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I interned during the same summer that I was going through the application process at McKinsey. I was more covert about my professional goals and intentions within my department. But I was able to be open and honest with my colleagues at UCHRI, who supported me in those goals and wanted me to succeed. The supportive environment made a huge difference, as did the work I was doing each day in tracking the many career outcomes of PhDs. That work reaffirmed for me that I was on a plausible and valuable path [beyond the academy].

Robinson received strong mentoring and institutional support, both tangible and otherwise. And her work was of clear value to the needs and long-term goals of UCHRI.

Whereas the UCHRI program takes place during the summer, when doctoral students are often seeking employment, a new initiative at the University of Miami extends over the full academic year. The program, called Graduate Opportunities at Work (UGrow), offers opportunities for doctoral students to take nonteaching positions in campus units outside their departments. UGrow has thus found creative ways to cover costs for doctoral student tuition and stipends for professional development outside the traditional teaching assistantship or research assistantship model. Tim Watson, who established UGrow in August 2015 and in one year has nearly doubled (from six to eleven) the number of opportunities it offers, explains, “The financial side of things was a hurdle to overcome at first. Departments have to release students from their teaching responsibilities. The hosting unit has to agree to reimburse the student’s department, and the department can then use those funds either to replace that teaching assignment or for other purposes.” The value to the hiring departments has become quite clear, he reported, as the doctoral students have already made high-level contributions in their new roles and have all worked semi-autonomously after an initial period of training.

Watson has placed doctoral students in campus units from the University Libraries—which, he notes, have been a key partner in establishing the program—to Advancement.² Brad Rittenhouse, a PhD candidate in English with an undergraduate background in computer science, is a UGrow Fellow in the Center for Computational Science at Miami, where he works on digital humanities projects related to his dissertation research. “Over the course of the year, I have gotten a lot of great experience in the coding language R—in the quantitative branch of DH, in other words,” he says. “I focus on how you read texts with computers, and what kind of reading this allows you to do.” Rittenhouse notes that professional development opportunities for doctoral students can be equally engaging whether they resonate with their dissertation research or open an entirely new line of professional inquiry.

We hope and expect that this trend of internships for doctoral students will continue. At the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State University, the Graduate Internship Program (GRIP) is designed to connect graduate students in the liberal arts with university units that can gain most from their skills and expertise. Students are hired for one or two semesters of twenty hours of work per week; costs for tuition and stipends are shared between sending and hiring departments. One of the key strategic requirements of the program—one that costs nothing in financial terms—is that the internship must be endorsed by the student’s dissertation adviser. This is all-important because, as the MLA report underscores, many faculty members continue to believe that success is only achieved if those with doctorates aspire to and are offered tenure-track positions at well-known institutions of higher education.

Finally, at Arizona State University there is the Humanities Doctoral Internship Program, a part of the Connected Academics initiative. Shannon Lujan, a PhD candidate in English and a Connected Academics Research Fellow at ASU, explains that the program is establishing a variety of opportunities for doctoral students, including an “Administrative Program Operations internship, where students will assist and learn from deans, department chairs, and program directors.” This internship will be designed specifically to “prepare students for a variety of careers,” she says. All these new programs offering internships are broadening what counts as success for doctoral students in the humanities.

At the same time, programs are being created that expand the traditional meaning of the term fellowship to include forms of professional development beyond research support. The term confers prestige on its recipients; to be given a fellowship is often to have been competitively selected to undertake what is viewed by a committee as important and difficult work. Within the academy, and within the higher education sector more broadly, a fellowship is considered a mark of distinction. But beyond the borders of a research university, the term internship seems to resonate more strongly. We thus understand the use of the term internship in the programs mentioned above to be a strategic choice, connecting doctoral students with wider audiences across sectors. Similarly the use of fellowship—in its expanded form as practice-based work—is itself a strategic choice.

“Give Us a Voice in Our Own Future,” the title of an August 2015 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education by James Van Wyck and Joseph Vukov, captures the ethos of emerging practice-based fellowships. Van Wyck and Vukov are the first doctoral students in the Fellowship in Higher Education Leadership program at Fordham University. The fellowship offers graduate students a two-year experience working alongside senior administrators at the university. The key term is alongside. Fellows in the program are tasked with high-level program and curriculum development; “the hallmark of this fellowship,” they write, “is the voice and responsibility it gives to graduate students.” One project they are working on is Public Scholarship for the Common Good, which they describe as a service-learning program.

A new program at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics, is similar in the level of autonomy it offers its fellows. Each year six doctoral students from departments across the humanities and humanistic social sciences at the university are paired with faculty mentors in their disciplines at community colleges in the Seattle district.³ Both fellows and mentors are compensated; time spent on the fellowship—thirty hours per quarter—is additional to the teaching-assistant appointments the doctoral students hold in their home departments at the university.⁴ The faculty advisers of the University of Washington doctoral students also receive a modest research budget as one way of pulling them into the orbit of the program.

In working on this program together over the past year, we have been elated to see these pairings of two-year college faculty members with doctoral students grow into inspiring collaborations, the outcomes of which we could not have possibly foreseen. The fellows and their faculty mentors have worked on exciting new projects, such as the course Philosophy for Children, to be added to the two-year college schedule in coming years, and a coauthored academic paper on economic precarity and transfer students. Fellows have told us that the freedom of project design is a core strength of the partnership. They have stated, in no uncertain terms, that their experiences in the program have literally changed the meaning of their work in graduate school. They also insist that they would not want to be called interns.

Three of our six 2015–16 fellows were from disciplines represented by the MLA (the others were from philosophy, history, and communication). AJ Burgin, in English, helped develop and launch the two-credit course College Applications and Personal Statements, designed by Kennan Knudson, a faculty member in English and Burgin’s mentor at North Seattle College. Central to the course is the mastery of what are to many of the students the altogether mysterious genres of the college application and personal statement. The students begin by researching transfer and admission requirements and then revise rough drafts of their application materials in an instructor-led, peer-review workshop. At Seattle Central College, Lise Lalonde focused with her mentor, Laurie Kempen, on integrated courses and assignments in French. Kempen, who holds a doctorate in French from the University of Washington, is an experienced advocate for foreign language learning as a critical area of funding by our state legislature, and Lalonde took up this cause as a secondary area of interest, looking into the ways in which such programs, at both the two-year college and the university, are perceived by lawmakers. And Angela Durán Real, in conversation with national reporting on the intense disparity in access and participation in study abroad among working-class and minority college students (see, e.g., Lu), started a project with her mentor, Asha Tran, at South Seattle College to encourage students to pursue their study of Spanish language and culture internationally.

In the fall and spring each year, we bring fellows and mentors together for discussion-based workshops. These events give momentum to collaborations at the beginning of the academic year and space for reflection at its close. Also joining the conversation are deans from our partner institutions and guest speakers whose work distinguishes them as national leaders in the humanities and in two-year colleges. Last year we welcomed Anne McGrail, professor of English and recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for her program Doing DH at the CC, at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon, and Lauren Onkey, chair and dean for humanities at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Humanities Center at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio. Both speakers energized the room with their remarks on the transformative work of two-year colleges. And in their end-of-year presentations, fellows and mentors shared their thoughts on how doctoral programs in the humanities could learn from that work. “This program, to me, is about dispelling myths and blurring boundaries,” Tran noted. She was met with wide agreement. The fellows told us that, over the course of the year, they came to view the two-year college with a deepened, more nuanced perspective. Burgin described the distance between the University of Washington and the North Seattle College campus as becoming ever smaller in her mind; now, “there is institutional proximity and possibility,” she said. This program, and others like it, seek to expand on such possibilities for the benefit of students across our educational system.

Internship and fellowship models range in the depth of their connection to the higher education sector; some programs aim to prepare students to go into business, nonprofit institutions, and government, while others explicitly focus on the future of universities and colleges. Many programs seek to bridge the two, partnering with on-campus units to provide students with experiences that would be useful within and transfer beyond higher education. For programs such as Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics and the CUNY Humanities Teaching and Learning Alliance, a partnership between the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and LaGuardia Community College, there is a strong emphasis on preparing doctoral students to participate in and contribute to a changing landscape of higher education, one in which inclusion and diversity are of major and increasing concern. The Mellon Fellowships at the University of Washington are designed to give our doctoral students a full sense of how higher education is serving people in the United States—or not (Mettler). Inside Higher Ed reports that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has increased its focus on gathering data on postsecondary education, specifically related to students for whom the two-year college is a crucial point of entry:

The impetus for the data push is gaps in knowledge about “posttraditional” students, . . . including low-income, first-generation and adult students.

“Higher education is reproducing privilege in this country,” said Dan Greenstein, the director of education and postsecondary success in the foundation’s U.S. program. “It’s unsustainable.” (Fain)

To counter this alarming trend, yes, we certainly agree that we do need to gather further information; the efforts of the foundation are commendable. But in addition we need to create structures of professional development that will enable doctoral students to position themselves effectively on the side of social mobility, especially if they choose to pursue careers in higher education.

The terms internship and fellowship are not strictly different in meaning, but we think that a small distinction may be useful for people who are considering creating such programs for doctoral students. Informing our thinking is our fellows’ insistence that the two terms imply radically different levels of expertise. When we asked the fellows if we should rename their fellowship an internship in subsequent years of the program, they immediately said, “No!” We suggest the following as a working definition of the term internship: internships meet the preexisting needs of an organization while expanding the experience base of the intern in a meaningful way. Internships should be highly directive, with specific and measurable outcomes determined in advance by the hiring organization. It is the responsibility of the mentor to find and create projects that will leverage and expand the doctoral student’s skills and to balance this work against the needs and goals of the organization. The humanities centers, university departments and offices, and external partners who hire doctoral interns will have a sense of the most valuable contributions these doctoral students can make in these settings. This may include the picking up and developing of backlogged projects, the improvement of processes, and the updating of documentation. This is the sort of work that sustains institutions. It is also fundamental to a professional skill set in a knowledge economy, as are the answers to such questions as, How do you draft a budget? respond to the concerns of multiple constituencies? plan and promote an event? conduct a meeting or an interview?

Fellowship, by contrast, could be defined thus: practice-based fellowships create space for breaking new ground and, as a result, yield outcomes that cannot be directed or anticipated. We might conceptualize the difference between an internship and a fellowship as one between the work of sustaining and strengthening organizations, on the one hand, and the work of reimagining and reconstructing organizations, on the other. These kinds of work do require, to our minds, different levels of expertise. But to be clear: both internships and fellowships are needed. Ideally, students would be able to do both. Because they serve different purposes—one focusing on the development of core competencies and responsiveness to the needs of an organization, the other applying those competencies and sensibilities to the creating of new projects and perhaps even to the building of new structures—they complement each other. They are two different forms of professional development. Doctoral students who pursue internships, fellowships, or a combination of the two will be better prepared to take on positions of leadership in higher education—and elsewhere.

On the basis of our work at the University of Washington and our discussions with UCHRI and the University of Miami, we make the following recommendations:

Strong mentoring. Internships and fellowships allow doctoral students to build relationships with mentors who are not their faculty adviser or members of their dissertation committee. Mentors, because they play a key role in guiding doctoral students and connecting them to larger networks, are indispensable to emerging forms of professional development for PhDs.

Project-based work. Well-designed projects develop core competencies that translate across a variety of professional opportunities. Doctoral student interns and fellows, and their mentors, should track the specific capacities that their various projects foster.

Deliverables. Doctoral students should emerge from graduate internships and fellowships with the ability to narrate their skill development in terms of measurable accomplishments. Whether these concrete outcomes are directed by the hiring organization or developed through collaboration, they will provide an archive from which talking points for interviews with potential employers and partners can be drawn.

The reconceptualization of doctoral education in the humanities is well under way, in national discussions and, more important, in practice. We are convinced that these initiatives will help prepare the next generation of PhDs to be leaders in and on behalf of their fields of study. We also believe that the programs noted here, and others like them, will serve as leading models for change.

There had been dissenting voices, the most notable that of the labor economist Allan M. Cartter, who was vice president of the American Council on Education from 1963 to 1966 and chancellor and vice president of New York University from 1966 to 1972. In a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association in 1965, Cartter examined the models that had been used to develop the projections of the 1950s and found them to be “poor predictors of actual developments” (26). Looked at in the light of what had happened over the years between 1954 and 1965, the models overstated the rate at which doctoral-level faculty would need to be replaced and understated the rate at which higher education would succeed in expanding doctoral education and the pool of candidates completing terminal degrees. Several years later, in a paper contributed to a 1969 compendium on the economics and financing of higher education prepared for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, Cartter and Robert L. Farrell, of the Smithsonian Institution, could affirm even more strongly how wrong the projections of dire shortages—“4 or 5 teacher openings for every PhD available” (358)—had turned out to be. “We can look forward to the 1970s with confidence that there will be an adequate supply of available manpower to meet most critical needs in teaching, research, and specialized employment fields. Whereas for the last decade we have needed to channel about half of all persons receiving the doctorate into college teaching to maintain the quality of our staffs, in the 1970s less than a third will be required, and fifteen years from now it may require only one in five” (357).

The record of PhD completions in English and other modern languages is illustrative. In 1958, the federal government reported a total of 596 modern language doctorates on its annual census of new doctorate recipients, the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED)—439 in English and 157 in other language and literature fields (classics excluded). Thirteen years later, in 1970, the fields’ doctoral programs, expanded in size and enlarged in number, awarded doctorates to 2,012 graduates, well over triple the number of 1958 (1,365 graduates in English and 647 in other modern languages). Through the 1960s, as doctoral programs were accelerating the production of modern language PhDs by more than 10% per year, on average, the MLA’s role continued to be helping departments identify qualified candidates for the many faculty positions they were desperately seeking to fill (MLA Office of Research 9 [fig. 3], 11 [fig. 5]). Each fall the association solicited vita sheets from students who had completed or were about to complete their doctoral programs and who were planning to attend the MLA convention (fig. 1). The vita sheets were gathered into binders for department chairs to review on-site at the convention, so that hiring departments could arrange convention interviews with candidates whose qualifications met their needs. At the 1969 convention, this system was overwhelmed by the large and still growing wave of PhDs and PhD candidates who arrived in Denver to compete for what had suddenly become a contracting number of professorial positions.

