E3W Literature | University of Texas

Teaching is Carbon Neutral

Professor Elizabeth Butler Cullingford took over as Chair of the English Department at University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 2006. Joseph Moser sat down with her in January 2008 to discuss her role as administrator, her concerns about feminism and the health of the planet, some of her award-winning teaching methods, and the history of Irish Postcolonial Studies.

Joseph Moser: How would you describe your job?

Elizabeth Butler Cullingford: Before I became Chair my job was quite clear and limited. It was to research and write, to teach undergraduates and graduates, to supervise dissertations, and in the last few years, to teach our large sophomore class, 316K. Being Chair —I’m now in my second year—is completely different. My undergraduate teaching has fallen away; I just teach graduate students and supervise dissertations. So that shifts the balance away from what had been the center of my life.

JM: So, you think teaching was the center of your life before you became an administrator?

EBC: Not entirely; writing was, but undergraduate teaching was a very strong counterbalance to it. I’m struggling to keep writing. I’m still doing it. But the challenge of taking on a big department and trying to improve it, to make life better for faculty and graduate students, and get us more recognition, which we have—we’ve attracted quite a lot of recognition—that’s exciting. I see myself as an advocate for the faculty and for the graduate students.

JM: Given your experience with schools in England and France, how would you compare the strengths and weaknesses of US universities?

EBC: Oh, well, the gyms are so much better. [Laughs.]

JM: Here?

EBC: Here, yes. [Laughs]. I was just thinking, “Why do I love UT so much?” this morning as I wandered around the gym. The facilities here are incomparable. I’m kidding about the gym, but the libraries are astounding.

JM: Do you think it’s better here, especially in terms of race and ethnicity and gender, as far as the diversity level and how far things have come in the academic profession since you’ve been in the United States?

EBC: I think UT is improving, and wants to improve, and I think we’re making some progress increasing the numbers of students and faculty of color, although in the case of faculty it is hard to retain them. I can’t really speak about England because I haven’t taught there recently enough. France was lily-white—in the Sorbonne. Galway, when I taught there, had almost no students or faculty of color.

JM: How about as far as just the make-up of English departments and the faculty and that sort of thing?

EBC: We’re making a lot of effort here, yes, and in the English department we have hired quite well. We have probably the largest percentage of faculty of color in the College of Liberal Arts, except for Anthropology.

JM: In terms of gender diversity, what do you think?

EBC: Have things improved? Yes, things have improved at the lower levels. There’s still a glass ceiling. I guess I’m proof that it isn’t impermeable, but I’m the first woman Chair of the English Department. And this is the twenty-first century. Women have been traditionally held up in the Associate rank because very often those are the child-bearing years. When you have to write your second book, and also raise a couple of kids, it’s very hard. We have only six female Full Professors and the Department is seventy-eight strong.

JM: So do you think that’s going to improve in the future?

EBC: Yes, I do. I’m quite sanguine about that. The problem of the female Associates has been recognized, and people are looking at ways of helping to relieve it.

JM: In the same way, are you optimistic about the feminist movement in general?

EBC: No, not particularly, because I keep hearing these dreaded words, “Post-Feminism,” as though we had achieved what we needed to achieve and we could all put our bras back on and shave our legs and wear extravagant make-up and buy Sex and the City-type handbags. That wasn’t what I had in mind when I became a feminist, I will say.

JM: So the popular culture reflects a backlash, or a movement away from feminism, and back toward more traditional models of femininity?

EBC: Well, it’s a feminism of empowered young women. To parody it somewhat: Okay, now we all have jobs, and we’re quite well-paid, so why shouldn’t we spend our money on Prada handbags? I use Prada handbags as shorthand, but I mean consumption more generally. It gives me the horrors. Because consumption is what’s wrong with this country, and why would liberated women want to buy into it?

JM: Is that kind of a larger problem of lack of political awareness among young Americans?

EBC: I think many young women take for granted their right to a job that is reasonably well-paid; they take for granted their right to split household chores. They didn’t have to fight for those things; their mothers did. We’ve won those battles. So, the argument goes, why grouch and complain? Why not go out and spend our equal pay on handbags and shoes?

