If you're going to write a satire, why be subtle about it? "All Politics" by Jessica Burstein

I was halfway through my master's degree in English at University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003 and had been accepted by the school to the Ph.D. program. Halfway through getting a master's, though, was enough for me to see that academia in the humanities was an insane asylum. Nothing I've heard from friends who continued on that route and are now working as professors has ever made me regret my decision. As much as my current work might be a bureaucratic mess, and as many head-scratching moments of "is this really what I want to do for a living?" it induces, it's a drop in the ocean to what my friends seem to face.

That's also the vibe I get from Jessica Burstein's "All Politics," included in the 2019 Pushcart Anthology. The title is misleading, because politics hardly figure directly in the story at all, but in another sense, it's right on the nose, because the entire point of the story is the political uselessness of humanities departments. As much as folks complain that the humanities have gotten "too political" or are "all about politics," in reality, they're so deep in their own dysfunctional cultures, they're hardly political at all. Or, to put it another way, if everything is political, then nothing is.

The first-person narrator, who only tells us her nickname of "Red DeMur," a name she is a little too proud to have picked up from black people at the gym-- "not the black guys who work at the university; the other black guys"--has gotten a fellowship to Oxford. She glibly reveals that the subject of her lectures that won the fellowship--"installation art, mostly earthworks"--is something she is only dabbling in, but dirt is somehow trendy, and she gets the gig. She's happy to escape the increasing budget cuts of American universities: "taking out the phone lines, restricting our access to the copy machines (professors still love to copy things), shutting down the library, merging the humanities with the new Diversity in Diversity Zion Protocols Center..." In Oxford, however, she finds that the humanities are equally impotent. The only difference is, as she puts it by way of how Brits and Americans work out at the gym, that "Americans grunt; the Brits just endure, quietly." Americans humanities departments might make more fuss about their growing irrelevance, loss of status and budgets, but it's happening to them just the same. (Of course, even Americans don't make that much fuss. As Red tells us: "...in these days of budgetary brouhaha, the university was getting it in the neck. And taking it, since basically, American professors are spineless. By basically I mean unequivocally. American professors are the worst. Or as we like to term it, the best.")

Along the way to discovering the differences across the pond, "Red" gives us the usual list of accusations against the humanities, although in such crisp and witty detail they feel fresh. She name-drops intellectuals, pop culture icons, and artists, both putting them into the mouths of her characters and also putting the actual famous people into her story to interact with Red. Red considers feeling empathy for a moment for humanities students, but then realizes they are "willfully oppressed," and therefore not in "actual need of empathy." This frees her as a professor to enjoy "being pandered to." Meanwhile, much of her narrative, far from being the insightful and revealing narrative we'd think it should be from someone who is allegedly an expert in culture, is full of banalities. These are the funniest part of the story. Burstein is really good at nailing these. For example: "So off I went to Oxford. It's in England. Long flight. Oxford was neat. They put me up in an apartment, or, as they say there, a 'flat.'" At least one-third of the story is Red talking about how she works out at the gym.

Much of the name-dropping is full of red herrings, an example of how in the humanities, it can be as important to make sure you signal that you are aware of the influential figures as it is to actually have original and intelligent thoughts about them. When Red wears a shirt where a woman is blowing her brains out with a gun, but the blood comes out as butterflies, the best she can come up with is to say that it's somehow "very symbolic." This was, by the way, the same thing one of her students had to say about the "Out of the Woods" video she saw while taking Red's Taylor Swift symposium.

Enough. Burstein did a good enough job beating the hell out of humanities departments that I don't need to keep explaining how she did it. It's a good reminder that I'm glad I didn't go down that route, and I'm happy to move on to the next story knowing I avoided at least one land mine in my life.