The shock of the 1969 convention is apparent in the consternation and spreading panic that rippled out from this abrupt reversal of fortune, as the 1970 report of the Commission to Study the Job Market appointed to respond to “what went wrong” in Denver suggests (Orr, 1192–93). One result was the reconstruction of the MLA’s job-related services. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the ADE and ADFL had initiated lists of “vacancies in college and university departments” to give department chairs who were experiencing difficulty filling faculty positions a way to bring the openings on their faculties to the attention of candidates (fig. 2). In October 1971, the vacancies lists were replaced by the Job Information List, which was conceived as a comprehensive survey and compilation of statements from departments about their hiring plans (fig. 3). Along with announcements of positions that were available and for which departments were seeking candidates, the new lists initially included statements that “no vacancies are anticipated or likely.” The idea was to give a statistical overview of the academic job market, direct job seekers to the available positions they were realistically qualified to apply for, and stem the flood of inquiry letters panicked candidates were blindly mailing to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of departments. The first English and foreign language lists note that statements were received from 55% of the English departments and 50% of the foreign language departments the MLA contacted; many entries consist of the short statement “no information received by press time.”

The trauma of 1969 has had a long afterlife in the profession’s collective psyche. Particularly sensitive is the sore spot touched whenever questions arise of just what occupational and career possibilities doctoral study in language and literature can lead to. What career options can doctorate recipients and their programs embrace as legitimate? What career outcomes might programs and graduates celebrate as shining examples of their success? Which do they mourn as the depressing signs of their failure? On this point, Cartter and Farrell concluded their contribution to the 1969 compendium by sounding a highly optimistic note:

The nation is accomplishing a goal that was thought unattainable a few years ago, by virtue of a strong partnership among public and private agencies. If the Congress had not acted with determination in the 1958–65 years to support graduate education, and if the States and the private universities had not been willing to invest untold millions in what they believed to be the highest priority task in the nation, the goal of insuring an adequate supply of the best brains and talents for college teaching, research, government and industrial service would not have been achieved prior to the 1980s. . . .

The projections of doctoral supply indicate that a rapidly increasing proportion of the total will be available for nonacademic forms of employment—in government, industry, and nonprofit agencies. This can only be viewed with satisfaction, as a mark that this nation has met its critical priority needs and can now begin to utilize this talent in a broader array of challenging tasks. If we are to revitalize the cities, improve the public schools, conquer pollution, improve health standards, explore outer space, and a hundred other tasks claiming our attention and energies, our strongest asset will be an expanding reservoir of highly trained talent. (374)

Citing this passage, the 1970 MLA report redirected Cartter and Farrell’s optimism to a determinedly pessimistic and depressed conclusion:

Unfortunately one of Cartter’s and Farrell’s conclusions has grim repercussions for us. “The projections of doctoral supply indicate that a rapidly increasing proportion of the total will be available for nonacademic forms of employment—. . .” Figures in our disciplines indicate that academic work employs over 90% of us; that is not because we choose it, but because that’s all there is to do. If more of us become available for nonacademic work, we won’t be using our degrees. (Orr 1187)

With this formulation, the commission’s report elevated appointment as a postsecondary faculty member into a normative marker as the sole employment outcome the fields’ doctoral programs and their graduates could—even should—possibly regard as legitimate or acceptable. The passage at once reflects and speaks to a culture of doctoral study bound to the doxa that only academic work qualifies, or can qualify, as employment appropriate to the doctoral degree; the logic requires all other employment to be by definition underemployment: “we won’t be using our degrees.”

And so prevailing sentiment across the discipline has continued to hold from that day to this. For students pursuing doctoral study in language and literature, a core aspect of acquiring scholarly identity and signaling acculturation into the profession consists of accepting and affirming a largely unspoken tribal understanding that “for us” postsecondary teaching remains “all there is to do,” the sole occupation in which those who complete the ordeal of earning the PhD know they have found suitable work.

The actual placement history, by contrast, points to other possibilities. The first six in the MLA’s series of PhD placement surveys revealed that through the 1970s and early 1980s significant and growing numbers of modern language doctorates were finding their way to professions outside academia. Across the six surveys, conducted between 1977 and 1985, 12.8% of new degree recipients in English, on average, and 17.0% of those in other languages had proceeded to work outside higher education directly after completing doctoral study. Among PhD recipients in languages other than English, the subset finding employment outside the academy immediately after graduate school reached a high point of 20.3%, for graduates who received degrees in 1978–79 (Huber, “MLA’s . . . Latest Foreign Language Findings” 68). Among new doctorate recipients in English, it rose as high as 15.3%, for the 1983–84 cohort (Huber, “MLA’s . . . Latest English Findings” 48). The brief resurgence of tenure-track faculty hiring in the late 1980s reduced the flow of graduates to placements outside higher education. And as employment opportunities in and also beyond academia contracted in the recession of the early 1990s, the postdoctoral fellowship, a negligible feature of the humanities career path up to 1990, started to claim a steadily rising share of placements, increasing, for example, from just 0.9% of English graduates in 1992 to 7.3% in 2010. Over the seven surveys in the placement series that the MLA has fielded since 1990 (the last covering 2009–10 PhD recipients), 7.6% of new PhD recipients in English, on average, and 10.2% of those in other languages have found employment in occupations outside higher education—about half the peak figures of the 1970s and 1980s.¹

As a first job placement after graduate school, then, PhD recipients have long gone on to employment beyond academia and postsecondary faculty appointments, albeit on a modest scale and often enough in the face of indifference or even active hostility from the prevailing disciplinary culture. But the historical record of placements immediately after graduate school reveals only one part of the story. A more complete picture emerges when information is added about what happens to degree recipients as they move forward in their careers and working lives. We possess two snapshots of the occupations where modern language PhDs have their primary employment—the 1995 Survey of Humanities Doctorates conducted by the National Research Council as part of the Survey of Doctorate Recipients and a 2014 MLA study of employment outcomes for a sample of individuals who received a modern language PhD between 1996 and 2011. Since 1973, and most recently in 2015, the federally sponsored biennial Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR) has canvassed a sample of individuals who have earned a doctorate in engineering; biological, health, and physical sciences; and (but only from 1977 until 1995) the humanities. The SDR explores the demographics and career histories of respondents from the date they receive the degree to age seventy-six. (Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the humanities participation in the SDR did not survive the reductions in the endowment’s budget in the mid-1990s.) The MLA study took a step toward filling the gap in our knowledge that the loss of the SDR created. With the support of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the MLA office of research used Internet searches for public information to identify the employment status and occupations in 2013–14 of a random sample of 2,590 cases drawn from a universe of 1996–2011 PhD recipients with Dissertation Abstracts International records in the MLA International Bibliography.

The report on the last SDR to include humanities doctorates, published in 1997, notes that, as of 1995, 60.9% of all employed humanities PhDs had postsecondary teacher and professor as their primary occupation. The other 39.1% were working as managers, executives, and administrators (12.5%); as artists, writers, and media specialists (4.9%); in management-related occupations (4.1%); as elementary and secondary schoolteachers (2.8%); or in other occupational situations (14.7%) (Ingram and Brown 40 [table 12]). The career paths of the subset of these humanities doctorates that held a PhD in English or other modern languages led to what even now may strike many as a surprisingly diverse array of occupations and employment sectors. Careers as postsecondary teachers and professors predominate, but far from exclusively—62.3% of PhDs in English and 64.4% of those in other modern languages held positions as postsecondary teachers in 1995; 78.1% and 77.7%, respectively, were employed by a postsecondary institution (37, 38). Presumably, the difference between the roughly 78% of modern language doctorates employed by postsecondary institutions and the just over 60% employed as postsecondary teachers and professors points to the substantial numbers who held what would later come to be called alt-ac positions in academic institutions but who were categorized as administrators on the 1995 survey.

The occupational distribution looks similar in 2014 for the parallel population from the MLA study—employed PhDs who received their terminal degree from a doctoral program in a United States university and who were residing in the United States at the time of data collection. The MLA study found about 70% of modern language PhDs working as postsecondary teachers or professors, compared with from between 62% and 64% in 1995, as reported in the SDR. But an almost identical fraction were employed in higher education, whether in teaching appointments or nonteaching administrative posts—79% in 2014 compared with 78% in 1995.

The Humanities Indicators has compiled findings from the humanities portion of the 1995 SDR, reproduced in figure 4 and figure 5. Figure 6 shows corresponding findings from the 2014 MLA study. Together, the three charts make vividly apparent both the strong orientation toward careers in higher education among modern language doctorates and the diversity of their job outcomes across a spectrum of professional positions, whether as postsecondary faculty members and administrators; secondary and elementary school teachers; or professionals in business, government, and nonprofit organizations.

So the history points to two conclusions. People enter the long and arduous path of doctoral study in the humanities thinking of professorial careers as a primary goal; and those who complete a doctoral program actually find careers in a far broader range of occupations than postsecondary teaching, even if their first job after graduate school is a postsecondary faculty position, on or off the tenure track. The question, then, is not whether doctoral study can lead to careers beyond postsecondary teaching—it already does and has for decades. The question comes down to the view doctoral programs and their inhabitants take of what has long been that simple fact. Do the diverse career paths that PhDs follow inspire an enlarged sense of success and possibility, both for the individual graduate and for the doctoral program and its faculty? Or, as the 1970 MLA report puts the case, are we to resign ourselves to a pessimistic sense that placements and careers other than a career as a scholar-teacher in a tenured faculty appointment signal failure—failure on the part of the individual graduate, of the program and the members of its faculty, and also of the wider profession?

It is important to increase both public and professional awareness of the actual diversity of humanist career paths, the range of professions where program graduates make their living, and the number of graduates working in those professions. But the placement facts may be of lesser import than the achievement of what has remained an elusive conceptual breakthrough: a robust account of the intellectual capacities and forms of specialized expertise exercised and advanced through humanistic study. To be at all influential, a concept of humanistic expertise needs to command wide recognition, both in public discourse about the humanities and in humanists’ professional discourse about themselves. Correspondent to such an account of humanistic expertise would be the idea of a humanities workforce.² Humanistic expertise advances as scholarship advances and elaborates its capacities to learn from the objects it studies, whether those objects be the documentary materials of the cultural record or the evanescent performances of social action (Guillory). As a feature of public and professional discourse, the concept of humanistic expertise would mediate between the scholarly research space of academic work and the varied occupational niches connected to and reliant on it, however directly and recognizably or hidden and unacknowledged. In the absence of a concept of humanistic expertise, understanding of the link connecting educational attainment to occupational possibility becomes limited to the PhD as a formal qualification required to compete for a particular job. If a tenure-track appointment in a four-year college or university is the one job for which the PhD is required, career possibilities deemed suitable for those who pursue and attain the degree necessarily contract to the tenure-track appointment in a four-year college or university. The discussion gets stuck at questions like, “But for what jobs (besides a postsecondary faculty position) does someone need to have completed a PhD in literature?” or “What evidence do we have that employers would prefer someone who completed a dissertation and received a PhD to a candidate who holds an MA or BA?”

This reductive logic defines the small box inside which the profession’s discussion of PhD career paths and possibilities has been confined. As a further corollary, widening the career horizon of doctoral programs, their students, and their graduates is frequently understood, or misunderstood, to entail diminishing their humanistic content and intellectual force, substituting preparation for careers apart from scholarship and teaching for the intellectual work necessary to scholarship and teaching. The result would be to turn doctoral study in literature into, for example, a lesser form of preprofessional training in management. Curricular revision of that kind is of course something a doctoral program could decide to pursue. But the reverse is also possible. We can think less in terms of qualifications signaled narrowly by the PhD as an attainment distinct from the MA or the MPhil or BA and focus more on the attributes and expertise developed through advanced humanistic study, whether or not that study leads to completion of the PhD (and hence of a dissertation). What matters is the intellectual work people do in pursuing humanistic study, the powers and capacities they acquire and deepen through that work, and how they carry these forms of humanistic expertise with them into the wider world. At stake are acquisitions of intellect—capacities for observation, description, judgment, analysis, and thinking; acuity in working with language and images; multilingualism; adept cross-cultural competencies that extend across time and geography in their reach—realized through long practice rising to the demands humanistic inquiries make in their distinctive specificity. Gathered under the homogenizing rubric of “transferable skill,” these attainments become far less visible than they need and ought to be. The question of advanced humanistic expertise and its uses in the world of work presents one form of the wider question of the public value of the humanities and humanistic scholarship. Far from pushing programs toward weakening the humanistic content of advanced study, the question of doctoral education and the careers that follow from it should be seized as an opportunity to affirm the social value of advanced study and the humanistic research space.

What if teaching and research, for all this support, do not necessarily reinforce each other? The link between research and teaching may be important to the identity of many academics, but might it not perhaps be better described as a myth? Certainly in terms of faculty time and money, as well as of university structures, many colleagues see research and teaching as in conflict. Who has not heard the claim that research consumes an excessive role at the expense of teaching? “University research,” write critics, “detracts from the quality of teaching” (Pocklington and Tupper 7). This view presents teaching and research as competing functions within a zero-sum game of resources. Members of the public are not alone in claiming that research has taken on an excessive role at the expense of teaching. The sheer volume of such indictments of university research is vast, and their tone is insistent. Martin Anderson calls most academic research “inconsequential and trifling” in Impostors in the Temple (85); Page Smith denounces in Killing the Spirit the “full flight from teaching” for the sake of research (6), “the vast majority” of which “is essentially worthless” (7); and Charles J. Sykes in Profscam deplores the “new vogue of specialization” (17). Such criticisms of the academy and of professorial commitments are not anything new; as James Banner writes, “criticism of universities for neglecting teaching in deference to research is probably as old as the modern university itself” (98). Even Sykes traces the beginnings of specialization back to the 1930s (17). Ronald Barnett, one of the strongest critics of the teaching-research nexus, takes a different view. Instead of suggesting that these are complementary activities forced into competition with each other, he makes the bolder claim that teaching and research constitute rival ideologies. He argues that in the twentieth century teaching and research, once in “reasonably comfortable relationship with each other,” have become “mutually antagonistic” functions (Beyond All Reason 157). They are, in his view, inherently different activities, different skills, and different approaches to knowledge: teaching is integrative, private, personally constructed, and process-oriented, whereas research is specialized, public, and results-oriented.

