Should ethnomusicologists be pundits?

Steve Sack, in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Should ethnomusicologists be public commentators? This question generated one of the roundtables I participated in during the Society for Ethnomusicology’s annual conference last month, in Albuquerque. The roundtable’s organizer had written some op-eds for national newspapers including the New York Times, concerning music and nationalism. For one of the op-eds earlier this year, the newspaper had identified him as an ethnomusicologist—previously he had been ID’d as a professor at a university and director of an area studies program—and the responses to his op-ed on line questioned whether ethnomusicologists had any business commenting on public policy. The gist of the negative comments was that he should stick to the subject of music. Would the negative comments have surfaced in response to my colleague’s op-ed had he been identified as a historian or a specialist in political science, a sociologist or a specialist in ethnic studies? Possibly not; but those readers took a rather narrow view of music's place in human life.

     Instead of sticking to the subject of music, my colleague--incidentally, a professor who'd studied with me and gotten his degree at Brown--went on to write more op-eds and to organize this roundtable on the subject of ethnomusicologists, advocacy, and expertise—where does it lie, and what should ethnomusicologist be doing in the public arena, now? A few of the participants took the opportunity to offer autobiographical presentations about their increased participation in politics, both inside and outside universities. I took a different tack, an overview of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s history with political participation, and a counter-argument to Stanley Fish’s book, Save the World on Your Own Time. Although I did mention this blog as an example of public commentary since 2008, I wanted to take a broader and longer view about ethnomusicologists in the political arena. 

     As individual citizens, ethnomusicologists have always participated in politics in their own ways and in their own nations, insofar as they’ve been free to do so. My colleagues’ passionate autobiographical presentations about their current activism exemplified something that some ethnomusicologists always have done. It’s fair to say that in today’s political climate more are taking an active role than before, although few are acting as public intellectuals or spokespersons by writing op-eds, maintaining blogs, and writing or speaking to a broad audience. As in most fields of knowledge production, ethnomusicologists write chiefly for our colleagues in the universities. There’s a sense in which our teaching is more public—we reach, over the years, a cross-section of the public simply by virtue of their presence in our classrooms—but in those classrooms we confine ourselves to our subjects; we do not advocate particular political positions in a partisan manner, and we do not propagandize our students.

     Fish, a professor who’s written numerous op-eds for the New York Times, agrees that professors should confine ourselves to our subjects, or academic disciplines; and that we should not, in our teaching, be political partisans and attempt to indoctrinate our students. Fish, writing eight years ago, believed that professors and universities have crossed the line into politics. No doubt he believes it even more strongly today. He does not share the anti-intellectualism of many conservatives who denigrate higher education, especially the liberal arts, and who wish for a more vocationally-oriented curriculum for colleges and universities. Nevertheless, he is emphatic that while as citizens we have every right to be political activists, we should keep activism out of the classroom and out of our professions as scholars. It follows that professional academic societies, such as the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), ought also to stay out of politics.

     That’s what SEM did until about ten years ago. Since its inception in 1955, SEM’s objective has been to promote research and scholarly communication in the field of ethnomusicology, taking only an occasional political position vis-a-vis scholars detained and imprisoned by governments. In 2007, however, SEM issued a position statement condemning the use of music for the purpose of torture. SEM had, also, transformed itself in the 1990s into an organization that supported ethnomusicology as a profession and also supported ethnomusicologists—that is, SEM increasingly promoted the field among educators at all levels, K-12 and higher, and it considered part of its mission professional development of graduate students, something previously left to the faculty at their own universities, particularly their dissertation advisers—some of whom regularly did so, but others did not. What had been, in 1971 when I joined it, a group of scholars who came together at regional and international conferences and published a journal for the purpose of sharing research and advancing knowledge, had now become an institution devoted to sustaining the field itself. No doubt this is helpful at a time when the number of qualified ethnomusicologists is greater than the number of jobs in the field, yet I confess to a bit of nostalgia for the old days when more of the informal conversations at these conferences was about ideas than careers. 

     In addition to his views that professors should “do their jobs” (teach their disciplines and do research in their fields) and “not do someone else’s job” (that is, don’t do anything else as teachers, such as promote political activism in the classroom), Fish believes that professors should “not let anyone else do their jobs.” But this is why professors become activists—that is, when people other than professors tell them how to do their jobs, and enforce those views by various means—redistributing budgets, hiring more part-time labor, encouraging vocational training, and so on. I have written here before of the threat to higher education in the transformation of the university from a collegial to a corporate institution, with a corresponding transformation in values among administrators, if not faculty. 

