Introduction: Cynicism and/as Academic Citizenship

Abstract

IN FOLLOWING THE DISCUSSIONS that have been swirling around the mounting challenges facing the humanities in Canada, I have been struck by a rising tone of frustration and fatigue, as if negotiating the changing model of the university is fast becoming as depressing as it is necessary. (1) In proposing a Committee for Professional Concerns panel on Cynicism in the Academy for the 2012 Congress, I hoped to foster a discussion about the affective and personal costs of navigating the academy in a period when the humanities are widely perceived as being under threat. Academic Citizenship, a second panel organized by Clint Burnham, emerged from a different path but addressed similar concerns, exploring how literary scholars in Canada currently understand their relationship to the profession and to the public at large. At a time when governmental and institutional leaders unapologetically evaluate postsecondary education through neo-liberal rhetoric of efficiency and economic accountability, a certain amount of cynicism in the academy may be understandable. It may also prove critically useful, for active cynicism has the potential to interrogate, or at least destabilize, the shifting power dynamics that are quickly becoming normalized. In their contributions to this forum, for example, Mark McCutcheon draws on Slavoj Zizek to underline cynicism's value as a carnivalesque mode of [ ... ] ridicule, while Erin Wunker draws on its classical tradition to suggest a form of cynicism that barks in the face of power. And yet, as both McCutcheon and Wunker go on to remind us, cynicism also exerts a tremendous affective and political cost and risks facilitating the conditions responsible for its rise. If the notion of citizenship has become an increasingly important term in Canadian literary studies over the past decade, it must be at least partly in response to the threat of institutional disengagement that comes with a rise in academic cynicism. (2) In this context, citizenship has come to signify less as a reified marker of inclusion in the nation-state than as a rhetorical construct designating a critically engaged participation in the structural and institutional politics of the profession. In his Defense of Publicity in this forum, however, Frank Davey reanimates academic citizenship's implicit connection to the nation. Untangling academic citizenship from activism--insisting the two may be related but ought not to be mistaken as synonymous--Davey suggests that as citizens with very particular skill sets, academics have an obligation to engage the larger national community by offering our expertise outside of the academic context. If we understand academic citizenship through faculty expertise, however, how are we to position graduate students? …