Our “crafty science”: Institutional Support and Humanist Discipline

Abstract

Our ‘‘crafty science’’: Institutional Support and Humanist Discipline Mary Carruthers New York University Ijust passed a New York City bus with an advertisement on its side for a television docu-drama (horrid genre) about King Arthur: ‘‘Did the most famous king who ever lived, ever live?’’ It struck me as a fine example of a totally misconceived question, its nonevident premises rendering it unanswerable. With all respect to the editor of SAC, asking about ‘‘the future of Chaucer studies’’ strikes me as the same sort of question. One might even start similarly: Did ‘‘Chaucer studies’’ ever actually live—outside the purview of The New Chaucer Society, where, like some apparition, Chaucer studies manifest themselves in a hefty annual volume and a biennial conference? Can something with so evanescent a past have a future? And—crucial question—should it? I’ve been asked to think about this subject as both a scholar and as a dean. Thinking as a scholar and thinking as a dean, I have found, are two different intellectual disciplines, each with its considerable professional pleasures and personal satisfactions, but with near-polar approaches to solving problems. A few years ago I thought about the issue as a scholar, in my 1998 presidential address.1 In this essay, I will be thinking as a dean. I cannot answer, any better than anyone else, the scholarly question, ‘‘Do Chaucer studies have a future?’’ except to observe that the study of Chaucer has one, though of what sort I can only speculate. But this is a 1 Mary Carruthers, ‘‘‘Micrological Aggregates’: Is The New Chaucer Society Speaking in Tongues?’’ SAC 21 (1999): 1–26. Further notably fruitful thoughts on ‘‘new’’ philology and the possibilities for and limitations of ‘‘cultural criticism’’ in Chaucer studies are in the ‘‘Colloquium’’ on language study and Chaucer published in SAC 24 (2002): 299–354, perhaps particularly the essays by Christopher Cannon, ‘‘What Chaucer ’s Language Is’’ (pp. 301–8), and Stephanie Trigg, ‘‘The New Medievalization of Chaucer’’ (pp. 347–54). PAGE 269 269 ................. 11491$ CH11 11-01-10 14:02:10 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER different matter from ‘‘Chaucer studies.’’ Lurking in the latter construction , from a dean’s standpoint, are matters of organization and institutional support that are not really the same as those involved in ‘‘the study of Chaucer.’’ We must try not to conflate the two in our own analysis, or we will cease to think clearly about either one. And institutional clarity is desperately needed. Also goodwill, but I will come to that a bit later. The practical future of Chaucer studies cannot be addressed globally, certainly not by musing to other Chaucerians in the pages of the annual publication of The New Chaucer Society. Academics do rather too much preaching to their own choirs already. Rather, whatever the future may be, it will result from the aggregate of specific, local decisions made one institution at a time by the faculty, including the deans and chairs, of those institutions. I make my observations from my experience as Humanities dean at New York University; my office is to oversee faculty hiring and retention and the budgets for programmatic development of all units in the division of the Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Science. Institutionally, the future of Chaucer studies should not be considered except within the future of the humanities as a whole. It is time to stop thinking of each of the particular things we are doing as a separate ‘‘field’’ or ‘‘discipline,’’ and to begin planning cooperatively with likeminded colleagues across the humanities departments. The dismay and discouragement motivating the SAC editor to commission this forum is shared across all faculties of the humanities—‘‘we don’t none of us get no respect.’’ (Notice the deft use of the Middle English triple negative: we deans take our intellectual pleasures quietly and inoffensively. Like good courtiers, irony is our essential trope.) One of the first things I noticed when I took office was that, although each of the three academic divisions of arts and science had roughly the same number of faculty (a bit more than two hundred apiece), the sciences were allotted among five major...