Numbers and Narratives

Today I attended a grant-writing webinar sponsored by the NSF. It was a basic overview of strong proposals, the kind that get funding. I am a humanities professional, so some of the information wasn't applicable to my work or any future grants I might write for myself. In fact, I was there mainly to increase my knowledge about grant proposal writing in general, to learn as much as I could from those who are supplying most of the funding. The webinar reconfirmed for me the distance between the humanities and the sciences (and for that matter business, too), and the way we think about what we do.

What was emphasized most in the presentation (and I'm not giving away any trade secrets here) is the importance of being able to show measurable outcomes. The influence of the project must be quantifiable in some way. The kind of grant under consideration was one that involved a strong pedagogical component, so successful proposals would clearly articulate how they would measure the effects of their projects on student behavior, habits, and attitudes. At this point, the webinar broke down in a heated argument (not really) when a virtual attendee called into question the ability to measure student outcomes in an objective, quantitative way. He must have had some kind of training in my field. In the humanities, we tend to cringe when someone tries to measure someone or a group of someones, the word normative flashing in our heads. To measure is to assume a standard, a someone or something that is normal, by which all abnormality can be distinguished, organized, subjugated.

Two years ago I sat in on an ecology course. I study ecocriticism and so wanted some technical training in ecology to supplement what I knew of the environment. One of the first things the professor said—and he said it was the most important thing we would learn the entire semester—was that nature must be reduced to numbers. The maxim shocked me (I nearly cried out in class). A counter adage popped up in my head: if you count it, you can kill it. As a student and practitioner in the humanities, I spend half my time extrapolating narratives from numbers, clearing spaces for stories, blowing numbers up into people, histories, loss, triumphs, pain, humanity and an affective non-humanity. Giving things back their ambiguity and contradiction, which numbers often steal away.

This is on my mind right now because lately I've felt my own story being taken away—my humanity, my history, my rage, my pain, my sense of self, my nature—all reduced to a number, my debt. I have in many ways become that number, a number that is, I realize too late, out of all proportion to another important number, my earning potential. My number means that I am now, and will likely be for the rest of my life, inexorably in debt (inexorably because unlike other kinds of debt, student debt is not forgiven through bankruptcy or bailout). Reduced to this kind of number (money owed), I am also reduced to the guilt and shame required of an American in debt, an American reduced to poverty. Any 1 can make it in American, and it's any 1's fault when they don't. As a number, the system can now dispense with me, let me and all like me be swallowed up by our totals and subtotals.

But the total has become hard to ignore. It is now close to one trillion dollars, which is the total student debt in the United States. It has doubled (doubled!) in the past five (five!) years. The numbers are staggering, especially when they are reinvested with the narratives of those they stand for. It's a trillion dollars worth of shame, guilt, frustration, confusion, hopelessness; a trillion dollars of anxiety, depression, and fear; a trillion dollars worth of teachers in every discipline who thought they were doing something right, something good, something valuable.

To our horror, most of us now realize that our greatest value is how much the speculators and hedge fund managers will make when the debt explodes the economy. You see, our number is really a different one when viewed from the investor's point-of-view: we are the next great profit, maybe the greatest.