by Dr. Thomas L. Long, Associate Professor of English

Thirty years ago Wayne Booth posed the question, "Is there any knowledge that a man must have?" in an article ceaselessly reproduced in the Norton Reader, an anthology that accompanied my entry into the teaching of freshman composition. For many of today's baby-boomer professoriate Booth's article defined the way we positioned ourselves with respect to our divided subjectivity as both graduate students in literary study and as teaching assistants providing a service course for students in business, science, and technology curricula. Later it would likewise provide us with a professional justification for general education or liberal arts requirements in technical and occupational curricula, a particularly pointed concern for English faculty teaching at two-year colleges with occupational/technical emphases. Today's post-humanists and post-structuralists might reframe Booth's question: Are there any knowledges that a person must construct in order to resist the cultural dominance of hegemonic discourses?

Although I am being mildly parodic in the formulation of that question, I suspect that both the humanist Booth and his post-humanist successors were talking explicitly about empowering students (as well as implicitly about empowering the beleaguered English professor). The post-World War expansion of higher education into new practical career departments (like schools of business) and technology (like schools of engineering) and the post-Vietnam War contraction of higher education into parsimonious productivity measurements have frequently left the liberal arts professoriate struggling to define our goals for both college curricula and the communities we serve outside the colleges. At the same time social movements beyond our control--for example increasingly mass-mediated and multi-mediated exchanges of information and images or America's incipient anti-intellectualism and pragmatism or campus diversity and multiculturalism--have laid claim on both what and how we teach. The dominance of business culture in America has also introduced a host of muddled commercial platitudes about professors and their "customers." More recently, influential moneyed interests of business and industry have lobbied (not without welcome from us) for better trained workers in the general education skills most demanded in an information economy. These forces have resulted in the innovation known variously as "Academic Tech" or "Tech Prep," an attempt to improve high school education and articulation into occupational/technical associate's degree programs.

Booth's nagging 1960s anxiety was that colleges and universities were simply training ants for the corporate anthill or machines for the industrial assembly line; our nagging 1990s anxiety is similar: are we simply programming integrated circuits for the information network? Add to that the cannibalism of our young in which we are all complicit and that is the focus of much of this convention's attention: the "outsourcing" of English instruction to adjuncts. What then must we do? I want you to consider or to remember that these issues are not new, that their terms have been played out before in different ways, and that any political tactics for scholarly vigilance and reform might benefit from revisiting those prior exchanges. In particular, I want to refresh your memory primarily of a nineteenth-century exchange in England with Thomas Huxley's critique of Matthew Arnold's understandings of culture and education, and secondarily an analogous critique in the United States in the early twentieth century, W.E.B. Dubois' critique of Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta compromise."

In Victorian England what we today might called a liberal arts education still meant learning the capital "C" Classics of Greece and Rome, but this notion of "higher" education was meeting increasing competition with career schools, like Sir Josiah Mason's Science College in Birmingham, founded in 1880. Ironically, the Victorian Classical or liberal education, the trivium and quadrivium that constitute the arts and sciences, were a calcified form of a ancient or medieval gentleman-citizen's eminently practical training in the public arts of discourse and the universal sciences of the ways of nature. In Victorian England, however, the sibling demands of empire and consumer capitalism required new arts and sciences, which Thomas Huxley addressed on the opening of Mason's school in what came to be published in 1881 as the essay "Science and Culture." Mason's benefaction had three stipulations: No party politics, no theology, and no literary (by which was meant Classical Greek and Roman) instruction.

Of course, no late Victorian speech on culture could fail to nod to Matthew Arnold's canonical formulation in his 1869 Culture and Anarchy:

Using this criterion, Arnold found himself agreeing with Ernest Renan's assessment of the United States as a popularly educated nation without "general intelligence," a nation of Philistines. Without having traveled to the United States, Arnold felt confident to assert:

Arnold found parallels in English society and he critiqued the imperial and commercial addiction to practical action based solely on dogma and its step-sibling, platitude, calling instead for a reasoned criticism of life.