JM: Do you have any ideas for how we could make feminism potentially cool for young people?

EBC: I don’t want to make it cool.

JM: Or attractive, or sexy, maybe?

EBC: [Laughs.] I think it’s part of a larger argument about class and money. I do get a sense in America of a “last days of the Roman Empire” kind of decadence. This is sounding very old-fashioned, but the world is starving and we are gorging. So to find that some young women are buying into conspicuous consumption, instead of being aware of the cost to someone else, I find distressing. I just can’t believe the narcissism of the SUV. I cannot believe that people see the ice caps melting and drive those cars.

JM: It’s an overall sense of entitlement—“I deserve this kind of lifestyle.”

EBC: Yes, “I deserve this kind of lifestyle, and the effect of this lifestyle on someone in Africa or India is not of any concern to me.” I don’t get it. I find it terrifying. So, I guess that’s not really a very specific answer about feminism. It’s that I can’t bear the idea that consumption becomes, as it were, the right for which we struggled.

JM: Do you think that’s part of your function as a teacher—or, in a larger sense, our function as academics or teachers—to help break through the sense of entitlement that our students have?

EBC: I don’t find the sense of entitlement a problem in my graduate classes, usually. Graduate students aren’t paid enough to buy handbags. In undergraduate classes I’m quite cautious, because I don’t want to be using Shakespeare as my political vehicle. Everything that I believe informs my classroom performance anyway, and when we’re reading Shakespeare we talk about issues of race and gender, but I don’t go into class thinking, “Today I’m going to take down their sense of entitlement.” King Lear might do it for them.

JM: So that’s an ethical way to use politics in the classroom?

EBC: Yes. As long as it comes out of the material. In my graduate classes, politics is part of the material. And in my Irish classes—in the postcolonial context, which is how I’ve always taught those classes—it is utterly legitimate to make politics a major focus. I do not think the undergraduate classroom is the place for sermons if they’re not relevant to the material. But whenever something relevant does come up, say an ecological reading of “The Ancient Mariner,” I don’t hold back. But you also have to make room for the other voices.

JM: I’ve heard you say in class that you don’t think that teaching is a form of activism.

EBC: It might raise consciousness. I have no problem with teaching as a form of consciousness-raising, but will it change the world? Probably not. You bear witness, though. It helps.

JM: All the reports about professors lowering someone’s grade because of their politics, and all the hubbub about political correctness, do you think that’s basically a boogeyman?

EBC: Yes. In this department my teaching and research interests have allied me closely with the Ethnic and Third World and Women’s Studies groups, the people who would be most likely to get accused of political correctness, and I know that such things as grading a conservative student down simply don’t happen.

JM: Do you have a teaching philosophy?

EBC: Yes, I do. It is that people learn best what they learn themselves, and that what you do in the classroom is make the opportunities for learning available. The big lectures were always an alien form to me—and that’s why I jazzed them up so tremendously. I don’t remember when you were my TA. Quite early, wasn’t it?

JM: 2003—Spring of 2003.

EBC: Well, it was after that that I began to use the clickers to make things more interactive: they buy a clicker, you ask questions in the course of the lecture, they press a button, and then you display a graph with the proportion of student answers.

JM: Oh, wow, like a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire kind of thing.

EBC: Well it’s more like, “What do you consider the most convincing argument that Satan makes to Eve?” and you give them several options, and you can see what the whole class thinks. I thought that would be a way to break up the potentially deadening effect of simply being fed material. Because literature demands discussion. It’s not like biology, or math. I don’t believe that literature works best when you’re standing up there telling someone what to think; I think it’s interactive.

JM: As far as the work you do as a writer and as a researcher, what impact do you think that cultural studies and postcolonial studies can have—here, or maybe in the outside world?

