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Administrative and Academic Values Presentation at a Workshop on “Cultural Studies and the German Tradition”

March 27, 2009

The questions we ask and the answers we give to these questions depend a great deal on where we sit. For the majority of my life at institutions of higher education I was a member of a German Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that time I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Both of these German Departments were fairly powerful in their respective institutions, at least in the humanities, producing some of the best research and ranking highly in NRC or other surveys. I was fortunate to be at two great institutions, both of which excelled at German, and I learned a great deal about the discipline and the way it operates from these experiences.

However, during this period of some 30 years I witnessed a gradual decline in German at universities in the United States. This decline was a continuation, to some extent, of a larger demise that had begun earlier in the century. At one point in the history of US education German was the number one language for any scholarly endeavor, and German Departments, or at least instruction in German and awareness of certain aspects of German life and culture, were therefore an essential part of the curriculum for anyone wishing to achieve academic excellence. To be a serious scholar in anything from art history to chemistry without some knowledge of German would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the previous century.

As we all know, the two World Wars altered that situation radically, and after 1945 German Departments continued their downward trajectory as the world became flatter and other languages and cultural traditions rose in importance. The infusion of funding into higher education accompanying the GI bill and the sputnik spurt may have masked this trend in the first two and a half decades after the Second World War. But by the beginning of the 1970s, when I was contemplating studying, first, Comparative Literature and, then, German, the market for Germanists and the importance of German in particular had already begun to slide perceptibly. Over the past 35 to 40 years we have thus seen many departments become smaller: the Berkeley German Department held 17.5 FTE when I arrived in 1979; it now has something around 11. It was formerly administered as a separate unit; now it shares an administrative staff with Spanish and Portuguese. Other departments, such as the ones at my last two institution, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, had been absorbed into larger units of language/literature/culture departments long before my arrival on campus. And, of course, we all know that several departments of German at reputable institutions of higher education have ceased to exist altogether.

Nonetheless, at Berkeley, where I was fortunate enough to be in a department consistently ranked at or near the top of departments in the country, we concerned ourselves very little with these larger trends – except for the occasional black humor at parties or following difficult budget situations – and focused instead on what we believed German should be at a contemporary university. In my views I was influenced to a large extent by my educational background, which had been in the natural sciences as an undergraduate, my interest in comparative literature, and my resolve to take up German as the best path to pursue interests of a more philosophical, theoretical, and historical nature. I was also affected by the training I received at Wisconsin, which never considered literature a “thing in itself,” but always a cultural product related to other social and historical phenomena. And of course I was influenced as well by New German Critique, a journal whose editors were mostly from either Madison or Milwaukee, and which became a paradigm for a certain type of German Studies popular in the 1970s in departments that I considered the best in the country.

Arriving at Berkeley, I was initially confronted by some of the old guard among the faculty, whose interests were purely literary. Some of these individuals were themselves European and had grown up and been educated in an atmosphere that bore little resemblance to the world in which they were now teaching. They adhered to older and, in my view, superannuated, values of the profession. But over time their influence waned, as they retired and the departmental leadership fell into the hands of faculty members whose thinking matched my own. Although we never articulated a program or issued a manifesto, it was obvious to the students who entered the department that we valued a larger study of things German that encompassed not only the literary tradition, but also cultural history, philosophy, and social theory.

In retrospect it seems to me that we moved instinctively in the right direction. While literature was a central intellectual activity during the nineteenth century – and as someone who worked quite a bit with nineteenth-century literature I appreciated its former centrality – by the time we reach the twentieth century it begins to cede its claim to universal cultural significance. It was telling that most of the older colleagues in the field when I first began attending MLA conferences were dealing with eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers, whose place in society was different from the place of their putative colleagues in the twentieth century, and certainly those of the late twentieth century. Moving from a solely literary focus to something larger was therefore a sign of the times, it was appropriate and necessary, not some act of revolution or cause for handwringing and angst. And it seemed to me then, as it seems to me today, that departments that have not made that transition are adhering to a notion of culture and, more importantly, of literature that is obsolete and fails to account for obvious historical changes.

