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The Academic Future of Folklore

We have reached a crucial point in the history of folklore studies in the United States. The entire academic scene is under scrutiny and review. Some critics and gloomy prophets, like Robert Nisbet in The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, are even predicting the end of the American university as an institution, to be jettisoned like the medieval cathedral by a society that demands relevance and involvement. Programs and departments considered peripheral are, as we all know, being eliminated; budget belts for faculty positions are being tightened; Ph.D.’s are seeking ever more elusive jobs; the so-called fat is being squeezed out of the vast plants of higher education. What are the prospects for Folklore, which by 1971 has inched its way into the tent of academe, but could easily be pushed out again? Should Folklore wage a holding battle to retain its modest foothold? Should it recognize and bow gracefully to the current austerity by seeking protection from, and absorption into, well established disciplines? Should it seek to continue its momentum of growth, and if so, in what directions and by what means and tactics? These are the questions I submit to our panel and to our Society, and I am sure they are already in your minds.

On our direction I have a firm view; on our stratagems I do not. I believe Folklore should fight unequivocally for continued academic recognition. By this I mean it should seek further Ph.D. programs, undergraduate majors and minors, and additional course offerings in Folklore, throughout the American system of higher education. To spell this out more explicitly, I think we can realistically argue that Folklore belongs in every fully developed liberal arts curriculum and that every major university and many smaller ones should have a folklorist—that is, a holder of the Ph.D. in Folklore—on its faculty. I am not contending that we should strive for many departments of Folklore, for such a goal would certainly be unrealistic today, and here is where the question of strategy comes in. For if there exist, and survive, only a handful of Folklore departments, who hires the folklorist, and who cares about replacing him if he leaves?

Let me first support my credo that Folklore should push for the major, the minor, the M.A., the Ph.D., in short, the works. I have not always subscribed to this full repertoire, and had doubts until recently about the undergraduate major. Other professional folklorists have had, and may still have, doubts about the Ph.D. At any rate here are the reasons that have led to my conversion.

First, Folklore as a subject of study is extremely attractive to students, both undergraduates and graduates. It is a poor teacher indeed who cannot turn on a class that is discovering tales and ballads and crafts. On all sides I hear reports of prospering enrolments. At Indiana the number of higher degree candidates in folklore has steadily climbed over the past fourteen years from six to one hundred twenty-five; although fellowship funds have diminished, the caliber as well as the number of applicants goes up each year. In 1969-70 and 1970-71 the three main introductory courses—survey, American, folk music—have, under the spirited direction of Robert Adams, Henry Glassie, and Charles Boilès, pushed undergraduate enrolment up to two thousand a year. The success of these courses has led to a spillover into upper division offerings. At Berkeley I was able to see the enormous drawing power of Alan Dundes with the country’s most demanding students who flocked into his classes to the number of seven hundred, and when I was there as visiting professor, he dragooned two hundred fifty bodies into a course of mine that was not even listed in the catalogue. Well, we live in a day when numbers count, and if Folklore pulls in students at a time when many of them complain about the sterility of college instruction, let us advertise our record loudly and clearly. Already our new undergraduate major in Folklore at Indiana University, initiated this fall, has led students to transfer to I.U. from other colleges so they can pursue this major. The Folklore Institute has just acquired a second building to handle its growing affairs. As Folklore in the universities has waxed, so has its professional organization, the American Folklore Society, prospered amazingly since the 1940’s.

Second, the humanistic values in folklore studies are especially appealing in the contemporary climate of opinion. Here I am thinking not just of student reaction but of the perspectives of university faculties, administrators, boards of trustees, alumni, legislators, businessmen, and the public at large. The nation today is concerned about its underprivileged, its poor, its blacks, its Appalachian whites, its ethnics, its Indians, its Chicanos, its forgotten and leftouts. While I will not equate the folk with the “lower orders,” as the Victorian folklorists were wont to do, I am ready to see, and claim, plenty of opportunities for the folklorist among such tradition-oriented groups. The frustrated scholars of Afro-American or Black Studies, for an instance, are becoming aware of the primacy of verbal traditions in the cultural heritage of the American Negro. Those who wish to comprehend more fully the thoughts of men in prison can turn to the collections of prison folklore recorded by Bruce Jackson.

