HOW OTHERS SEE US. The Weekly Standard's Charlotte Allen travels to Kalamazoo for the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies. Nothing is more likely to confirm the prejudices of one order of higher education's critics than a blend of Marxism, literary theory, and poop.

Jeff Persels, a lanky associate professor of French and director of European studies at the University of South Carolina, was reading aloud a scholarly paper at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies. The paper's title was "The Wine in the Urine: Managing Human Waste in French Farce." The paper was about, well, the wine in the urine, or perhaps the urine in the wine. Its topic is a 15th-century farce, or lowlife comic drama, about an adulterous wife who uses a wine bottle as an impromptu chamber pot, with predictably gross results involving her husband and her lover.

Persels's paper didn't discuss the play simply as an example of Rabelaisian-style scatology, however. The perspective he used was the postmodernist discipline of "cultural studies," which means pushing works of literature (or movies or television shows or ad campaigns or whatever) through a Marxist cheesegrater as examples of the way society conditions its members to accept the views of a dominant class. In Persels's view, the wine-bottle farce marked a stage in the development of what he called the "bourgeois fecal habitus." Translated out of postmodern-ese into plain English, that means the tendency of uptight middle-class people not to want to talk in public about matters pertaining to the bathroom and to assume that those who do are kind of crude.

Our friendly connection at Unlocked Wordhoard reacts.

Regular readers of the Wordhoard know that I share her concerns about certain types of cultural studies, since they apply a cultural Marxist paradigm to a pre-capitalist world. Nor am I a big fan of scholars who do "transgressive" work just because it's "transgressive" -- first of all, since it'll get you tenure, it isn't all that transgressive,^* and second, it's stupid to do anything just because it's transgressive.

[Superintendent's note: I have also copied the footnote as a footnote to this post.] Also at Unlocked Wordhoard is a preliminary bibliography of reactions by other practitioners. The "cultural Marxist" observation intrigues. One commenter to the post suggests that Marxian interpretations of social evolution provide a useful framework for understanding "precapitalist" society. Perhaps. Double-entry bookkeeping, hull insurance distinct from commodity insurance, and contracts for future delivery don't sound sexy.

Back to the Weekly Standard article. Amid the culture-studies references are some observations about life in the mid-majors.

Western Michigan, occupying 1,200 hilly acres on the far western outskirts of Kalamazoo, is one of those state normal schools that during the mid-1950s decided to switch identities overnight from poky teachers' college to populous state research university via a massive building campaign entailing awe-inspiring quantities of cinderblock. Today the student population totals 26,000, and its enormous campus is dotted with midcentury structures of an architectural style that can be described as "non-descript but sturdy."

Shortly after I moved to Northern Illinois, a Western Michigan colleague that I worked with from Wayne State asked about setting up a Ph.D. program in their economics department. (There now is one. Their graduates get jobs.) The description is accurate. The enrollment is a bit larger, the acreage half again larger, and the hills substantially larger than those of Northern Illinois.

Engineering, science, and business are Western Michigan's strong suits, along with Division 1A football--not exactly promising soil for nurturing study of the Middle Ages. Still, the campus houses a Medieval Institute that sponsored the first congress in 1962 and continues to do so to this day, as well as an Institute of Cistercian Studies (complete with an impressive rare-books library) that started sponsoring theological sessions at the congress during the early 1970s. The congress, with its lingering overtones of 1960s hippie culture, was designed as a gathering of the tribes in all things medieval: history, literature, theology, philosophy, drama, art, and music.

Apart from the Compass Point State designation, the rest of that topic sentence could apply to Purdue or Wisconsin or Northwestern or Duke, well, you have to pick your football samples somewhat selectively. There's no reason for the mid-majors not to model themselves on the state flagships or the larger selective private universities. But when it comes to research presence, depressingly frequently, they don't.

The pecking-order realities of academic life, even among otherworldly medievalists, leave a vast army of poorly paid, overworked lower-echelon professors at not-so-big-name universities and, of course, legions of strapped graduate students for whom a trip to Western Michigan and the dorms of "the Zoo," as they call it, may well be the high point of the academic year.

Many state schools and smaller colleges on tight budgets pay for at most one or two trips to academic conferences per professor per year, and often at the rate of just $500 or even $300 per conference--hardly enough to cover air fare--and usually only if the recipient delivers a paper. You scarcely need to put two and two together to figure out why this year's congress featured 1,500 papers and why so many of them, delivered by graduate students afraid to venture outside the postmodernist box in which their theory-laden seminars have confined them, or professors who seemed to have hastily thrown their notes together in order to qualify for a free plane trip, were, to put it kindly, not so hot.

And thus, the proliferation of archival journals that exist solely to validate scholarly activity, if not necessarily deep thought, and the too-common mid-major mindset of counting pages or articles published, rather than considering the outlet in which it is published. The mid-majors are in the same business as the state flagships and the private selectives. There's nothing wrong with acting like it.

The article mentions the "rail line" between Chicago and Detroit. I know Amtrak bisects the Western campus (football field to the east, hockey arena to the west) but the university is a fair distance from the station (albeit not the 20 miles to Elburn). A route inspection may be in order, as Kalamazoo is the east end of the Porter-Kalamazoo section under Amtrak ownership that has been upgraded for 110 mph running.

Oh, that footnote.

^*True transgression would be to do scholarship supportive of the Bush Administration, as that kind of thing could get you fired despite tenure. Unless you're taking actual, real risks, don't believe your friends when they say how "courageous" you are. You ain't, bub.

Tell me about it. On occasion I serve on hiring committees. Nothing turns me off faster than the dissertation spiel that mentions the current popularity of the topic. Find something that interests you and tell me why it interests you.