There is mounting empirical evidence that teaching and research are at best only loosely coupled. Such studies consider teaching effectiveness (judged by student evaluations, limited though they are) in relation to research productivity (judged by publication counts, inexact as that metric may be). In a meta-analysis from the mid-1990s, John Hattie and Herbert Marsh found a near-zero statistical correlation between teaching effectiveness and research productivity. Some scholars thus suggest that the link between teaching and research is an “enduring myth” (de Weert 134) and have called for abandoning the integrationist research ideal (Dierkes and Merkens).

To say that teaching and research have been torn asunder presumes that there was a time when they were closely linked: if they are now being driven apart, when, if ever, were they integrated? Any standard history of the teaching-research nexus points us to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who proclaimed at the founding of the German research university in 1810 that teaching and research are a unity: “at the highest level, the teacher does not exist for the sake of the student: both teacher and student have their justification in the common pursuit of knowledge” (243). Humboldt is, however, but one part of the model of American universities. With the adoption of graduate programs in the late nineteenth century, American universities grafted the Humboldtian model onto a tradition of liberal education that did not at all see teaching and research as a unity. Cardinal John Henry Newman, in his Idea of a University (1858), argued, for example, that the aim of the university was “the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than its advancement” (xxxvii). Research was left to the research societies, learned societies, and specialist academies outside the university, since “[t]o discover and teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person” (xl). Teaching, not research, was the mission of the university.

The most distinctive aspect of American universities today is without a doubt the commitment to the utility of knowledge creation. Clark Kerr, the influential president of the University of California in the 1960s, characterized the modern university as part of the “knowledge industry” (66). This is a departure from both Newman and Humboldt, who believed that knowledge should be cultivated at the university for its own sake and not for its uses. In The Uses of the University (2001), Kerr identified a significant shift in the conception of the university in the twentieth century, as universities came to be drivers of regional and national (knowledge) economies. Kerr saw the resulting research funding as fragmenting the university, weakening the humanities, creating a competition for research talent, and downgrading teaching, thus creating a race toward reduced teaching course loads as markers of selectivity and prestige. University prestige, after all, tends to favor research. “When universities raid one another’s faculties,” notes Barnett, “they do not do it because they seek cutting-edge classroom teachers” (Improving Higher Education 40).²

Debates over the teaching-research nexus reveal the tensions that lie at the core of our institutions. Our universities are built not on a single foundation but on distinct philosophies of education that stand in uneasy relation to one another. American higher education rests on an integrationist view of the teaching-research nexus, but it also embodies a teaching-centric dedication to liberal education, a commitment to research as practical knowledge production, and a growing allegiance to the use-value of universities that drives research links to industry and economic development. These elements are implicitly, if not explicitly, at odds.

If these competing conceptions and allegiances of the university have not always been apparent, I believe there are (at least) three pressures that are visibly redefining the teaching-research nexus today.

First, the changing value of education: the focus on the value of education is increasingly seen in financial terms, as return on investment. This emphasis gives impetus to the criticism of faculty research as a freestanding and self-indulgent claimant on faculty time and resources. Kerr noted the shift to the use-value of the university as a concerted part of collective economic development. Today’s emphasis on use-value calls attention to the career placement of graduates, the size of their student debt, and the return on investment that their degrees offer them. The stress on the pecuniary value of higher education puts particular pressure on graduate education, where the focus on research training continues. This is especially the case in the sciences, where student stipends, faculty salaries, and research costs are often only partly supported by universities themselves and thus require an influx of external research money. The effect of this changing value of education is to push research and teaching further asunder.

Second, the unbundling³ or fragmentation of the roles of teaching and research in the university: “Teaching, research and service specialists are emerging,” write Schuster and Finkelstein write in their study The American Faculty (232). The role of the scholar-teacher, or even “teacher-scholar,” is increasingly hard to maintain (Cassuto). In the university, we are developing teaching-only positions (particularly in the growing adjunct teaching pool) and, largely in the sciences, research-only positions. With the career administrator, we are forging service-only positions. Tightening of research monies and of the academic job market are reinforcing a pernicious stratification in which tenured and tenure-track professors are increasingly separated from a contingent workforce.⁴

Third, the professionalization of teaching and the movement of assessment are transforming how we approach teaching. I hear a lot from colleagues that we should shift the balance back to teaching by strengthening incentives for good teaching. Yet our professional identity is often understood as a function of our research identity, starting with the completion of a dissertation. Teaching experience and pedagogical training have often been ancillary. Indeed, teaching has often been assumed to be a function of research skill. Only recently has teaching at the higher education level become professionalized, with teaching certification and training, as well as with teaching and learning centers. Part of this shift has meant that more refined assessment models of learning outcomes are becoming widespread—at times against faculty opposition. While the focus on teaching and learning outcomes is invaluable, it has had a counterintuitive effect: the establishment of teaching-specific training and performance markers in effect disarticulates teaching from research. It suggests that research and teaching are different academic functions, with different preparation and different skill sets.

But there is a possible solution embedded in the way we have begun to talk about teaching. In the past three decades, we have moved from talking about teaching to talking about learning. In other words, we have shifted from teacher-centered teaching to student-centered learning models, in what some have termed the “age of the learner” (Sorcinelli, Austin, and Eddy 1). This shift opens an opportunity to redraw the boundaries between teaching and research. Student-centered learning is inquiry-based and problem-based: it combines research-based learning and research-based teaching. The shift from teaching to learning gives us the opportunity to be process- rather than results-driven, to redefine teaching and, in consequence, also research.

The shift from teaching to learning gives us an opportunity to redraw the fault lines of the teaching-research nexus. Here are some recommendations:

Let us redefine teaching. The redefinition of teaching has already started in recent years; it includes a wider spectrum of activities, including engaged learning or teaching with work-based components. The focus on student-centered, inquiry-based, and problem-based learning highlights the process of inquiry rather than the accumulation of knowledge. My first recommendation is to make at least parts of teacher training more disciplinarily specific, to bring some of it back from teaching and learning centers and integrate it into our graduate program curricula (as it still is in some language departments).

Let us redefine research: If we need to redefine teaching, we also need to redefine research. We need to look beyond publications as the marker of research performance. There is a fair amount of talk about expanding the kinds of research we accept, but focusing on publications—of any sort—reinforces an older sage-on-the-stage conception of teaching as research or knowledge delivery. David Shumway, in his contribution to this forum, traces by contrast the longer lineage of “[r]esearch as process,” in which faculty members “were assumed to be engaged in the process of research even if they were not publishing.” The National Science Foundation (NSF) made the integration of research and education a priority in its 2001–06 strategic plan (NSF GPRA Strategic Plan 1): its funding guidelines now include, for example, sections on the contributions of research to teaching and other human resources. Many humanities fellowships, by contrast, still ask applicants to show their project’s “original and significant contribution to knowledge,” with little explicit mention of the impact on teaching, curriculum, mentorship, or other forms of engagement (see, e.g., “ACLS American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships”). The new NEH Public Scholar fellowships, which support scholarship in the humanities for a general audience, and the NEH Next Generation Humanities PhD grants, which promote the integration of the humanities in the public sphere, are a step in the right direction.

My second suggestion, then, is to ask in statements of research, whether in grants or annual reviews, not just for evidence of the projected scholarly impact of research publications but for their probable curricular effects. Ernest Boyer, in his influential 1990 report for the Carnegie Foundation, put forward an expanded concept of scholarship, suggesting we move to different categories altogether, by dividing academic work into discovery (this being roughly congruent to what is often—and narrowly—called research), and also integration, application, and teaching (16). In 2000 the Kellogg Commission similarly argued that we should shift from research, teaching, and service to “learning, discovery and engagement.” These models sought to move beyond teaching versus research, and the divide between theory and praxis, to rethink priorities in higher education. A number of universities have incorporated aspects of Boyer’s model of scholarship in tenure and promotion structures; such changes may be effecting modest change in the status quo of the publish-or-perish model. Recently Drew Moser, Todd Ream, and John Braxton, in an expanded, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered, made the case that Boyer’s ideas may prove to be “more relevant” in the next quarter-century than even in his day (xviii). Indeed, the continued advances in the scholarship of teaching and the upsurge of interest in the scholarship of engagement echo aspects of Boyer’s redefinition of scholarship: what unites these two ways of framing scholarship is a focus on inquiry-based and problem-based learning.

When we still speak of “teaching loads” and “research opportunities”—as when we prepare what are often separate teaching philosophies and research statements—we continue to reinforce a divide. While we are unlikely to leave the research ideal soon, redefining both research and teaching as parts of a shared process of learning may go some way toward setting them into a new relation.

The Age of the College: All Service, All the Time

To answer that question, we need to go back to the age of the college in the United States, before research universities were founded. Donald Light breaks the work of early-nineteenth-century American professors into a different triadic division: the disciplinary career, the institutional career, and the external career (2).

The external career was once more important than it is now. In the early days of American colleges, professors’ salaries were often insufficient to cover basic needs, so many of them maintained separate careers outside the institution—as clergymen, for example—to make ends meet. Today professors are more likely to have a substantial external career only if they’re already very well known—and, typically, well paid, too. Today’s professors may have the opportunity to do consulting work here and there, but external careers are rarely vital to their well-being. The necessary external career has become a relic—though the unfolding future of contingent academic labor could bring it roaring back.

That leaves the institutional and disciplinary careers, which are still very much with us. The institutional career is made up of the duties we perform at our institutions, while the disciplinary career encompasses the work we do as members of our disciplines. Teaching a course in history is institutional work, for example, while giving a talk at the American Historical Association conference is disciplinary work.

That division between institutional and disciplinary pursuits has animated the profession for many generations, but it didn’t always. The institutional career ruled during the American age of the college, before universities. If you were a faculty member then, you spent your time doing what the institution required—which meant teaching and whatever else that needed doing. Administration wasn’t pervasive because the institutions were small, and those responsibilities fell to the faculty. For example, the tutors (as they were called) at Harvard in those days “were with their pupils almost every hour of the day [that is, in classrooms, study halls, and at meals], and slept in the same chamber with some of them at night.” They were responsible for their students’ intellectual development, but also for their “moral and spiritual development” (Morison 53), like a professor, resident adviser, class dean, and pastor all rolled into one. Even though these tutors were doing service all the time, there was nothing in their jobs that was defined as service.

Service was inseparable from teaching in this scheme. Our familiar teaching-research-service division would have been unrecognizable to a college teacher two hundred years ago.

This brings me to the disciplinary career, which centers on what we today call research. To advance our disciplinary careers, we do specialized things of special interest to a few similarly specialized colleagues at our home institutions—in some extreme cases, to none of them. So instead, we share this work with colleagues at other colleges and universities who have a common interest in our specialties, and that sharing forms the basis for extramural community.

Those research-based communities became structured beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1820 only a few professors at a few colleges had what we would call a disciplinary career at all. Most were not trained in any one discipline. At four of the country’s oldest colleges—Brown, Bowdoin, Harvard, and Yale—only one faculty member was publishing in his field (Finkelstein 15–16).

American professors professionalized in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Many went to Europe to acquire disciplinary training and discipline-related credentials. They came back with newly forged disciplinary identities, and many of these newly credentialed scholars started publishing in their disciplines. This in turn created tension with the old guard, between the new purely academic concerns and the old-time version of 24-7 student care (Finkelstein 23). These prodigals loudly touted the quality and value of their foreign training, and so the first American research universities, created in the wake of postbellum national wealth, were inspired by German models (Veysey 125–33).

Research Culture and the First Incarnation of Service

The research university brought research culture. Research culture, as I refer to it here, is an ethos centered on the value of research not so much in terms of utility but for its own sake, for the value of the search for truth and the glory of the intellect that attended new discoveries in any field. Research culture cemented that sense of value by rooting it in the measurable currency of publication.

The first research universities proliferated in the United States from the 1880s to about 1910.¹ Private research universities were joined by public ones to form this country’s distinctive higher educational landscape. The formation of professional societies followed the birth of the American research university. Groups like the MLA institutionalized the value of specialization that research brought. At least two hundred similar groups were formed during the 1870s and 1880s, the decades that coincide with the earliest American research universities (Bledstein 85–86).

The creation of these disciplinary societies shows how the pursuit and organization of knowledge joined the emergent academic professionalism in the United States to form a newly professionalized ideology of higher education. Advocates of academic professionalization—like the philosopher John Dewey—believed that “the influence of institutional imitation and rivalry” and “the informal exchange of experience and ideas” helped sustain the very institution of democracy (148).²

The consolidation of professional identity in disciplinary associations marked a shift and laid out a template for the university to grow and complicate its workings. A great deal has been said about this development, but I want to mark one particularly important change: the professionalization of the university helped plant the prestige economy and give it deep roots. We all know how the prestige economy works: universities and faculty members mark their professional positions by the amount of knowledge that they create. The more publication, the more prestige; the more prestige, the greater the possibility of a move up the food chain.

This professionalization of the professoriat led to a consideration of what a professor’s job should look like. The founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915 is rightly seen as a watershed in the history of academic freedom, but the association was likewise dedicated, said Dewey, its first president, to “developing professional standards” (qtd. in Schrecker 17). The AAUP sought not just “independence” for its members but also “dignity” in the university workplace (American Association of University Professors 294).

