I also tell students that an essay of two thousand words doesn’t give them all that much space to get going. “You’ve only got a few pages to make tha… - Michael Bérubé

Amazingly, this disdain for aggressive marketing and self-promotion is matched or exceeded by academe’s aversion to the kind of structural, systemic change that has made the American economy so remarkably productive. While it is true that American universities have adopted some of the most constructive developments of the business world — boosting the pay of dynamic executive officers to almost a million dollars a year while maintaining a flexible, “as-needed” workforce for outsourceable tasks such as physical plant maintenance and freshman composition — it is also true that not a single American university to date has shown enough basic business sense to register its name as a commercial trademark. This has had a strongly negative impact on universities’ mobility, and therefore prevents them from seeking out optimal wage environments in New Delhi and Singapore. But it also speaks more generally to academe’s cluelessness about how the world actually works.

One of the strengths of Cultivating Humanity is that it explicitly explores the conflict between authority and reason, even if the book does not entirely resolve this conflict. Nussbaum’s untrammeled confidence in both the universality of reason and the diversity of human life makes hers a challenging and curious book, one that strongly endorses multicultural study while distancing itself from nearly everything typically associated with it, including postmodernism, identity politics, and the critique of philosophical universalism. Here, in other words, we have an emphatic humanist who rebukes the ethnocentrism and willful ignorance of her fellow self-described humanists and the relativism and irrationalism of her postmodernist colleagues. Who knows? If her book is read as carefully and as sympathetically as it was written, it might just give humanism a good name again. But can it convince readers who don’t understand “reason” as she does? That’s another question entirely.

I suggest, therefore, that we try to see the intellectual challenges of contemporary literary study as enriched by rather than in competition with knowledge of the history of literary theory. In the same spirit, I suggest that we cultivate a determined antagonism to disciplinary territorialism, whether in faculty hiring, curricular design, or graduate admissions. While I have numerous complaints about the profession and various critiques of its mode of conducting business, I have not forgotten that literary study truly is a remarkable field whose appeal lies in its ceaseless intellectual delights and debates.