An academic friend of mine asked me a while back what I knew about friendships in academia.
He was thinking that academic friendships have or should have an unusual dimension where it is possible to argue strongly about an issue, question or theory without that argument touching on the friendship. E.g., that you might argue ferociously with an academic friend about whether it’s possible that ʻOumuamua was in fact an artificial object rather than an asteroid or other natural body, or how to define “violence” in the context of British colonial rule, but that most academics would understand that this kind of argument shouldn’t intrude on the emotional heart of a friendship.
I’ve been mulling this over since. (My friend clarified that he wasn’t subtweeting me about an argument that he and I had had, which is good, because I couldn’t remember us having a strong argument of that sort in any event.)
I think if there’s anything to this thought, it has to be broadened out to intellectuals more generally. As I think about intellectuals from the 18th Century into recent times, I am struck that they frequently have seemed to form friendships of that are about ideas or knowledge. E.g., that they connect with one another through ideas or publications or research findings and forge a sense of friendly connection through letters (or more recently emails) that eventually become more personal in terms of their correspondence encompassing the ups and downs of everyday life. (Here I’m including in the category of ‘intellectuals’ various writers, artists and so on, who also form these kinds of friendships.)
I can think of a lot of examples, but the examples suggest that in fact people who make friendships in that way don’t see ideas, theories or research as something you can debate fiercely and then leave aside to return to the core relationship. Quite the contrary: those kinds of intellectual friendships often are riven to the core by conflict over ideas just as they were brought together through them.
Intellectuals—including many if not all academics—invest their sense of selfhood and self-worth in ideas, in theory, in research. Thinking is acting. Just as two non-academic friends might be driven apart by one doing something that the other person finds unforgiveable, intellectuals can walk away because someone is thinking in a way they can’t tolerate.
I do know what my friend was thinking about. There’s a kind of conversation where two friendly intellectuals just sort of drift into it where it’s not something that either of them cares deeply about but it’s kind of fun to bat the idea around. Two historians talking about whether there’s life on other planets, two biologists wondering about what distinguishes poetry from prose, and so on.
I had a colleague once who liked these kinds of “put up your dukes” arguments about everything and I did enjoy them myself quite a few times. But they’re an acquired taste and even these lighter kinds of sparring matches have a tendency to drift into bombastic peacocking and eventually into more serious territory where core convictions and deep loyalties are at stake. The more I knew that many people find these discussions either tedious or emotionally stressful, the more I felt motivated to maintain a blog (or now a newsletter) because that’s a place to take that kind of energy usefully without inflicting it indiscriminately on people.
I also think that the kinds of low-stakes arguments my friend was considering (arguments that in his view should have low-stakes, that is) are mostly the heart of intellectual friendships only when they’re forged at a distance. When intellectuals and academics work together all the time and see one another on a daily basis, friendships form much as they do anywhere else, based on a richer range of emotional alignments, complementarities and so on. Maybe that’s all about to change back to something more like an 18th Century “republic of letters”, only this time via Zoom, if remote work becomes more and more common.
I have another academic friend who makes me feel stupid sometimes.
You might think: here you seem to use the word “friend” in an unfamiliar way. Who would say that such a person is a friend?
It’s possible that I am in fact stupid about the things that I am made to feel stupid about. In fact, perhaps it is not the friend who is doing it, but that I am making myself feel that way whenever I unavoidably discover that I have said a stupid thing, had a stupid thought, or simply do not understand what the friend is saying.
It’s also possible—likely even—that I make my friend feel stupid too, and thus I am forgiving of being made to feel so knowing that this could be true, that I also do it. In a long life of identifying myself as knowledgeable, literate, scholarly, and academic, I know I have on occasion made people feel stupid quite on purpose. Because I was angry, because I disliked my target, because the person in question was saying disgusting or hateful things and the way I fight back is with what I know and the words that come easy to me. Perhaps because I felt belittled for reasons other than my ostensible stupidity and I wanted to hit back with the weapons at my command. (Protip hint, however: that guy at the neighborhood block party who is making fun of you because you don’t catch a football very well is likely not much affected by the counterthrust of your erudition.)