This line of thought might seem to move toward the seductions of Applied Folklore, but I am not proposing that Bruce Jackson’s work will avert another Attica. Greater knowledge of mankind, particularly the overlooked masses of mankind, may well aid social reformers. But I do not think reform is the business of the folklorist. He has his work cut out to justify and explain his discipline. And today he can justify it in good part through the “disinterested” pursuit of cultural truths about his fellow-man. Here I use disinterested not in the sense of without interest, but in the Victorian sense of without bias or self-serving end, as Gordon Ray has revived the term in his splendid essay on “The Idea of Disinterestedness in the University.”¹

A third reason why I believe Folklore should strive for as complete autonomy as possible is my conviction that it is a separate and independent field of learning, fully equal to the other humanities and social sciences. By any tests one can apply—the density of the scholarly literature, the specialized nature of the concepts and techniques, the international community of professionals—Folklore is a full-time academic enterprise. At one time I thought that the historian, the literary critic, the anthropologist, and perhaps any sympathetic scholar of whatever discipline could master folkloristics by listening to some shoptalk and reading some key books. After thirty years in the game I now feel that the interdisciplinary ideal is a chimera, because the professional in one field never really understands the professional in another field. He has a hard enough time comprehending the subdisciplines of his own domain. By the time the aspiring academic has taken his graduate colloquia and seminars, sweated through his qualifying examinations, consulted with his graduate advisors, attended his professional meetings, labored over his dissertation, all the time closely closeted with his peers traveling the same rocky road, he is corrupted for life; his mental muscles have atrophied, his speech patterns have coagulated, his intellectual blood stream has thickened to a slow ooze. Until his grave he will be a political scientist, a linguist, an historian—or a folklorist. His Ph.D. is irreversible. The only difference between a doctorate in Folklore and other doctorates is that nonfolklorists think they can talk about folklore. No outsider would dream of talking, say, to a sociologist in his own jargon, but because of its restricted academic status and its popular nature, Folklore can be patronized by anybody. How often have we all had the experience of Professor Smooch from the Gerontology Department, or Mrs. Curious from Suburbia, coming up to us at some social gathering and saying, “Now what is folklore?” In his innocence Professor Smooch is no different from Mrs. Curious, and even academics whose research over the years has brought them close to folkloristics never grasp the most elementary concepts. I could cite chapter and verse for the exchanges, the book reviews, the corridor comments to document these generalizations, but one will do. In a taped discussion which is being broadcast this fall over university radio stations in the series “Conversations from Chicago,” Walter Blair, professor emeritus of English at the University of Chicago, was talking with me about my new book of old essays, American Folklore and the Historian, in which I had held up a passage from his Tall Tale America as an example of fakelore. “Well, Dick, people are calling you pedantic, arrogant, and dogmatic,” he said with refreshing candor. “What authority do you have to tell me what liberties I can take with my materials? Tall Tale America is still selling, but if I did not rewrite the stories they would be pretty dull and people would not read them.” Now Walter Blair has done excellent and courageous work on American humor over a long stretch of time, and flirted with folklore, as in his co-authorship with Franklin Meine of two books on Mike Fink. He would cut his throat before he would tamper with a Mark Twain text, but in his eyes folklore texts require tampering.

The walls between disciplines work for us as well as against us. Every Ph.D. in Folklore we turn out becomes a recruit to our growing guild, and whatever department he ultimately joins, he will be irrevocably branded as a folklorist. We have of course in our Society professionals from other disciplines, but they belong for the most part—and I include myself here—to the day before doctorates in Folklore became readily available.

Our future as I see it lies in the university. We have witnessed the doldrums that folklore in England has fallen into without a university base. I do not believe that support from agencies of the federal government, were it forthcoming, would ever permit folklorists to engage in the disinterested pursuit of truth. We have before us the example of the folklore gathered under the Federal Writers Project which was never published because it fell into divisive ethnic categories rather than unified all-American stuff.

So for the strategy of folklorists in the coming years, I say go all out to get entrenched in the colleges and universities. But what of the tactics? How do we maintain and expand Folklore programs and how do we place our Ph.D.’s? The two questions are interrelated, for if more courses are taught and more majors and minors developed, more Folklore Ph.D.’s will be needed.

