future states of academia circulate among elite professors, far from the majority working in higher education. What the conversation so far lacks are perspectives of those teaching at regional publics, small liberal arts colleges, HBCUs, and community colleges, the institutions that educate the majority of students. These perspectives, and the challenges they address, are important, as James Shapiro wrote in 2019, because they "are likely to be visited soon upon those who teach at research universities," and evidence suggests that they already are, in states like Florida and Nebraska.

In contrast to the situation at elite institutions, where the generalist is under fire, at many institutions, the specialist is under fire. These colleagues, often trained at elite institutions, are becoming generalists, or even do not teach literature at all; the "Great Books" are long gone and so, too, are many single-author or even survey courses in our field.

Titanic Optimism: we mean the double-entendre of titanic/Titanic for faculty at the many institutions who struggle with the goals of the discipline in what feels like the final hour. Forced to make difficult decisions about what sections of creative writing or literature or technical writing to cut given stretched budgets and declining admissions, we do not get to choose, if you will, our place on the deck—arranging chairs, as the adage goes. We don’t have the luxury of choice. This the hand we are dealt, which we must play whether we acknowledge it, see it as a double bind, or choose to ignore it altogether.

On the Titanic, the small orchestra played familiar but upbeat pieces as the ship went down, trying to prevent panic among the passengers. Heroic, true, but what this collection will explore is whether preventing panic by reciting what's familiar is the answer we need.

Most of us face enrollment declines—which equals funding declines for state-supported institutions—which the continuing pursuit and promotion of STEM and other "practical" subjects, and legislative backlash to CRT and DEI.

Countless opinion pieces have appeared on how we got here with no shortage of antagonists or culprits, so we seek papers that do not finger-point. That said, analyses of root causes, surprising connections between the material, the political, and the pedagogical, and radical strategies for intervention are welcome—and encouraged.

We seek papers that assess the situation, either broadly across institutions or on the ground of one’s home institution:

- what is changing

- what has changed

- what do colleagues do in response

- what do you do in response

- How is your institution representative of broader trends and issues—or not

- What, ultimately, do we envision as the future of the discipline, of disciplinary study writ large, and what strategies exist to survive—or even thrive—in tempestuous times?

updated:

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 12:11pm

full name / name of organization:

Timothy Francisco Youngstown State University

contact email:

tfrancisco@ysu.edu

categories (up to 5):

cultural studies and historical approaches

journals and collections of essays

pedagogy

professional topics

renaissance