Such professionalization contributed to the conditions that link the idea of service to administrative work, but not right away. For one thing, the new research universities remained relatively small. It’s easy to imagine them as behemoths because we’re so used to seeing large research enterprises, but Princeton, for example, enrolled 1,374 students in 1904. Stanford had 1,568. Columbia and Yale were bigger, but tiny by today’s standards. Public universities were proportionately larger, but their numbers were also puny compared to now: Berkeley had 2,699 students in 1904, Illinois 3,222 (Geiger 270). Mostly because the university still operated on a small scale, teaching and service were still folded together in concept.

But service did emerge during this period as an idea that was opposed to research. It centered principally on public service: what role the university ought to play in society at large. This question was galvanized at the turn of the twentieth century by the founding of numerous state universities. Given that the public was funding these institutions, it seemed fair to ask what they were going to do for the public—and these early discussions centered on that idea. Indeed, the Morrill Act of 1862 that authorized land-grant institutions focused on their mission to serve the public by providing “liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.” This idea of public service was linked at first to teaching, especially in “agriculture and the mechanic arts” (7 USC sec. 304).³ Land-grant colleges would also serve the public directly through cooperative extensions and continuing education courses (Christy and Williamson 108).

The founder of one such land-grant institution, Ezra Cornell, asserted in 1868 a democratic—and notably utility-minded—ideal of the university as a place “where any person can find instruction in any study” (qtd. in Veysey 68). This idea that no one subject is better than any other provides the background for the most important version of public service of this period, which arose at the University of Wisconsin at the turn of the century. It came to be called simply the Wisconsin Idea, which, in Lincoln Steffens’s much-quoted 1909 articulation, was that the university should “teach anybody—anything—anywhere” (qtd. in Veysey 107). This was one of the most expansive ideals of higher education as a public service, in which the university reaches out into the community at large.⁴

This idea also resounded outside Wisconsin. The president of the University of Illinois, Edmund J. James, wrote in 1906 that the state university should be “a great civil service academy, preparing the young men and women of the state for the civil service of the state, the country, the municipality, and the township.” He called this “an ethical crusade” (qtd. in Veysey 79).

The coming of the American research university brought with it the idea of service as a distinct aim, then—distinct, that is, from research. But this new thing called service was still bound up with teaching.

The Coming of Teaching-Research-Service

The teaching-research-service triad first appeared in the 1920s. A 1927 article in the University of Michigan alumni magazine reported on a speech by the recently deceased president of the university, Marion Leroy Burton, in which Burton said that “teaching, research, and service were concrete examples of the things that a university should make its chief aim” (“President Burton”). This early invocation of service as an “aim”—and these early instances to the triad tend to refer to it that way—still points service outward, as something aimed at the community in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea.

Print sources might be considered a trailing indicator in this case. The grouping of teaching, research, and service probably started appearing in academic conversation before the triad made it into print. We might hypothesize that the tricolon made its appearance in academic culture during the years leading up to the 1920s, in sources that may be found in university archives. That hypothesis gets some support when we search Google Books using what is called an N-gram, which graphs the frequency of the appearance of words or phrases in millions of books. Figure 1 presents a 4-gram that traces the four words teaching, research, service, and university as they appear together. It’s quite a striking picture.

Two big jumps in this graph need interpretation: one from 1900 to 1920, and the other from around 1958 to 1975 or so. That first jump correlates with the creation and rise of departments and the institution of the credit-hour system.

The rise of the credit hour marked the growing bureaucratization of higher education. As universities grew, administrations needed a way to quantify the work that was being done. Colleges and universities borrowed the idea of the credit hour from the rapidly growing system of public high schools—which developed the system in part to enable colleges to efficiently evaluate high school students’ work. Research funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching during the 1900s sought “to measure productivity in higher education.” The result was called the student hour. As an “administrative, reporting, and external monitoring device,” the student hour affected the development of the higher educational bureaucracy that defines not just student work but also the work of their teachers (Shedd 8, 9).⁵ Put simply, the rise of the credit system in the early twentieth century enabled a standardization consistent with dividing professors’ work into categories.

The rise of departments contributed similarly to this new bureaucracy. Before about 1890, all faculty members reported directly to the university president. As universities in this country found their shape, discipline-based departments formed. “The history of academic departments before 1920 has few fixed points,” as historian Roger L. Geiger puts it, but we know that “by about 1910 most appointments of junior faculty members at research universities were made on the recommendation of academic departments” (36, 37). That jump in the graph coincides with a time when departments were gaining controlling authority over the areas of their expertise: teaching, research, and personnel—and when they became sizable structures within a growing bureaucracy.

Departments altered the nature of academic society because they became worlds unto themselves. They offered a space in which individual professors might exercise their ambition to rise, and they also drew the lines of competition for control of resources in the university. Which department would statistics belong to? or the study of Middle Eastern culture? The departments that won such turf wars got more support. And the departments also became units in the prestige economy: being the best in one discipline or another created a new basis for competition among universities. The consequence of all these pressures, says the historian Laurence R. Veysey, was “continual department expansion”—which went along with a steady rise in student enrollment as well (323).

The teaching-research-service triad became visible at the same time that departments were contesting the landscape of a growing, diversifying, and standardizing university. It seems fair to assume that the triad answered some need created by this new organizational structure—and it’s pretty easy to identify such a need. Once the department became its own workplace, it had to meet its own structural needs. The new departments were run in their early days by autocratic heads, who were like mini college presidents with nearly absolute authority in their domains. The heads needed administrators just as university presidents did.

So we can say that the category of service came into being because service was needed by department heads to make departments run—and because the new bureaucratized system encouraged the creation of such neat category divisions. But that didn’t mean that the need for service was met smoothly. In 1939 a group of faculty members in the AAUP chapter at the University of Michigan reported their views of how they should be judged for tenure and promotion. “Since a university should be a co-operative organization,” they said, “it is recommended that faculty members be given proper credit for performance of necessary administrative duties” (qtd. in Wilson 103). This call to recognize service by faculty members has a familiar ring. So does the writers’ observation that extramural service is “of secondary importance” compared with “services [provided] directly to the university.” We see these faculty members identifying a palpable need for intramural service work—and we see them privileging it over the community work that was originally given the name of service.

The need for service—and the invocation of the teaching-research-service triad— expanded along with the university. Enriched by foundation money (as opposed to government money, which became a major player later on), universities continued to grow between the world wars. “The dominance of the graduate research model,” says historian Martin Finkelstein, “was clearly established” by the mid-1940s. As a result, “specialized expertise” became the definition of professorial authority (25; see also Ward). The Cerberus model of the professor as the three-headed performer of teaching, research, and service firmly buttressed this authority.

But that model was not comfortably in place. As the sociologist Logan Wilson observed in a 1942 study of academia that was widely cited at the time, “Teaching, research, miscellaneous administrative and public service functions are recognized everywhere as essential parts of the academic man’s work” (106). But if we close-read this quotation, we see a glaring tension: service is seen as “miscellaneous” but also “everywhere as essential.” How can something be ubiquitous, essential, and miscellaneous at the same time?

We still feel this discomfort today. Wilson went on to observe that “the most critical problem confronted in the social organization of the university is the proper evaluation of faculty services” (112). Cerberus, you could say, had one lagging head—and he still does.

The Cold War Research University and Its Value System

It gets worse. Let’s put service aside for a moment and look just at research. The 2-gram shown in figure 2 tracks the frequency of the word research as it appears in the same source with the word professor:

We see a sharp uptick around the 1940s. This increase coincides with the onset in 1947 of the Cold War, which transformed academia for both better and worse. It also roughly coincides with that second sharp upward turn on the earlier graph that includes service—and that’s no coincidence.

This result points to the effects of the Cold War on the academic profession. The culture of intervention and paranoia that the Cold War spawned has been well documented. It included loyalty oaths, hearings, and the dismissal of more tenured professors than at any time since academic tenure became a feature of the academic landscape (see Schrecker). But even as the Cold War interfered with the workings of academia, it also led to huge increases in university funding—and the mushrooming of research.

The exponential growth of research in our time was essentially a Cold War bargain: the university became the research and development lab for the Department of Defense and, indeed, for the whole country. The government started funding all kinds of academic research, with special emphasis on the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Professors in those fields were given extra money to do research and were allowed to teach less. To prevent intramural rivalries and tensions, and also because research culture had always encompassed all fields, other disciplines were given the same deal: teach less and publish more (Lewontin).

This change was both gradual and inexorable. For example, the teaching load at Stanford during the 1950s was four courses per term, at least twice what it is now. Government investment in the university changed our value system within a generation. Research, which was already king of our world, was given an even higher throne, and it continued to rise. Both professors and universities are now measured according to what is sometimes called knowledge creation or productivity, both of which equal publication.

The system is top-heavy now, and its lack of proportion deforms a lot of lives—including those of graduate students, who have to train to be everything to every possible employer. Even though the Cold War has been over for a generation, we are who we are today because of it. As David Shumway notes in his essay in this cluster, professor and researcher are substantially overlapping identities, and universities fight for their places in ranking systems driven by that fact.

The expectation that professors do more and more research—that they work harder and harder on their disciplinary careers, while maintaining their traditional institutional careers―mirrors the traditional bind faced by many working women. Indeed, some commentators have noticed how institutional service is a feminized form of labor in academia (see Massé and Hogan). Academics are still better rewarded for the research that they do.⁶ The intramural call to service stands at distinct odds with the value system that surrounds not only the faculty but also their institutions—and not just research universities.⁷

So why teaching-research-service? We might look at the order of the terms. In the 1920s, teaching appeared first—but it’s obvious from what I’ve been saying that it does not rank first. Why put teaching first, and why put service there at all? Because the triad elevates subordinate items to a semblance of parity. It’s a rhetorical ruse that denies that teaching, research, and service are in competition—and that research has a big lead. Christopher S. Jencks, coauthor of The Academic Revolution, a still-quoted 1968 sociological study of academia, points out that “[s]uch three-word descriptions tend to imply equal importance and hence that they should get equal time―a fabulous rationale for expanding faculty time committed to administrative work, as has indeed happened.”

This value system is with us until a seismic higher educational event occurs. But let’s be honest with each other. If institutional service needs to be done—and it does—let us not pretend that it’s equivalent to research. The university promotes research for many reasons: that’s the nature of the world in which we live. But the institution, and all of us in it, can reward service, too, if we’re up front about it, and fair. Priorities may contradict in ways that are difficult to reconcile—but we need to discuss them openly if we are to meet our own needs as professionals, teachers, and cohabitants of the same institutional house. Let us honor the work that we do by treating it transparently and truthfully.

This professional identity is not merely the way others in our field recognize us but the way we understand who we are. As I have argued elsewhere, “disciplines produce an identification between the inquirer and the object of inquiry”; “To be a Shakespearean doesn’t just mean to know the works of Shakespeare; it also means to adore them. And as the name ‘Shakespearean’ implies, one derives part of one’s identity from the object of study” (104; 102). Graduate students do not just learn history or English or physics; they learn to be historians, literary scholars, or physicists. The discipline we learn in graduate school defines who we are, and that discipline is a research practice.

Moreover, disciplines also define our audience. We learn how to write for that audience and that we should write for it. It is true that tenure requirements usually specify that publication be in peer-reviewed venues, but it is not clear that this fact inhibits academics from writing for a larger public. Rather, their sense of their research is the inhibition. The insular character of most academic publication contributes to the sense that such writing is insignificant, as Menand illustrates. He publishes constantly, but not usually in academic venues. Thus his writing is exempted from the “indifference and hostility” he believes most people hold toward “academic writing.” He asserts, “I can’t think of a single person I know who entered college around the time I did, in 1969, and who did not go on to become a professor, who has the slightest interest in . . . what goes on within university humanities departments.” Menand blames “credentialism”—in effect, training in research―for creating “a wall . . . between academic intellectuals and everyone else.” In this reading, the activity of research actually inhibits interest in the research product.

Research as process is one of the chief requirements for academic discipline. It was originally rooted in the assumptions of the scientific revolution and in a simple positivism that held all knowledge as valuable. The research university, with its disciplinary divisions and its principle of covering the universe of knowledge, was founded on it. Both the MA and the PhD were originally conceived as culminating in the production of a contribution of original research, differing mainly in the scale of said contribution. Thus, even though as late as 1969 nearly half of all English department faculty members above the rank of instructor did not hold the doctorate (Wilcox), it still does not mean that these faculty members were untrained in research.

University faculty members have always been trained mainly as researchers, and not directly as teachers. Back when publication was not demanded of most professors, there may have been a significant disjunction between training and career. Yet teachers trained as researchers were assumed to be experts in ways that those without such training were not. The extent to which university faculty members have been understood as professionals has depended on this expertise, which schoolteachers, who have been largely deprived of professional status, are not assumed to hold. Professors were assumed to be engaged in the process of research even if they were not publishing.

In theory, the link between teaching and research goes back to nineteenth-century German educational reformers, who, according to Jürgen Habermas, “were able to think of the scientific process as a narcissistically self-enclosed circular process of research and teaching because the philosophy of German idealism by its very nature required a unity of teaching and research. . . . Schelling, in his Lectures on the Methodology of Academic Study, demonstrated that the form in which a philosophical idea is transmitted pedagogically arises out of its construction” (110). It is unclear, however, just how influential this theory was in the United States, although its influence is often taken for granted, as it is in Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins. As Laurence Veysey shows, “German higher education, however incompletely understood, became the focus of extravagant excitement and admiration. . . . An insufficiently differentiated Germany, partly real and partly imaginary, became the symbol for all scientific claims upon American education” (128). This invocation of Germany largely ignored the idealism of German theorists and instead emphasized the “painstaking investigation of particulars, both in laboratories and in such areas as historical documents” (127). Germany conceived in this way served as the model for the research vision of university reform in the United States.

