The Fishtank, Destroyed

In plain language, here is what happened at Duke:

By the 1980s, university admissions were getting more and more nationalized and more and more competitive, and colleges outside the Ivy League saw opportunities to improve their national prestige and reputation — to “move up.” Michigan advertised itself as the “Harvard of the Midwest,” Stanford billed itself as the “Harvard of the West.” Berkeley, Chicago, Wisconsin, NYU and Duke also developed more acute national sensibilities.

Duke, in particular, is encumbered by a mediocre regional reputation. To southerners, the best Southern schools are the University of Virginia and Washington & Lee, teaching colleges with centuries-old reputations. Reputations in the South change very slowly (it's a region that's big on tradition).

What the South lacked, however, was a big research university like Columbia or the University of Chicago or Cal-Berkeley. Duke, with an immense endowment and, already, some fine graduate schools, was well-positioned to become that research center.

Buying a first-rate English department is much cheaper than buying a first-rate computer science department or a first-rate aeronautics program. You don't need extensive facilities or government grants, just a handful of well-respected scholars.

In the mid-1980s, also, literary scholars were developing particularly enhanced academic reputations. The reason was a range of post-structuralist (and radically left-wing) theories — deconstruction, queer theory, reader-response theory — that had filtered over from France in the 1960s and 1970s. These theories (really methods of analyzing literary texts) were linked by the notion that what a text said was less important than what a critic had to say about it. This meant that the criticism written using these methods became intensely autobiographical — every critic needed to show what the text meant to him, and this meant much more “him” and much less “text.”

The upshot of all this was that by the mid-1980s, there were a handful of literary-critic superstars in American academic circles, academics who subscribed to these theories, wrote about themselves, and became famous. The criticism became essentially linked to the author, and so English scholars were more well-known then history scholars, for example, who didn't insert quite so much of themselves into their work.

The corollary development was the growing power of these schools of literary thought. At the time it must have seemed to Duke that all of literary criticism would soon be post-structuralist, and post-text.

So Duke hired Stanley Fish, a prominent deconstructionist Milton scholar, away from Johns Hopkins, and gave him the funds to buy a first-rate, post-structuralist English Department. They also gave him a series of perks (they printed his journal, they hired his wife, they gave him a joint appointment at the law school, they gave him virtually solitary run of the English department) and Fish went out and got the most reputable English department money could buy — Henry Louis Gates, Eve Sedgwick, Michael Moon, Frank Lentricchia, all for several times the going rate. By 1992, the New York Times was calling Fish the model for a new archetype — academician as showman, superstar.

The problem was that these new superstars were drifting farther and farther away from the classroom, from the text, from English. They spent months, years on projects that kept them away from Duke and left Duke's English instruction in the hands of Teaching Assistants. They produced self-important memoirs that did little to enhance their academic reputations but much to increase the disgust of the rest of the academic community at their egotism. Most important, their brand of criticism, never terribly substantive, was opened up to lesser scholars and was diluted down to pages and pages of meaningless jargon. Their flagship journal, Social Text, became a joke.

The joke was exposed beyond academe when Alan Sokal, an NYU physicist, submitted a fake article to Social Text, couched in all the proper jargon, which claimed that basic scientific principles were also subject to subjectivist, deconstructionist impulses — that the weight of an atom might be different for a Guatemalan peasant than for Einstein.

The editors of Social Text, of course, ate it up. Sokal wrote an op-ed in the New York Times detailing his fraud, and how eager Social Text had been to publish it. The implication was clear: submit any bit of nonsense in the proper jargon and the post-structuralist community will think it's terrific.The relevance of Social Text began to dip, and so too did Duke's reputation. Frank Lentricchia, who had moved to the graduate program in literature, wrote a long article in the academic journal Lingua Franca distancing himself from post-structural methods and denouncing deconstruction. Fish wrote a feeble response to Sokal's op-ed, but it was clear he had lost a lot of his intellectual weight.

The scholars began disappearing: Gates to Harvard, Moon to Johns Hopkins, Sedgwick to the CUNY Graduate Center. Graduate schools across the country began re-imposing a focus on the text. Finally, this fall, Fish announced he was leaving Duke to accept an appointment as the dean of the College of the Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois' Chicago campus, clearly a step down for him.

There are two possible conclusions to draw. The happier conclusion that the academy is, finally, a neatly self-corrective institution. Faddish trends may hold intellectual sway for a few years, but, eventually, they are overcome by real scholarship.

The darker conclusion stems from the fact that, whatever the fate of its English department, Duke University's larger emphasis on research and the development of a big-research big-money university has worked. Duke, in the latest US News & World Report polls, is ranked fourth nationally, and its scholars are taken far more seriously than they were even at the beginning of this decade. The increasingly competitive nature of College admissions and of University politics, coupled with the success of institutions like Duke, might prompt Dartmouth to follow the same model. This, of course, would mean abandoning its traditional focus on undergraduate teaching and learning, and would be a disaster.

— Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Editor-in-Chief