The Hunger Games

Picture 10

Did you see this article by UVA’s Mark Edmundson, a — you guessed it — Professor of English, published at The Chronicle of Higher Education? It’s a pretty good example of how some play the zero sum game called “getting majors”: we cannibalize other Departments by positioning ourselves as the best place to prep for, say, law school or, in Edmundson’s rather ambitious argument, to become a better human being.

Although I’m a scholar of religion, and my own field is filled with those who make comparable arguments (but in favor of the study of religion rather than English lit), the blog posts I’ve written here take a rather different approach. For we all — all across the liberal arts — teach students to read and write, we all read texts (along with a lot more than just traditional texts, of course), and we all study the past (this morning is the past as well as last week’s newspaper, though both seem less auspicious than ancient Rome — but they aren’t). Distinguishing ourselves from our fellows by claiming that only we study the past the correct way or only we teach you how to read deeply and truly, strikes me as playing our own version of the hunger games — good for privileged spectators who sit outside the arena but hardly helpful for anyone in the liberal arts, for even the winner in such competitions strikes me as a loser.

One thought on “The Hunger Games

  1. It *is* the Hunger Games, but institutions have a lot of influence on individual departments that run to the arena. If proving a (humanities) department’s worth is measured through enrollment, professors’– and especially lecturers’ and adjuncts’– jobs are dependent on getting majors. Everyone becomes a professional educator/rat-racer. And you get ludicrous/hyperbolic claims to superiority like the one in the article.

    Fact of the matter is this: university courses in the humanities/social sciences are the only time that a majority of students will ever be asked to think about their world in new, critical ways. If it doesn’t happen in college, it’s not ever going to happen.