Americans were much more likely to think of teaching and research as practically linked through new types of instruction that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the laboratory, the lecture, and the seminar. These new forms of instruction displaced the recitation, which had been dominant in old colleges with curricula rooted in classical languages and the theory of mental discipline. While the lecture was at best a report of research previously conducted (and, as Veysey observes, it could be used by any professor regardless of personal involvement in research), the laboratory and the seminar were understood as spaces in which research took place. They “became the most characteristic methods of instruction for the future scientist or scholar” (153). Keith Hoskin argues that modern academic disciplines owe their existence to the laboratory, the seminar, and the classroom, all of which date to no earlier than the late eighteenth century (280–95).

The vision of the university as defined by pure research was only one of three such regimes of reform current in late-nineteenth-century America. According to Veysey, only the newly created Johns Hopkins University and Clark University were primarily envisioned in terms of pure research, and even Hopkins’s first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, resorted to broader goals in explaining his institution’s mission. In addition to pure research, educational reformers envisioned the new university in terms of utility on the one hand, and liberal culture on the other. Those who championed utility advocated for universities that would serve the public good, whose orientation was toward “real life,” and were themselves “democratic” (Veysey 60, 62). Cornell and Stanford were both founded on versions of this vision, and it was the primary rhetoric used by Harvard’s transformative president Charles W. Eliot. It lay behind the elective curriculum, which Eliot pioneered, and behind the famous Wisconsin Idea, popularized by Lincoln Steffens in 1909, “to teach anybody—anything—anywhere” (qtd. in Veysey 107). Those who advocated for liberal culture as the model for educational reform opposed both the practicality of the utility model and the minute investigation that the vision of research entailed. They rejected the scientific model as too narrow and the utilitarian one as debased. Strongly influenced by Matthew Arnold’s ideas of culture, proponents of liberal culture urged a curriculum built around great works and the study of past civilizations. In the early twentieth century, liberal arts colleges emerged based on this model, but Yale and Princeton also adopted it (Veysey 209, 233–47).¹

It is easy—indeed, a bit too easy—to see how these three visions cashed out in different types of institutions. The Morrill Act, which created the land-grant institutions, required instruction in agriculture and mechanical arts, defining these institutions as practical. Liberal culture was the dominant model behind the liberal arts colleges, which were often what the smaller old colleges became, while research would seem to be the model that informed the research university. But Veysey’s point is that the American university as it developed in the twentieth century was influenced by all three visions. His focus is on elite private and public institutions, almost all of which today would easily be classified as research universities, but those include nonetheless elements of utility and liberal culture in their missions and curricula. In the humanities in particular, it is clear that the vision of liberal culture remained influential even though research was dominant.

Utility, research, and liberal culture also seem to line up with other divisions that characterize contemporary American higher education. James Sosnoski has observed that within departments, utility manifests itself in basic skills (or service) courses such as freshman composition or elementary foreign languages, liberal culture in the content of the humanities majors for undergraduates, and research in graduate education, where what is taught is “a mode of inquiry.”

Utility, research, and liberal culture also seem to line up with service, research, and teaching, service being another word advocates of utility used to name their goal, and teaching being at the heart of liberal culture vision. But utility does not fit very well with service as a requirement for tenure and promotion, since such a requirement is almost always for internal service—though as Cassuto observes, earlier invocations of “teaching, research, and service” did treat the latter as something aimed outward. Moreover, the vision of pure research does not correspond exactly to publication requirements, and teaching even less to the vision of liberal culture. The visions of service, research, and liberal culture in the end made themselves felt across the spectrum of different types of institutions and in many different practices within them.

The idea that the university should be a site of knowledge production, fundamental to the research vision, eventually became dominant, even if the value of that knowledge was understood primarily in practical terms. Veysey notes that liberal culturists, who often styled themselves men of letters, tended to be found primarily in English departments, but they were not usually in control of them (183). Philology, which understood itself as a science, was the dominant method of literary study at the turn of the century, and most English professors at elite institutions thought of themselves as researchers. The requirement of the PhD for most university faculty members assured that they would be trained in research regardless of whether they continued to be active researchers.

Under the assumptions of positivism that governed philology and literary history, all contributions had value. In principle, then, there was no limit on how much research might be needed. However, one of the conditions for the emergence of the New Criticism and the shift from literary history to interpretation was a widespread sense that new contributions to literary history were often not valuable. Still, the absolute quantity of publications in the 1930s was relatively small. After the war, as faculties expanded, the number of literary publications did as well. But many of these new contributions were no longer literary historical but hermeneutical. While they may have continued to use a positivist rhetoric, the number of competing interpretations of major works illustrated that there was no agreed-upon method for determining a single correct meaning—which implicitly raised the question of what kind of knowledge was being created.

By 1958 Harry Levin could already remark that the investigation of Moby-Dick might almost be said to have taken the place of whaling among the industries of New England (vi). By the late 1960s it was clear that industries had grown up around major works and authors, and that the value of new interpretations of them was ambiguous at best. While whaling had produced commodities that had significant exchange value, most of the products of literary research were not commodities in this sense. They were produced without direct compensation and did not in general generate profit for their publishers―which were usually nonprofits. And, under the new hermeneutic model, it was harder to justify the value of all new interpretations. In practice, an interpretation’s value lay in its teachability, which in this context is a kind of utility, showing again how in the American university, categories are hard to keep apart. The value of some of these interpretations has been demonstrated in the same way that the value of literary works typically is, by their being read and reread over an extended period. Texts such as Norton’s critical editions are evidence of the continued value of many different interpretations of the same work.

When fewer scholars published, those who did achieved a greater distinction as a result. Publication is still the chief means by which departments can improve their reputations, but with so many more scholars competing, success has become so much harder. The problem with the research product today is that there is far more of it than there is a readership. While the increasing demand for publication means that published research continues to be cited, a great percentage of it is never cited.² Moreover, there is a difference between citing something and actually reading it. While writing in academic journals has never had an audience beyond the academy, books of criticism by academics were at one time reviewed in magazines and newspapers and did have a more general readership. Menand’s complaint about the isolation of academic intellectuals is a recognition of this narrowed audience, but his explanation does not hold water. Earlier PhDs were not inhibited by their research from communicating more broadly. The problem rather has been cultural anti-intellectualism and the continued dumbing down of journalism. More recently, however, other challenges have occurred. The exchange value of all writing has declined as authors have become content providers. There is now less of a professional future for academics writing for the public than for those writing for one another.

There is no easy solution to the problems that beset research in the humanities today, but there are measures that might help. For one, the value of our research needs to be explained and defended to those outside our disciplines, a task we have historically neglected, perhaps because it has been perceived as service. For another, an effort might be made to tie research more directly to undergraduate teaching, making the connection between the two a matter of practice rather than theory. Finally, given the dubious worth (judged purely in terms of reach or influence) of much that is published, perhaps it is time to question the significance of publication statistics. Maybe we should be encouraging faculty members to write less, but more consequentially.

Ryan questions the commonplace notion that teaching and research are entangled and synergistic activities in the academy. For Ryan, assuming that teaching and research are self-reinforcing is a sleight of hand that obscures the reality that “our universities are built not on a single foundation but on distinct philosophies of education that stand in uneasy relation to one another.” She historicizes these distinct foundations to better understand the friction between competing ideologies of higher education and then identifies three tensions that create friction at this moment: the discourse questioning the use-value of a liberal arts education in a time of high tuition costs and high student debt; the increasing stratification and separation of activities and their identification with particular sets of people (researchers, teachers, administrators); and the deepening differentiation of the skills needed to be a researcher and to be a teacher that results from the current emphasis on teaching outcomes (“assessment”) and the professionalization of teaching. Ryan calls for a redefinition of teaching as student-centered, inquiry-based, and problem-oriented, and she opines that asking faculty members to pay attention to how research on student learning affects student learning may push us toward a redefinition of research itself.

Shumway puts a different kind of pressure on the meaning and value of research in the humanities. He exposes the conundrum that the work of scholars in the academic humanities now has trouble finding readership and visibility inside and outside the academy, and yet research productivity has become increasingly important to an academic humanist’s portfolio. By historicizing the distinction between research as process and research as product, Shumway illuminates how from the mid–nineteenth century to the mid–twentieth century, “professors were assumed to be engaged in the process of research even if they were not publishing”―indeed, that was their expertise and their identity―and how since the 1970s the value of research has been attached to the commodification of its products. In his application of Laurence R. Veysey’s triadic reading of competing models based on “utility, research and liberal culture” in the history of higher education in the United States, Shumway observes that the three models loosely correspond to the prevailing service, research, and teaching missions of higher education. The effect of this alignment is the undervaluation of interpretive and critical research in the liberal arts—as opposed to the professional fields, where research can be seen to meet utilitarian needs, and to the basic sciences, where research can be seen as “pure” knowledge production.

Given the growth in the number of articles and books published in the humanities and the corresponding decrease in readership, Shumway asks us to reconsider the research mission of higher education and its reification of the research product. On the one hand, he enjoins faculty to become better advocates for the value of research in the humanities; on the other, he calls for more direct ties between undergraduate teaching and research and less focus on quantified productivity. “[P]erhaps,” he concludes, “it is time to question the significance of publication statistics. Maybe we should be encouraging faculty members to write less, but more consequentially.”

Cassuto directs us backward, historicizing the tricolon phrase to parse the term service and the current status of the work to which it refers. He reminds us that in the early and mid–nineteenth century the essential activity of the academy was service to students through teaching and mentoring. The professionalization of college faculty members began in the decades before the Civil War, when professors in the United States sought “disciplinary training” and credentials in Europe. It intensified when the institutionalization of the German model of the research university and the founding of professional organizations such as the MLA remade higher education into a prestige economy. As specialized academic departments were formed in the early decades of the twentieth century, they needed the administrative services provided by faculty members; as a result, the concept of service emerged as distinct and focused on the practical. During the decades of the Cold War, the infusion of government money into research universities upped the expectations of scholarly productivity across all departments, further skewing the differential value accorded teaching, research, and service in personnel evaluations. Cassuto’s deep historical reading concludes with a call for greater directness in naming service for what it is―the least valued of the three domains of faculty obligations―and for greater transparency in valuing all the labor that goes into institutional life.

Ryan, Shumway, and Cassuto bring important insights to the components of our collective mantra, recognizing the complexities of category confusion in everyday academic practice and in the attempt to historicize the categories. Let me add further comments on the frustrations of distinguishing categories from one another.

In the humanities, we have a model of graduate training that becomes troubling for those who advise large numbers of students in any one year or over a succession of years. Unlike in the STEM fields, the work of graduate students does not directly advance a faculty adviser’s research agenda. Although professors in the humanities learn much in the process of advising students, they rarely if ever share bylines and authorship with their graduate students. In fact, they often work with students whose fields or subfields are different, even far afield from their own. And yet, at most institutions this work with graduate students does not count in the teaching obligation. It is indeed teaching, but it is often counted as service instead.

There is another kind of category confusion emergent in these times. I think of certain activities in what is called the digital humanities: designing new platforms; creating interactive online knowledge communities; organizing crowdsourcing; building online archives and sites; assembling, marking up, and curating data, big and small; composing new multimedia modes of scholarly communication. All these activities (and many others sustaining born-digital and digitally environed inquiry, argument, visualization, computation, display, and communication) constitute scholarship. They entail setting new questions, pursuing altered lines of inquiry, shifting methodologies and theoretical frameworks, and assembling a research team. This work is also research-based and participatory teaching, often involving undergraduate and graduate students and others in humanities collaborations; it is also service to the field, and to the academy. This work is online, in repositories, for other scholars, seasoned and emergent, to draw on in their own research and teaching. It is there for students to access and incorporate in their projects. It is there for the broader public. Such category confusion taxes systems of evaluation. (And this is where the MLA’s 2012 “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media” and 2013 “Guidelines for Authors of Digital Resources” become increasingly important in personnel processes.)

Since Ryan, Shumway, and Cassuto call on us to rethink the tripartite structure of faculty work and identity, let me add another call, apropos of the domain of service. In this instance, I want to confuse categories rather than resolve confusions.

Administrators of all kinds turn out page after page of written material in the course of their service. This corpus of work is commonly understood to be bureaucratic writing. But what if we understood this corpus differently, as part of the scholarly and intellectual achievement of the person in the position? Much of it may be read and even appreciated as short-form essays—proposals written to launch new programs, curricular- or research-oriented; documents produced for program review; documents written in personnel cases. These kinds of documents are often collaboratively produced, but collaborative inquiry and analysis is increasingly important in the academic humanities, and our evaluation guidelines and procedures are evolving to account for this mode of communicating knowledge.

Which leads me to a final comment on the MLA session that led to the essays before you. A robust discussion followed these presentations, and the passion of the large number of people who attended the session suggests the importance of engaging this commonplace teaching-research-service mantra directly and often. The dominant concerns in these exchanges focused on the expansion of administrative roles, the call after call to do more service with fewer and fewer resources―human and budgetary. People spoke to the requests to serve on or chair committees, task forces, and targeted initiatives; to administer programs; to serve in leadership positions in professional organizations. Equally important, the discussion focused on the increasing pressures on non-tenure-track faculty members to take up more and more service obligations, as well as the way that service obligations in the humanities are often a gendered affair.

On this latter point, I have observed over the last fifteen years that the position of the chair or program director has trended female in the humanities. That is not necessarily a negative thing. Not long ago, say in the 1980s, feminist academics and others pushed to break down the barriers to white women and women and men of color advancing in leadership positions. But now women, white and of color, are being tapped for leadership positions within and outside their departments and programs with ever-increasing frequency. Further, since the majority of faculty members in contingent and non-tenure-track positions are women, and since they, too, are being asked to do service to their units and they are in vulnerable positions from which to challenge service assignments, the gendered politics of allocating service across the faculty can no longer be a subject about which we do not speak.

The central image is a humanlike being whose head appears to be taken up as a single eye. The figure itself seems to be a commentary on the fact of looking or the power of images: is it saying that the figure has been taken over by images or that the figure represents a visionary capable of feats of representational power? Are the nearby images making some form of obeisance to the larger central figure, or is their position in relation to it accidental? Indeed, in this whole set of images, are we to read each image on its own, or are there threads to follow or constellations to grasp? Or may all these approaches be deployed simultaneously?

