Academia: Don't Pay the Trolls, But Do Cross the Bridge

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

I get so goddamn tired of people like Pamela Paul who present themselves as friends of academia who claim to be supportive but who are really just concern trolls trying to move pieces on the chessboard of culture war. “Oh, dear, are you really going to allow that kind of radicalism on your campus? Really, do you think that’s wise? Don’t you want a balanced perspective?” I could write one of these kinds of essays in my sleep at this point, having read so many of them. They almost never come from someone who has a genuinely judicious, broad-minded curiosity about the widest range of scholarly and intellectual work, who really believes that the university’s job is the fearless cultivation of the widest imaginable range of ideas and frameworks.

Such people do exist in the academy! But you know what? They’re usually too busy reading, thinking, teaching and producing knowledge to waste time trying to work the ref on behalf of some orthodoxy they favor. They’re often the person that everybody respects, the professor who shows up in lots of rooms and brings a lively curiosity and indiscriminate erudition with them. They’re the person who can be a useful devil’s advocate, who gives a trusted reading to anyone and everyone, who knows a surprising amount about all sorts of scholarly debates, a wide range of theories. Those are the people you’d think would be writing constantly about political intolerance or bias within the academy but they generally aren’t. Not only are they too busy trying to be the best intellectuals and teachers they can be, they generally understand that even the strongest ideologues among their colleagues and students may actually be more complex, interesting and engaging than their surface-level dogmatism might imply. And they understand that most of their colleagues, most universities, are already far more heterodox than the concern trolls who infest the public sphere want us to believe.

The curious, thoughtful scholar who is taking advantage of academic freedom to truly explore what is known and knowable often also understands who the real threat to the potential of academia often is. That person is not identifiable by the color of their politics but by the content of their character. The colleague or administrator to fear is not the person who wears their loyalties on their sleeve, who commits openly to a particular politics, who is outspoken. The people who really do damage are the quiet ones, the folks who use whispers to paint a target on someone. The people who pretend to be on your side while constantly warning everybody else about you. The people who are clever liars, always figuring out who to blame for their own mistakes. The folks who weaponize students against colleagues with rumors and sly asides. The people who are eager to make new rules and procedures, to be managerial without any special convictions about principles or loyalty to values. The scholars who wait for conventional wisdom to take shape from creative, interesting and daring work and who then self-nominate to be the enforcers of that wisdom, not because they like the politics or substance of it, but because it represents a secured position from which to exercise power over others.

Fear pedantry before you fear passion. Fear people maneuvering for structural authority over the institution before you fear people who are persuasive, influential or engaged within it. Fear people who want to forget the past and control the future. Fear the person who finds talk of underlying values irrelevant over the person who is maybe a little too ardent about what they believe those values to be.

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The concern trolls don’t care about any of that. For the most part, they don’t care about the university as such. Many of their highly vocal allies inside the university are looking to forcibly increase the market share for their own political and professional convictions via leveraging extra-institutional affiliations, via trying to get trustees or legislators to do their dirty work. They’re not trying to build intellectual diversity, they’re trying to take over the brand altogether.

It’s best not to pay too much heed to all of that activity. This does not mean, on the other hand, that everything’s fine within our institutions as they stand. When I can manage to ignore the waves of ill-intentioned and manipulative attention coming at us all within universities and colleges, I do see that we have some collective problems to work on—that to some extent we are vulnerable to concern trolls precisely because we have unfinished work.

One of the top priorities at many institutions built around some form of “liberal arts” has got to be looking for more cohesion and connection. With a handful of notable exceptions, institutions built around liberal education are dangerously diffuse at the moment. We’ve been solicitous towards “entrepreneurial” mindsets for a long time now, and not just because that’s a neoliberal buzzword. You could give it another label that suits the mindset of most faculty, but the fact is that centrifugal energies within the academy have pushed us away from one another. It’s why that type of academic intellectual who is genuinely interested in exploring multiple domains of scholarly work plays such an important—and threatened—role in our institutional ecologies, because for the most part our curricular structures, our incentive systems, our working socialities no longer support that sort of catholicity. So we depend on the ethos of particular individuals to provide us the connective tissue that our institutions no longer cultivate or reinforce.

