|
« AAUP Homepage
|
A Mission Counterstatement
Mission statements demand compromises we shouldn't have to make.
By James Berger
Like many other colleges and universities, my institution, Hofstra University, now requires each department to create a “mission statement.” Then, on the basis of this statement, we have to create a set of more specific curricular goals and objectives and, finally, a set of quantitative, behavioral criteria by which to assess the department’s efforts. This new emphasis on formal objectives and quantifiable assessment criteria arises, we are told, from the need to retain certification from some appropriate certifying body; failure to do so will result in losses of funding and decreased ability to attract students. But we have never discussed in any public setting whether this direction is in keeping with the values and methods of liberal education. In private conversation, every faculty member with whom I’ve raised the topic—from colleagues in my own department (English) to those in fine arts, sociology, and chemistry—has been appalled. But we were given no choice. In essence, we were told: either prepare the needed documents or the institution will shut down. What can we do? At the moment, nothing. We have complied. But I would like to propose an intellectual defense against the mission statement–outcomes assessment ideology. To that end, I present here a draft of what I call a “mission counterstatement.”
Ideological Conflict
The current emphasis on mission statements and outcomes assessment is part of a political struggle over the status of the humanities. It is part of an effort to denigrate our values and methods. This emphasis compels us to justify our values and methods by translating them into the quantitative, quasi-scientific methods attributed (wrongly, I think) to the social sciences. We are not asked to identify what we want our students to know or understand or be prepared intellectually to grapple with. Rather, we are asked for the behaviors that our students will exhibit that will demonstrate their learning—and we are told that we must develop a quantitative instrument that will measure these behaviors.
Our values and methods are fundamentally at odds with this approach. Indeed, literary study can be regarded as a critique of such quantitative, econometric methods. We reject the premise that quantifying, pseudo–social scientific methods have privileged access to knowledge and to the authority such knowledge brings. We reject the premise that what they—the social scientists—do (and what we are being asked to do in the assessment) constitutes knowledge and that what we do in our research and teaching is a froth, a dessert, a small morsel of cultural capital that, in serious times such as these, must justify itself in the terms provided by the scientific disciplines—the disciplines of knowledge.
We also should not avoid the fact that the mission statement terminology is derived from the language of corporate management. Its goal is a narrowly defined “efficiency.” If you can define your “mission,” then you can achieve it. Every “player” on the “team” should be able to state clearly and rationally his or her objective and then precisely measure progress toward it. The goal is the efficient functioning of the organization. The goal is profit; the goal is victory. There is no place for the irrational, the ambivalent, or the unproductive. The ideology of the mission statement and outcomes assessment is a faith in the cost-benefit analysis. Whatever does not contribute to the corporate good will be hard-pressed to justify its continued existence. We should recall also that the origin of the “mission” metaphor is the military operation.
Literary Study
Literary study creates knowledge of other kinds, knowledge that is not as easily measured. It is certainly true that literary study teaches grammar, organization, coherence, argumentation, and certain factual and definitional knowledge of literary history and genre. But other courses and disciplines could teach these things as well. What is left over after these areas of skill and knowledge have been assessed composes the major part of what we do. Literary study tries to understand what literature is and does. Thus, it must prove exceedingly difficult to describe, much less to define or assess. Literature imagines alternatives to the world as it is. It insists on the possibility of a world that is beyond the capacity of a mission statement to imagine.
What do we do in a literature course? We read. Then we think and talk about what we’ve read. Then we write about what we’ve read and thought and talked about. We read first the text as story, as plot, as a representation of human experience. Second, we read the text as text, as artifact—that is, as a made thing. The events of the plot do not simply happen. They happen for a reason that is part of an overall design. Even the introduction of randomness into a literary text is the result of a decision by an author. And yet, at the same time, no author is ever in perfect control of his or her own text. Locating paradoxes, contradictions, less-than-conscious processes, and ideological elephants on the table is part of the process of interpretation. Thus, the woven object of the text becomes available for unweaving. Third, we read the text in the context of the time in which it was composed. We read the text as document—that is, as a document of ways of living and thinking and feeling; of types of fantasy; of social, economic, and political tendencies. Reading the text as document opens certain directions of interpretation and forecloses others. I would stress that the initial phase of reading—of reading for plot, identification, emotional engagement—should never be eliminated. The subsequent more sophisticated phases build on the first phase but do not supplant it.
