I feel compelled to say something about this week’s news (building on news over the last several years) about John Comaroff. I wish I could just ignore it, but I’ve had things to say about other cases (like that of Avital Ronell) and it just feels wrong to take a pass when you know more of the people involved.
I’ll admit it makes me slightly nervous to write this for multiple reasons. I do have friends who will feel directly criticized and hurt if I say that signing a letter criticizing Harvard for suspending Comaroff was a mistake. They made a mistake. I don’t want to lose my friends, and I hope it won’t cost me anything in terms of hostility towards any future scholarship I might produce, though I have nothing at stake in that besides wanting to produce it. I have friends that I know are in pain because of this story who don’t wish to speak about it, and I think it’s perfectly fine that they don’t. I hope I don’t make them feel worse.
Comaroff is a major scholar in my own field whose work has impinged directly on my own interests. I’ve had helpful or friendly if not deeply personal interactions with him for my entire career, and I deeply appreciate the profound insights and comradeship of many people he and Jean Comaroff have trained. I don’t have the kind of direct experience or knowledge that would let me say anything about past conduct relevant to the complaint brought against him at Harvard or the contents of the lawsuit. But I wouldn’t have signed a letter criticizing those complaints for any reason whatsoever for precisely those reasons: I have no basis for thinking the filed complaints exaggerated, questionable, or untrue and every reason to think that Harvard’s procedures and the administrative systems are one right place for these accusations to be heard and resolved. (The court system is another.) I think the faculty who signed the two letters defending Comaroff or criticizing Harvard’s process made a serious mistake based on very limited information. It now appears that many of them know that after reading through the lawsuit filed against Harvard on February 8th.
The focus properly should remain on this case, but I do want to situate it in relationship to some bigger concerns. I hope that will not seem like I’m trying to change the subject or spread blame around more widely. It’s just that this case is also a window into a much bigger set of issues that take some more work to think through and change. There’s a continuum involved where relatively innocent behavior at one end unintentionally provides cover for malign practices at the other.
What I think is that there’s a wider model of graduate study that’s caught up in this case (and others like it). This general vision of graduate work creeps into a great many controversies about academia, faculty life, faculty governance and the nature of scholarly professionalism and pushes many sitting faculty into making local commitments that contradict their own political commitments or their own claims to expertise about power and social capital.
The model of graduate work that many sitting faculty in research universities defend (or at least quietly prefer) is complicatedly private, domestic, quasi-familial. It is a hybrid admixture of apprenticeship and kinship rather than a vision of professional or job training as an impersonal service provided in return for payment. The model invokes the atelier with the master scholar who shapes future scholars (all clamoring for a place at his or her side), scholars whose later work then is read as reflecting and amplifying the master’s reputation, creating a traceable lineage. The model is understood by its practitioners and defenders as necessarily having some of the human drama and passion of the atelier, the household, the artisanal studio: the rivalry of the rising generation with the aging masters, the competition for attention and affection from the mentor, the leader’s angst of a star pupil’s defection to another camp, and so on. For the most part, the people who defend—even relish—this way of doing things take that kind of emotional and social landscape as unavoidable and perhaps even desirable. As proof that there is something human and real to it all. As the kind of emotional investment that makes the world go round and the knowledge get produced.
And rather like the Tolstoy quote from Anna Karenina, happy academic kinship is often thought to be much the same, and unhappy academic kinship is often thought to be quite varied.
In my own training, I got a look at both the unhappy and happy sides. I was jointly admitted by two professors of very different temperaments and pedagogical approaches. I did not really know what I was getting into. My peers in my program turned out to be extremely wonderful and insightful guides to what was going on, and some were a lot more savvy than I was about academic institutions. Nevertheless, I did spend two years thinking that what I was doing was simply extending my undergraduate experience, having debates and trying out provocative arguments and exploring ideas. This was a pretty serious misreading on my part of what I was actually meant to be doing, and it was nearly disastrous for me when I sat down for my qualifying exams.
On the bad side of things, as it dawned on me very slowly that one professor had taken an uncomfortably proprietary interest in seeing that my work narrowly conformed to his ideas and sensibility, I found myself feeling more and more desperate about where this was going. It was perhaps characteristic of this scholar’s vision of professional kinship that when he tried to bring me into his atelier, his notion of socially appropriate intermingling was to hire me (at minimum wage) as a bartender at a large formal party held at his home. (He knew I worked part-time as a chef and service person for a catering business.) And his notion of filial duty was that rather than encourage me to do the dissertation project I had conceived (which led to my first book, which is still the best thing I’ve ever done as a scholar), he demanded that I change the entire project to be dry economic history that was nothing like what I’d proposed or wanted to do. I eventually got him off my dissertation committee but that involved ritually abasing myself in front of him (not an exaggeration of what I had to do) and begging his forgiveness for wanting to work with someone else.