Huxley's argument with Arnold was not as polarized as is popularly held. He agreed, for instance, that "a criticism of life is the essence of culture," but dissented from the notion "that literature alone is competent to supply this knowledge." By "literature" is explicitly identified "Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity" (118). Instead, Huxley proposed that "[t]he distinctive character of our own times lies in the vast and constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowledge" and he urged that the "revival of science" was at least as momentous as the Renaissance "revival of letters" (123, 124) and that an understanding of science could produce the criticism of life called for in Arnold's definition of culture. However, Huxley criticized the complaint of the "'practical' man" that only measurably pragmatic "applied sciences" mattered. Instead he proposed:

In this address marking the inauguration of the College of Science, Huxley also proposed that it was to draw students from across class lines (certainly a reform of the rigidly hierarchical English education system) and from the publicly funded primary schools. Moreover, he held out this vision for the cultural work that the Birmingham College of Science would perform:

Where Arnold asserted Classical learning as the stay against anarchy, Huxley urged natural and social sciences. His address and the essay conclude with a reference to England's "universal suffrage" (discounting votes for women, of course), which reminds me of the explicitly political tenor of one of Huxley's earlier addresses, this one to the South London Working Men's College in 1868 (one year before Arnold's touchstone book) and later published in Macmillan's Magazine. Entitled "A Liberal Education: and where to find it," the essay proposed this definition:

Might I repeat myself with this paraphrase: Are there any knowledges that a person must construct in order to resist the cultural dominance of hegemonic discourses?

Finally, I want to turn to an American instance of this same discussion, overlapping with the lives of Arnold and Huxley and reaching into our century: Booker T. Washington's Atlanta compromise and W.E.B. Dubois's critique of it.

Washington's life is generally well known, self-published in his autobiography Up From Slavery in 1901. Born a slave in Virginia and freed at the end of the Civil War, Washington taught himself to read, traveled to Hampton, Virginia, where he attended what was then called the Hampton Institute, a vocational school for African-Americans and Native Americans, and a decade later headed Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, which initially was a technical school that under his leadership grew into an institution of higher learning training teachers and other professionals. Washington's political pragmatism led him to an accommodationist strategy, which came to be called the "Atlanta Compromise," that entailed temporarily accepting disenfranchisement and civil inequality and embracing vocational training for blacks instead of college or university education in order to establish black financial independence. It is this last point that I want to examine more closely: offering a narrowly defined technical training by appealing to economic exigencies.

Whatever the practical merits of this tactical retreat at the time (and withholding our own tendency today to second guess Washington's position), the Atlanta compromise met its harshest critic within a decade and a half in an American intellectual without parallel, W.E.B. Dubois. Born in Massachusetts and the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, Dubois published his groundbreaking The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, a work whose notion of "double consciousness" preceded post-colonial theory and whose examination of African-American history, social practices, and popular culture anticipated culture studies by more than half a century. While acknowledging the validity of Washington's own struggle and his economic aims for blacks, Dubois excoriated his narrow educational agenda:

As for Huxley, Dubois viewed forms of liberal education as components of ascending political, cultural, and economic power and speaking for his fellow critics assessed Washington's vocationalism as terribly short-sighted:

While Dubois explicitly underscored that black training institutions cannot be staffed unless there are colleges and universities producing instructors and professors, he also acknowledged the cultural and political capital of a more broadly-based higher education and criticized Washington's adoption of "a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life" (87). In the context of an analysis of race and education, although applicable to other markers of cultural difference like social class, Dubois wrote: "The tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends" (126). College or university education for Dubois contained both instrumental and symbolic power: it could empower people for leadership and self-determination, and it could bestow the markers of status. In both instances, power and autonomy underlay the acquisition or construction of knowledges (and he didn't need Foucault to explain that).

What I have tried to show here is that certain curricular and pedagogical controversies over the past century have always already been imbricated with moral, racial, ethnic, sexual, political and economic dimensions and that however "liberal arts" as a collection of analytical practices is conceived, its practitioners in the professoriate must resist the temptation to romanticize or "nostalgize" that history. More to the point and another site of resistance for English professors in the two-year colleges: We will increasingly be pressed into the service of a doctrine of diminishing resources and increasing productivity. We are told we must do more with less. We must train people for jobs and be happy for it. We must rely increasingly on underpaid adjunct faculty. But the assertion that there is less to go around is a lie, one of the more egregious and pernicious lies of our time, betrayed as a lie by the expanding stock market of the past decade, inflated executive salaries, increasing corporate profit margins, and the expanding wealth among a shrinking percentage of the population. Our job is to turn a stream of fresh and free thought upon these stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically, and to guide students in doing the same.

Works Cited