OPINION 

This literary research doesn't want answers

    The Modern Language Association held its 110th annual convention in San Diego in December, and made use of the occasion to publicize its latest study of what university English professors are up to, "What's Being Taught in Survey Courses."
    The press release led off with the comforting assertion, "Study of American and British Literature Courses Shows Continuing Prominence of Traditional Authors in Literature Study," and noted that Geoffrey Chaucer's name popped up most often in answer to the question "list up to five authors whose works are regularly included in the survey."
    The MLA's president, Patricia Meyer Spacks of the University of Virginia, explained the purpose of the study to the Los Angeles Times: "We wanted to try to see whether it was true that the great literature of the Western canon was disappearing from the curriculum of our universities," she said. "That is not the case."
    She's probably right about that, but you'd never be able to tell from this parody of statistical research. It's so bad, as the physicist Wolfgang Pauli said in another context, that it isn't even wrong
    The MLA's report, written by Director of Research Bettina J. Huber, was based on a questionnaire sent to 669 English department chairmen ("chairs" in MLA-speak) asking about their English programs in 1990-91. Most of the respondents said they still offered lower-division survey courses in English and American literature. But then, no one ever thought they didn't, or that Shakespeare (mentioned by 77.7 percent) and Hawthorne (66.3 percent) were vanishing from those courses -- although you might wonder about what was going on in the 22.3 percent of the departments whose chairmen didn't think Shakespeare worthy of inclusion among the five names they were permitred to give.
    But you won't fred out from this study, and that, says Norman Fruman, is exactly the point -- "it's totally useless at finding out what's actually happening in the classroom, and whether there has been any change."
    Fruman, a professor of English at the University of Minnesota, brilliantly "deconstructed" the last MLA survey in a 1993 article in the magazine Academic Questions. For those of you who wisely avoid reading literary theory, that means he demonstrated how the MLA's political views are reflected and revealed in the way it designs its research to produce the most reassuring results possible.
    Compare the official catalog descriptions with what is really being taught, Fruman suggests -- especially at prestigious universities, where the most radical professors are teaching.
    Froman says that in the spring of 1992, for example, Minnesota students in a course titled "Introduction to-American Literature" read four novels -- Ursula LeGuin's "Lathe of Heaven," Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye," Jean Toomer's "Cane" and Scott Momaday's "Har-Row." But the catalog description listed "Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Fitzgerald, Humon."
    The current MLA study seems designed to prevent such embarrassing comparisons, because the people who teach the courses weren't asked to describe them.
    "The resulting data, therefore, are second-hand," Huber writes, "but the informants who provided them are unusually well-placed."
    Anyone who thinks harried department chairmen have any idea what their junior faculty or graduate teaching assistants are asking students to read is remarkably naive about life in the ivory tower.
    But even if they did know, they weren't allowed to tell the MLA. "The names of five authors were sought," the report says, "and no more than five were coded."
    Consequently, Huber admits, "there is no way of knowing whether the failure to mention a specific author is an oversight, represents a judgment that the author is unimportant, or is the result of the limitation on the number of authors a respondent could name."
    You might be forgiven for wondering why they bothered. But it gets worse.
    "We have assumed that 20 authors are widely recognized as important enough to be regularly taught," Huber writes. "The laws of probability tell us that under such circumstances only 20 percent of the respondents could be expected to name any one of the 20 authors."
    No way. Put aside the minor matter that five out of 20 is 25 percent, not 20 percent. The only possible way the laws of probability could apply is if the respondents chose names at random, and that's quite simply absurd. More likely, they just picked five names they were reasonably sure of. That tells you nothing about the next 15 names, and nothing either, about whether those minor figures have changed in the lut decade or so.
    At Minnesota in 1993-94, Fruman said, the survey course on 19th-century British literature spent more time on Felicia Dorothea Hemans than on Wordsworth and Coleridge combined, yet Hemans isn't anywhere on the MLA's list and Wordsworth was the fourth most commonly mentioned.
    Hemans was well-known in her time, but is she being rediscovered because she's a long-neglected genius, or artificially revived as an affirmative-action poet?
    The report doesn't tell us how many students take these courses. But far more schools offer courses in women writers (59 percent) or ethnic or minority writers (55 percent) than in Milton (39 percent) and, moreover, they offer more sections of those courses.
     "The findings should be reassuring to parents of college-age students," said Phyllis Franklin, the MLA's executive director.
Not if they can read.