On the good side of things, my good advisor changed my entire view of my discipline and my career in ways that I could never have come to on my own and that of necessity had to touch deeply onto my professional, political and ethical personhood. He didn’t do that by diktat or even through conventional persuasion. I learned from him by watching, by doing, through dialogue—through my questions, my choices. That was a deliberate ethical pedagogy on his part, to let each student find their own way to what they wanted to think and do and to then add value to it as it stood when they had. His vision of his role was to help a student amplify and intensify and complicate what they were doing already after they’d decided to do it and after the student had taken responsibility for their own commitments. He wasn’t pulling strings or patrolling orthodoxies. He once told me as I left for the first stage of my dissertation research that I ought to go to see such-and-such person while I was there. So I did, but that person had received no advance word of my coming, which is just as it should have been. It was up to me to make those connections and make of them whatever I could.
As a result my “kinship group” of former graduate students is a richly pluralistic bunch of folks who don’t have a common politics, a shared methodology, or any sense of continuous heavy obligation to front for a “school” or a single way of thinking—and no sense of a familial debt carried around. Most of us are in touch with one another and the personal entanglements we have are the kind of warm and humane adult relationships that I think almost everyone wants in life generally. Everybody in that group handles their own professional situation. We don’t travel in a pack, we have never moved in tune with our advisor’s career.
I think this good model is what some graduate faculty think is at stake every time that administrative power wants to suddenly interject itself into those mentoring kinships. They fear the end of that kind of empowering mutuality, a shared fellowship suffused with both kindness and intellectual curiosity. They know there are “happy families” out there, a lot of them, and that even some of the cohorts that are “unhappy” are often highly productive and functional, that things generally turn out well. For most people. Mostly.
I understand those concerns. I don’t like the idea that the answer to neoliberalism is more neoliberalism, the answer to managerialism is more managerialism. But you know how you get neoliberal managerialism as the only possible answer to abuses of power or even to a not-especially-abusive but emotionally-manipulative, overly-dependent “kinship group” where the luminary figures within it has some form of continuing power or influence over the professionals they’ve trained? When people can’t maintain humane teaching and advising relationships that follow some basic ethical rules and guidelines. That’s how you get neoliberal managerialism.
This is how some graduate faculty talk themselves into being opposed to graduate student unionization. They tell themselves: that just makes the relationship into employer and employed! How cold! This is how some graduate faculty talk themselves into telling their students whose turn it is to apply for a particular job, or who a call might be made for and in what order. It’s how some decide that it’s their prerogative to call a department that’s made a job offer to tell them that their possible colleague is not the right person for them. It’s how some people use pedigree—a kinship chart—to predict (and thus decide) what a third-generation descendant of a founding ancestor ought to be or do, or what could be expected of them. I don’t know if it happens more or less than it used to, but it may also be that it only happens a lot when you you’re inside the winner’s circle (aka Harvard) and I’m too much of an unproductive third-rater now to catch wind of it.
It’s how some graduate faculty decide it’s ok to start telling graduate students they look beautiful or need to smile more, how they start managing the whole life of a person studying with them. Even when that doesn’t have sexual intent or isn’t about gross forms of emotional manipulation, it’s creates a kind of emotionally confusing space for everyone that can create feelings of debt, dependence, and obligation, where the boundaries between self, group and the familial head of the kinship tree get blurred. Offering a hand up is what sometimes creates space for putting a hand on. Being intimately responsible for an advisee’s future life slides into ownership in the blink of an eye.
Professionalism is supposed to put the brakes on abuses of an atelier system of training but we know it largely doesn’t. Any time you forcefully try to say to a colleague (or your graduate supervisor if you’re really brave, as the Harvard graduate students have been) “you really shouldn’t be doing that” in response to something you’re observing in how they work with graduate students, you run the risk of all kinds of low-key retaliation that you can’t stop or confront. This is exactly what the complaint by two of the three graduate students at Harvard is trying to underscore: the power of almost-unexpressed, slightly suggested threat that the word will get round. That people who would have been friendly to you might not be, without ever really knowing anything about you. Because they’ve heard. Heard what? Well, you know.
So what’s the way out of all this?
Graduate advising still should have some elements resembling apprenticeship and should involve some kind of humane relationships that go beyond the relationship of a customer buying a service. Yes. We all need emotionally real, humanly situated advice about how to inhabit the professional roles we’re hoping to secure, we all need to work out with the help of some wise advice what it means to be an intellectual or a scholar or a teacher. We need good mentors to tell us the hidden truths about how institutions work, to provide us road maps to the unspoken world of habitus. We need teaching that is kind, emotionally supportive and generous in spirit. I think graduate study would be a worse, more discouraging, more disempowering experience if it consisted of nothing more than showing up to formal classes, being taught from an impersonal distance, being certified in a managerial way as capable of independent research and then being left alone until the time to evaluate the completed product arrives.