Although these images have been treated as art pieces by at least one scholar (see Vastokas and Vastokas), here I will treat them as a mode of writing. In proposing that these enunciations be seen as writing, even literature, I am recalling the early Derrida’s expansive notion of writing in Of Grammatology (107–09) while also invoking a notion of the alterity of the other. However, and as will shortly become clear, the specific form of alterity involved here is grounded materially—through the concept of mode of production—in a way that does not allow it to easily fold into the generalized discussions of identity politics that circulate widely. So before proceeding I need to backtrack.

Indigenous people, like Anishnabwe, of the mid and far north of “Canada” base their way of life off a gathering and hunting mode of production, or what Glen Coulthard has called a bush mode of production (171). Across the boundary of mode of production all certainties dissolve: time, space, and subjectivity become organized around different principles and values. Fredric Jameson early in his theoretical work positioned the concept of mode of production as the third and widest horizon of interpretation (88–102). While literary theory invokes mode of production to set a literary text in a historical context involving some seismic shift in capitalism, or more occasionally in the transition to capitalism, in anthropology mode of production remains a marker of the sharpest or most distinct social difference. There is no other that is more other than those who remain attached to the distinct way of life associated with a different mode of production. The bush mode of production (or gathering and hunting) is even more different from contemporary capitalism than the agricultural, tithe, or neolithic modes of production, including such modes that were also colonized (see Wolfe, whose broad understanding of the concept and whose studies of the peasant forms remain invaluable).

The bush mode of production involves values, ways of seeing, ways of being, laws, gender relations, decision-making processes, and forms of writing that are markedly different from those we take for granted. Hence, if this paper has a modest program, it would be to recognize what we do not know. We do not know how to “read” the Teaching Rocks, because although we may recognize them—or choose to categorize them—as a form of writing, we are illiterate in that form. The “we” here would include non-Anishnabwe who do not know the protocols of interpretation associated with these inscriptions on rock. Consider figure 2.

Multiple utterances, inscriptions, folded over each other, some faded and in palimpsest-like relation, others sharp and distinct. Human and animal; possible clan symbols; spirit journey vessels; and in their midst, carved around a crack in the rock, a curvaceous, female-gendered image. It is said that the sound of water once emanated from the fault, that the image may be a guardian or at least positioned at the entrance of another world. She is constructed around a feature (the crack) of the rock itself. The image also recalls the notion of earth as mother that has some currency among many bush people. Here certainly we have a representation where the substance of the representation (image of a woman), the material of the representation (along a crack in a rock), and the subject of the representation (the earth as mother / mother as earth) collapse into each other: the earth as woman is woman as earth.

To show that such complexity is not unique to that image, I will refer to another. In figure 3 the turtle invokes “turtle island,” an image or notion or legend that Haudenosaunee and Anishnabwe alike use to describe and understand the world: the earth is an island carried on the back of a turtle. And in this image, again, we have the substance (image of a turtle), the material (rock, or the earth itself), and the subject of the representation (turtle island) all indistinguishable from one another:

I offer this partial, inadequate reading of these images to make three interrelated points: that most of us, settler colonials, do not know how to read these writings; that nevertheless “we” can know enough to know that there is a strong representational power to these writings; and that the use of the terms simple or complex (including my own above) is generally irrelevant to interpretive gestures except as part of the apparatus of colonization (in which everything to do with the bush mode of production is “simple”). To actually make a strong interpretation of these writings we would need to talk to someone: a spiritually knowledgeable Anishnabwe teacher. But, finally, my real purpose here is to raise the issue of what has happened to the Teaching Rocks, what is happening all around us to similar places, and what therefore is happening to the people associated with these places.

For many years (as I have been told by my friends from Curve Lake First Nation), the Teaching Rocks were buried under moss. Elders would bring initiates and offer tobacco, tell stories, and show specific images, deploying them in healing ways. Then in 1924 a local, nonnative person “discovered” the Teaching Rocks. All the moss was removed, and in classic colonial nominalist practice the site became known as the Peterborough Petroglyphs and also became a favored picnic hike for local people, both nonnative and Anishnabwe. The sound of water gurgling underneath acted as accompaniment to those who visited. But, exposed to the elements and especially to acid rain, the images began to erode. Good-natured, helpful, non-Anishnabwe grew concerned about the immanent disappearance of this powerful sacred site. Meetings were held. Funds were raised. A solution emerged. A protective structure was built around one core area of the Teaching Rocks, in which all the above images are found. Now “protected,” the teaching rocks can be visited at Petroglyph Provincial Park (established in 1976), encased in the structure pictured in figure 4.

The sound of water faded and disappeared as this structure was built. There are other images around the building that are not so protected. As well as the physical structure, explanatory signs “contain” the logic of the Teaching Rocks, telling viewers that, for example, there are some number of similar images found around the Great Lakes: categorization as interpretation. In the period of political decolonization that emerged at around the same time (the 1970s) and especially under the impetus of a push to aboriginal self-government in the 1980s, the site has come to be managed by nearby Curve Lake First Nation, though it remains a provincial park. Traditional teachers and users of the site have keys and can visit and practice their spiritual activities away from the objectifying gaze of visitors or tourists. But protection itself, conservation in a museum or conservation on site, can also act as one of the most powerful destructive mechanisms of totalizing power. Safe, contained, renamed, surrounded, preserved, embalmed, sterilized: an evocative challenge to our mode of writing opening onto a substantial questioning of our mode of being is here repositioned as a cultural curiosity, the object of a settler colonial, imperial gaze.

Consider and compare another set of teaching rocks (fig. 5), images located in roughly the northwest corner of Anishnabwe territory, also known as the Manitoba Petroforms, in Whiteshell Provincial Park in my home province. Here, the images are produced not by carving into the rock but by piling stones on top of the large flat surfaces of boreal, igneous rock that serve as canvas or writing paper. It is as if these sets of images exist in some relation or tension with each other, a mirroring or reflection.

Here too we find one of several turtles, where again the tripartite elements of representation become inseparable. Scattered across an area of several acres, the distinct images pose the same problems as their eastern relatives: do we read each image as a singularity? Do we tell stories that connect multiple images or all of them? Does a single image sit in several constellations? Among snake, spirit vessel, clan figures, we find, again, the mother that is earth. Partly covered in growth, made of about twenty rocks, she lies flat, simultaneously sinking into and emerging from the earth: she is called Bannock Point Woman. She has arms, legs, head, breasts, and a rounded belly. Is this mother the earth? Is this earth the mother? Is every earth also mother? Is every mother also earth? No doubt many present and past visitors do not know of the spirit “double” that exists far to the east, and, taken together, these earth mothers gently but insistently question prevailing notions of the value of uniqueness and of the establishment of genealogical relations.

This site is in a large provincial park. It is marked by sparse signage and accessed through a trail from a parking lot off a little-used paved road. There is no structure, not even a fence, surrounding the site, though a bit of signage at the parking lot reminds visitors to respect the images, which are vulnerable to the boots of visitors. That the images remain intact is a modest testament to the respectful behavior of the province’s citizens. The province’s leadership, however, does not evidence such a positive ethical example. Among the most powerful sacred sites in northern Manitoba (Inninuwak/Cree territory), two, the Footprints (figs. 6 and 7) and Wasagejak’s Chair (fig. 8), were flooded in the profiteering interests of the export of hydroelectric power.

The story of the Footprints is a cautionary tale. The site originally had a number of footprint-shaped and
-arranged indentations going straight up a sheer wall of rock (the story associated with it tells of the trickster Wasagejak getting his head stuck in a moose skull and running to shake it off until he ran into the rock, which he then walked up). In the 1970s the site was flooded as part of a hydroelectric grand project called the Churchill River Diversion and Lake Winnipeg Regulation. Two of the Footprints were removed and set in a concrete slab, which sat at a variety of destinations until it was returned to rest on the bank of the river near its original site. Although there is evidence of traditional activity at the site, at least some local elders believe these are not the real Footprints but a copy, attesting in my view to the fact that they feel the site has lost its power.

The story of Wasagejak’s Chair is easier to tell. It was flooded as part of the same project. I have no pictures of the chair, but in figure 8 you can see a representation of the void it has left behind.

The Teaching Rocks, northeast and northwest, have been constructed by indigenous peoples, specifically by hunting people. The Footprints and Wasagejak’s Chair may have been found, constructed by people, or constructed by more-than-human, supernatural beings. Figure 8 shows rather starkly what we have left to learn from these powerful sites and moves me toward a theoretical point.

I deploy the term totalization to describe the social and cultural processes that assiduously refashion the bush mode of production. The term signifies the transformation of bush ways of embodying space, time, subjectivity, landscape, relations, ways of seeing, and modes of being into forms that are conducive to the accumulation of capital and to the expansion of the commodity form. While these two forces were well known to Karl Marx, he did not specifically theorize the state as another instrument of totalization, as a structure that sets into place the preconditions that will allow for, indeed call for, capital accumulation. A state can also, of course, be totalitarian: that is, and here I can recall Hannah Arendt, a state form that relies extensively on a police-surveillance apparatus to ensure the production of politically docile bodies (447, 457). Totalization and totalitarianism are distinct processes. When they conjoin, as they sometimes do, they make for a particular and historically specific, dangerous hegemonic form. To some extent, the regime of George W. Bush moved the United States in such a direction. Contemporary settler colonies almost always rely on some combination of both forms. In Canada, what could be more totalitarian than residential schools? In Canada, what could be more totalizing than the day schools that both predated and came after residential schools? The state-produced and monitored form of relating to time (say, clock time) has been socially naturalized and becomes a presupposition that everyone is expected to conform to: totalization. The systems of coercion used to ensure that indigenous people do not miss their appointments: totalitarianism.

Both the brutality of planned and orchestrated destruction of sacred sites, that is, totalitarianism, and the “accidental” generational “forgetting” of sacred places, that is, totalization, are busily doing their work erasing, containing, and sterilizing as many of these sites from the settler colonial landscape as they can and as quickly as possible. That many such sites remain in the mid and far north of Canada is only a signifier that work remains undone. Consider the sites in figure 9 from the western arctic, Northwest Territories, or Denendeh.

This waterfall is far up the Redstone River, which flows into the Dehcho (Mackenzie River) from the Mackenzie Mountains. A female spirit is said to reside or be embodied at this site. It is an unmarked site and not frequently visited. The waters are thought to have healing power. The “blackness” that is seen in the rock to my untrained eye indicates a possible presence of oil or natural gas in the limestone that could be extracted through fracking. It is therefore entirely possible that this site will, at some future point, be disappeared by a bulldozer or drill rig. And consider figure 10.

This sacred site sits at the foot of Red Dog Mountain on the Begadeh (Keele River), which also flows from the Mackenzie Mountains to the Dehcho. It is the subject of a powerful ancient narrative, still told by mountain Dene (Begade Shuhtagotine). Hunters traveling up the river by jet boat leave bullets or tobacco or coins at this place as they pass it.

Figure 11 is a photograph taken on the Dehcho itself but quite far upstream, between the communities of Norman Wells and Fort Good Hope: outlined along the side of a cliff is Wolverine, a powerful being in Dene narrative and philosophy. The small pointed rock outcropping is the tail, and if one follows that down the cliff a brief distance, the head and legs of Wolverine become clear. The site is known as the place where Wolverine turned to stone, in reference to an event embedded in the lengthy story cycle involving that character. As with the waterfall, as with Red Dog Mountain, there are no markers. In my many travels by boat from Norman Wells to Fort Good Hope, I passed the place where the Wolverine turned to stone without knowing of it. The fact that these sites are unmarked both protects and endangers them: they are intentionally visited by relatively few people, mostly local Dene or Métis, and therefore not disturbed. A proposed Mackenzie gas pipeline would lead to a huge construction project near this site from which it could be damaged or destroyed.

When the memory of these sites is lost, the sites are lost: they are irreparably tied to their place in memory. While some of these may be mapped by, for example, the very good ethnographers working with the Northwest Territories Heritage Museum, it is possible that my own work may be the only documentation of their existence (needless to say, this dramatizes their deeply precarious status). And of course this small sample only gestures toward the many other similar sites embedded in the landscape. Negotiating an ethical relationship to these sites must be premised on face-to-face interaction with the people who know the stories. Advertising the sites through park structures can lead to protection but also sterilization. Keeping knowledge of the sites restricted can lead to accidental destruction. The solution offered by the Footprints is not an acceptable middle ground. Each site must be placed under the stewardship of the indigenous people who read it, who themselves must decide how to balance official protection, desecration, commercial value, continued spiritual uses, and so on.

Another example, from Nunavut, land of the Inuit, in the eastern portion of the arctic, raises similar and additional issues, including the broad question of how we see as epistemology (or how we “train . . . the imagination for epistemological performance,” in Spivak’s phrasing [122]). Halfway up the “cut,” or ledge, that traverses this cliff face a cave can be seen, itself briefly obscuring the cut. The path leading up to the cave is known as the Blind Man’s Walk (fig. 12), owing to a lengthy and powerful story cycle involving a central character who, after much travail that in part left him blind, walks across the ice, up along the ledge, and through the cave, at which point he regains his sight.

Elsewhere I have commented on the desire that “we” might traverse this passage and come to see the world with newly reenchanted eyes (I note the influence of Michael Taussig’s work on this idea). A few blasts or drills to merely explore for the minerals that might be behind this rock face will be enough to erase this marker forever. The dominant social order is more likely to engage this place in the search for abstract wealth than to walk through it in an attempt to stretch the boundaries that circumvent the forms of meaning that circulate to entrench the established order. That is, do we see the possibility for capital accumulation to take place here (in which case we remain blinded by the promise of a certain restricted form of wealth as capital), or do we see the possibility of another form of wealth associated with another form of seeing?

