20140716.0737

I know that many people view the kind of work I do outside the classroom as being...not. Even the work I do inside the classroom is seen as...not, of course, following Shaw's old adage about those who can and those who can't. I have addressed that issue before, however, here and here. I need not do so again at the moment, although I likely will sometime in the future; people continue to throw it in my face and in the faces of others, so I will continue to need to scrape it off and shove it down their throats. No, today I have something else against which to write: the perception that the work I do outside the classroom is...not.

That the perception is prevalent is clear to me. I have frequently faced such questions as "What do you do?" and "Why would you ever do it?" I have often been asked "What's the point?" and "Why do you waste your time?" (Sometimes, the questions have come from others in the academic humanities, which is hardly comforting. I have spoken to it, also.) Each bespeaks not only a lack of understanding of the mission of the academic humanities, but also a denial that there is a mission, or that there is a mission worth pursuing. And I am not alone in having faced such questions, as my many colleagues in the academic humanities can attest.

Our collected assertions, however, are likely to be dismissed as anecdotal and therefore insufficient upon which to base judgment. Admittedly, evidence that is purely anecdotal is insufficient upon which to base broad assertions--but I think there is a point at which the combined weight of anecdote becomes something more than that. (Social scientists and ethnographers can likely speak to that point more fully than I can; I rather hope to hear from some, or from some who can point me towards such discussions, which are likely to be relevant to my interests.) And I can point to other evidence than my own to support such assertions.

For a variety of reasons, my wife and I receive Reader's Digest, and we do typically read through it; we have the occasional five minutes to spare, enough time to need filling but not so much that something more complex can be begun. In the August 2014 issue, I read a distillation of Oklahoma Senator Coburn's Wastebook, in which, among others, the complaint is made of the less than $1 million spent since 2010 by the US National Endowment for the Humanities on the Popular Romance Project. Why it should be considered a waste for a government to invest in understanding the people from whom it ostensibly derives its power and to whom it is theoretically accountable escapes me. It is the case that looking closely at what people seek out for their entertainment reveals much about them, and romance (of the Harlequin sort rather than the medieval) as a genre is abundantly sought by the reading public of the US. Too, the assertion that the studies "represent two American industries that are raking in millions of dollars and don't need government support" is misleading; the studies represent the work of scholars, not of companies, so that it is not the "industries" that benefit but the people who work to expand human knowledge of humanity. Yet, since Reader's Digest is, as "nonfiction," thought real, and it is widely circulated and read, the errant ideas voiced in the piece are likely to be taken up by a large portion of the US populace and discussed as "truth." It goes beyond my anecdotes, and it goes to a prevailing attitude that what I do and what my colleagues do does not matter.