Academia: The Absence of Intelligent People Talking Intelligently
Thursday's Child Has Far to Go
I just finished a New Yorker profile of the amazing Samuel Delany, whose work I love and who I think is an endlessly interesting person. (Though I learned new things about him: I had no idea that Gayatri Spivak had asked him to father a child, for example.)
Anyway, at one point, the article turns to Delany’s academic career from his first appointment at the University of Buffalo through to his time at Temple University, which spurred his engagements with literary theory and sharpened his pedagogy around creative writing. However, Delany also says that he found academic life boring: “‘I thought the university was a place where a lot of intelligent people spent a lot of time talking intelligently,’ he told me, but colleagues seemed uninterested in discussing ideas outside the classroom. He preferred Manhattan, where neighborhood book sellers were always available for an intellectual quickie.”
On my former blog, I offered a similar lament several times over fifteen years of writing. I’ve heard sentiments like this from colleagues at many institutions, and on social media where academics congregate. I’ve considered explanations for this seeming absence before, and I feel ready to catalogue them again.
(I recognize that a long list of explanations for an observation may feel tedious, or at least not especially dialogic. But it’s how I try to escape from a pattern I mostly dislike in public culture, where a writer observes something about the world and then relentlessly beats a path towards a single monocausal explanation. The only way to stay polyexplanatory, I think, is to make the biggest list you can think of and then review it.)
It’s not you, it’s me. E.g., the people who think that no one in academia discusses issues or has intellectual conversations are people whose colleagues avoid having conversations with on purpose. In this line of thought, everybody’s having those conversations except that they completely stop when you come into the room, because they’ve discovered you’re going to be a tendentious bore, incomprehensibly weird, creepy, or just kind of stupid.
You’re in the wrong room, or you aren’t around enough to even know where faculty are having good conversations. Maybe nobody’s trying to avoid you, but you’re not doing enough to find them: the conversations are happening at the lunches or in other committees or at the bar near to the university. Or in every other department besides yours. Or your discipline is peculiarly antithetical to intellectual conversations and you don’t get out of its context enough to find the discussions you’d like to be part of. Maybe you are more weighted on the ‘life’ side of work-life than colleagues and don’t realize it.
The faculty are having the good conversations outside of the university’s workflow and you just don’t socialize enough to know it. E.g., everybody’s having more fun than you are, or has more work friends than you do, and all the really satisfying conversations are happening at dinner parties and coffee meet-ups and on the train, while you expect them to happen when there’s work at hand that has to get done.
We used to have those conversations and now we don’t, because the newer faculty aren’t that way. This is the favorite folkloric explanation of many older faculty. Sometimes, in some places, I think they’re at least potentially correct—the nature of academic culture changed as the competition for a dwindling number of good jobs intensified. But also this lament is frequently a lightly disguised complaint against the diversification of faculty. More importantly, it’s sometimes simply incorrect: there weren’t any more of those conversations thirty or forty or fifty years ago. (I’ve found faculty expressing more or less this same complaint, that nobody at their university or college talks about intellectual or scholarly issues, in writings all the way back to the 1920s and 1930s.)
We used to have those conversations and now we don’t because everybody’s too busy, because the managerial style of the last twenty years fills every spare second with trivial administrative labor rather than meaningful engagement. Another favorite explanation. I think there’s something to it, but again, it’s not entirely clear to me that there were more satisfying conversations before the rise of the neoliberal university. But even before our present moment, institutions had a way of making most conversations be about institutional life and professional relationships, not intellectual questions—a lot of older “campus novels” like Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution satirize that tendency back into the 1950s and 1960s
Some group of faculty killed all the good conversations through some kind of misbehavior. Or just because many of them are socially maladjusted and awkward. I used to hear this some when I arrived at Swarthmore, for example: that there had been a regular forum to discuss scholarly work and the older men killed it by being persistent bullies towards junior faculty, especially women, such that when the bullied generation got tenure, they immediately stopped going and the forum died. When I do external reviews or spend time with colleagues at other institutions, I often hear similar stories. Sometimes this thought is cross-cut with disciplinary antagonisms or accusations that a particular subfield of disciplinary work is hostile to good discussions.
It’s not me, it’s you. Here it’s not about groups, it’s about the thought that there is an incredibly small group of individuals on the faculty who: a) frequently show up to venues where good intelligent conversations might happen; b) are complete assholes of some variety or another with whom it is impossible to have a good conversation; c) are prone to aggressively insert themselves into any conversation which happens to start without them being part of it. Hence everybody starts to avoid having conversations to avoid dealing with this person.
Faculty aren’t as intelligent or interesting collectively as they suppose themselves to be. They’re bourgeois conformists who have no interest in rocking the boat. Real intellectual conversations only happen under less stultifying conditions. It’s pretty easy to see how someone with as many unconventional ideas as Delany might feel this way. It’s a common impression that many non-academic intellectuals, writers, artists and others have of academia.