I know also that I might sometimes make someone feel stupid without meaning to at all. Perhaps simply because I share something that I know in a spirit of genuine passion and excitement and the person I’m talking to feels like I’m implying they’re stupid. Or they feel excluded because I say something I know and they have no idea what I just said and I am speaking as if they should.
Sometimes it’s neither. I do what I learned from my father and I triangulate on something I don’t quite know from what I do know and I accurately identify what is known inside that space of my prior ignorance, and the person I’m talking to knows what I just did and really hates that I did. They can’t say that what I just said is wrong and yet they know that I don’t really know it in the way they do.
So you stay friends with people—not just intellectuals—even when they make you feel stupid because maybe you’re the one making yourself feel that way or maybe they don’t mean to do it or maybe because you’re stupid and they’re the only one willing to tell you that.
I suppose my thought for my first friend—or any friend—is that academic friendship is hard. Maybe because it’s never very clear what it is that we love in other people in a working world that so thoroughly intermingles labor, values and feelings. Maybe because what we love is kind of messed up. But maybe all friendship is hard and complex for exactly the same kinds of reasons, just in different domains of messiness.
I can think about professors I’ve known who maintained very close friendships with one another for the whole of a career. Mostly though I could think of relationships that were friendly but not friendships, that were collegial acquaintances that enabled people to collaborate in a sustained way but not really friendship.
So to go back to something I mentioned earlier: real friendships between academics who work together are like friendships generally. Not a public or visible relationship but a private one, that they aren’t about arguments over scholarship or working in institutions but are instead about who you trust to pick up your kid from school, who you like to have over for dinner, who you’re willing to travel with, who you list as an emergency contact. So no wonder many academic friendships aren’t famous, even among famous scholars: to really know about them you’d have to have an intimate biography of a famous academic, because you can’t tell the difference in the foreward of a monograph between who’s getting thanked because they read a manuscript and who’s getting thanked because they talked the author through a bad divorce or helped out during chemotherapy.
There’s a ground between intellectual friendships that are mostly about ideas and personal friendships that are built from the same sociality that most friendships rest upon, which I guess you could call “friendliness”. It’s what a lot of faculty are invoking when they talk about collegiality or civility, an idea that we owe one another a kind of friendly regard that is rooted in our mutual professionalism. Curiously, that kind of perspective is also what fuels certain kinds of distanced enmities—it’s the sort of thing that people in one “school” or research team might do to perceived rivals in their own discipline or in another discipline working with the same subject matter, mustering the energy of “collegiality” to create in-groups and out-groups. (It’s always kind of amusing when faculty who’ve been mobilized into these rivalries end up forming personal friendships when they get to know one another more fully.) Friendliness in this sense I think relies on not knowing much about faculty and administrative colleagues, perhaps even including what specifically they work on or think about.
Friendliness is one of the things we’ve lost in the pandemic, I think, because it is built from the everyday happenstances of working together but also from the dedicated labor of a small subset of faculty who try to maintain the sociality that creates friendliness. It feels like a momentous loss sometimes, making interactions that were relatively frictionless into a grinding and discordant affair. It will take a lot of work to restore that and I suspect some of the people who’ve been doing that work are feeling very unmotivated to take it on again.
Image credit: Mark Twain in the laboratory of Nikolai Tesla, 1895, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Twain_in_Tesla%27s_Lab.jpg
For me, academic friendships begin in the shared love of ideas but don’t stop there. I’m with you on this. After a while, I no longer think of them as academic friendships but just about being friends. This is why I often talk about “my friend and colleague Tim Burke,” as opposed to “my colleague, Prof. X.” We still talk about intellectual issues of mutual interest, but there’s an emotive quality that grows from knowing someone well for so long. One of my dearest friends in the world, who has never been my colleague, is currently days from death in a hospice in Maine. Our last conversation—via phone—was emotional but also intellectually challenging, as we sought and found ways to say what we have meant to one another since 1969. Not my colleague, but my life collaborator. That’s a friend, indeed.