The values we espoused, and that I would continue to espouse for German Studies, were implicit, rather than explicit. We did not believe we were compromising literature studies by expanding beyond the literary realm. We believed that expanding beyond the purely literary realm was the only way to gain a genuine understanding of literary phenomena. But we also believed that as representatives of things German in the United States we should not restrict our purview to literature and literary history. At German universities faculty members could count on their colleagues in other fields to deal with aspects of culture and history pertaining to Germany. In the United States we did not have that same position inside universities, and we advocated therefore an active partnership with members of other departments dealing with the German tradition, even while we expanded our interests and teaching to encompass larger issues of German culture and society. It seemed natural to us that we would have just as much – or even more – in common with faculty members expert in Hegel or modern German history or Max Weber as those located in other literature departments. We were certainly not nationalistic in our advocacy of German; indeed, many of us were hypercritical of German nationalism and its deleterious manifestations over the past few centuries. But we recognized important commonalities arising from a shared cultural tradition of German-speaking countries, while at the same time understanding that this cultural context could be, or perhaps even must be, supplemented by other contexts that were European or even global.

These values were intellectual and academic values. They derived from inside our field of study, but were largely unaffected by exigencies connected with administration. I believe they made the life of the faculty and of students in our department more vibrant and more meaningful. And I am convinced that their spread to many departments across the country validates, to an extent, their attractiveness as a model for the study of German in the United States.

During the past decade I have become acquainted with a somewhat different set of values related to the administration of large public research universities. First as the Dean of the Undergraduate Division at Berkeley, then later as Provost at Tennessee, and now as Chancellor at UMass Amherst, I see that there are other types of considerations important for the institution and only tangentially related to my former concerns as a faculty member and as a chair of the German Department at Berkeley. The values with which I am daily confronted exist uneasily at times with values internal to a give field of study, and to some extent I often feel more like a bureaucrat in my institutional considerations and concerns than an engaged intellectual advocating for academic excellence.

I wrote about some of these matters when I responded to a forum piece by Katherine Arens in German Quarterly in the last issue of 2007. At that point I was writing from the perspective of a provost, but the view of a chancellor is similar, especially with regard to academic matters. Arens was rightly concerned – from her perspective – with what she called “credibility,” by which she meant the dilettantish encroachment of scholars in the field of German Studies into areas with which they have less, little, or no academic training. The danger she brought up – and I don’t want to minimize its importance – is that students who have studied German literature will venture into other areas without knowing the scholarly traditions or the most recent wisdom about these disciplines. The risk is that the scholarship produced in the name of an expansive view of German Studies will be disqualified and the credibility of the entire enterprise will be called into question.

It is perhaps a sad commentary on administration, but it does not really pay much attention to such issues. For better or for worse I think the response of most senior administrators at research institutions would be that credibility, in the way that Arens describes it, is not very important. I don’t think the central administration cares very much about disciplinary foundations and possible infringements on the intellectual territory formerly occupied by others. Some of the practical matters Arens cites – how tenure committees evaluate the work of Germanists, whether a faculty member in the new Germanistik is as competitive for grants and prestigious fellowships – will undoubtedly be concerns. But in the case of German, and in other disciplines, the provost and the chancellor will be more attentive to other aspects of a department and its activities. As long as the faculty member meets the internal standards of their field, the central administration remains largely agnostic to the particulars and unconcerned with intellectual trespassing, validity of results, and credibility to others outside the field.

