In “The Joke’s Over: How academic satire died,” Andrew Kay asks: What happened to the academic novel? He proffers some excellent theories, including: “the precipitate decline of English departments, their tumble from being the academy’s House Lannister 25 years ago — a dignified dynasty — to its House Greyjoy, a frozen island outpost. [. . .] academic satires almost invariably took place in English departments.” That seems plausible, and it’s also of obvious importance that writers tend to inhabit English departments, not biology departments; novels are likely to come from novelists and people who study novels than they are from people who study DNA.
But Kay goes on to note that tenure-track jobs disappeared, which made making fun of academics less funny because their situation became serious. I don’t think that’s it, though: tenure-track jobs declined enormously in 1975, yet academic satires kept appearing regularly after that.
But:
When English declined, though, academic satire dwindled with it. Much of the clout that English departments had once enjoyed migrated to disciplines like engineering, computer science, and (that holiest of holies!) neuroscience. (Did we actually have a March for Science last April, or was that satire?) Poetry got bartered for TED talks, Wordsworth and Auden for that new high priest of cultural wisdom, the cocksure white guy in bad jeans and a headset holding forth on “innovation” and “biotech.”
And I think this makes sense: much of what English departments began producing in the 1980s and 1990s is nonsense that almost no one takes seriously—even the people who produce it, and it’s hard to satirize total nonsense:
Most satire relies on hyperbole: The satirist holds a ludicrously distorted mirror up to reality, exaggerating the flaws of individuals and systems and so (ideally) shocking them into reform. But what happens when reality outpaces satire, or at least grows so outlandish that a would-be jester has to sprint just to keep up?
What English departments are doing is mostly unimportant, so larger cultural attention focuses on TED talks or edge.org or any number of other venues and disciplines. Debating economics is more interesting than debating deconstructionism (or whatever) because the outcome of the debate matters. In grad school I heard entirely too many people announce that there is no such as reality, then go off to lunch (which seemed a lot like reality to me, but I was a bit of a grad-school misfit).
A couple years ago I wrote “What happened with Deconstruction? And why is there so much bad writing in academia?“, which attempts to explain some of the ways that academia came to be infested by nonsense. Smart people today might gaze at what’s going on in English (and many other humanities) departments, laugh, and move on to more important issues—to the extent they bother gazing over at all. If the Lilliputians want to chase each other around with rhetorical sticks, let them; the rest of us have things to do.
Decades of producing academic satire have produced few if any changes. The problems Blue Angel and Straight Men identified remain and are if anything worse. No one in English departments has anything to lose, intellectually speaking; the sense of perspective departed a long time ago. At some point, would-be reformers wander off and deal with more interesting topics. English department members, meanwhile, can’t figure out why they can’t get more undergrads to major in English or more tenure-track hires. One could start by looking in the mirror, but it’s easier and more fun to blame outsiders than it is to look within.
Back when I was writing a dissertation on academic novels, a question kept creeping up on me, like a serial killer in a horror novel: “Who cares?” I couldn’t find a good answer to that question—at least, not one that most people in the academic humanities seemed to accept. It seems that I’m not alone. Over time, people vote with their feet, or, in this case, attention. If no one wants to pay attention to English departments, maybe that should tell us something.
Nah. What am I saying? It’s them, not us.
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