Innovation does not equal high enrollment

There are just so many examples of how institutions undermine themselves, despite their best intentions. In the era of budget cuts, administrators have become more concerned than ever with maintaining high enrollments. So now some universities have begun a review of courses in order to eliminate the “under-enrolled.” Missing in much of the discussion about course enrollment is a consideration of course content.

A common distinction, in graduate courses, is made between courses that are listed, and often required, by the department bulletin and “special topic” courses which are taught by faculty interested in developing a new research topic. These “special topic” courses have been targeted increasingly because they are under-enrolled. However, the low enrollment in such courses does not indicate that these courses are unimportant or uninteresting. In fact this year’s special topics course may become a requirement in five years, it’s just that no one can predict that today.

Special topic seminars are, in my experience, where the new research happens. Every literature department can fill a course on Romanticism, but not everyone is willing to take a course on race theory in German Idealism. Just wait though a few more years, and those handful of students who took the race theory course will be publishing up a storm. The Romanticism students will probably be following in their tracks. Yes, its more pleasant to discuss Wordsworth crossing the Alps than the Haitian Revolution. But if we pause a little, we will find that of course Wordsworth has a few things to say about slavery in the Caribbean and before you know it we have dissertations on race theory in Romanticism—here’s the point though. The race theory class was first presented as a “special topics” course, something outside the mainstream curriculum, an innovation, an experiment, a professor’s first attempt at laying out a long and complex argument. Someday we may all think Wordsworth’s most daring poem was dedicated to Toussaint L’Ouverture. But you heard it first in a “special topics” seminar.

So if you want a university that innovates, that does not fall back on the familiar, a university that grows and develops new research, please, dear high-level administrators, do not cut the special topics seminars, just because they are under enrolled.

Haiti for Germanists

The world has once again discovered Haiti in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake. In addition to sending money, Germanists can read up on the long history of forgetting and remembering Haiti by taking another look at Susan Buck-Morss's essay "Hegel and Haiti," first published in Critical Inquiry ten years ago, and now reprinted with an introduction and accompanying essay by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

http://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=35923

Buck-Morss argues that news of the Haitian Revolution must have motivated Hegel as he elaborated the "Master-Slave dialectic" portion of his Phenomenology of Spirit. The Master-Slave dialectic is perhaps Hegel's most famous argument, one that has been read for almost two centuries as a precursor to Marxism.

In college I was taught that Hegel was thinking about Stoicism and the fate of Christians in the Roman Empire when he wrote that section of the Phenomenology, but Buck-Morss argues that the immediate condition of African slaves in the New World and the first successful revolution against white masters in Haiti must also have had a profound impact on the young Hegel, one which scholars have since forgotten.

Her argument is by no means confined to one German Idealist. She traces the long history of how European intellectuals looked past the immediate oppression of Africans when they theorized on freedom and slavery. The Mediterranean ancient past was always assumed to be the philosophical context for Enlightenment arguments against slavery, a perversion given the aggressive involvement of all European maritime powers in the Atlantic slave trade.

How much Buck-Morss's argument will shift our understanding of Hegel remains to be seen, but her essay, and this new book, is a compelling place to rediscover Haiti's crucial stand against oppression and the two hundred years of punishment that the United States and Europe of meted out ever since sugar cane slaves rose up against their masters.