That’s a caricature, though, of what could be. Because the opposite caricature, and one that some graduate faculty try to defend, is that building those kinship worlds over several generational cohorts is so individualistic, private, and idiosyncratic, so utterly under the sign of personal and extreme kind of pseudo-libertarian vision of academic freedom, that all procedures, norms, rules, and constraints are just administrative meddling or the hostile intervention of outside forces that hate our freedoms. That bristling rejoinder: how dare you second-guess how I approach this delicate task? Do you want me to start micromanaging your teaching? No, we do not, so to preserve the legitimate humanity and emotional connectedness of our own teaching and advising practices, we don’t mess with other people, we leave them claiming that academic freedom covers anything they choose to do.
The way out is simple. An end to ateliers, to kinship trees. An end to powerful figures whose patronage is informally required and whose disapproval is professionally if insidiously deadly, an end to “schools of thought” as major structures of professional and institutional reproduction. An end to suffocating interiority built within and between fields of specialization that feels at times too much like a meeting of mafia families trying to decide how to divide up a territory.
Most of our life as scholars and teachers should look like ad hoc assemblies coming together and fissioning apart constantly, about mostly standing on our own two feet, about making our own networks and relations. Read outwards, build outwards, explore. Show up in unexpected rooms. Be alone in how you curate your own interests and engagements and don’t constantly measure your relative status, don’t spend effort trying to manipulate an intellectual market to keep the stock of some program high and another program low. Don’t be part of conversations that are trying to decide who’s in, who’s out, who matters and who is a failure. Every graduate seminar that is primarily about deciding whose work the collective hates or opposes should start over.
I understand this is a slightly harder prescription in STEM fields or any field where much of the research is necessarily collaborative, but there are ways to talk about how to structure labs and other research collaborations to avoid these issues—and many STEM researchers have been working hard with exactly these problems, about how to structure who gets to be first author, about how credit within a lab is apportioned, and so on.
If we need a metaphor to talk about the humane qualities of graduate education, how about age-sets? Let’s not deny that there are generational progressions of how we think through and experience life as scholars and teachers. But let’s talk about that in terms of what each age-set owes one another in terms of responsibility and mutual care, not debt or dependence, not gate-keeping or access. Far better still: how about networks, a kind of structure where everyone from grad students to senior professors can be a hub, everyone can curate their own links and shift them constantly through every moment of interaction and exchange with others? Something that is not a neoliberal hierarchy ruled by managerial power but neither has the fraught sociality of kinship or mastery.
We can be responsible to one another for following the rules and guidelines, which takes making our teaching and advising in graduate programs shared and visible. No graduate student should be working exclusively with one advisor ever. Graduate seminars should be co-taught, and not invariably by people who are tightly connected already in sensibility or subject matter. Every graduate program should force every member of the department to be collectively responsible for and responsible to all the students they’re training.
Let everyone see the network map as it forms and shifts and reforms. Make every person a hub of their own—and grant everyone, professor and graduate student alike, the autonomy of their own lives. Professionalism should involve distance. Not the cold distance of Weber’s iron cage, of rational institutionality, but a good distance that understands that even the best-intentioned entanglement of one intimate world and another opens the way for the worst intentions.
I know it’s possible to voluntarily practice graduate training that way because I experienced that combination of ethical restraint and kind regard in my own training with my good advisor. There are many graduate advisors out there right now who are not gatekeepers or puppetmasters, who are not maintaining lineages, who are not running ateliers. It’s time for their practices to come to the fore not as the particular choices of individual faculty but as the explicit commandment of professionalism for all.
Image credit: Enea Vico, “The Academy of Baccio Bandinelli”, 1544. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/358113
I fear the end of such letters, letters circulated like this one, letters reproaching powerful actors in institutions constructed in ways that smother reaction and resistance. I have signed many. I have also drafted some, circulated them for influential signatures, moved them forward to the reproachees. And now I wonder, not about their powers, but their flaws. Yet I also would like to understand why they seem so standard a means of influence, repair, why they seem the obvious way to go…and how signing them seems so easy and proper…until the damages are accounted.
Thanks Tim for speaking out on this.
I’m not ready to give up my fictive kin just yet, Tim. However, I never really cared to reproduce myself, either. I had, you know, experienced the good of the lineage alongside the bad of it. And yes, I’m talking about the Comaroffs, who sometimes disappointed me (as kin are wont to do), but who did not harm me. I do not doubt these women had the experiences they describe. I didn’t. Maybe it was the part of their career that made the Comaroffs more generous and less threatening. Maybe I just would never be as vulnerable as some. Definitely I was fortunate in my cohort of like-minded grad colleagues, who remain close to the present, most of them.