"I question your optimism."

About six months ago I delivered a presentation to an international workshop on best practices for reinvigorating English and American Studies majors. I had shared in my cheerful way many of the practices we've put into place at my home institution, and spoke about some of the successful strategies I've seen at work elsewhere. I argued throughout the presentation that the best way to foster engagement with the humanities is to stop assuming that tampering with doctoral training will lead to the transformations we seek (that is cart before horse: various well meaning organizations have invested tens of millions of dollars on that project without much to show). I am convinced that our efforts are best placed into revitalizing undergraduate humanities education to create spaces of welcome, access and activation of potential. I argued for renewed emphasis on public work and community collaboration. Throughout I emphasized carefully choosing the words we use to describe our endeavors, with an ear towards how they resonate for those we’d like to invite to study with us. I admit that in fields where our terms of art tend towards the negative (problematize, interrogate, critique, deconstruct, expose), even when they connote plumbing the vexed complexities of lived or recorded reality and expanding understandings in ways that are at once unsettling but also engaging, then using terms like adventure, creativity, imagination and leading a good life can be jarring. Yet I was not quite ready for the first statement in the Q&A.

"I question your optimism."

That's what a fellow academic stated, as if what I had presented would then evaporate into mist. It took me aback for a second, even as I knew where it was coming from (as a literary scholar how can I note be versed in Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking work?), but then of course I smiled: I question my optimism as well, how can I not? But in the end I do believe that affirmation and welcome are necessary to building projects. I believe that the emotional tone we set through our language should welcome the newcomer and the stranger into our community. To be blunt, who wants to be part of a collective that is dour, downtrodden, unable to imagine better futures than the diminished one we are being handed? It’s too easy to create an accidental argument for remaining in place as the terrain shrinks.

I also believe that education is a social good, and that access to a superlative liberal arts and sciences education is a basic right. I am grateful to work with eager undergraduates and affirmative colleagues, and so I cannot help being optimistic for the world they and we are hoping to build.