The decline of the language requirement in English doctoral programs will have to be reversed if those in the English profession are to treat global and ethnic studies seriously, to refuse to replicate “spread-eagle” isolationism in their work, to research and teach world literature and English-language literature’s place in it responsibly, and t…[Read more]

Because academic freedom is a function of and entrusted to the corporate faculty, defenses of academic freedom must be articulated in the terms of curricula that are thoughtfully constructed according to disciplinary norms. But this potentially powerful system of protection is weakened when the faculty has little sense of how its curriculum fits…[Read more]

The story of the master’s degree in English and foreign languages since 1966 is most dramatically a story about women’s access to areas of study traditionally dominated by men and more generally a story about how economic shifts influence students’ degree decisions.

In some fields—notably, foreign languages—second majors make up an unusually large share of the students receiving degrees. If we compare the number of second majors in a field with the number of first majors, we see that second majors range from 3%–5% of the number of first majors in fields like communication and psychology to 10%–16% in economi…[Read more]

For the narrator of Invisible Man, the abjection of women and homosexuals operates at first as a discursive strategy for making the black male’s position more subjectively endurable, but the narrator must eventually confront this discursive strategy as an illusion of hetero-phallic agency, since he continually fails to acquire the sorts of i…[Read more]

The state of academic freedom today, the particular vulnerability of certain areas of study, and the special relevance of scholarship in the humanities to defenses of academic freedom.