EBC: Well, it’s had a huge impact in the academy and has opened it up to all sorts of issues that we weren’t discussing in the early 1980s, when everyone was talking theory. In those years I was able to cling to feminism as an antidote to Derrida. [Laughs.] But then in the 90s, the question of gender was subsumed by questions of race and postcoloniality. Anyway, it turned out that I’d been doing Postcolonial Studies all along without knowing it, because my first book, which I published in 1981, was about Yeats’s nationalist politics. It was greeted with an enormous fervor that I didn’t really understand. I wrote it in England and I didn’t go to a lot of conferences, so I wasn’t fully aware that I was contradicting a very influential group of Irish revisionist historians by arguing that Yeats was primarily a nationalist. I was arguing against a particular person called Conor Cruise O’Brien, but my work was read as a crucial intervention into a longstanding Irish argument. The book made people like Seamus Deane very happy. But I hardly knew who Seamus Deane was. [Laughs.] So I entered the conversation from the outside, and I kept on doing that kind of work during those years when that kind of work wasn’t fashionable.

JM: How do you view the relationship between Irish Studies and Postcolonial Studies in general? Is it a happy relationship?

EBC: Yes, I think it is. There are pressure points, obviously. The argument between Irish revisionism and Irish nationalism had been going on for a long time, before Postcolonial Studies became a wider movement. And so Irish academics like Declan Kiberd invited people like Edward Said to the Yeats Summer School, which was not an obvious venue, because they saw in the larger movement allies in a battle that they’d been fighting for quite a long time. They were dismayed by the abandonment of the Irish national narrative by those who were saying, “History must be objective; history must be written from no point of view; history must be statistic- and fact-based, and we’ve had quite enough about martyrs.” Revisionists contested the commemoration of the Easter Rising in 1966—their position was, “All this is old news, we’re no longer a colonial nation, we need to get over the past.” Their opponents were saying, “No, there’s still a real problem in Ireland, and it’s a result of colonial history”—they were concerned that that story not be forgotten. And so the postcolonial vision of scholars who were writing about Africa and India was intellectually sustaining to people who didn’t want people like Roy Foster to be able to say, “Well, the Famine wasn’t the fault of the British, and the landlords did their best.”

JM: Foster said that?

EBC: Yes.

JM: Wow.

EBC: So many Irish scholars felt about postcolonial theory, “Oh, yes, this is about us, too. We may be white, but we have been the others of the English imagination in much the same way as people with darker skin than ourselves.” Perry Curtis’s work was crucial: Apes and Angels (1971)—about cartoons showing the simianization and racialization of the Irish. So it was about finding allies; it was a way to say, “Irish nationalism is not some sort of atavistic, out-of-date, self-deluding oppression studies. It’s part of the whole movement of decolonization.” It was the first. 1922 comes before India, comes before 1948 and partition, and Africa in the ‘50s—the winds of change, all that. Because if you’re talking about the twentieth century as the era of decolonization, it does begin with Ireland.

JM: Overall, does Ireland provide a relatively good model of decolonization?

EBC: It did, but it doesn’t now. In 1916, the dismemberment of the Empire was only just beginning. The First World War dealt it a blow, and the Easter Rising came in the middle of that war, and was succeeded by the Irish War of Liberation. So, yes, Ireland is an essential part of postcoloniality. But the analogy begins to break down after Independence, because what has happened to Africa and India is so much more disastrous—Africa, particularly, but India is problematic too. The great British screw-ups all over the globe are less obvious now, because the great American screw-ups have overlaid them. But the British screw-ups were first. And, as Barbara [Harlow] keeps reminding us, they were all about partitioning people. India, Ireland, Israel. In Israel, particularly, in the wake of the First World War, all sorts of promises were made to the Arabs, and all sorts of promises were broken. Lawrence of Arabia is very interesting in that respect—the end is about betrayal. But subsequently Ireland did much better than other postcolonial states. Africa and India currently have much worse problems than the Irish. So you have to be careful with your analogies. There are differences that you have to be constantly aware of.

JM: Do you think the way that Ireland has been able to become a first-world country in the twentieth century is a matter of good policy-making on their part, or being able to deal with a lot of trauma in a productive way, or is it just a lot of luck, or a combination of all those factors?