The crux of the matter lies in the departmental structure of American universities. Departments are composed of scholars holding the Ph.D. in a common field, and they recruit new members with the same doctorate. In smaller institutions, the president may hire new faculty, but he places them in a department of their fellow-Ph.D.’s. The problem for the new doctor of Folklore, and his sponsors, is to persuade a department composed of doctors of English, or anthropology, or history, or foreign languages, or music, to give him a home. A number of such departments have taken in their token folklorist, but each negotiation represents a struggle; many institutions possess no folklorist, and too often, especially now, if the folklorist moves to a more attractive situation his vacancy is gobbled up by hungry chairmen, former colleagues, or harassed deans to use for a Milton specialist or an urban anthropologist, or it may simply vanish. There is an opening now that has not been filled for some time in a southern university with a long commitment to Folklore, although well qualified nominees have been recommended, because the departmental spokesman insists on a candidate who will publish and make his career primarily in English. Yet this candidate is supposed to edit a folklore journal and teach some Folklore. Our Ph.D.’s at Indiana, Pennsylvania, Texas, customarily have strong minors, but the hiring institutions should expect them to make their contributions in large part as folklorists, and not to disguise themselves under other hats. Our chief argument indeed is that conventional Ph.D.’s exist in abundance, but a university should be proud and delighted to have on its roster that colorful and exotic academic growth, the professor who professes Folklore.

The question then is, how do we get doctors of Folklore onto the faculties of many of the 2600 institutions of higher learning in the United States? A university organism is a strange animal, belonging to a common genus and yet with its own individual markings, in the form of presidents, provosts, vice-presidents, chancellors, vice-chancellors, deans, vice-deans, divisions, schools, institutes, committees of every hue and complexion, and with varying relationships to other units of higher education in the state or the conference or the association. And yet, in spite of all this formidable bureaucracy, effective action may take place through informal human relationships. Once when I was seeking an appointment as tennis coach in the Harvard Athletic Association, the director of intramural athletics told me he would intercept the provost next day at 12:10 P.M. on the path the provost always took from his administrative office to the faculty club for lunch, and obtain his approval en route. As dean of the graduate school at Indiana University in 1949, Stith Thompson looked with favor on his own proposal for a graduate program in folklore. He tells in his memoir how he first met the new president, Herman B Wells, in the barber shop, and there commenced an intimacy that resulted in Folklore having a strong champion in the president’s office for the next quarter of a century. In these respects universities probably resemble other large business organizations; the husband of a folklorist once told me he learned of his promotion to assistant sales manager of Chevrolet in a men’s room of the General Motors Building.

Recognizing that personal initiative will always play a prominent role in the developing of academic programs, we still ponder what we may do collectively as a learned society to support our cause. I suggest the following three-stage ladder as one for the panel to consider and possibly for members of the Society to adapt to their particular situations.

In the first stage, an administrative official makes the appointment of a folklorist to a liberal arts faculty where folklore is absent from the curriculum. This official, possibly a dean of the college of arts and sciences, places the assistant, associate, or full professor of folklore, with that title, in the department of the new faculty member’s choice, or on a joint appointment in two departments, say English and anthropology, if he so desires, or in the department that has actively expressed an interest in acquiring a folklorist. His salary increases, tenure and promotion decisions will be recommended by the department chairman, or chairmen in the case of a joint appointment, to the dean who controls the position. Should the folklorist leave for another institution, or be released, his slot, which has never left the dean’s unallocated faculty budget, will be filled again by the dean. This device ensures the preservation of the Folklore slot against departmental pressures.

Although I had forgotten about it, this was exactly the mechanism used in my own appointment at Indiana University. When Stith Thompson, whose position was in the English department, retired, the dean of faculties and the dean of the college of arts and sciences looked for a folklorist to succeed him. If Wayland Hand had come, he would have been placed in the German department. When I came, I was located in the history department.

Stage two is the mini-department. Chance or intention may bring two or more folklorists together at the same institution. No one is so lonely as the single folklorist, and he will convert a colleague or seek to bring in a peer. The two will soon begin planning an expanded curriculum. When the time seems ripe, they can propose to the administration a semi-autonomous status for themselves, under some title such as, say, the Folklore Studies Curriculum. This unit would have its own budget—and a separate budget for Folklore is the key to everything we hope for academically. In the budget would go half salaries of the two or more folklorists, whose other halves would remain in their original departments. Such joint appointments would ensure continuing relationships between Folklore and its allies, and make less drastic the new curriculum. Also in the budget could go a modest sum for library purchases, an assistant for the now burgeoning folklore archives, and a part-time secretary. The mini-department would control two or three introductory courses, which would be given a separate identifying letter, so that they will be plainly visible in the catalogue under the Folklore Studies Curriculum. More specialized upper division folklore courses can remain for the time being in their existing departments, but be crosslisted under Folklore.