     But for the past two years, with a new politics of populism and anti-intellectualism ascendant and in control of state legislatures (which allocate money to state universities) and Congress (which allocates money to funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, and whose political appointments to head these agencies change their direction), professors face a different and equally serious threat to the values of academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. Which is to say, the academic professions face that threat; and increasingly, SEM and other academic societies (as well as universities themselves) are issuing position statements on political matters (such as DACA, immigration, minority rights, and so on), with the near-full support of their constituent memberships.

     This doesn’t answer, directly, the question about why a professor of ethnomusicology might be qualified as a political pundit. But that answer is simple. Ethnomusicologists’ expertise isn’t confined to music. We are also historians, anthropologists, sociologists: we study society, history, and culture. Some of us also have backgrounds in the sciences. We don’t just study the structure of music, or how to appreciate it, or how to perform it, although these things are important. We are concerned with music and sound not simply as structure or aesthetics or a craft, but as a way of life. And that requires understanding life as it is lived, not only in our home communities and nations but all over the world. 

Dark Sustainability

     A recent essay in the New York Review of Books, by Shakespeare scholar Joseph Shapiro, connects a dark interpretation of Hamlet with the dystopian climate in academia today. A young scholar just published a book whose thesis is that all the older literary critics were wrong about Hamlet: he didn’t hesitate to kill Cluadius because he had an Oedipus complex, nor because he was a coward, nor because he was depressed. He didn't oppose murder on religious grounds. Rather, he was the embodiment of a Renaissance humanism that was collapsing because it failed to reckon with the predatory force of a heartless world. Hamlet is a weak idealist. 

     This kind of claim, coupled with the ascendance of dystopian visions among millennials (such as the author of the Hamlet study), made me wonder whether sustainability itself isn’t the product of a weak idealism in the face of a worldwide struggle for existence, to use the Darwinian metaphor. In other words, why think that it might be possible to sustain a sound commons, music, people and cultures, the environment of planet Earth? And yet, dark interpretations are just that: dark interpretations. Dark money and the dark internet are new, but dark, apocalyptic visions have been around at least since the Book of Revelation. Dark interpretations of sound as an instrument of power and control dominate contemporary scholarship on sound studies. To those writers, a sound commons appears unrealistic and utopian in the face of a crisis that is deeper than environmental. I agree that it is deeper than environmental. Since 2015, in my lectures and writings I have contended that sustainability is, ultimately, a crisis in ontology (being) and epistemology (knowing). 

     But since these dystopian visions are, after all, projections of the future, it’s possible to ask what it is in the present that gives rise to them. It’s not difficult to understand why they’re ascendant now, given the current political climate—one that threatens the institutions positioned to do something about sustaining music, culture, the environment, energy, food and agriculture, and so on. Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia, muses on the possibility that the dark future for humanities scholars is reflected in this writer’s new theory about Hamlet. He wonders if the writer is a scholar who, “Hamlet-like, expected, when their turn came, to inherit an academic kingdom”—that is, to become a tenured professor of literature at a college or university. But cutbacks in funding, coupled with those institutions’ turn to a corporate model of economic efficiency, have resulted in dismal prospects in this century for professors in the humanities—that is, many fewer tenured jobs, and many more bad (part time, underpaid) ones. Embittered, the scholar doesn’t blame the politicians or the political climate. Instead, the scholar blames the failure on the liberal arts themselves, which equips educators to think, and ponder, and contemplate, and cogitate, on political philosophy; but not to act on it, to fight back against the forces allied against it—and this failure, it seems, grows out of the very idealism built into the humanities themselves: not only that persons could be educated into wisdom, but that the world could be educated into justice.

     Of course, although Hamlet himself failed, Renaissance humanism did not fail. Yoking Hamlet to a collapse of humanism makes little sense, if history is consulted. Humanism’s educational values broadened and deepened, giving way to an even greater reliance in the 18th century on reason, then a period in which reason was coupled with feeling, followed in the later 19th century by the rise of science and the modern liberal arts university. To be sure, dissenting voices of modernism and post-modernism undermined humanist ideals, while powerful contemporary voices rise in a post-human assault on the humanities, sometimes in the name of a deeper ecology, but also (as in the case at hand) arising from a darker, dystopian vision of the world. Nor is this pessimism new: Hobbes and Malthus had it during the so-called Age of Reason, while the optimism fueled by the new science and technological advances of the late 19th century was also the time when the pessimism of social Darwinism implanted the struggle for existence into human nature itself.

