As the sultry days of August cool, portending the crispness of autumn, young minds naturally turn to thoughts of school — and turn away in horror from the tuition bills before them. This article appearing in the August 28, 2009 edition of The New York Times points to this opinion piece in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by John Zmirak, editor of Choosing the Right College. Zmirak’s AJC piece rehashes an earlier piece he published in the August 20, 2009 edition of The San Franscisco Examiner, which is itself a response to an American Enterprise Institute white paper, provocatively titled “Professors on the Production Line, Students On Their Own,” by right-leaning Emory University Professor Mark Bauerlein.

No stranger to controversy, Bauerlein has made waves before, most notably with his 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) (see our capsule review). In it, Bauerlein condenses long experience as an English professor into a pungent diatribe on so-called Generation Y, also known as Millennials or Echo Boomers, the cohort currently in its teens and 20s. Vain, helpless nincompoops all, they believe themselves nonetheless entitled to the cream of the social surplus. And this, according to Bauerlein, is precisely the problem. They bring their self-centered, incompetent ways to every context, leaving every context poorer for it. In their sheer vacuity they represent a force of overwhelming Spenglerian decline.

But in “Professors on the Production Line,” Bauerlein takes aim at an older group, the humanities professoriat and its aspirants, whom he accuses of transforming American universities into satanic mills of paper-wasting and logorrhea. The précis to Bauerlein’s paper (the pdf original has since disappeared from the American Enterprise Institute’s website) offers a sense of Bauerlein’s indictment — “the trend for faculty to do more research and publishing translates into less time for motivating and mentoring students” — as well as his proposed remedy — “creating a ‘teacher track’ in which doctoral students are trained and rewarded for generalist knowledge and multiple course facility rather than a highly-specialized expertise.”

“Unread Monographs, Uninspired Undergrads,” a review of Bauerlein’s white paper appearing in the March 18, 2009 edition in Inside Higher Ed, adds more somber tones to this dark portrait of higher learning gone mad. Those great satanic mills of humanities programs conceal behind all their frenzied publishing one whopper of an absurdity: No one can possibly keep abreast of such output, so no one even tries. The review quotes Bauerlein, who writes that “literature professors feel no urge or need to monitor publications in the discipline in order to keep up with research in the area.” This professional inattentiveness apparently escapes sanction: “If they overlook much of it, they don’t suffer.” The real scandal, however, is the fact that “throngs of scholarly compositions appear each year only to sit in distribution warehouses unread and unnoticed.” This leads Bauerlein to conclude that “[t]he fields and subfields proceed without them, and the grand vision of a community of experts advancing knowledge, broadening understanding, and closing holes in the historical record fades to black.”

The image Bauerlein conjures of scholarly books piling up in warehouses calls to mind the reams of briefs and motions attending the interminable court case of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a novel which similarly plays incessant scribbling to absurd effect. As absurd as is the publish-or-perish imperative responsible for all this unread writing, however, it is also quite destructive — at least, according to Bauerlein and his sympathizer Zmirak.

Stop the presses!: higher education's monograph monotony.

Zmirak takes as his theme the economic consequences wrought by the profligate pens of the humanities professoriat. He writes in the Examiner piece: “During an economic slowdown, prices usually fall. But there’s just one sector of the economy that’s bizarrely insulated from reality: Academia.” Universities’ fortunes tend to be countercyclical vis-à-vis the larger economy, as people pile into them seeking new skills or sanctuary from a downturn. (Though, universities tend to enjoy the fruits of more prosperous times, too, particularly once the economy moved away from industry into services and finance, making degrees and credentials essential prerequisites for middle- and upper-class status.)

Yet university tuition has steadily risen in recent years to truly staggering sums, economic conditions notwithstanding. Zmirak offers some perspective on the amounts: “Tuition, room and board at Sarah Lawrence College just hit $53,166 per year. That’s like buying a C-Class Mercedes every year — without the car.” Now, a Mercedes-of-the-mind a year certainly seems an extravagance. So, if one’s forced to pay the going rate, then one should be able to expect some value in return, right? After all, a Mercedes is a really nice car with plush appointments.

But, as Zmirak puts it, the situation in higher education is as if one writes a check for a Mercedes and is handed the keys to a Yugo — or, worse, to an American junker from the Big-Threes’ late-70s wilderness years. He asks:

[W]hat if universities … turned into featherbedding, unionized factories that existed to protect their overpaid workers? What if these factories botched the items customers paid for, and spent their energy generating oddball inventions no one wanted?”

The perception that higher education has become an increasingly elaborate and costly hustle is perhaps to be expected in era when no one’s ever quite sure if her pension is perched on a Ponzi scheme that’s ready to blow. In an economy in which few actual things are made, and in which more experiences, services and social relations are monetized, value calculations begin to admit more variables, and people become more suspicious.

Writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in a 2004 article appearing in The Believer (which, incidentally, features Charlie Bertsch and Eric Hayot, two former professors of mine) ventures his answer to the very sort of question Zmirak asks. It is Lewis-Kraus’s contention that literature professors create value precisely by simply keepin’ on keepin’ on:

as much as we whine about English professors, we know that their aloofness is a stately and effulgent thing, and it’s disconcerting when they abandon it. It’s sad when they lose faith in it. It destroys the solace we take — whether we realize it or not — in their purity. All of us, I think, would rather they be elliptically profound than banally useful.

Literature professors for Lewis-Kraus are like churches for the speaker in Phillip Larkin’s poem “Church Going“: even if we don’t believe in or can’t understand what they stand for, they’re ultimately better to have around, because they console us by preserving the illusion of a comfortable way of life, one which can sustain even the most splendidly useless of us.