For Folklore, or American Studies, or Black Studies, or any fringe program to gain academic status means simply to gain control of a budget, for faculty slots, for teaching associates, for graduate student fellowships, for library acquisitions. But Folklore can make a better case for autonomy than area programs because it is an intellectual discipline. To depend on the good will of a sponsoring department—and here I come back to my theme of the walls between disciplines—for an indefinite period invites trouble. Folklore has its friends and its enemies. Anthropology has given its fair share of support to Folklore, but I know of one anthropology chairman at a distinguished university who has killed Folklore dead; he once confided to me that a mutual friend, a professional anthropologist, had shifted his research interests to Folklore because he could not make it in anthropology. The resistance of historians to Folklore is well known. In any event, in these days of tight budgets, why should a department be asked to squeeze out a slot for an alien Ph.D.? Once the mini-department of Folklore has its own minibudget and its own mini-curriculum, Folklore is alive in the university, breathing through its budgetary gills. It need not fear sudden erasure at the hands of a new unsympathetic departmental head or clique, and it has a chance to grow. The two or three members of the Folklore Studies Curriculum have a base from which they can operate. They can maneuver for further joint appointments with various departments; they can add to their courses as their student following increases; they can attract outside funds to add to their university budget; they can develop a folklore journal, archives, museum; they can solidify friendships throughout the university community with a faculty—and perhaps a student—advisory committee; they can strike for the minor, the major, the M.A. from a position of strength; in short, they are in business. Administratively the Folklore Studies Curriculum reports directly to the dean or his designate.

The day may come when expanding enrolment and faculty prestige make plausible the transition to stage three, a full-fledged department of Folklore. But the mini-department is not to be presented as transitional; in a number of institutions it may answer Folklore’s needs over the long haul, and will not alarm administrators apprehensive of future commitments or disturb departments that retain doubts about Folklore’s intellectuality. On the other hand, if the strength is there, the Folklore Studies Curriculum should certainly push for departmental status. By every criterion the UCLA program has long since passed into stage three, and it seems to me tragic that excellent and committed holders of the M.A. in Folklore there are waiting in limbo to see if the doctorate comes through.

Two objections to these ideas I have already heard voiced. One is, how will the Ph.D.’s in Folklore get placed? Well, so far they have all gotten placed. The field develops its own momentum. In the last two tough years, Indiana placed thirteen people, none with the Ph.D. completed, and all teaching, or with the expectation of teaching, Folklore. Pennsylvania has regularly placed its Ph.D.’s.

The second demurrer is, what will a Folklore concentrator do if he majors in Folklore in college and continues with it in graduate school? My own thinking is that the A.B. is quite a separate proposition from the M.A. and Ph.D., and that college students who learn about man’s ways by taking courses in Folklore are not predestined to become Folklore scholars. But for those who wish to go all the way, I see no reason why they cannot, like the history or anthropology or English major, find plenty of ground to cover at each successive level. And the student who seeks three degrees in Folklore can address himself to the task of mastering foreign languages while still in college, so that he does not spend precious time in graduate school learning elementary French, German, Spanish, or Russian. He can go on to Swahili and Hindi for his Ph.D.

Assuming the reader supports in principle this three-stage proposai—an assumption I make simply to complete this argument— how does it get presented and to whom? My own instincts are against a formal Society manifesto or a committee empowered to draft a resolution, or indeed any collective action beyond the airing of the questions in this and other forums. Rather I favor individual action based on what seems to be the consensus, if one develops, of the Society’s mood, or of our panel’s thinking. We may as individuals gather data and publish articles, such as Ronald Baker’s recent inventory of college and university course offerings and programs in Folklore,² to call attention to the success and promise of Folklore in higher education. Some of these articles might be gathered together as a pamphlet and mailed to university and foundation officials. The message I would like to see transmitted forcefully and persuasively in such statements is a simple one: Folklore should be taught in every liberal arts college.

Note

1. The Graduate Journals 8 (1971): 295-309.

2. “Folklore Courses and Programs in American Universities and Colleges,” Journal of American Folklore 84 (1971): 221-29.

Paper read before the American Folklore Society in Washington, D.C., 13 November 1971.