Background: Recent Disciplinary Initiatives in the UCSB English Department

1. 1999 Department mission statement of three collaborative concerns:
   
   
   1. Historicity and Historical Studies
      
      
   2. Contemporary Theory and Culture
      
      
   3. The Public Humanities
      
      
2. New Department "Centers": Transcriptions, Early Modern Center (EMC), American Cultures and Global Contexts (ACGC)
   
   
   1. Each center has a physical space in the department that combines teaching/meeting facilities with information-technology facilities (e.g., Transcriptions Studio, EMC)
      
      
   2. Each center runs a combination of research and curricular initiatives, including undergraduate "specializations" tied loosely or tightly to faculty research activities (e.g., the EMC's yearly "themed" conferences and courses)
      
      
   3. The centers convene faculty across fields and periods
      
      
   4. The centers vertically integrate the three tiers of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in common research activities (e.g., Transcription's Literature and the Culture of Information specialization, which with HFA funding ran a series of undergrad paid research assistantships supervised by grad students and faculty).
      
      
   5. The centers have a productive history of formal or informal collaborations with other departments and programs on campus as well as intercampus research groups (e.g., Transcriptions's collaborations with: Art Studio, MAT, Film Studies, the UC Digital Cultures Project, UC DARnet, U. Nottingham trAce, Electronic Literature Organization)
      
      
   6. The centers are to various degrees funded from both intramural sources and extramural project (rather than individual research) grants.

Strategic Considerations

1. The first strategic consideration concerns the general disciplinary context in which departments are being asked to consider long-range planning. The leading question posed for this panel (a close variant of the language used in Division of Humanities and Fine Arts memo on the LRDP) is: "What would you hope your discipline would look like 10-15 years from now?" But the singular noun "discipline" in this question is founded on a wrong premise. In the next 15 years, there will be no one "discipline" defining the norms of a humanities department like English.
           Looking around us, we see that the "knowledge economy" that currently dominates society favors an increasingly diverse rather than mono-institutional or mono-disciplinary ecology of learning. As I wrote in the MLA's Profession magazine a few years ago, education now
   
   

   occurs across a whole lifetime in an unprecedented variety of social sectors, institutions, and media: not just schools, community colleges, and universities, but also businesses, broadcast media, the Internet, even the manuals or 'tutorials' that accompany software applications. Education, in other words, is now a decentralized field where no one institution individually corners the market and where we encounter a dizzying dispersion of the kinds and scales of learning—all the way from educational programs leading to degrees to CNN 'factoids' leading only to the next commercial. [The operative question has become:] how can society create the most inclusive, flexible, and intelligently interrelated mix of educational options to take care of all its citizens hungry to 'know'? "Knowledge in the Age of Knowledge Work," Professions 1999: 113-24

   
   Looking at the specific sector of the knowledge economy occupied by higher education, we see that the same trend toward diverse ecologies has been in place for some time, and in all likelihood has accelerated—a point that is excellently surveyed in the chapter titled "A Taxonomy of Teacher Work" in Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio's 1994 book, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (which addresses the stratification of American higher-educational institutions into various classes of research and teaching environments).
             In this rain forest of contemporary knowledge, why should a diversity of paradigms not apply at the micro-institutional level of disciplines and departments? Why should there be one normative model for a discipline or department—or, even more specific, one model for a disciplinary research department—when there are so many niches that can be filled and even invented?
   
   
2. The next set of strategic considerations concerns the specific niche of the UCSB English Department.
            To begin with, consider the numbers. The number of ladder faculty in the UCSB English Department is currently in the mid thirties. Even assuming the most extreme growth rate projected in the HFA LRDP memo (2.5% a year for 15 years), the department would grow to only the mid 40s in total ladder faculty. That compares with numbers in the 60s to 70s for ladder faculty in some of the top-tier English departments in the nation, e.g., Yale, Berkeley, Harvard, UCLA, UVA. On the numbers alone, UCSB's English Department will never have the strength of those other departments in terms of "coverage" across the fields. That is not a measure on which we will be competitive with the top tier. However, this is less a cause for mourning than it is an opportunity to do something different, to occupy or invent another niche.
   
   
3. Next, consider funding. UCSB is a public higher-education institution, and funding from traditional public sources for scholarship and teaching—whether at the level of departments or of individual research fellowships for scholars—is now on the wane. The number of funding sources for individual fellowships, for example, has not been growing; and the amount paid out from each such fellowship source has significantly declined in proportion to a full-year faculty salary. Therefore, depending exclusively on monies from campus and state entities or on such traditional federal funding sources for the humanities as the NEH will be a recipe for the long-term decline of UCSB humanities departments relative to the top-tier departments in the nation. Even if we gain in strength, they will gain faster from their combination of public and private funding sources. However, this may be seen as another incentive to do something different—borrowing from the title of a recent business bestseller, "to move our cheese." (Spencer Johnson and Kenneth H. Blanchard, Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, Putnam, 1998.)
   
