Do clickbait articles like "Why professors are writing crap that nobody reads" erode the humanities? Here are 5 weird tricks to tell you the answer.

Figure 1. It got your attention, didn't it?

This little number--"Why Professors Are Writing Crap That Nobody Reads"--was all over my Facebook feed recently, as it may have been all over yours.

Why?  Why does this stupid piece of clickbait provocation keep popping up every few months? I didn't link to it because you don't need to read the article; Google tells me that there are 13 million+ hits on the same exact subject.

Although I'm calling out this one because it's the most recent, it's a whole genre, and you could take your pick of reasons why they're written and published:

1. It requires absolutely no thought at all to write, since the conclusion is always the same: "Well, the main reason is job security." No kidding! Do tell me more, Captain Obvious. 
2. It's quick to do, because you can always pick up some random figures from a recent study to "prove" your points.
3.  Snark is the currency of the internet, and everyone wants to raise their social profile by getting a lot of hits.  It's easier to hurt something than to build it up. 
4.  It's basically an aggregator paragraph or two that popularizes someone else's research with a few sensational provocations--calling what professors write "crap," for example.

Yes, we'd like it if more people read our stuff. And yes, we ought to reach out to the general public, as I do, or try to, on my other blog, and as many of you on the blogroll already do. Yes, we shouldn't be enabling Elsevier and the rest to make the big bucks by profiting from our free labor as writers and editors. Finally: yes, it's true that we ought to give more weight to informative posts on social media like blogs or platforms like Vox, Medium, LitHub, and the late, lamented The Toast.

But there's an insidious side to all these calls to stop publishing for a scholarly audience and judge an essay's worth based primarily on its popularity. Here are the five weird tricks promised in every clickbait headline to tell you why, although I'll spare you the usual pointless slideshow festooned with ads to show you the list:

1. You can't judge the impact of an article by its immediate popularity. Did Vannevar Bush's classic "As We May Think" make as much of an impact in 1945 as it has since the development of the computer? Some pieces take a while to come into their own. How many ideas popular in their own time (cough*eugenics*cough) were popular and entirely destructive?

2. All research, and certainly humanities research, builds on previous work--standing on the shoulders of giants, I think they call it. The general public may think that an article mapping where speakers in England used "icicle" and where they used "isacle" is pointless, but maybe it tells later researchers where the Vikings landed, or something. I don't know, because I'm not a specialist in Old English, but that's exactly the point: I don't know, and neither do you, dismissive writers and casual readers on the web.

3. It plays into our current national value of being ignorant and proud of it. There are a lot of things I don't understand because I'm not trained in the field, but that doesn't mean that they are not worth attention. A civil society has to trust its members, and it ought to trust that people with expertise know something.

4. The people who read these essays are in a real position to harm funding for research--not just voters, but legislators, who like to wave things from the internet around during their speeches to prove that they're current with what the public is saying. Every time a state legislature moves to cut funding for higher ed, saying "why can't they teach 7 classes a day, 5 days a week?" this is the kind of article they cite.

5. People are hungry for real information, which is why we should share it, but not everything is going to make enough news to gain the kind of currency that these articles demand.  What's going to make a bigger splash on Google News--identifying the multiple authors of a manuscript or a cute walking molecule simulation?

When these articles appear on Facebook, I have held back from saying what I really think, in the name of being noncontentious. I think it's time to start being contentious.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means to me

An open letter to the interwebs, not to individuals. For the record, nobody said what's exactly in quotation marks, but it's an impression I've been getting.

Let me start with a premise: one of the fundamental principles of the humanities is that we can agree to disagree or even argue, but that we do so with a respect for the other person's expertise or body of knowledge. If we don't think the other person has much knowledge, we still try to understand his or her perspective and see it as an individual issue, not an indictment of the disciplinary specialty as a whole. That's one way that humanistic discourse differs from the mud-slinging invective that passes for political discourse in this country.

But.

If you tell me that you don't think it's important that students read, or that some of us teach, what might loosely be translated as "old s@#$% by a bunch of dead people" and that students ought to be held accountable only for what they can find and interrogate and theorize on YouTube and Facebook, I might have a problem with that.

If you tell me that exploring and learning about books from the 20th-century and back into the past is basically stick-a-fork-in-it done, and that learning about history and culture is passe, I might have a problem with that. I suspect that classics, medievalist, and early modernist scholars would have an even bigger problem with it.

Why can't we do both?

