The American Scholar, 2.0

Delivered at Oklahoma State University, to the inductees of Phi Beta Kappa, May 9, 2014

            Phi Beta Kappa, as you know, is an honors society founded to advance the liberal arts and sciences, or the humanities, and promote “freedom of inquiry and expression, disciplinary rigor, breadth of intellectual perspective, the cultivation of skills of deliberation and ethical reflection,” and so I’ve been asked to talk about those goals today – and the role of humanities in our world. It’s a great honor to do so, and I want to thank the chapter at OSU so much for inducting me.

Cassandra, the original humanities scholar, from a 15th century woodcut

            I’ll begin by saying that if humanities scholars were a sect, we would worship at the shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual crisis. Recently one of my friends gave me a book called The Poet As Journalist: Life at the New Republic, which was published the year I was born. My friend thought I’d like it because it is by Reed Whittemore, a poet and English professor who, like me, also wrote for The New Republic. But I was more struck that the book begins like this: “I have been an English teacher for nearly thirty years now, [and] have watched the decline of my profession with some sorrow.”   I lit a candle at the shrine. In fact, the first book with the title Crisis in the Humanities, was published in 1964, just as my father was graduating with his English degree. Long before that, in August of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a speech called “The American Scholar” to the fledgling Phi Beta Kappa Chapter at Harvard. And even then, he made it clear that the humanities were in crisis. Emerson noted that the scholar must “relinquish display and immediate fame... incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside.... Worse yet, he must accept, — how often! poverty and solitude. For[saking] the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of his own making...” Congratulations, Graduates!

            In all seriousness, and if this is possible, the situation of the humanities scholar may be more tenuous now than it was then.  A few years after his speech, Emerson would see the passage of the Morrill Land Grant act, which established Colleges across the nation, including OSU, “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes." In this era of privatization and shrinking state support it’s hard to imagine the same thing happening. In our practical society, with its emphasis on the bottom line, to be a liberal arts major is almost an act of civil disobedience. Even President Obama – who most Oklahomans, according to Senator Inhofe, believe is an Islamic Communist – even President Obama has suggested that we should evaluate colleges based on the earnings of their graduates.

            We can make the case that humanities graduates in fact do very well by these metrics. A recent study of 3 million US residents showed that those who majored in liberal arts earned an average of $2,000 more per year at their peak, compared to peers who majored in professional or pre-professional fields. But the fact remains that this assessment of value would have made Emerson shudder, and it surely isn’t core to why we study the humanities. For Emerson, “the American scholar...is one who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies...has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions, — these he shall receive and impart.” 
       Nice work if you can get it!“The Oracles of the human heart” is pretty high flying stuff,  but at its base is a good definition of the humanities, and the reason they almost necessarily exist in a state of perpetual crisis. After all, we don’t always want to hear oracles, or the judgments of history. As early as Aeschylus, Cassandra was a kind of oracle – gifted with the power of prophecy, she was able to foretell the fall of Troy, to warn against that very suspicious gift of the big, wooden horse – but she also had the curse of not being believed.  She is the original Lady of Perpetual Crisis, and perhaps the original humanities scholar. When the humanities are doing their job – when they are plumbing the depths of history and culture to speak unpopular truths – they frankly should be in crisis.

            The word comes from the Greek, krisis (κρίσις), turning point, or the Greek verb krino (κρίνω) "to separate, judge, or decide.” The humanities look at the panorama of history and critique those aspects of the world that outrage our sense of human justice. They separate and analyze the best and worst of what it means to be human.

            So what did Emerson think the American scholar should stand for – what truths should this scholar speak? “The American idea,” he said, “is emancipation, to abolish kingcraft, feudalism, black-letter monopoly, it pulls down the gallows, opens the doors of the sea to all emigrants” (“The American Idea," Complete Works, 593). Sadly, those goals have much the same relevance here in 2014 as they did at Harvard in 1837. For all the triumphs of emancipation, "kingship," measured as inequality, is alive and well. And the recent, botched execution in Oklahoma has sadly shown that in at least 32 states we haven’t pulled down the gallows – that in many areas we’ve merely put the gallows behind a curtain.

            But isn’t attacking “emancipation, kingcraft, and the gallows,” while opening the door “to all emigrants” a tall order for the humanities? Perhaps. And it is also true that humanities scholars have been as complicit as anyone in their own disappearance from the public eye. In some ways we’ve become too narrow, too specialized, and too reluctant to engage with crisis. But it is also true that humanities scholars have helped lead the great advances in social justice since Emerson gave his speech, from Walt Whitman, giving voice to emancipation, to the student of Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King. When I arrived at OSU in the fall of 1994, I distinctly remember that the fledgling LGBT Club at OSU staged a day of solidarity – a denim day, where you were supposed to wear denim to show your support. When I left my calculus class that day the sidewalks were covered, in response, with really hateful anti- gay graffiti – and I also remember one of my study partners from calculus, as he surveyed the scene, saying that we should take a baseball bat to anyone who dared to come out so publicly on our campus. In that moment, I bit my tongue and withdrew from the duty of crisis. But later that night I wrote, of all things, a poem, reflecting on the moment and my sense of ethical failure, and then I wrote one of my first O’Colly articles, calling on students at OSU to rise above the hate. For a week after, when anyone called my name as I walked across campus, my first instinct was to hit the ground. But as it turned out, the vast majority of those voices were friendly.

            I don’t think I personally had much to do with this change, but I think it’s fair to say that the kind of bigotry we encountered then is almost unimaginable on a campus like OSU’s today. I live just up I-35, in a state where gay marriage has been legal for seven years and where one our students, Zach Wahls, has gone from high school quarterback, to Truman scholar, to Daily Show guest and bestselling author of the book My Two Moms, just in the past few years – and will, knock on wood, be a strong Rhodes candidate next year.

            Whether you agree with such changes or not, history will judge them. And while many people, from many walks of life, were involved in making them happen, they were led by the liberal arts and sciences --  by the writers, filmmakers, philosophers, and cultural critics who began to show people like me, a straight white kid from rural Oklahoma, the essential humanity of people whose lives were superficially very unlike my own.

            So the next time someone asks if you think the humanities are in crisis, you can answer, “I hope so!” Since it was founded in 1776, at a moment of crisis that would begin to define the nation, Phi Beta Kappa has been fostering the debate and ethical inquiry that has guided that process. But we are still not all we can be. As John Milton says, in Areopagitica – his famous defense of free speech, written during the crisis of the English Civil War – “The light which we have gain'd, was giv'n us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.” So welcome to the crisis – and my most sincere congratulations!

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