I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail about my post on that Chronicle of Higher Education essay on why liberal humanities professors are liberal. This e-mail was typical of a whole bunch:

Jonah,
I was taken by the second line of Professor Surber’s first paragraph where he states “. . . despite substantially more advances study than business instructors and the equivalent of those in the natural sciences”. Since I have a PhD in elementary particle physics I can state that unless drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes counts as advances studies most PhD in the Liberal Arts may have as many years of Advanced studies but number of years is not a relevant measure of quality. While I was struggling with Quantum Field Theory most of the Psych Doctoral students I knew were struggling with basic Statistics that I took as a sophomore undergrad. This is not to argue that I deserve to make more money because I know vector calculus, but I deserve to make more money because people are willing to pay more for my services.

It in turn reminded me of an interview I heard on NPR’s “Tell Me More” the other day in the car. I checked Nexis and there’s a transcript. The host, Michel Martin talked to Elizabeth Alexander, the chair of Yale’s African American studies department (she was also the poet at Obama’s inauguration). Anyway, this exchange stuck out:

MARTIN: As I understood periodically there have been dust-ups around black studies, or African-American studies, about whether there’s sufficient rigor attached to this. Some people argue that these courses are more an extension of identity politics than scholarship. Could you speak to that? Prof. ALEXANDER: Well, yes. I mean, I think that that is fundamentally just completely specious, and I think results from a lingering sense that the contributions of people of African descent are not worthy of study. But if you think about what so many universities are doing, the students who take our classes are students of all colors who are learning a richer and more complex portrait of what America is. And I think to the people who question the rigor, I would even argue that an interdisciplinary major — that is to say, our majors look at literature, they look at history, they look at political science, they look at economics — they try to think about this question of the contributions of black people from a number of different disciplinary perspectives. And so we feel that they come out of the major actually with rigor that is as intense, if not more intense, than they could find anywhere else in the university.

Okay, so not only is it “fundamentally just completely specious” to think that black studies might come up a little short on academic rigor, but anyone who thinks black studies lacks the rigor of, say, medicine or physics is still clinging to racist notions. Then:

MARTIN: Just as an aside, do you ever anymore get parents calling you up and saying, well, how can my child get a job studying that?
Prof. ALEXANDER: Well, yes, and I take that very seriously, actually. You’ve probably seen with these latest scholarly studies that show that in fact there is discrimination against people with quote-unquote “African-American sounding names,” as opposed to, you know, Karen and Ann and Emily and so forth and so on. And a lot of students have responded — not necessarily our students, although I’m sure some have — feeling that they need to downplay their study of African-American studies because it will limit them in some kind of way.
And so what I say to those parents — and I have talked to some of them — is, I tell them about what we’re doing and I tell them all the different things that the graduates of our major are doing, because they are excelling in every conceivable field. It also offers them a very wonderful example of the power of critical thinking, because one of the things that you learn in the long study of black people in this country is that it is a country that is not always fair, but wherein we see people responding with tremendous creativity and ingenuity to the denial of full equality.

In the first paragraph, professor Alexander says she takes the career issue “very seriously” and then she immediately insinuates that there’s a subtle racism at work on the part of employers and others who question whether a black studies major is the most desirable degree to pursue. That doesn’t sound too serious to me.

Then in the second paragraph we are told that black studies majors are “excelling in every conceivable field.” Every conceivable one? Really? Are black studies majors knocking it out of the park in, say, entomology? She then goes on to argue, sort of, that black studies is great preparation for dealing with racism. Whether that is the training parents want their kids to get from their one crack at a college education is an interesting question. But maybe a degree in black studies is in fact a way to guarantee that these kids will spend the rest of their lives seeing every issue through a racial lens.

My point isn’t so much to single out black studies. Nor is it to highlight how Martin (a very nice lady, by the way) seems dismayingly unwilling to apply the slightest critical thinking or journalistic rigor to the spin being offered by Alexander. But I do think Professor Alexander’s answers are a perfect example of how the humanities tend to lack the sort of rigor found “anywhere elese in the university.”

I do think black studies — and women’s studies and chicano studies etc — are more likely to lack the rigor of even other disciplines in the humanities, never mind the social sciences (and forget about the hard sciences). But that probably varies a lot by department and university. And there are a lot of soft majors outside of the indentity-politics industry.

But what I find offensive is the idea that Alexander is telling parents, black parents, that there’s no cost in terms of careers by choosing black studies as a major. There’s nothing wrong with getting a black studies major if that’s the path you want to go down. But it has consequences, right? If you want to be a particle physicist, majoring in Jewish studies or 17th-centiry French poetry isn’t the best idea. Likewise with black studies.

Anyway, I’m droning on here because I think it ties into the absurdity of Jere Surber’s essay. Surber says liberal-arts professors have figured out the arc of history and have made a de facto alliance with the oppressed peoples of the world. Surber makes all of this sound like some sort of dispassionate, empirical thing. But to me it sounds like a self-serving rationalization. Surber and Alexander both see the world through a defensive crouch, rendering them intellectually and emotionally unprepared to concede any fault or deficiency and all-too-eager to blame any negative perception on the ignorance, stupidty, or bigotry of their critics.