What will be the concern of the central administration? How do provosts and chancellors look at departments and what they are researching and teaching? One important item will be how well the department or program delivers its curriculum. Is it providing an education for undergraduate and graduates that allows them to do what they need to do when they graduate? In some fields such questions involve what employers think of the preparation of students for certain branches of industry. In almost all fields of the humanities the external questions would involve how well students are trained to think and solve problems, how effective they are in communicating their ideas orally and in written form, and, in languages, whether they have attained enough mastery to use it as a tool in the outside world. In general administrators are concerned about how well undergraduate students are prepared for what they want to do next, whether that be professional school, graduate school, or employment, and, with regard to graduate students, how well they do in competition for positions they seek, especially those in the tight academic job market. Job placement and preparation are essential dimensions of curriculum for administrators; rarely do these aspects rise to the level of consciousness when faculty members are thinking of their courses and majors. I should add that student satisfaction at all levels will also be important in curricular matters, as will the resultant alumni support and fealty, but these dimensions are often more connected with preparation than faculty members care to acknowledge. But far down the list will be whether foundational knowledge is transmitted, whether there is an established canon that is taught and what that canon is or represents, and how much formerly literary studies have morphed into cultural studies.

Another important dimension for the central administration will be the stature of the department. Does this group of professors in German stand in high regard among national or even international peers? Is the scholarship that is produced recognized as first-class and cutting-edge? Are the Germanists at the university achieving high rankings in the various (and admittedly flawed) comparative surveys of German and foreign language departments? Here the administration cares less about whether these faculty members are poaching on other disciplines, or whether they incline toward literary or cultural models, than whether the results of their research and scholarship are highly esteemed by the competition. The values held by the central administration are a bit crass in this regard: rankings matter more than substance, although administrators naturally assume that a department cannot achieve positive recognition and a high ranking without substance. In essence the administration often feels that the ends are the most important feature, not the means, and only if the means would bring discredit to the institution would they be seen as something unwelcome.

Finally, the central administration will probably be somewhat concerned with contributions that the German faculty members make to the humanities and to the campus. Is this a cohort of prima donnas and loners, alienating other faculties and students? Or does it participate and work collaboratively at the institution, enhancing the general well being of the university? Important here might also be the contributions of the German faculty members to institutes and centers on the campus, as well as to any representative body of the faculty in matters of governance. In general a department that is contributing to lively intellectual discourse, that is stimulating discussions and exerting intellectual leadership, that is attracting positive attention on the campus and beyond is viewed as important from an administrative viewpoint. An agreed-upon methodology is less important than the faculty’s willingness and ability to set a positive tone campus-wide for scholarship and teaching.

Administrative values tend not to examine very closely the very matters we considered most important in the German Department at Berkeley, as well as the questions Arens and this conference pose. But I don’t believe that there is always and necessarily a complete disassociation of administrative and academic values with regard to German Studies. In my view the most exciting research and teaching have come from precisely those corners of German Studies that have adopted a cultural or German Studies model, whether wittingly or unwittingly. These departments produce relevant and provocative courses and curricula that train students for graduate and professional schools and produce alumni who have fond memories of their studies. In the current rankings of departments these institutions are apt to be more highly valued than those that have retained a purely literary profile; thus here too the views of the faculty and the administration will coincide even if their concerns are not exactly the same. And finally, by its very nature an expansive view of the field of German and what is the appropriate substance to be studied tends to connect faculty with colleagues in other areas of the humanities and across the campus. Again the values of the department may contribute to a situation that supports the desires of an administration wishing to promote scholarly connections and faculty engagement.

In general the internal norms and standards to which Arens alludes and with which we are concerned today are unimportant for the central administration, but I would insist that they are not irrelevant since these internal norms and standards, and the values they reflect, will invariably impact the educational process, scholarly reputation, and campus weal. Academic and administrative values diverge widely; the former are concerned with features inside a field or discipline. Administrative values are usually external and from the perspective of the faculty they may also appear to be superficial. Despite their different points of view, they have the potential of coinciding in practices that departments adopt. In my view the move toward German Studies was one of those felicitous occasions when administrative concerns and academic proclivities lived in harmony.