For most of my career at a liberal-arts college, I’ve been calling for colleagues to find some principled basis for drawing us into a more coherent ‘center’ and thus helping us to make decisions about what we value that can stand against the centrifugal logic of disciplines deciding entirely on their own what fields they believe must be covered. Expertise is important in setting priorities, but there’s got to be something to balance against that, something that lets experts in different fields and disciplines agree about what the institution needs. That’s especially important in institutions that stand on the knife’s edge of losing some of the last domains of effective faculty governance, most centrally the structure and ethos behind the design of a curriculum.

It’s not hard to convince many American professors that there are major issues with letting markets decide everything, and yet inside our institutions, we often end up surrendering to a kind of market logic in designing our shared curriculum, either following students wherever they go, or deciding on curriculum via extremely segmented consumer preferences, where the department with the highest internal consensus gets what it wants because it speaks most consistently about its desires.

I may be unusual in my thinking when I say that any structured principle providing connective tissue in a curriculum is better than none, but that’s how I see it. I can make a case for and against a Great Books humanism, for and against a kind of mini-MIT approach where humanities leaven and supplement STEM learning, for and against a strong general education core, and so on. I can think of at least ten coherent designs that provide that sense of connective principle and none of them are exactly what I’d most like myself—but all of them would work to provide the standing faculty of existing institutions with a bit more clarity about what they’re doing and why. Any would be acceptable to me.

Most of the reasons I’d oppose any particular version of those kinds of structure would be procedural, not philosophical or substantive. E.g., certain kinds of general education structures are simply technically hellish to staff or manage. Required courses require a ton of quality control management that has to come from faculty overseeing other faculty—you outsource that work to administrations and you lose control of the curriculum altogether. A structure that is just a bunch of arbitrary traffic-control mechanisms without any coherent principle behind it just becomes one more hassle that students try to circumvent rather than a conceptual framework that brings intellectual order to the chaos of learning. There are wrong implementations of right ideas, for sure. But faculty often cite the possibility of a bad implementation as a reason to not even try, largely to preserve their own freedom of action against even the best kinds of governing constraints.

It’s been ok to ignore the call to connection for much of the last four decades. But our pursuit of professional autonomy not only made it easier for many institutions to shift towards contingent labor, away from tenure, but it also is why concern trolling has become steadily more powerful. I firmly believe that thirty years ago, a trustee like Marc Rowan who took a colossal public dump on the institution he’s supposed to be serving, would have been asked to step out of that role. Today, not so much. Part of our problem is that when we move to defend what we do as scholars and teachers, we do so from the relatively atomized positions that we’ve settled into. To defend our practices—our brand, if you prefer—we have to attend to its growing incoherence. Our difficulties in making decisions about what we value internally also deprive us of a strong voice about what we value when we are challenged by insincere culture-war manipulators. I don’t think we can connect more without learning to surrender some portion of what we individually value in order to strengthen the whole—and to build a durable vision of shared values, everybody on a given faculty has got to give up something of their possible autonomy, all at once, together. If that’s just about figuring out who the weakest link is, we’re playing right into the hands of the concern trolls.

Faculty should all be interested in one another’s knowledge production and pedagogical stylings—that should be the essence of the professionalism that we prize in tenure and promotion, in hiring, in the incentive systems we superintend or advocate. Reinforcing a shared vision and purpose is no longer a luxury or a strange variant form of institutional design. It is the only way we make our working worlds friendly to our best possibilities and to live up to the expectations of our most supportive publics. It is the only way to avoid paying tolls to concern trolls to the point of our total impoverishment.

Image credit: Photo by Felicia Montenegro on Unsplash