Faculty are too specialized to have conversations outside of their highly particular expertise, and on most faculties, that limits you to yourself and perhaps one other person to talk to. This is a common view of academics from outside the university, and there’s something to it.
Faculty are too territorial about their expertise, and work to shut down discussions that are perfectly valid and interesting but where the discussants lack the credentials that the territorial people believe you should have in order to talk about that question or issue. Definitely happens, and most of us give way because we want the right to exercise the same prerogative in reciprocal fashion. Happens more often if the conversation is edging towards questions of governance or resources.
Faculty get so sick of hearing collegial ignoramuses prattle on about things they know nothing about (variant: mansplaining, etc.) that they avoid conversations rather than endure one more prattler. Flip side of #10.
Everybody would love to have great intellectual conversations but we’re just too tired because we already have those conversations in other venues—in our classes with our students, in our disciplines and in our scholarly writing. There just isn’t enough cognitive bandwidth for more of it. Sure feels like this sometimes.
Conversations with other faculty are dangerous because of the precarity of academic jobs. The entire idea of “intelligent conversation with intelligent people” invokes a vision of playfulness about ideas, but every game can be destroyed in an instant by another player who takes it too seriously or who follows a different ruleset. If you’re in a contingent position or you’re pre-tenure, you’re always one “intelligent conversation” away from offending someone you can’t afford to offend. Better not to risk it.
Conversations with other faculty are dangerous because there’s nowhere to go when a discussion reveals a very serious and substantive disagreement with a colleague. If you’re recently tenured, it starts to sink in on you: I am going to be working with all these other people for decades. In every long-term human relationship, you learn pretty quickly that you just do not talk about things where you are uncertain of the other person’s views or reactions out of fear of revealing a divide so profound that the relationship becomes untenable.
Faculty are so handicapped by their jargon or specialized knowledge that it takes too long to get to the clear and fundamental issues that animate a good conversation. This is a position that Chip Heath and Dan Heath laid out in their book Made to Stick, that academics are actually very bad at the kind of simplifications and clarity that good conversations require—that they mistake complexity for intelligence. It’s a pretty fair observation.
Faculty are substantially inclined to a kind of operatic performativity in conversation, to ‘peacocking’, showing-off and dickwaving, which short-circuits conversation. Well, guilty as charged—a lot of us are so deeply worried with being seen to be intelligent that we have trouble letting other people get in a word edgewise. It’s one reason I actually like asynchronous forums and even synchronous chats for some kinds of faculty conversations—it lets people be conversational in a way where peacocking doesn’t necessarily short-circuit a back-and-forth dialogue.
It’s precisely because some faculty treat intellectual conversation as a playful exercise that real intellectual conversations are rare. ‘The point is not to interpret the world, it is to change it’: good intellectual conversations have real stakes and are about doing real things in the world and faculty don’t have the courage, mostly. Another common sentiment, both within the academy and outside of it—that conversation for conversation’s sake is a dilettantish, foppish luxury and it’s only worth getting into a discussion if it will have instrumentally tangible outcomes.
It’s not our job to have intelligent conversations all the time, our job is to teach and to produce knowledge. The people who expected this of academic life are naive romantics who need to grow up. There’s something to this—the expectation that professors are wise people who sit around with each other being wise is maybe in the same boat as “Literary critics should just love literature, why don’t they” and “Historians should just remove bias from historical records and provide an objective account of what really happened!” and so on.
Intelligent conversations with intelligent people happen a lot in academia, it’s just that we don’t remember them, we only remember the negative experiences. I think this has something to it—when I run over my professional life with a more meticulous accounting of my time and experiences, I often realize that I’ve had a lot of satisfying conversations about intellectual and scholarly questions, I just don’t account them properly.
Everybody’s too afraid of everything now—our students, state legislators, our administrative leaders, our middle managers, each other—and so faculty just want to get on with it and go home at the end of the day. Overlaps some other explanations—and definitely something to it right now. It’s not so much “cancellation” as it feels like nobody has a taste for exploratory thought (including many of the centrist liberals who claim to value it).
That’s my list! Others to add?
This sounds about right, especially the ones in the teens. I’d also add that the flip side of professionalization and specialization is a narrowing of general ed knowledge--I will frequently evoke completely midwit things like Rashomon and encounter faculty who have never encountered the references before. Ultimately, and here I would amend one of your points, if you want the amateur sport of intellectual salons, you just...go online!
I’d also note that the demise of the faculty wife and greater burden sharing at home, both very good, have had some costs in terms of horizontal, informal, unplanned exchange. Well worth the trade off but who is going to do the dishes while we discourse?
1. I think Paul Musgrave is right that I spend less time with faculty colleagues outside of work because of changing demands at home, both more-egalitarian norms and changing approaches to middle-class parenting.
2. Greater ease of online communication means that more of our discussions are with people not at our own institutions (like me writing this comment).
3. More collaborative work means spending a greater share of time with a smaller set of people rather than colleagues in a different department.