To be clear, placing signs to mark the fact that these are signs is not what ethics demands, is not an adequate ethical response. Developing an ethical relation with indigenous communities in which asking and listening are the primary and foundational actions would allow for the stories that unfold the significance of these sites to be told. The continuing capitalist colonial conquest of the Americas carries and rests on a set of presuppositions that foreclose such asking and listening. The bottom line is to say that more lands should be under the control of more bush peoples, but this view challenges the logic of primitive accumulation that underwrites the global economic forces pressing on these peoples, these sites, this knowing, these practices, this reading, these ways of seeing.

Because the capitalist colonial conquest of the Americas is not some long-past set of events but rather a continuing and urgent politics, this analysis can finally move to its conclusion. A final few images will anchor this element.

The Keeyask (Gull) Rapids on the Kitchi Sipi (literally the “great” or “grand river” but on the maps the “Nelson River”) in northern Manitoba (fig. 13) are the last natural spawning grounds of an endangered form of sturgeon. Along the river’s banks at this site, but not found by the archaeologists who searched for it, is an ancient, sacred offering stone. Figure 14 is an image of what the future holds for this place, the Keeyask Dam, a project designed by a crown utility, Manitoba Hydro, largely to produce electrical power for export to the United States.

Although the project involved a “partnership” agreement with elected leaders of four of the nearby First Nations, the agreement is flawed in many respects and will likely produce few benefits (a similar agreement for a nearby dam and First Nations community has led to an enormous debt load there, not likely to be alleviated for decades). Along with other nongovernmental organizations, a group of locally and university-based activists, to which I belong, engaged in a struggle through public hearings to prevent this project (fig. 15).

Under the name the Concerned Fox Lake Grassroots Citizens, this group made a strong effort to articulate the view of traditional harvesters and land-based Inniniwak (bush Cree) that the project was destructive and unnecessary. We spoke, but we were not heard. The Manitoba Clean Environment Commission recommended construction of the project, the province agreed, and the construction is, as this is being written, under way.

The image of Keeyask Rapids in figure 16 would reasonably be understood or seen as a representation of what we used to call “nature.” It is not an image of nature. It is an image of history. Perhaps history in Jameson’s sweeping sense:

History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them. (102)

We refuse to be done with the issues created by restructuring the hydrology of northern Manitoba that will suit the exigencies of a regime based on capital accumulation. Too much is at stake. In the early summer of 2015 as I toured artists around hydroaffected communities, I met with the Inniniwak elder who had drawn me into this struggle, Noah Massan, and documented the devastation to his trapline, which I had visited in an untouched state the year before. Together, in tears, we vowed to fight on. Later that month we met with sixty people, academics and activists, nonaboriginal and indigenous, and planned the next phase of our struggle. The work of mourning must necessarily be brief: the work of alliance building, of dissidence and opposition, struggle and resistance, remains too urgent to allow for rest. Negotiating these sites involves the struggle to remember that there may be things in this world of a different kind of value that cannot be discussed in the terms proposed by the logic of capital accumulation and its brutal henchman colonialism. These sites, and the interpretive powers of the people who read them, open a world where the mode of valorization itself acts as a check on the avarice-laden assumptions of the dominant logic. May the bush sites and the bush stories discussed here open a window onto that world.

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper . . .

              . . . it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth. (stanza 2)

Rather than saying that poetry has no effect on the world, Auden is actually making a different and more interesting point, namely that poetry has no direct effect, no executive power, the kind of decisional authority that delivers verdicts, and delivers clear and unmistakable outcomes. Poetry is not clarity driven and outcome producing, at least not on its own. As a tissue of words, it is by nature dependent on the interpretations that readers put on it, negotiated and implemented among those who collectively decide what sort of life it would have in the world. That dependency does not make it powerless. On the contrary, simply having the ear of others makes poetry a nontrivial force, and, Auden further suggests, this force is best captured by the form of the gerund, a grammatical construct that takes the form of the noun but is, in fact, no less a verb. The gerunds here are “making” and “happening,” and each of these is in turn embedded in a larger syntactical unit—“valley of its making” and “way of happening”—at which point they can speak, like a mouth. Poetry, then, does have an outcome-producing capability, but on one condition: it would have to become part of a larger process, a larger network, that allows it to switch from noun to verb, which is to say, to function not only as scripted content but also as an unscripted and as-yet-to-be-developed intervening force, with a different kind of consequentialness in the world.

Auden’s poem to Yeats is not usually read in conjunction with Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. Latour distinguishes between two forms of association, practiced by intermediaries and by mediators—the former, passive vehicles, rubber stamps, that transmit prior decisions without altering them; and the latter, networked agents that dynamically alter the relation between input and output in any social aggregate (37–42). In this essay, I would like to draw on this concept of networked agency to propose a way of thinking about literature as a practical force changing the fate even of those not ordinarily thought of as readers. It is the presence of networks, locally based and user generated, that multiplies the contexts for action and multiplies the chances each participant has to produce a nontrivial outcome. Participating in this way, literature becomes both input bearing and input receiving, not only being acted on but also becoming an actor itself, a mediator, intervening in situations where neither the solutions nor even the nature of the problems are self-evident, and where regular decision-making bodies, including those with punitive powers, might come up short.

The question, of course, is where to find such networks in which literature could play such a mediating role. My short answer, and I hope it is a little shocking because it is so obvious, is that the university could in fact be an experimental site for this kind of user-generated network and that teaching might turn out to be the activity with the most outreach potential. This is a surprisingly undertheorized aspect of what we all do. For this essay, I will concentrate on a small subset, namely the teaching that we do outside the traditional classroom, bringing us into contact with students we do not ordinarily encounter. I am thinking especially of the ways higher education might intersect with the criminal justice system, in the form of the teaching done under the rubric of a program called Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI).

An ATI is any form of activity other than jail time that can be required of those convicted of felonies or misdemeanors. Given the well-documented abuses of United States prisons, ATI is a high priority for the White House. Many cities have such a program. (New York City leads the way, boasting an ATI rehabilitation rate of sixty percent.) According to a study commissioned by the city, New York

has expanded the network of actors in the courtroom to encourage the use of alternative sentences. City officials have created an ATI system that includes not only programs for offenders, but also court representatives whose job is to persuade even reluctant judges, assistant DAs, and public defenders to use these programs routinely in appropriate cases. As a result, the ATI system plays a dual role in the criminal justice process, trying to shape plea bargains and sentencing decisions in court as well as administering the sentences themselves. (Porter, Lee, and Lutz 4)

Active both inside the courtroom and outside, the ATI has vastly expanded the network of actors involved in turning offenders from criminals to ordinary citizens. Restorative justice rather than punitive justice is the guiding principle here, and community groups play a crucial role in coming up with alternatives to jail time. New York City’s ATI is targeted at four groups: the general population, substance abusers, women, and youth. Programs in other cities tend to be more limited; the one in New Haven that I participated in focused only on youth. In exchange for reduced sentences, juvenile delinquents came to campus once a week for an hour to discuss literature, accompanied by Yale students and a representative from the program Community Partners in Action.

Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery was a big hit with this group, and short stories in general are probably the best assignments. Still, it might be interesting to try out some nonfictional prose, perhaps The Autobiography of Malcolm X, especially the section where he writes about all the readings that he did in the prison library: from Herodotus to W. E. B. Du Bois, from genetics to world history. And, even though it might seem counterintuitive, some poetry might work as well. I would put Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos in that category.

Pound was incarcerated, from May to November 1945, at the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center, or DTC, at Pisa, because of his pro-Fascist Radio Rome broadcasts. His Pisan Cantos were written there. He was initially kept in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage (fig. 1) but was moved indoors after three weeks and even given a homemade writing table, made out of a packing box.

The other inmates were offenders from the army, mostly African Americans. Pound writes about one of them, Louis Till, in Pisan Cantos: “And Till was hung yesterday / for murder and rape with trimmings” (qtd. in Terrell, 74.171–72). It is a casual reference, but Till’s name would come up again in a far more explosive context: in 1955 his fourteen-year-old son, Emmett, would be tortured and murdered in Mississippi after whistling at a white woman. The acquittal of the perpetrators made Emmett Till the rallying cry for an entire generation of civil rights activists. The Pisan Cantos could not have made this particular connection, but it is one that any Internet search today would make impossible not to see.

Many of the guards at the DTC were also African American. Pound mentions some of them with gratitude, especially Henry Hudson Edwards, the GI who made him the writing table:

Mr. Edwards superb green and brown

in ward No 4 a jacent benignity,

of the Baluba mask: “doan you tell no one

I made you that table.” (317–20)

This is not the first time African objects—in this case, a Baluba (i.e., Biembe) mask from the Congo—come up in the Pisan Cantos, nor the first time African civilizations are cited with admiration and longing. Earlier in canto 74, Pound mentioned “Lute of Gassir. Hooo Fasa” (93), followed by this obsessed incantation:

4 times was the city rebuilded, Hooo Fasa

      Gassir, Hooo Fasa  dell’Italia tradita

Now in the mind indestructible, Gassir, Hooo Fasa

With the four giants at the four corners

And four gates mid-wall Hooo Fasa

And a terrace the colour of stars

Pale as the dawn cloud, la luna

      Thin as Demester’s hair

Hooo Fasa, and in a dance the renewal

  With two larks in contrappunto (197–206)

“Hooo” is the Soninke word for “Hail”; “Fasa” is a tribe of heroes in North Africa. The phrase “Hooo! Fasa!” is a refrain in the Soninke epic Gassire’s Lute, which opens with these words about the mythical city of Wagadu:

Four times Wagadu stood there in all her splendor. Four times Wagadu disappeared and was lost to human sight: once through vanity, once through falsehood, once through greed and once through dissension. Four times Wagadu changed her name. First she was called Dierra, then Agada, then Ganna, then Silla. . . . [But] she endures no matter whether she be built of stone, wood and earth, or lives but as a shadow in the mind and longing of her children. . . . Hooo! Dierra, Agada, Ganna, Silla! Hooo! Fasa!” (qtd. in Terrell 370)

It is not surprising that a man held at the DTC, a “man on whom the sun has gone down” (74.178), should be obsessed with a four-time-resurrected city. Pound had come across Gassire’s Lute in Leo Frobenius’s Atlantis: Volksmärchen und Volksdichtung Afrikas (1921), which he had started reading around 1928. Frobenius’s account of West African civilizations left a deep impression on him. On 26 December 1931 Pound sent a letter to the president of the Tuskegee Institute, urging him to make the work of Frobenius a part of the curriculum. Frobenius, he said, has, with “an unflagging enthusiasm for the beauty of its different civilizations,” “done more than any other living man to give the black race its charter of intellectual liberties.” Pound had been trying to get some of this pioneering work translated into English, and it occurred to him that this “shd. be made a racial act, with whatever university or other backing you can give it.” He added:

There is no reason why a black University shd. be merely a copy of a white one. I have written elsewhere that our American universities are full of redundance. A great deal left undone and a lot done uselessly three times over. There shd. be (if there is not already) a course in Africanology in every black special school, it wd. be more interesting than another professorship of greek or latin. (qtd. in Roessel 212)

Since Pound did not personally know the president of the Tuskegee Institute and had no idea “whether he is the sort of man who will have sense enough to ACT on the suggestion,” he thought it wise to send a carbon copy to Langston Hughes, adding, “The job ought to be done. I don’t know that I can make the suggestion any stronger or clearer, but I will cooperate with any scheme you suggest for getting on with it” (211).

On 22 April 1932, Langston Hughes wrote back, apologizing for the lateness of the response (he had been on tour), but said immediately, “I was very much interested in what you had to say about Frobenius. Certainly I agree with you about the desirability of his being translated into English, and I have written to both Howard and Fisk Universities concerning what you say.” As for Tuskegee, Hughes was “afraid they have little inclinations toward anything so spiritually important as translations of Frobenius would be to the Negro race” (213–14). He was pleased, however, to be able to include affirmative responses from Howard and Fisk.¹ He also added, “I have known your work for more than ten years and many of your poems insist on remaining in my head.” And, since Pound had asked to see some of his work, Hughes said, “Some weeks ago I sent you my books in care of INDICE. I hope you have received them” (214). Pound wrote back on 8 May to say that the “INDICE has gone bust.” On 17 June Hughes replied, “My books, sent to you c/o INDICE, came back, so I re-sent them directly to you. Also a Scottsboro booklet of mine, the proceeds of which go to the defense of the boys” (218).

The boys in question were the black youths accused on 25 March 1921 of raping two white women on a freight train near Painted Rock, Alabama. The rushed trials, held in nearby Scottsboro, quickly produced death sentences for eight of the nine defendants. The presence of a lynch mob before the trial, along with the frame-up, inadequate legal counsel, and all-white juries, made the Scottsboro case a byword for racial injustice. The case went up to the United States Supreme Court twice on appeal; the first appeal resulted in the landmark decision Powell v. Alabama (1932), which ordered new trials, and the second resulted in Patterson v. Alabama (1935), the ruling that African Americans would have to be included on juries. Charges were eventually dropped for four of the defendants. Haywood Patterson, found guilty of rape, was sentenced to seventy-five years. Norris Clarence, the oldest defendant and the only one sentenced to death, jumped parole in 1946 and went into hiding up north. In 1976 he was pardoned by Governor George Wallace, who judged him not guilty, since by then the convictions had been studied from every angle and thoroughly discredited.

Hughes, active from the first, published his booklet Scottsboro Unlimited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse in 1932, beginning with a poem entitled “Justice,” a quietly furious testimony to what it looks like across the racial divide:

That Justice is a blind goddess

Is a thing to which we black are wise

Her bandage hides two festering sores

That once perhaps were eyes.

Pound probably never experienced justice like this, not even when he was held at the DTC. Still, back in 1932, and in faraway Rapallo, Italy, he had already made a point of keeping himself informed about the trials. On 18 June 1932 he wrote to Hughes, thanking him for Scottsboro Unlimited, and observed that, while the “American govt., as INTENDED, and as a system is as good a govt. as any,” it does sometimes “allow the worst men in it to govern.” “There is no doubt in my mind,” he said, “that the extreme Southern states are governed by the worst there is in them.” And he concluded, “All of which you are welcome to quote if you think it will do any good. I do not hide my opinion” (qtd. in Roessel 219).

