As the furnace tech group last week worked on the problem (a safety switch had triggered and shut off the furnace, and needed to be replaced), the head repair tech was explaining to me what “Zone 1” and “Zone 2” on the system meant, and why we had grids in the floor that didn’t blow heat or air conditioning up into the room. (They’re return vents.) Which in turn explained why we often have an issue in the summer particularly with the upstairs struggling to hit the thermostat mark and the downstairs being colder by far because it’s trying to compensate, because we don’t have return vents upstairs, only downstairs.
It was a really cogent explanation. The head tech situated that in a larger universe of ways to set up home HVAC and talked about why he thinks the alternatives are better. He wasn’t trying to sell anything—I’m not the property owner and he was an independent contractor rather than a representative of one of the big predatory companies that are always trying to upsell people on more expensive repairs. He was just educating me, in a very generous and engaging way.
At the end, he turned to me and said, “I just find this stuff so interesting, it’s why I’m still doing this work after all these years. I’m sorry, I know I’m not educated and all that, I don’t know a lot of things.” I hadn’t even introduced myself in terms of what I do for a living, but I think the property manager had mentioned that the tenants in these houses were all professors and I’m sure he’d seen the many shelves of books visible on our first floor.
It’s a kind of automatic, unprompted response that I think faculty get from time to time. I hope most of us don’t high-handedly demand or prompt it. I think it’s something of the same deference that many of us show to doctors and other professionals both when we’re calling on their services and when we meet them in social settings.
That deference sometimes gets withdrawn slowly if the person to whom you might defer doesn’t live up to the role. I once had to talk to a lawyer who was representing someone I knew on that person’s behalf and as it dawned on me that he was one of the stupidest people I’d ever met, I found myself less and less presumptively passive in listening to his advice for my acquaintance. And for some people, the opposite emotion reigns—some professions have dedicated enemies or rivals, and some people have worked themselves up to hate or mock a particular profession to the point that dictates a kind pre-emptive rudeness.
While I don’t demand or expect that deference—in this case, I was the one who was uneducated, learning from a person quite skilled at transmitting his knowledge—I do think there’s something deep buried in that sociocultural space that matters, that does both good work and bad work.
The bad work is easier to see. It’s not just the elitism contained within that expectation of social respect, it’s part of what has enabled faculty to see themselves as “not really labor”, which has been a blindness that our institutions have grown more and more inclined to exploit and which has cost tenure-track faculty some of the meaningful affinities they could and should have not just with contingent teachers but with other groups of workers within academia.
What’s the good work of this kind of remnant deference? To some extent, the answer is the same as when we talk about anything that we associate with “professionalism”. The history that has produced the idea that because the professions have valuable skills with general value to society that take years of training from certified instructors to acquire, they also have special responsibilities to the wider society, they have important obligations to follow internal forms of self-discipline and associational responsibility, and are thus also owed some form of gratitude in return for meeting those responsibilities and following those kinds of discipline in their work and public life. The key idea was that the professions governed themselves, which meant both taking out rivalrous practitioners who offer unreliable or untrained services in the open market (usually in alliance with some form of governmental licensing or certification) but also internalizing in licensed members a model of professional ethics, of dignity and service to the greater good.
Inasmuch as we are seeing the alternative form of these services when they are reconfigured by unconstrained financial capitalism and by the wholesale abandonment of public goods, it’s hard not to think that if the alternative is a stuffy professional bourgeoisie who think of themselves as better than everybody else but who (mostly) do their duty and who (mostly) look after their professions with an eye not to personal profit but the needs of a wider public, the alternative is vastly preferable.
It is, of course, not the only possible alternative to rapacious financialization and its host of collateral outrages.
I never want a person who knows a lot in his domain to apologize pre-emptively to me for not knowing what I know. That much I’d gladly do without. But there is a sense, I think, that I would take a kind of generalized respect, a sort of diffuse sense of status, always over what a completely market-driven system might provide me as payment for my training or my labor.
I think that holds generally across our society. If you said to medical doctors, “What if we paid you 40% more but stripped you of any remaining sense of authority over medical decisions and stopped calling you ‘Doctor’—in fact, got rid of the existing system for licensing medical professionals in order to produce greater efficiencies in health care and more consumer choice?” I think a lot of them would say, “Absolutely not.” If we said, “Eh, if a convict on death row can learn enough about the law to direct his legal team, anybody can. Hey lawyers, how about we get rid of requiring any education to do legal work, but we’ll compensate lawyers 50% more?” Most would say no. That would go I think for all forms of certification, professional training, and regulations requiring the use of particular people to do particular jobs.
Everybody deserves respect and deference for what they know, for the distinctiveness of their skills and experience. And I think everybody resents it when the institutions and employers they associate with try, with varying degrees of subtlety or crudeness, to strip that respect away when people already have it, even if it is in the name of equity. Because I think we know that in the starkness of this economic and political moment, the forces that want to strip away professional or social respect from some group of people are not seeking to confer that equally on everyone, but to deny it to all except perhaps a few isolated billionaires who have enough money to compel it. (Or to not care about whether they’re respected or not.)
So for faculty who’ve had a sense that they knew something that mattered, that they were good at teaching others, that the society at large valued the work and knowledge they offered, no wonder they want to gather the tattered remnants of that respect around their shoulders like an old and precious keepsake shawl against the gathering chill. Even in terms of efficiency-seeking, bean-counting, austerity-driven approaches, leaving people with that warmth was worth a lot. Administrations at many institutions have stopped understanding that they were buying a lot of otherwise uncompensated labor from faculty via the unperturbed provision of that kind of respect, and it often didn’t cost anything, even in psychic or emotional terms. Those same faculty perhaps understand better now the hurt from when they mutely witnessed but did not respond as those same tatters of respect were taken from other faculty as the tide of tenure receded.
Then and now, the alternative to bare shoulders in a bitter wind might be that we all take up our knitting needles, and perhaps not only to make shawls for everyone. Because a needle jabbed into an intruding hand can be a valuable way to make a point about leaving people with the comforts they have while they also try to re-warm the rest of the world.