So what would happen if a professor changed his or her mind? What if many years of studying and teaching Milton ultimately led one to the conclusion that those people who claim that Milton’s views of gender are oppressive and unjust are right? In Mark’s vision of the “conservationist” English department such a thing simply could not be allowed to happen. A person who came to such a conclusion would need to resign or be forced to move to the Cultural Studies department. But how could this ever be done without lawsuits? There would have to be a kind of creedal statement which all members of the department would be willing to sign and abide by — which, in a university context, is manifestly absurd. (“I pledge that I will not change my mind about these matters”?) Yet without such restrictions it would be impossible to maintain the department with the integrity that Mark wants it to have.

One could argue that American universities already support majors in Women’s Studies and African-American Studies that effectively, if not openly, maintain ideological unanimity through unspoken and unwritten “creeds.” But the conservative response to that kind of thing has always, and rightly I think, been “Shame on them,” not “Gimme some of that.” Moreover, it is easier for unspoken and unwritten creeds to be changed; once ideological uniformity is formally and structurally mandated it becomes truly immovable.

No, if people in English departments ever “laugh at the zeal with which we embraced” the theoretical movements of the ’70’s and ’80’s, it will be because of the passage of time or because individual members of the profession make strong arguments demonstrating the absurdity of those theoretical trends and revealing the intellectual damage they have done. There’s no other way for the changes Mark desires to take place.

For the same reasons, it would regard the advances of the previous 30 years with a skeptical eye. One of the bedrocks of cultural conservatism is to avoid contemporary enthusiasms, to accept something as great or important only after it meets the critical demands of the tradition and thrives outside of its moment of origination. This will save us lots of embarrassment. Otherwise, we look back upon the products of the 70s, 80s, . . . and laugh at the zeal with which we embraced them.

On the outcomes issue, I think confining the time frame to the last 3 decades is crucial. We have enough data sources to get good pictures on what’s going on with youth culture, youth knowledge, and youth academics. Of course, as you say, the inferences one draws are tricky, and there are differing messages. For example, when we look at behavioral measures, we see improvements in many areas, for instance, violent crime and teen pregnancy and attitudes toward parents. On economic measures, too, there are gains, as Generation Y, as the marketers call them, are the most powerful consumer cohort in human history. But one area hasn’t improved: academic achievement. Why? Why haven’t knowledge and skill levels kept pace with social and economic levels?

You ask: “I want to know more about what conservativism in the humanities actually looks like.”

I can’t spell out all the details of what a “conservative” research program would look like in various disciplines, but it would be interesting to see what might emerge absent the sort of politically-motivated behavior that is described here. No?

I would ascribe the abysmal ignorance of college students to failure in the elementary and high schools, rather than to failure in the college. Now, there’s a critique which says the modernist pedagogy on all levels is aligned, and equally culpable, but I suspect one could argue that drilling of basic facts and writing skills is possible at the basic levels, combined with a modernist pedagogy at college and above. I don’t think the argument from ignorance necessarily applies here: traditional remediation and modern remediation are equally unsatisfactory outcomes.

There is then then the question of whether American students *are* more ignorant than they used to be. I have a pretty profound sense of *yes*–where yes means expectations per education level, not average attainment of the population as a whole. (My great-aunt graduated from a public high-school in NYC ca. 1920–admittedly a good one–with Latin and Greek. And became a secretary, such is the way of the world, which I think means she was literate in English too.) I’d be willing to believe that Americans are more literate, on the whole, than they were in 1900, or even than they were in 1950, at the same time as the value of a high-school degree has plummeted.

I do also think there’s a specifically academic-level expectations game going on: I have a wild theory that the influx of refugee (German) professors in the 1930s meant that a whole lot of academics arrived with higher expectations for academic performance than America had ever achieved; American graduate students today aren’t the polymaths that Heidelberg graduates were in the 1920s, but neither were American graduate students in the 1920s!

Tim: the general conservative idea that principles are best embodied in institutions is also relevant here. The thesis is that a traditional curriculum embodies the best way to teach critical thinking skills. We think this not least because we recollect that reading Cicero and Tacitus (say) has something to do with various political revolutions in our history, which were rather marvelous exercises in critical thinking. And, indeed, a highly practical test: read Cicero and Tacitus, and you can turn the world upside down. Read Derrida, and you can get tenure.

You could even argue the opposite when it comes to social consequences. Maybe the decline of the canon is a direct or indirect result of the relative efflorescence of popular culture in the 1990s and early 2000s, for example? Maybe it’s the precondition of the aesthetic improvement of television, or of the growth of games as a media form. Culture in general is more revenue-producing as a whole today than it was in 1960, even including books, despite declining readership as a whole. Etcetera. I think very little “speaks for itself” in these kinds of debates.

I’d be happy to debate whether the items tested count as serious and important knowledge, and I would add that the academic practice of discounting such closed-response tests has done a lot to discredit the trust the public has in our schools.

I agree on both of these. But, as far as I can tell, there has never been space for the concentrated study of literary form. Literary formalism, for example, was not about the study of literary form. Rather, it was a philosophical position that asserted literary form as the rationale for a certain kind of critical practice. The actual study of form was incidental to that practice, though it did take place.

For a sustained argument for the consideration of literary form, formulated in thoroughly contemporary intellectual terms, see my Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form. I should note that, while that article references work in the cognitive and neurosciences, the pedagogical practice that follows most easily from it would be one that emphasizes practical criticsm: the analysis of the form of specific texts (based, in part, on examples of such analysis).

If it’s joyful passion you want, then, alas, academia is not the place. I don’t see much of that anywhere, conservative, liberal, radical, reactionary, not anywhere. Yes, it is there, somewhere, but not much of it. That’s just not what academia is about.

As for the lack of affirmative practice, the whole deconstructive post-modern moment in lit crit is all about skeptical counter-punching. It depends on having an opponent to demystify and undermine. Without that, it loses its energy. There’s no positive program there. So, the conservatives don’t have a program, the pseudo-radicals don’t have a program. They’re all clock punchers pretending they’re above it all.

Is that a too harsh? Probably. But it’s on them to come up with a positive program. Until that happens, who cares?

On the outcomes question, one might suggest that the conservative program of literary study you outline isn’t the answer to most of those shortcomings (e.g., for someone who wants to get the social science out of your literary study, four of the five areas of ignorance that concern you are in the terrain of socail science more than literary study.) I’m also profoundly skeptical that American students today are substantially *more* ignorant in many of those respects than students in the 1950s or 1920s, which to me raises the question about whether the outcomes as measured are consequential, and in what respect. (This is particularly considering that many of the worst outcomes are comparing populations that didn’t go to college at all before 1960s with those who now go to college). It all sounds dreadful to intellectuals, who prize knowledge, but what exactly is the outcome of those outcomes? It has to be at least possible that “critical thinking”, however low your opinion of its vagueness might be, produces better practical results within certain workplace and everyday life contexts than students who know their Latin, have all read Mill on the Floss, and can recite a formal history of the succession of American Presidents.

Tim mentioned St. Johns curriculum. Yes, it and similar Great Books curricula should be the norm, with various contemporary and cultural studies programs an add-on.