So much and more coming out of the Pisan Cantos. Historical memory, taking the form of an ever-multiplying web, extends from a mythical African city to the living reality of lawlessness under law for African Americans. Summoning this as the mitigating ground makes all the difference to jail sentences—whether actual ones for prison-bound offenders or metaphoric ones for offending poets such as Ezra Pound, serving the equivalent of jail time under the implacable “Fascist” verdict. Networked mediation has already made things happen in the hands of those not fully persuaded by the punitive benefits of criminal justice. It remains for us to enact something similar in literary studies.

In what follows I will try to offer a literary alternative to the murderous, supersessionist versions of the story that animates the site. The textual and the physical sites that appear so recalcitrant and exclusive are actually interwoven, more elastic and artificially constructed than they appear in contemporary theological or political discourse. So if we can solve the textual conundrum, we may be able to resolve the conflict on the ground.

The site of revelation and sacrifice begins in the Hebrew Bible with the vague injunction to Abraham in Genesis 22.2 to “go forth to the land of Moriah and offer [Isaac] up as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I shall say to you.”⁵ It then moves through a number of extemporaneous altars and dramatic encounters to a movable ark accompanying a people in the wilderness and, finally, to one fixed shrine in Jerusalem. But even after King David has consolidated his dominion over Jerusalem and established its status as sacred center by bringing the Ark of the Covenant to the city, and even as his son Solomon commences building a “house” for the Lord, there remains some ambivalence about confining the divine into one physical space. It emerges that the holiest place in Judaism is not the dwelling place of the deity but the site where the human voice can call to, can name, can invoke, the deity. God repeatedly refers to “this house, which is called by my name,” not the place where God dwells (1 Kings 8.15–19; Jer. 7.11, 13–14).⁶

That is, this bold monotheistic move, by which the presence of the divine is established, is one of appellation, a human speech act—undermined periodically, however, when people attempt to reify the desire to draw near to, to possess, or to merge with the divine.⁷ The seesaw between unmediated presence and forms of mediation—calling, naming, imagining—will continue to haunt and shape Judaism from its inception in ancient Hebrew impulses to the present.⁸ After the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE, before the dust had settled on its ruins, before physical reconstruction had commenced under the new Persian regime, it was rebuilt as a vision or figment of the imagination—in the prophecies of both Ezekiel and Zachariah.⁹

But the pendulum continues to swing. The Hebrew Bible, which opened in Genesis with a vague designation of “one of the mountains [in the land of Moriah],” concludes with a reference in 2 Chronicles to Solomon’s building the “house of the Lord” on “Mount Moriah, where the Lord appeared to David his father” (3.1). And thus the mountain has been known ever since: all the shrines and hills consolidated into one spot,¹⁰ all the holiness and all the squabbling stories and stones, like the squabbling brothers, concentrated in a few dozen acres.¹¹

My argument is that the symbolic status of the city—a wandering signifier—was born at the same time as the material edifices. And that the topocentric need for what Mircea Eliade would have called an axis mundi continues to compete with more spacious, inclusive, and self-conscious linguistic and ethical flexibilities hidden in plain view in the constitutive text.

I entitled my remarks “Literary Archaeology at the Temple Mount.” Archaeologists tend to find what they are looking for, and current archaeology of the area around the Temple Mount is governed by those who discard evidence in which they are not invested. Although physical remains of the reign of David are virtually nonexistent, Elad, the right-wing Israeli group in charge of much of the reconstruction of the so-called City of David, creates what is meant to be an authentic evocation of the past through visual and textual means; these architectural “reconstructions” and “archaic” landscapes succeed in eradicating or occluding almost all traces of Islam or Arabs, past or present.¹²

Literary archaeology has the advantage of keeping your hands clean, even while you are paging through a text that is thousands of years old. It can, like later appropriations in the midrash and in other monotheistic traditions, be twisted or squeezed to yield various versions and meanings, but the text itself is always there to be rediscovered. A literal reading of the story will highlight certain structural and narrative quirks that determine the genre and contain the secret of the akeda.

Genesis 22 begins very theatrically, like the Book of Job: “And it happened after these things that God tested Abraham.” This is a wink behind Abe’s back to the audience, who is given some assurance that the old man will pass the test. In what follows we may be forgiven if we forget the stage wink as we get caught up in the unfolding tragedy. J. William Whedbee, in his study The Bible and the Comic Vision, follows Northrop Frye in calling the U-shaped plot pattern the telltale curve of the comic. According to Frye, this pattern entails “action sinking into deep and often potentially tragic complications, and then suddenly turning upward into a happy ending” (qtd. in Whedbee 7).¹³ Disaster averted at the last minute through divine intervention is the Hebrew version of deus ex machina.

The structural seemingly needs no elaboration. We all know that Genesis 22 ends with Isaac’s release, yet we repeatedly repress that knowledge so that Isaac can continue to animate our tragic imagination. From the description of Isaac’s “death” and “resurrection” in the midrash¹⁴ through nearly every modern Israeli version—and through all its appropriations in Christian iconography—the akeda is apprehended as an accomplished sacrifice. In fact, the occlusion of the happy ending in Genesis 22 is fundamental to the evolution of the genre of tragedy as sacrifice; safeguarding the place of the sacrificed son, the pharmakos—Isaac or Jesus—is tantamount to safeguarding the very “idea of the tragic,” as Terry Eagleton argues in Sweet Violence. So unearthing the comic structure in the place of ultimate sacrifice becomes a subversive act.

The other element that signals the comic in this narrative cycle is rhetorical or linguistic: the repetitions and wordplays that create literary patterns in the Bible. Genesis 17.17 is the first time the word z-h-k (“to laugh”) is introduced in the six chapters that surround the story of the akeda, when God tells Abraham that his wife, Sarah, will bear a child: “And Abraham flung himself on his face and he laughed [va-yitzhak], saying to himself, ‘To a hundred-year-old will a child be born, will ninety-year-old Sarah give birth?’” In the commentary to his translation of Genesis, Robert Alter notes that “in the subsequent chapters, the narrative will ring the changes on this Hebrew verb, the meanings of which include joyous laughter, bitter laughter, mockery, and sexual dalliance” (83). In short, all the elements of the comic genre. Actually, some version of the word z-h-k appears twenty times in these chapters. Everyone laughs—Abraham, Sarah, Ishmael, and, as a capstone, laughter is embedded in Isaac’s very name, Yitzhak, which means “he will laugh.”

In this most serious of texts the comic muscle is flexed, then, in its every permutation.¹⁵ I will illustrate with only one more passage, which replicates Abraham’s response—this time as slapstick or shtick. When Sarah, who is listening at the tent entrance, hears the annunciation given again to her husband, she repeats Abraham’s response: “So Sarah laughed inwardly, saying, ‘After being shriveled, shall I have pleasure, and my husband is old?’ Then the Lord says to Abraham, ‘Why is it that Sarah laughed [lama ze tzahakah Sara], saying, ‘Shall I give birth, old as I am?’ Is anything beyond the LORD?’. . . And Sarah dissembled, saying, ‘I did not laugh [lo tzahakti],’ for she was afraid. And He said, ‘Yes, you did laugh [lo ki tzahakt]’” (Gen. 18.12–15).

Although one can really ham this passage up, in the manner of domestic farce,¹⁶ something very consequential is transpiring here. I see this as the beginning of the Jewish version of the Divine Comedy¹⁷ as it is passed down from the biblical narrative in Genesis to Philip Roth’s story “Conversion of the Jews.” The exchange manifested hilariously in Sarah’s incredulous laughter, and God’s put-down, actually points to a disparity that will remain fundamental to the Jewish conception of the comic: despite the miracles that are regularly performed throughout the five books of Moses, especially in Genesis and Exodus, there is a healthy Jewish suspicion about any supernatural intervention that disrupts the normal processes of nature. God may be all-powerful, but parturition on the part of a ninety-year-old woman raises the same skepticism as Immaculate Conception will over a thousand years later.

Nevertheless, the laughter intensifies, darkens, and then fades as the story proceeds. After the twenty wordplays on his name, Isaac’s laughter disappears altogether, as if his near-death experience effaced whatever good humor he had.¹⁸ Posttraumatic stress disorder is, after all, a far more powerful reflex than humor.

But one can conclude from the convoluted ways in which the biblical story plays out here, and in future histories,¹⁹ that the very essence of Yitzhak’s name is manifest in the test that Abraham, and his descendants, actually failed: what was at stake was belief in a God who would desire child sacrifice, or for that matter, any human sacrifice. No, the story states simply, God—the tarrying deus ex machina—would actually prefer the comic version of human history and human-divine relations. Der Mensch tracht, und Gott lacht (man proposes, God disposes [literally, man schemes, God laughs]).

In other words, like the messianic faith in Judaism that posits the inevitability of salvation but also its endless deferral, this constitutive story authorizes the Jewish comedy.²⁰ But today in the Holy Land, where hard-won lessons have again been superseded by sacred temptations and messianic impatience, we need something more radical. The comedy I am endorsing makes more room for human intervention. Grounded in faith but driven by human agency, it has been most powerfully articulated in the bloody twentieth century in the work of Franz Kafka and the ethics of Jacques Derrida. Here is a taste of Kafka’s Abraham:

I would conceive of another Abraham for myself—he certainly would have never gotten to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer—who was prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately . . . but was unable to bring it off because he could not get away, being indispensable; the household needed him, there was perpetually something or other to put in order, the house was never ready. . . . (172)²¹

Kafka’s Abraham, humbly anti-Kierkegaardian, is the ultimate comic figure, one who cannot obey the call-from-without because he is too embedded and obligated in this world.

The problem is that the “event” of the akeda, enshrined as memory, is what leads us, again and again, to the suspension of ethical obligation and the comic point of view in favor of the tragic-sacrificial mind-set. “Memory serves tragedy,” writes Carey Perloff in the October 2014 issue of PMLA, devoted to tragedy: “In the Sophoclean universe, to hold the memory of an injustice in one’s ongoing consciousness is a heroic act. In today’s world, it can be a form of psychosis” (833).²²

The “sacrifice” of Isaac moves, then, from a remembered “event” to an existential posture. Psychotic memory abolishes the wedge that distance and deferral provided. “[The] secret of the sacrifice of Isaac,” Derrida tells us, is the “space separating or associating the fire of the family hearth and the fire of the sacrificial holocaust” (88). (The “whole-burnt offering” that Abraham was to offer in the form of his son is called olah in Hebrew—holocaustum in the Latin Vulgate.) Negotiating that space, between the family hearth—the Kafka/Derrida quotidian—and the fire of the sacrifice, is, then, the forgotten secret.

In modern Israel and Palestine, that secret has undergone different iterations and subversions. In the early prestate Jewish community referred to in Zionist memory as the Yishuv, the Temple Mount had more or less the same status in Jewish imagination as it had in the diaspora—although in Jerusalem much of the tension in the 1920s between Muslims and Jews centered on the Wailing Wall, or Al Buraq, and the Temple Mount, or Haram al Sharif.²³ The folk art of the period speaks volumes. Consider, for example, a Rosh Hashanah (New Year’s) greeting from 1925 by the craftsman Moshe Mizrahi (fig. 1).²⁴

The iconography is layered and eclectic, representing a popular concatenation of visions for the future. The flag on the top of a somewhat stylized Dome of the Rock says, “mekom ha-mikdash,” or “place of the Temple.” There are a number of biblical verses, including a reference to the akeda and the priestly blessing. There are doves of peace with greetings in their beaks. But the most interesting element is the barely decipherable writing on the mosque meant, presumably, to be the place holder for the Temple. The passage is from Isaiah’s eschatological projections—when God, the speaker, “will bring them to My holy mountain and make them joyful in My house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted on My altar; for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the peoples” (Isa. 56.7). The reference is to “all the peoples” who accept God’s dominion in the end of days, but the phrase “all the peoples [or nations]” doesn’t appear in the inscription on this card. Naturally, the Hebrew reference to sacrifices and burnt offerings was not exactly pleasing to the Muslims whose Koranic inscriptions it supplants. Although in the ongoing conflict over the Temple Mount this image and others like it enraged the Muslim community—and, as Hillel Cohen shows in his recent study, this kind of supersessionist ambition actually contributed to the riots of 1929 (106–96)—one can also see such acts as at least on some level evoking an “end of days” scenario in which all competing religious visions will be reconciled.²⁵

Because this site was occluded from view and inaccessible to Israelis, because there really was space between the family hearth and the fire of the sacrifice, the Temple Mount was overshadowed by other physical shrines that constituted the “official” Israeli landscape after the establishment of the state in 1948: Yad Vashem and Mount Herzl as memorial sites, the Knesset as the site of modern Jewish sovereignty, and the Israel Museum as a shrine to ancient and modern art.²⁶ Since the Israeli victory of 1967, however, as messianic fervor has grown, all memorial and sacramental activity has converged on the Wailing Wall, with the Temple Mount as site of ultimate aspiration. Along with our loss of boundaries, that is, there has also been the loss of space between us and the sacred center—and, crucially, the loss of our sense of humor.

I suggest, then, an alternative that has always been there, that is consistent with a literal, even “fundamentalist” reading of Genesis 17–22 and of the memory site it animates: a spacious, comic negotiation between the material and the divine, with faith in, but without the hope of, final resolution.

In a speech before the United States Congress in 1994, Jordan’s King Hussein declared, “My religious faith demands that sovereignty over the holy places in Jerusalem reside with God and God alone . . .” (qtd. in Molinaro 17).²⁷ The smiles I imagine on congress members’ faces at the king’s appeal to divine intervention to pacify the squabbling sons of Abraham are the rare signs of our stubborn faith—tested regularly by events on the ground—that politics, like poetry, can be a site where memory yields to magic and comedy defeats tragedy.