Literature depicts lived experience. We apprehend lived experience through narrative. As a form of knowledge informed by narrative, literary knowledge differs from the knowledge provided by social science. The knowledge conveyed by literature does not employ abstract models. The story is not a paraphrase or approximation or narrative version of some other, more precise and scientific sort of knowledge. In fact, it is the literary narrative that is more precise, and its precision renders it unamenable to the abstraction of the social science model. To assess the outcome of a social science curriculum, one might reasonably assert that students will be able to explain the relevant disciplinary models. This would be a sufficient outcome. But no analogous criteria exist in literary study: for “model” one cannot substitute “genre” or “mode” or “trope” or “plot type.” These terms are, at times, convenient heuristics, but learning them is not the center of what we do.
What we do is read and talk and think and write and talk and think and read. To study literature means to live with it; to have a living relationship with literary texts on the terms that they bring to us, each text, specifically. For this reason, our methodology is fluid. All attempts to make literary study into a science have broken down. They have left behind many valuable examples of reading but no plausible, enduring methodology. A discipline whose goals and methods are not quantifiable or scientific will be difficult to assess using methods borrowed from disciplines that aspire toward what is quantifiable, scientific, and profitable.
Literary study requires the most careful engagement with turns of language. How does one recognize, for instance, when an apparent analogy is equally a crucial distinction? Which aspect of the trope takes precedence? How does an interpretation of the text convey this tension most effectively? Most imaginatively? How does one assess a genuine, imaginative engagement with the language of a text? Furthermore, in presenting narratives of the possibilities and limits of personal-social agency, literary texts participate in ongoing ethical and political dialogues, and this participation is likely to be itself intensively dialogical—complex, contradictory, conflicted. How does one assess an interpretive engagement with the ethics and politics of a literary text? How is this engagement also part of the aforementioned engagement with the text’s language, or vice versa?
Methodological Problem
Literary study should help students break down ideological discourses like those of the mission statement and outcomes assessment and discern the motivations behind them.
The methodology of the outcomes assessment presumes that the methodology of a discipline is external to the discipline’s object of study. The scientist or social scientist stands (or believes he or she stands) outside his or her data sample and thus feels able to make objective observations, hypotheses, and evaluations. The language of analysis is not implicated in the thing being analyzed. In literary study, on the contrary, the tools of analysis and the objects of analysis are of the same nature. Both are composed of language. The scholar is always and necessarily implicated in the thing he or she studies. Because in the study of literature, there is only language, with no clear distinction between the language of the scholar and the language of the literary producer there is no outside from which an “outcome” of study might be “assessed.”
It is a good thing for scholars and teachers of literature to reflect on and articulate our aspirations, achievements, and failures. But these reflections will take more complex forms than those provided by the mission statement–outcomes assessment model. Literature, in the forms of attention it demands, tries to convey an attitude toward life—toward other people, toward oneself, toward language. How does one know whether the lesson has stuck? Our time frame as literature teachers is not the semester but the lifetime. And, given the methodological concerns discussed above, the mission statement and outcomes assessment for a department of literary study would have somehow to be, in all the senses I’ve described, literary.
The university, and its humanities departments in particular, should maintain values alternative to those of the market and the corporate model. It should, in fact, emphatically insist on its independence from those values. Otherwise, it reveals its true “mission” to be merely an adjunct of the corporation.
James Berger is professor of English at Hofstra University. He is author of After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse and editor of Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition. He is currently writing a study of portrayals of cognitive and linguistic impairment in modern literature.
Comment on this article.
|