On the Tyranny of Good Intentions: Some Notes on the Task Force Report

Abstract

The academy enjoys a good crisis. The clash described by Hannah Arendt, between the values of authority and tradition, on the one hand, and the centrifugal forces of the modern, on the other, probably qualifies as an educational crisis—though I think not a corrigible one (Steiner 145). More often the crisis is fathered as much by self-importance as by facts (we have unhappily learned to say) on the ground. In the 1980s and early 1990s, crisis mongering, led by conservatives like Allan Bloom, was everywhere. The canon was dying. The end of Western Civilization, if not of Western civilization, was at hand, apocalypse a day or two away. At the time, I wrote a book that took a less gloomy and, I thought, more historical view (Battleground). Much as I would enjoy attributing the subsequent diminution of crisis mongering to that book, realism suggests that events merely ran their course as things dwindled into normality. Now we have another crisis or the supposition of one, the “tyranny of the monograph,” first named by Lindsay Waters. Notwithstanding some economic realities, I think this crisis, too, is in good part factitious. That does not mean, however, that I suppose all is perfectly well. Rather, I think that forces set in motion long before 1970, the date offered by the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion as the moment when the tyranny of the monograph took hold, have produced a moment of self-recognition. At heart, any tyranny has been that of good intentions paving the way to a traffic jam with its attendant anxiety—and