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About 10 years ago, David Noble’s colleagues in the American studies department anticipated the professor’s retirement by creating the David Noble Lecture, an annual event in his honor. They were a bit premature; their 80-year-old colleague is still teaching a full course load at the University of Minnesota, serving on doctoral dissertation committees, and writing books about a culture he’s been studying for over half a century.

As a teacher, Noble was among the first 15 faculty members to earn the Morse-Alumni Award, the University’s top honor for outstanding teaching. As an academic, Noble’s oft-cited work has earned him widespread acclaim. George Lipsitz, a former colleague at the University, marvels at the continuing impact of Noble’s 10 books and other writings. “Many of those who know him and his work today are the most junior members of the profession, young scholars who view Noble as one of the few people in his generation . . . alert to the new possibilities emerging from contemporary contradictions and conflicts,” Lipsitz wrote in the foreword to Noble’s 2002 book, Death of a Nation.

One of the earliest contributors to a discipline born in the 1930s, Noble is now in his 53rd year of teaching at the University and continues to enjoy sharing his knowledge.

Q: Did American studies have to earn legitimacy in academia, or was it respected from its inception?

A: The first American studies programs were started as “American civilization” programs in the Ivy League universities in the 1930s. Heretics in English and history departments were coming together to create those American civilization programs. Legitimacy came from the fact that there was such a sense that World War I, as an experiment in internationalism, was a terrible failure and a terrible mistake. Academics wanted to reassert American autonomy and, in a sense, to give greater dignity to that autonomy by calling it an “American civilization.” There’s a complex conflict between the majority of people who wanted to keep disciplinary boundaries and those who wanted to create American civilization programs to define that we weren’t European.

Ironically, by the 1970s  it became easier in these experimental American studies programs to begin to emphasize the transnational character of American culture—easier than within the boundaries of English or history departments. I felt more freedom in American studies to be critical of a tradition of an isolated American history, which continued to be characteristic of history textbooks coming on down into the 1960s and 1970s.

Q: Some have criticized American studies for scholarship that rarely recognizes anything positive in the contributions of white, Protestant, heterosexual men. Does American studies devalue majority culture?

A: What I see us doing is saying “both/and.” Americans or Germans or French or anybody are human beings who are both constructive and destructive, both good and bad, committed to both liberty and power. Critics thinking in “either/or” terms see the saintly United States or a profane United States. Rather, what we’re presenting is a United States where there is both good and evil, both constructive and destructive activity, and both power and liberty.

I think what we’re doing is giving a balanced picture of the fact that the history of the United States is not just that of liberty, it’s also that of power. And this is both within the U.S., where dominant people have exercised power over dominated people, and in the external world, where the U.S. as a world power has exercised power in the world.

Q: You’ve taught a seminar on the political correctness debate. What is your perspective on that debate?

A: I still see the political correctness debate within a larger pattern of culture wars. The major moment of political correctness was the late ’80s, early ’90s, when conservatives—those who adhere to established patterns and resist abrupt change—saw academics as trying to impose a pattern on undergraduates, that undergraduates had to see that there were a variety of cultures in the United States, they had to see that there was an unequal relationship among those cultures.

The conservatives, from my perspective, never looked at their own viewpoint, with its roots in the 1940s, as being politically correct; they just assumed that their viewpoint was neutral, that it was objective. But what they were implicitly saying is that only male Anglo-Protestants had enough dignity to be put in textbooks, or only novels written by male Anglo-Protestants had enough dignity to be put in canons of American literature.

Assuming the neutrality and objectivity of that viewpoint diverted attention from the analysis of the liberals or so-called radicals of the 1960s to the 1980s who wanted, in a sense, to say, “Look at how much political power is being used to exclude all of these people from textbooks or to exclude the writings of all of these other groups of Americans from being considered in American literature.”

We were trying to see to it that courses in American literature were multicultural or that courses in American history were multicultural. We were talked about then as totalitarian in trying to force the teaching of multiplicity, but this way of framing the debate hid the fact that the patterns of the 1940s were very totalitarian in terms of how tightly the boundaries were guarded.

Q: In Death of a Nation you examined the end of U.S. exceptionalism, which was marked by the idea of an isolated, homogenous nation. Why did you choose that topic?

A: In my own field of American studies, the vestiges of exceptionalism lasted into the 1950s. Much of my generation and subsequent generations converted to the idea of the nation as part of a larger community economically, politically, and culturally. There’s the breakdown of that vision of homogenous, national culture, the recognition that there are always, within each nation, a variety of local cultures. This all occurred in my lifetime, which has made it very interesting to be a scholar of American studies, to move away from that vision of an autonomous nation with a homogenous culture to visualizing a nation involved in transnational patterns of vibrant, local cultures. It’s been a fun 50 years to be a teacher and a student of American studies.

Q: You could have retired a decade or two ago. Why, at 80 years old, have you decided to remain a full-time faculty member?

A: I find this experience so fascinating. I have no idea where my field is going to go. One side wants to imagine a flattening out into a kind of universal global culture. The other side of the debate wants to retain local cultures.

I’m writing a book now that tries to look at the larger implications of this partial shift from what I call the national landscape to the global landscape or global marketplace, to see how this is played out in three academic areas: economics, literary criticism, and ecology. Every day I’m reading for the book I’m learning things and speculating how these patterns interrelate with one another.

I have a bad back and I couldn’t play golf anyway. I would rather play with scholarly materials than play golf.

Q: Thirty years from now, when the chair of the American studies department at the University introduces the speaker for the David Noble Lecture and explains your contributions to the field, what would you like him or her to say?

A: That I questioned both departmental boundaries and the whole, awful compartmentalization of culture, which kept people from being able to understand the culture that they were within and the complexity and contradictions and debates that were going on in the culture.

I would like to be seen as a Don Quixote who tilted at the windmills of both departmental and national fragmentation of culture.

Danny LaChance is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer.