Both/and: The Alternative of Relational Thinking

To call the issues facing departments of English today difficult or sensitive would obviously be understating the case. Chairs would be forgiven if they had nightmares about the incommensurability of the demands made on them and the kind of institutional and collegial support they can count on. Some of the problems they face are internal ones, such as how to deal with the ideological factions—often generational—within departments. Others are more public: how to justify our discipline to a population indoctrinated with the notion that what we do has been irremediably politicized, rendered incapable of disinterested intellectual investigation.