According to late statistics compiled by the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), over a thousand colleges, junior colleges, and universities throughout the land have courses devoted solely to science fiction. This is twice the number extant in the mid-seventies, almost ten times that of a decade ago and, when one considers that in 1960 there were perhaps two such courses in the United States (one of them taught at City College in New York on an adjunct basis by Sam Moskowitz), imposing. Part of this growth has to do with simple consumer economics: science fiction is something that they're reading, let's register them and grant credit to keep up the enrollment. (Most college catalogues are testimony to this philosophy of desperation.) Part has to do with the agonizingly slow but continuing legitimization of the field: some science fiction writers have broken through to critical recognition in other fields, and Leslie Fiedler did none of us any harm by declaring in the early seventies that he had always loved Phil Farmer (and now admired Norman Spinrad), but could not admit this until he became, at last, a tenured Distinguished Professor.
All of this is supposed to be good for science fiction, if not for science fiction writers, who are, with occasional exceptions, unable to teach courses for credit in their own field, made self-conscious by textual analyses and often photocopied and distributed without their knowledge or permission. The statement of the late sixties has already passed into the liturgy of the field (and has been claimed by a few): "It's time to get science fiction out of the academy and back in the gutter where it belongs." Analyzed out of existence, drained of mystery, codified to the final decree, science fiction, some of its writers fear, is on the way to becoming the Henry James or George Eliot of the twenty-first century.
Still, the academicization of the field, if only marginally helpful to the writers (and the students), can hardly be portrayed as an evil: it does not seem to have done much damage. The questions are a little more basic than those above but by their definition cannot be raised at the yearly conferences of the SFRA, the association of science-fiction teaching college academics (two of which I have attended with great glee). They can, however, be raised here, at least a couple of them.
The pervasive question is whether the field is worth teaching, whether there is sufficient text and insight to support a full-term college-level course. Oddly, I heard this point raised not by a crusty Chaucer scholar, Dean of Student Affairs or member of the department of antiquities (in many places in many universities the academicization of "popular culture" is regarded as loathsome) but by one of the most experienced and sophisticated editors in the field, a credit to the genre to say nothing of a certified member of First Fandom. "What the hell is it?" he said, "a couple of lectures on the historical stuff, Wells and Verne and Chaucer and that crap which doesn't apply, has nothing to do with American science fiction and then the thirties and Heinlein and Campbell and when it got dirty in the sixties, but really, there just isn't that much to it. A few ideas, a few basic treatments and all of the variations; it's just a bunch of crap. Crap, crap," the editor mused and finished his whiskey sour and went onto other matters more pressing, although I cannot recall which.
A few writers, a few ideas, the same old variations? Not exactly, but the point is not superficial (nor is this editor a superficial man); is there enough about science fiction as distinguished from literature itself to justify it as a separate course unit, a heady three credits toward a baccalaureate? To the editor's point of view it would be as if a Bachelor of Music accepted in partial fulfillment a three-credit course on Khachaturian or the viole da gamba. Isn't it part of the continuing isolation of science fiction, another aspect of literary ghettoization, to render it a separate course within a Department of English (or Sociology) as something discrete, special, impenetrable? Why can't it simply be taught—for example, the works of Heinlein, Kuttner, Ballard, Kornbluth, Le Guin, Silverberg—as part of contemporary American literature?
Well, for once it might throw a lot of currently employed nontenured personnel out of work and reduce tuition input into the English Department. That is not a contemptible consideration. Then too, my perception at the SFWA conferences was, appositely, that instructors of science fiction were regarded by their academic colleagues almost exactly as editors of science fiction (even unto this day) are regarded by senior trade editors in the publishing houses. With few exceptions, the only way a science fiction editor can have a major editorial career14 is to get out of science fiction and into something else (writers too). Anything will do for the shift. Science fiction academics, already functioning at the margins of their profession, will do anything to consolidate their position, and although a few might be able to move crosswise most will use their courses and enrollments to build up small power bases . . . which they hope to carry over to other universities should the need arise. There are very practical reasons why the SFRA catalogue a decade hence may double the number of colleges again; by 1990 every college and university in this country and most of the junior colleges as well may have a course in science fiction catalogued as routinely as Intermediate Algebra first . . . and will then seek someone to teach it.
What does it all mean? To appropriate my friend the editor's line, perhaps not very much. Some writers have expressed an amazing amount of (righteous) hostility toward this academicization because indeed the last person to teach science fiction in most of these places would be a science fiction writer. With tightening budgets and cuts in discretionary funding most courses now can administer their three credits without the students even meeting, for one session, a science fiction writer. Recrimination has always been the underside of these people; not inappropriately most science fiction writers have known in their hearts for years that they were generating a good deal of money for some people, very little of which ever got to them. The Harvards of the future perceived as the Bouregy Books of yesterday. Too—and although this is last it is in deference only to its simple truth—many of the academics are appallingly ill-informed. Their courses are superficial and filled with inaccuracies; they rarely diverge from the accepted canon, and they get much of that canon wrong. Students in many courses would be better informed had they been sent off to read a dozen books and Aldiss's Billion-Year Spree with the Nicholls' Science Fiction Encyclopedia as backup.15 The rendering of three academic credits for many of these courses is, if not an insult to the field (the field can take anything; it always has) then to the universities.
Ambivalence, then. Again. But somewhat less than expected: a hesitant vote after all for the academy. I was at one time quite hostile; credit Brian Aldiss for giving me the first quick turnaround of my life when, after I had mumbled some imprecations on a panel in 1975, he said, "No art can be taken seriously without a body of criticism; the universities with all of their flaws are beginning to work us toward that body of criticism; we cannot reject them and aspire to be taken seriously."
"The man is right," I said on the instant. "The man is right and I am wrong. I see that now."
A year later, in different circumstances about a different matter, I said it again, not on a panel.