The paradox is that university life can be both terrific and troubling for parents and children alike: the workplace environment is casual and accomm… - Michael Bérubé

So these days, when I talk to my scientist friends, I offer them a deal. I say: I’ll admit that you were right about the potential for science studies to go horribly wrong and give fuel to deeply ignorant and/or reactionary people. And in return, you’ll admit that I was right about the culture wars, and right that the natural sciences would not be held harmless from the right-wing noise machine. And if you’ll go further, and acknowledge that some circumspect, well-informed critiques of actually existing science have merit (such as the criticism that the postwar medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth had some ill effects), I’ll go further too, and acknowledge that many humanists’ critiques of science and reason are neither circumspect nor well-informed. Then perhaps we can get down to the business of how to develop safe, sustainable energy and other social practices that will keep the planet habitable.
Fifteen years ago, it seemed to me that the Sokal Hoax was making that kind of deal impossible, deepening the “two cultures” divide and further estranging humanists from scientists. Now, I think it may have helped set the terms for an eventual rapprochement, leading both humanists and scientists to realize that the shared enemies of their enterprises are the religious fundamentalists who reject all knowledge that challenges their faith and the free-market fundamentalists whose policies will surely scorch the earth. On my side, perhaps humanists are beginning to realize that there is a project even more vital than that of the relentless critique of everything existing, a project to which they can contribute as much as any scientist–the project of making the world a more humane and livable place. Is it still possible? I don’t know, and I’m not sanguine. Some scientific questions now seem to be a matter of tribal identity: A vast majority of elected Republicans have expressed doubts about the science behind anthropogenic climate change, and as someone once remarked, it is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his tribal identity depends on his not understanding it. But there are few tasks so urgent. About that, even Heisenberg himself would be certain.

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 that argument of yours. You don’t need a grand introductory paragraph that begins, ‘Mark Twain is one of Earth’s greatest writers.’ It’s far better to start by giving us some idea of what you’ll be arguing and why. If you like, you can even begin by pointing us to a particularly important passage that will serve as the springboard for your larger discussion: ‘Not long after the second scaffold scene in The Scarlet Letter, when Arthur Dimmesdale joins hands with Hester Prynne and her daughter, Pearl, Nathaniel Hawthorne asks us to reconsider the meaning of the scarlet A on Hester’s breast.’”

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.