Academic anatomy: more debate over the faults and fault-lines in higher-ed humanities. From the editorial:

This month The Chronicle Review published an epic essay by Andrew Kay, titled “Academe’s Extinction Event.” In the piece, which quickly went viral and occasioned days of feverish debate on social media, Kay meditates on the decline of literary studies while wandering through the corridors, conference rooms, and bar of the 2019 Modern Language Association conference, having given up trying to find gainful academic employment after recently receiving a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The structuring image is that of golfers genially playing against the background of a raging forest fire. Like them, the academics attending the conference are blithely playing the game, while “all around them, the humanities burned.”…

I was therefore disappointed to see the authors of the response — Devin M. Garofalo, Anna Hinton, Kari Nixon, and Jessie Reeder, four tenure-track professors of English literature — concede all of Kay’s substantive arguments at the outset:

Tenure-track positions in the humanities are in steep decline. The majority of scholars in the humanities are overworked, undercompensated adjuncts. Humanities departments and programs are subject to austerity and annihilation. Adjuncts and graduate students are quitting or being shut out of the profession in droves.

All is as Kay says it was. What is left, then, to rebut?

The problem, the authors insist, is that Kay is thoroughly invested in “a certain kind of white male fantasy.” According to this fantasy, the humanities are failing not only because of external political, economic, and social pressures but also because of changes internal to them, in particular because the academy opened its doors to voices, themes, and methodologies that had been previously excluded from the academy. The authors acknowledge that Kay makes no such claim explicitly. But they insist that they are nevertheless able to infer it from several details in the piece….

The authors are right that Kay’s essay is saturated, like a blood-drenched rag, with pained longing. But in asserting that what Kay is nostalgic for is the whiteness, maleness, and colonial chauvinism of Peak English, they once again draw inferences about what he does not say and ignore what he does. Kay says very clearly what he misses about his life at the university: talking to and reading poetry with an adviser he admires, doing work he cares about, and being part of a community that could provide him with the opportunity to talk about literature with those who share his love for it. This fantasy is the fantasy of those who wish to dedicate themselves to a life of the mind. It is mine.