The thing is, there's space for all kinds of work in this discipline--YouTube and "old S@#$%," a.k.a. literature--so why would you say or imply that one has to replace the other? I respect what you do enough to know that there are many things about it that I don't know. We all have to assume this, or we could never have a functional discipline, let alone functional departments within a discipline. So can't you believe that there is some value in the "old S@#$%"--that is, show it some respect?

Dear interwebs, I may have misunderstood the import of what you were saying, and if so, I apologize. But do think about what I've said.

Two links in defense of the humanities

Michael Berube, over at Crooked Timber, dismantles the idea that the humanities have been declining as a major: http://crookedtimber.org/2010/11/16/breaking-news-humanities-in-decline-film-at-11/.

And Gregory A. Petsko, at Genome Biology, responds to SUNY Albany's purge of its language departments by providing an eloquent defense of the humanities from a scientist's perspective. http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/10/138. A sample:

But universities aren't just about discovering and capitalizing on new knowledge; they are also about preserving knowledge from being lost over time, and that requires a financial investment. There is good reason for it: what seems to be archaic today can become vital in the future. I'll give you two examples of that. The first is the science of virology, which in the 1970s was dying out because people felt that infectious diseases were no longer a serious health problem in the developed world and other subjects, such as molecular biology, were much sexier. Then, in the early 1990s, a little problem called AIDS became the world's number 1 health concern. The virus that causes AIDS was first isolated and characterized at the National Institutes of Health in the USA and the Institute Pasteur in France, because these were among the few institutions that still had thriving virology programs. My second example you will probably be more familiar with. Middle Eastern Studies, including the study of foreign languages such as Arabic and Persian, was hardly a hot subject on most campuses in the 1990s. Then came September 11, 2001. Suddenly we realized that we needed a lot more people who understood something about that part of the world, especially its Muslim culture. Those universities that had preserved their Middle Eastern Studies departments, even in the face of declining enrollment, suddenly became very important places. Those that hadn't - well, I'm sure you get the picture.

News flash: First person column in Chronicle reveals depressive self-absorption

I don't want to turn this blog into the Chronicle's loyal (or not so loyal) opposition, but this caught my attention today.

The Mediocre Professor. Shorter Chronicle: Professor Mediocre laments his mediocrity. Some might find this depressing, but I find it irritating. He wants suggestions? I've got suggestions.

Take some vitamins and show a little energy. The students respond to your energy. If all you're showing them is sighs and ennui, guess what they'll reflect back to you?

If you speak the way you write, try turning your efforts outward instead of inward: the point of teaching is communicating directly, not being Henry James with well-turned sentences. I'm not criticizing your writing; I'm just saying that teaching demands something different.

Teaching is like playing tennis, not like performing Hamlet. Students are not interested in watching you dramatically stare out the window as you ponder self-doubt and despair; leave that to the student from Wittenberg. They're adolescents, or just out of adolescence. They have enough self-doubt and despair for the both of you. It's your job to get them to hit the ball back and keep the discussion going. If they don't hit the first one, lob another. They want to talk about the literature, but you may not have served them something that they can respond to. Try a different approach.

If you really think the students are right and that the humanities are a dying carcass, have you thought about doing something that you would really like to do and giving your spot up to one of the eager hordes of Ph.D. jobseekers out there? I don't want to sound too much like Willy Loman, but in a way part of your job is to sell the humanities. You can't sell a product that you don't believe in.

All those laments about "digital twitterings" are a red herring. If you think the students are uniquely indifferent nowadays, you should look back at the laments about students from ancient times to the present.

Also, "digital" means a different form of expression, not a killer technology that swallows up books. This isn't a deathmatch between digital media and the humanities, however much the news media like to propose that it is. They're in love with the "digital natives" idea and celebrity culture, too, but that doesn't mean that they're right.

In fact, that isn't a bad starting place for a discussion with your class. How about it?

Sven Birkerts mourns loss of cuneiform, clay tablets

I have a confession to make: despite all the rational reasons for not getting a Kindle, I have been reading far too many reviews of the new version and lingering over pictures and videos of the Kindle 2 in action. "Rational reasons" can't entirely stamp out the lingering techno-envy best expressed by "Shiny! Want it!'

So Sven Birkerts's "Resisting the Kindle" in The Atlantic ought to supply some more ammunition for rationality, shouldn't it? I thought so until I read this in a passage where Birkerts is bemoaning the ability to access the internet and look up something using a Blackberry, claiming that such an ability "abets the decimation of context":

Literature—our great archive of human expression—is deeply contextual and historicized. We all know this—we learned it in school. This essential view of literature and the humanities has been—and continues to be—reinforced by our libraries and bookstores, by the obvious physical adjacency of certain texts, the fact of which telegraphs the cumulative time-bound nature of the enterprise. We get this reflexively. . . .
That is the trade-off. Access versus context. As for Pride and Prejudice—Austen’s words will reach the reader’s eye in the same sequence they always have. What will change is the receiving sensibility, the background understanding of what this text was – how it emerged and took its place in the context of other texts—and how it moved through the culture.

