In the wake of my experience as President of the Modern Language Association in 2010, I felt the need to think through the changes in the everyday life of academic humanists now and in the next decades and to expand my call for a more capacious repertoire of dissertation designs. In 2016 I published Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in GoodEnough Times. Given the realities of a higher than desirable average time-to-degree and dismal job prospects for humanities doctorates, and the shifting ecology of the everyday life for academic humanists, I wanted to add my voice to those calling for the transformation of doctoral education. That call has now become a broad one. Across North America, deans of graduate schools, foundation officers, faculty, and doctoral students are contributing to a national conversation about the humanities in higher education and about doctoral education for the next generations. A discursive threshold has been reached. If, in 2010, I often felt myself shouting into the void, now I feel myself swept up in the tide of transformation, however hard that project will be in the Trump era.
In Manifesto I do not argue that this moment is like every other, especially in this post-2016 era. There’s been a decades-long retreat from public funding of higher education as a public good, a trend with demonstrable impact on levels of student debt, educational access, and increasing inequality. There’s been a seismic shift in the makeup of the professoriate—now disproportionately non-tenure-track, contingent faculty, exploited in their conditions of service. There’s been the raucous cacophony of pronouncements from pundits and politicians devaluing the liberal arts and the humanities in particular. There’s been the concentration of corporatist discourse and practice in the academy. There’s been an intensification of the chronic condition of the job market for those with doctorates seeking careers in the academy.
But for me repetitive talk of crisis obscures an historical perspective on crisis and change in the academy and leads too easily to a sense of enervation, and a nostalgic view of “the old” 20th century academy. Invocation of “the crisis” is not enough now. Intervention is all. Which brought me to the mantra that the times are good enough. It’s a usable slogan, effective in marshaling energy to avoid a sense of despair. To explain why I cleave to my mantra that the times are good enough, I proposed my agenda for surviving, even thriving in these times: beware the route of nostalgia; avoid the blame game targeting theory and identity politics; hold the vision of an inclusive academy as the key to excellence in sight. Those who talk of crisis bring their usable data to the table, along with the narrative of decline and impoverishment of this sector of the university. But if we eschew the language of crisis and reject the call of nostalgia for “the good times” of the past, then we can get into the fray by mustering data for evidence-based counternarratives to commonplaces about the sorry state of the academic humanities. We can gain energy from all the activism in play right now dedicated to conceptualizing, advocating for, and enacting interventions in aspects of the conditions noted above. The changes won by hard work in the past and all the advocacy, innovation, and change now in process sustain a sense of historical perspective and daily purpose.