     As it happens, this scholar who threw up the dark vision of Hamlet seems already to have inherited the kingdom. He's a “research scholar with the rank of professor,” at an Ivy-league university. It's not clear whether he holds a "continuing appointment" (tenure); but his research and writing accomplishments are significant, and his perch in the profession of English does not appear in doubt. His interpretation of Hamlet doesn’t arise from a personal failure to thrive within the diminishing world of scholarship and universities. The dystopian vision seems to be a contemporary cultural phenomenon, especially among millennials; and anyone who advocates for sustainability needs to reckon with it.

Scott Walker's Assault on Sustainability

     In my last entry I suggested that anyone who wanted to become an ethnomusicologist should realize that the usual path to this profession, through graduate school and the Ph.D. degree leading to a career as a professor in a college or university, was harder now that it was a few decades ago. The doctoral programs are graduating more ethnomusicologists than there are professorships available for them. Some graduates seek careers elsewhere, in museums, arts organizations, as journalists, and so on, while others remain on board the academic vessel, in 2nd class cabins as adjunct (i.e., part-time) professors for low pay and few, if any, benefits such as subsidies toward health care, retirement, etc. I’ve written earlier about the trend among presidents and boards of trustees to run colleges and universities as corporate businesses, generating profits in certain areas such as fund-raising, so as to support other areas and compete for students, faculty, attractive facilities and, of course, administrators capable of generating income. The difficulties arising from running colleges as corporations stem ultimately from the divergence between business values and educational values. Whereas business values competition and efficiency, education values collaboration and the free play of ideas, which is inherently inefficient. Education is far more process-oriented, whereas business values emphasize results.
     If the current assault on the tenure system in higher education succeeds, then the prospect for aspiring college and university teachers takes a further turn for the worse, while US higher education's sustainability is further threatened. Now, security of the position and tenure’s guarantee that a professor’s teaching and research must be free from political interference is in jeopardy. Ten days ago, the news media carried stories on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s attempts to do away with tenure at the state colleges and universities. Walker proposes to eliminate tenure and also some faculty decision-making authority regarding curriculum, research, and staffing. The idea behind it, say Walker and his Republican supporters, is to enable university administrators to “be more like a business and nimble in how they govern,” according to the US News & World Report.
    This change would enable administrators to hire faculty to teach this year’s fashionable subjects, and fire those whose offerings were no longer popular, as if math and history and physics and literature and engineering and music were marketplace products subject to the law of supply and demand. Competition in the educational marketplace, as in the business world generally, must be a good thing, they reason, as the best products will out-compete the others. The Wisconsin Board of Regents, most appointed by Gov. Walker, just recently approved many of his proposals, despite overwhelming opposition from faculty and students at Wisconsin colleges and universities.
     And if this change occurs in one state, Wisconsin, pressure will mount for others to take similar action in order to compete. The end of the tenure system and faculty authority concerning curricula, research, and staffing means the end of academic freedom—the rights of free speech granted to faculty—that enabled the growth of knowledge and its expression at the university without threat of faculty being fired for exercising that right. Professors without tenure could under this new regime be fired, and students expelled, for expressing minority views on such topics as climate change, labor unions, foreign policy, racial profiling, or the roundness of the earth. Although the First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech, it doesn’t guarantee the right not to be fired from a job as a professor unless that right is accompanied by the academic freedom that has been guaranteed in the US by tenure for at least a century.
    These efforts can be viewed within the larger trend toward turning the colleges and universities from collegially organized and governed institutions, where tenured professors were responsible to their colleagues and to the profession, into corporations organized and governed hierarchically, where the privileges of freedom of inquiry no longer operate. Of course, it isn’t only professors who suffer under these conditions. Teaching, research, knowledge and its application suffers as well under a regime of fear, as does public discourse. Professors fled Nazi Germany and Soviet countries in the last century—if they could get away—on account of political interference; academic freedom guaranteed in the US was, for them especially, an expression of the principles of freedom on which the US was founded. It is vital that not only professors and students but also the public at large vigorously oppose Gov. Walker’s efforts to politicize higher education.