Porter Abbott on Teaching and the University (Page 3)
From UCSB English Department Knowledge Base
Professor H. Porter Abbott (Emeritus) discusses his 40+ years of experience teaching at UCSB.
Changes in the Culture of English Departments
Academic Language: Potentials, Pleasures, Pitfalls
Ryan Boyd: "I want to go back to something you said earlier about the way in which academics [. . .] write for other academics. Do you feel, in the forty-plus years you've been in the field [. . .] that the kind of language we use has become more self-enclosed, or has it always been that way?"
Porter Abbott: "It's always been that way. There are several reasons for this. Perhaps the most salient in the last six or seven decades has been the need to publish within seven years."
RB: "To get tenure?"
PA: "To get tenure. And as a result, research productivity has become increasingly frenetic. This pressure to publish, I believe, was one factor behind the immense popularity of the New Criticism, and behind the popularity of what succeeded it, that is, post-structuralism and various forms of deconstruction. These are methods that allow you to operate with the least amount of historical reach. You can focus on a single text. As these modes of reading stuck around, they tended to sustain the circulation of a specialized lexicon.
"But it was also true with the cultural turn (and historical re-turn) in literary study, there are always terms that seem necessarily to be unexamined. Terms like 'homosocial,' 'authority,' 'origins,' 'originality,' 'interpellation.' There’s a distant analogy here to oral formulaic verse. They serve as place holders. And also, I think they sometimes serve as protective coloration.
"There is a constant risk of their becoming so worn, like coins, that you can't see the assumptions that are engraved in them. 'Erotics of reading,’ for example: is there a clinical assumption in the choice of the term ‘erotics’ or does the term serve as a metaphor? And if it’s a metaphor, how does it metaphorize? It’s not even clear to me how Barthes used the idea, but the phrase has been recycled in all kinds of contexts where the questions I ask need answers. And another thing--I hope I'm not talking too much--"
RB: "No, no, we have plenty of time."
Debate and Intellectual Diversity Within the University
PA: "OK, disciplines undergo repeated entrenchments of specialized language, and with the language come both insights and exclusions. You see this occurring most tenaciously in the discourse on political subjects. There are – and I say this as someone who tends to be pretty deeply embedded in liberal points of view – modes of decorum that control the discourse in segments of the humanities and social sciences and that discourage certain other points of view: by and large conservative points of view. I came up against this time and again as director of the IHC [Interdisciplinary Humanities Center] when I set out to develop panels in the wake of 9/11. In all, I developed six panels on six different issues: religion and 9/11, ethics and 9/11, the law, economics, and so on--really good topics. And I’m proud of those panels. They were effective. But there were times when I had to go pretty far off-campus to find somebody with some kind of counter-balancing point of view, someone whose thinking departed from the dominant liberal bias--and it's real--that you find on a campus, on any campus.
"There is a good reason for this. Liberals tend to be open, they tend to tolerate new ideas, to stretch beyond the idols of the tribe. These are attitudes that are built into the term. There are great good things about that. But, then, by definition, liberalism ought to include allowing space for conservative voices, and directly contending with them – this only makes your liberalism stronger.
"Another reason to do this is the mandate the university has to connect with the larger community. And in the community, inevitably, you're going to have a higher representation of conservative frames of mind than you do in a university. So in those venues you need somebody to reflect those points of view; otherwise, we seem once again to be talking to each other and not with them. Judging from the mail I got after each of my 9/11 panels, this was a problem that I didn't always solve. I think I did it best on the economics panel: I found a supply-sider.
"This may be something I'm just particularly sensitive to, coming out of my Reed background, where someone could always be depended on to play the Devil's Advocate. So, yes, I do feel sometimes that there are certain positions one is tacitly constrained from taking, a kind of gravitational pull, and to this extent it’s a weakness in a university."
RB: "Do you think that that decline in the contrarian spirit has to do with the way large universities have become more and more--I hate to say 'like corporations,' that's kind of a cliché--but [with the way] the institution has just become so big, and has [. . .] developed its own sets of practices and behavior, and [these] have been entrenched for so long? Is it inevitable that this kind of bias comes in, this sort of closed-mindedness, or is there something particular about the way American academic culture has [developed] in the past?"
PA: "That's a very good question. I think it is a characteristic of any kind of large organization like this. A corporate mentality takes over, and you find it as much in the corporation--your choice of words--as you do here. For that matter, it’s a common in the business news to read about the kind of edge that lean, streamlined, youthfully adventurous, new venture-capital operations have over the larger, more entrenched, Microsoft kinds of operations. They are free of certain kinds of limits in their speech and therefore in the possibilities they can entertain.
RB: "Do you think there's a way for academic institutions to re-liberalize their liberalism, or open up the way we talk about things? Has that been done at all?"
PA: "Beyond a certain point, I don’t think it can be institutionalized. There’s an inevitable kind of corporate-think that grows up in time, even in the sciences, with their vaunted objectivity. How many stories have we heard featuring a scientist with an original idea who can’t get a hearing because the idea conflicts with the reigning orthodoxy? Of course there have been as many charlatans who have made such claims, too, but still, it does happen.
"How do you shake it up? I tried really hard on those panels to do that. And in that same period after 9/11, I was invited to chair panels that I had to turn down because they were panels of people all with the same point of view on a very important topic. But I think this is mainly something we have to cultivate ourselves. I can't think of a way to impose it. That's very difficult."
RB: "And you wouldn't want to."
PA: "Yes, you should never try to regulate it. The negative consequences outweigh the advantages.”
Page 3
Interview Date: February 18, 2008
Conducted by Ryan Boyd
