What Next? Thought and Action in Intellectual Work

THE PRESENT HISTORICAL MOMENT CALLS FOR A SERIOUS RECONSIDERAtion and reconstruction of higher education and of the humanities especially.1 What follows is not, I hope, a jeremiad. I aim, rather, to articulate some professional discontents that I suspect are widely felt and to offer several specific courses of action to help remedy them. Over the last three decades, the profession of those who are concerned with history, American studies, cultural studies, and other aspects of the humanities has changed remarkably in two ways. First, it has greatly expanded its field of inquiry to include the perspectives, concerns, and contributions of groups hitherto excluded (except, occasionally, as objects of study). Second, it has considerably diversified its own membership and now constitutes itself less as a monocultural elite that aims to explicate and define one culture and more as a multicultural association that aims to trace the relations among cultures. We are no longer invested in reproducing a unitary, totalizing conception of humanism, literature, or America and desire instead to make visible the multiplicities and specificities that undo any one construction of these abstractions.2 This shift from implicit justification to explicit critique has not been accomplished everywhere and may have scarcely begun in some quarters. As a project, it is still underway, and it has much useful work yet to do. At the same time, however, it has begun to approach the limits of what it can hope to accomplish. While it has not exhausted itself, it has begun to tire

Action (physics · Physics · Sociology · Work (physics · Academic Freedom and Politics · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Engineering

• In Search of “Cognitive Consonance”

  Open Access•Corey Dolgon•Humanity & Society•2002

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