Here are the problems with that argument:

1. Umm, Mr. Birkerts? That ability to look things up instantly? Not going away any time soon.

2. Also, wouldn't the ability to look things up help to PROVIDE rather than erase context? Doesn't access enable context rather than erasing it?

3. And having a little knowledge about context creates a desire for more, doesn't it? That's why (trumpet flourish) investing in the humanities is a smart idea. "Context of other texts" and "how it moved through the culture"--wait, what's that murmur? Why, it's a chorus of humanities professors saying, "That's what we do! If you want to learn more, we have a wealth of information to share with you, and we want to hear your ideas, too!" For example, I've seen various history blogs make gentle fun of the History Channel enthusiasts out there, but honestly, doesn't the History Channel (at least until it eschewed history for "Haunted History" or "UFO History" or "Big Shiny Man-Gadget History" or whatever it's doing now) help to nudge people toward history courses?

4. Birkerts envisions this context as being transmitted through libraries and bookstores as people scan the books on the shelves. Now, nobody loves browsing in libraries and independent bookstores more than I do, but this option presupposes (1) the leisure to hang out in libraries and bookstores; (2) an acculturation process that values and promotes such an activity; and, for the bookstore, (3) the money to buy books.

I somehow don't think he's envisioning the kind of chain bookstore where Ten Things I Learned from My Dog Morley or Addiction Memoir Confidential or The 365-Day Cat Golfing Calendar are the featured big sellers. Here again is class privilege in action: he's picturing a big-city library or independent bookstore experience for people who have the leisure and means to appreciate it and the cultural tools, granted by a humanities education, to understand what they're looking at.

So the Kindle isn't the problem. Even a dead-tree book won't have the proper context unless there's some kind of additional learning involved. The answer isn't to fret about the Kindle and wish ourselves back in time; it's to support the humanities that make that context possible.

Respect for humanities, not humanities, in decline

The New York Times is wringing its hands over the decline in the humanities, and, as usual, Dean Dad nails the flaw in the argument, noting that the money quote, near the end of the piece, states that the number of humanities degrees has remained constant for the past ten years.

The real problem is that for much of the past decade, the culture isn't listening to what the humanities have to teach. Let's just take a few examples from English, American history, rhetoric, and philosophy, shall we?

• Rhetoric. A culture that took rhetoric seriously wouldn't have fallen for the fallacious arguments (concluding with "He tried to kill my dad!") that had the U.S. searching for terrorists in Iraq instead of Afghanistan just because "Iraq had better targets." Some columnist said at the time that by that logic, you should look in the garage for the keys you lost in the driveway, because the garage has better lighting. But by stating contrary propositions on different days as though they were fact--and were reported as such with a straight face by, yes, The New York Times and other news media--enough people were duped to lead the country into an unstoppable series of events.
  
• Writing. An economic culture that took writing and language seriously (not to mention math) would have said that the Emperor of Derivatives had no clothes. Difficult terminology doesn't necessarily mean that you're stupid for not understanding it. It may mean that the language, as Orwell predicted, is designed to hide chicanery--and so it was.
• Literature. Speaking of Orwell, those who had read 1984 in one of those despised humanities courses would know what was being said, when, after 6 years of being told "stay the course," we were told that the president was "never about stay the course." It's the same as being told that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia in Orwell's novel, as Leonard Pitts pointed out at the time.
  
• Philosophy--logic and critical thinking skills. An education in critical thinking skills would have told a prospective homebuyer that paying no money down + no interest + more money than she makes in a year = massive FAIL. The figures don't add up, didn't add up at the time, and will never add up. Did the executives at Countrywide and the other mortgage lenders really not grasp this?
  
• History. The only glimmer of historical memory in all this is the refusal of the U.S. population to go along with the dog-and-pony show of 2004-early 2005: "Let's privatize Social Security! C'mon, it'll be fun! The brokers will make a fortune! And the stock market can never go down, so what's to worry about?" Somebody, somewhere, had a dim recollection of October 1929 and subsequent events, and enough of those people refused to go along with the hype so that the cumulative disasters mentioned above weren't compounded by this one.
  

So to all this talk about cutting back on the humanities because they aren't useful, I would say this: they aren't useful if you don't use them. If you do, and if we had, we'd be in a much better place in this country right now.