EBC: I don’t know how to answer that definitively. One factor is America. The Irish had a powerful recourse there. The Irish spoke English, Irish education was good, and education is the secret of the Celtic Tiger. Ireland had an educated, Anglophone workforce and favorable tax breaks for global companies that wanted to invest. The Irish diaspora has been supportive, too, particularly the American Irish diaspora. They’ve kept Ireland in their hearts, for good and ill. And that powerful sense of nostalgia has kept the Irish story alive.

JM: So that’s something that’s been productive for them—keeping the culture alive?

EBC: Yes, and part of Mary Robinson’s brilliance was saying that she was not just the President of the Irish people but of all the children of Ireland who had gone elsewhere. She put a light in the window of Áras an Uachtaráin and said, “The light is still burning for you. Your homeland is still here.” She was a genius, Mary Robinson. Her presidency in the 1990s helped to produce a good decade for the Irish.

JM: These factors—it’s a combination of things that other countries just don’t have—certain advantages that Ireland has.

EBC: Also, when the Irish got independence, they maintained the British infrastructure. And the British infrastructure worked quite well: the judicial system, the civil service, the post office. They inherited a functioning democracy. Relatively. Relatively functioning, relatively democratic. Sean Lemass forced Ireland to open itself to the outside in the ‘60s, but it wasn’t until the ‘90s, until the election of Mary Robinson and the uptick in the global economy, that the Irish really prospered. They became powerhouses in computers. Construction also became important. And of course this isn’t universally positive. They’re concreting over the island. And suddenly immigration became a problem for the Irish in a way that it’s never been before. The immigrants are mostly from Eastern Europe, and racism is increasing.

JM: I think you’ve already addressed a lot of the stuff about your own work and balancing things, but do you have any advice for people getting into the profession about what to expect and how to balance—

EBC: Do you mean between the kinds of things you’ll have to do as a professional?

JM: Yeah, and still trying to have a personal life and all that stuff.

EBC: Actually it’s always been my advice that getting a particular kind of academic job is not the most important thing in life. It depends what you’re willing to give up. You have to decide what it’s worth to you. There are many ways to be happy, and it’s almost never a waste of time to have done a Ph.D. It may land you in more debt than you’d like, but a six-year period in which you are free to explore, and think, and see if teaching is for you, and read a ton of books, and be, yes, pressured and poor, but not in the corporate world, not out causing more problems than you’re going to fix…I mean, the thing about teaching is that it’s carbon neutral. It’s not making the world’s problems worse. There are many things that you could do for a living that would make the world’s problems worse. I am a little skeptical about how much it’s making them better, partly because I don’t want to be self-pleasing, you know?

JM: Having said that, are you optimistic about the future, whether of this country or—

EBC: Only if Bush is totally expunged. I haven’t been optimistic. It’s been like having a political depression for the last seven years. And I’ve wondered why I became an American. I find it very hard not to think about Iraq; I find it very hard not to think about global warming. No, I’m not all that optimistic. Even if the right decisions are made now, can we save the planet? Have we gone too far? I tend to think that American ingenuity is so great that we’ll find a way to fix it somehow. But China—I went to China. Pollution there is appalling.

JM: Have they kind of adopted American capitalist ideas?

EBC: Yes, in the worst way. It’s not as if they have a democracy. They have a tyranny, with capitalism on top. You couldn’t see the sun when it was shining. There was a vague glow somewhere in the grey pall. And the only time we saw blue sky was after the most amazing downpour. That is real pollution; it makes America look clean. So, am I optimistic? Not intellectually. Still, I’m psychologically disposed to optimism, I can’t help it. There isn’t much about the future that I can change, but I’ll change whatever I can, including my light bulbs. I have ugly light bulbs all over my house, and my next car will be Prius. You know, feminism pales beside the idea that there’ll be no planet to be equal on. [Laughs.] Don’t you think?

JM: Yeah, I agree. But I guess I would say that if people can’t recognize problems with sexism and classism and racism, they’re probably not likely to—

EBC: To worry about the planet, either. Right, absolutely.