A Letter to the Times Literary Supplement

Dear Editor: The brouhaha over university funding policies reminded this retired American Lit specialist what had been going on in our Academe over the same time period. In pseudo-egalitarian America, all hot shot Ph.D.s maneuvered to the Ivies, which dealt with a separate "country", Upper America.

Shortly after my Ph.Deification in 1957, I was Ivied with a Carnegie postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania to create a new course in American Civilization on the Mass Society--first semester, Mass Communication (print, graphics, and broadcasting); second semester, Mass Production (industrial design, architecture, and urban planning). The strategy was simple: identify the most creative talents in these new institutions and urge our most promising students to emulate the best.

Alas, when we baptized this scheme publicly for the first time in 1960 at a Daedalus magazine symposium in the Poconos, the poet Randall Jarrell concluded the discussion thusly: "You're the man of the future, Dr. Hazard, and I'm glad I'm not going to be there!" (He soon wasn't, having committed suicide!)

This fatal abandonment of "those masses" (then new) after World War One occurred when the Modern Language Association sluffed off these new untutored patrons to the National Council of Teachers of English, viz. Schools of Education.

More recently, we observed the simultaneous emergence of $100,000 extinguished humanities professors and a compensatory plethora of part time adjuncts with no health insurance and multiple employers. The latest MLA report (2009) commiserates that new jobs for English Ph.D.'s are nowhere to be seen. Had we had the likes of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams assessing our emergent challenges, we perhaps wouldn't have buried our guilty sorrows in silly French mystifications.

I walked away from a tenured full professorship after thirty years to risk the imponderables of cultural reporting. I got more professional satisfactions advising Time-Life Films which BBC programs to import. (It took some serious arm twisting to get our American "managing director" to approve Monty Python!).

And summarizing American TV for the British Film Institute's "Contrast." Thirty more years later, I advise the brave to take such chances. The culture you save may be your own. I write criticism for The Broad Street Review (the on line site of the Philadelphia (my home town) University of the Arts. I have been living in Weimar, Germany for the past 10 years researching a book on idealism in the Bauhaus.

For the curious, try my blog. There is life after tenure!

Patrick D.Hazard, Seifengasse 10, Weimar,D99423 Germany.