   
4. Finally, consider how we are wired. Scholars in many of the top-tier English and other humanities departments in the nation have access to world-class library archives, but little to zero direct engagement with (or national visibility in) the use of information technology and new media. Several humanities and arts programs at UCSB already have high national or world visibility in integrating information technology into their core research and teaching concerns—including Art Studio, English, Film Studies, Music, Art History, and Media Arts and Technology. Again, this is an area of opportunity, a niche we can build upon.

A Proposal for a Future Top-Tier English Department at UCSB

1. Maintain current levels of "field" coverage by hiring to replace retirements or losses in existing fields (subject to variances for the department's needs to hire in new fields or to build-to-strength in existing fields)
   
   
2. Extend the model of research-and-teaching "centers" in the department so that a super-majority of faculty and graduate students are affiliated with one or more such centers. (E.g., add a fourth center in the English Department that intersects in an innovative fashion with such fields as minority, women's, or postcolonial literature.)
   
   
3. Define for each of these centers specific research and/or curricular development "projects" that can be:
   
   
   • magnets for extramural public and private sector grants,
     
     
   • that can create rich, diversified ecologies of research and teaching touching many faculty interests,
     
     
   • that extend the work of the humanities beyond "interpretation" or "critique" to active building or intervention,
     
     
   • and that can bridge across fields and/or departments.
     
     
For example: there could be a Transcriptions project on "Transliteracy" to study empirically and interpretively how "reading" actually works in a new-media milieu of searching, scanning, browsing, link-jumping, and other "low-cognitive" or "other-cognitive" reading activities. The project would not only interpret or critique such reading but also intervene practically in such reading (e.g., by collaborating with engineers and computer scientists to build an experimental software platform optimized for digital reading or a "smart" search engine that allows users to prioritize thicker or more internally rich streams of discourse among the "hits").


4. Set up such "projects" so that they are structurally rather than only thematically or methodologically interdisciplinary (e.g., by defining hiring slots for scholars who are trained in both literary interpretation and such other fields as cognitive science, computer science, film studies, art studio, etc. To take a specific instance, hire an English department member who can be cross-appointed with MAT.).
   
   
5. Set up such "projects" so that they include multiple ranks of scholarship in an integral relationship: ladder-faculty, postdocs, graduate students, undergraduates. (Postdoctoral fellowships have been an important, continuing source of new ideas and new contacts for other humanities departments in the nation, but have had minimal impact at UCSB in the humanities fields. The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center attempted last year to initiate an application for Mellon postdocs that would rotate among the various humanities and arts departments involved in new media, but that effort has for the time being halted.)
   
   
6. Devote part of the 15-year annual increase of 1.5% to 2.5% FTE (as specified in the LRDP planning parameters) to hiring ladder faculty specifically for projects existing within or between departments. Give priority in such hiring to faculty who cross fields or disciplines in a way that can structurally bridge programs; and to projects that have cross-field, cross-period, cross-disciplinary, or cross-institutional reach.
   
   
7. Devote a second part of the funding increase to soft monies or block grants for postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate research assistants in specific projects. For example, designate part of graduate monies for particular projects rather than for departments at large. Place a premium in the assignation of such monies on projects that have cross-field, cross-period, cross-departmental, cross-disciplinary, or cross-institutional reach.
   
   
8. Devote a third part of the funding increase to soft monies for course relief for the faculty who write grant applications and manage collaborative projects. This would bring the humanities and arts more into line with other divisions where grant-writing and project-direction duties are part of the recognized workload. (If necessary, course relief for such duties in the humanities and arts could be tendered by the College on "spec," whereby advance relief is awarded contingent on a successful grant application—and will be paid back in the form of overload teaching (equal to half the expended course relief; with the other half compensating for the work of grant-wriitng) if no grant application is successful within five years. (Corollary: guidelines should be put in place to ensure that humanities and arts scholars, including especially junior faculty, can be normally evaluated and promoted on the basis of work that includes not only research, teaching, and service but also project-direction, fund-raising, etc.
   
   
9. Devote a fourth part of the funding increase to supporting the development of information technology to enhance cross-field, cross-department, and cross-institutional project knowledge networks (i.e., "start-up costs" for humanists).

Summary Overview

In such a future humanities department, the "centers" and "projects" layer on top of the "field coverage" model would be a way to jump us into the next higher tier of research departments. It would be a strong recruitment magnet for new faculty and graduate students. It would have the capability to generate grant and also private-sector extramural funding. It would create a new model of the humanities department.