Academia: Who Knows What Potential Lurks in the Hearts of Students? The Professor Knows. (Maybe.)

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

John McWhorter’s public writing is sometimes comfortably inside some visible ideological boundaries, but I generally get the impression that he is doing some real thinking inside the territory he has chosen to inhabit. Most of the time, I think he also troubles to actually look at evidence and data. He is a public intellectual with his feet still rooted in the scholarly world.

(This is, as an aside, why I was honestly surprised he was one of the co-authors of “In Defense of Merit”, which I thought was a terrible piece of work.)

In terms of his chosen patch of ideological ground, his exploration of his personal experience of affirmative action in the New York Times this week was not at all surprising. He describes himself as a somewhat undermotivated and modestly underperforming student who was nevertheless offered opportunities at each stage in his personal and professional journey that he believes he did not truly deserve in meritocratic terms compared to other candidates or applicants. He feels sorry for the people that he thinks were harder-working and more talented than he was.

That feels like a pretty ordinary expression of imposter syndrome except that he also criticizes the white professors and administrators who made those choices, arguing that they main reason they chose him is that he was black. Here McWhorter is in the same territory as Clarence Thomas, though without Thomas’ oft-reported derision and anger for what he perceives as white paternalism. Like Thomas, McWhorter seems to be saying, “I would not be where I am were it not for the logics of affirmative action, and knowing that is true is another kind of harm done to me and people like me.”

Unlike Thomas, McWhorter comes from an upper middle-class background, which I think intensifies his sense that he didn’t really even have a disadvantage to overcome and hence shouldn’t have been chosen with some form of desire to compensate or correct for barriers to his success.

The odd thing for me on reading this piece is that McWhorter doesn’t seem to credit at all the possibility that the people who chose him for various opportunities accurately saw his potential or correctly recognized his capacity. He is today an accomplished linguist, able scholar-teacher and talented public writer. Would anyone given the same opportunities have ended up being even more accomplished in the same way? Would a person more motivated, better trained, and more insightful at the time of selection today be an even more accomplished version of John McWhorter?

I mentioned this in a thread on Reddit and one smart respondent replied that it wasn’t fair to question what McWhorter is reporting as his own feelings at the time, that this is how he felt. It’s a fair point and one of the legitimate issues at the heart of debates over affirmative action. If we’re going to talk about the harms of microaggressions, of pervasive discrimination, without telling people to just get over it or it’s not a big deal, then we have to take a report like McWhorter’s just as seriously.

On the other hand, however, that’s not a license to ignore what other people report about their motivations, thought processes and feelings. In this case, McWhorter’s view that white professionals involved in selecting, training or promoting him only saw him as a black man who could provide value through diversity, and refused to see his lesser worth in meritocratic terms because of it.

My Reddit interlocutor said, “Look, professors are not normally perspicacious judges of the potential capability of their students.” Here I disagree. I frequently turn to the 2014 book How College Works by Daniel Chambliss and Chrisopher Takacs for its many insights into higher education. In particular, I often underscore one of their most important findings, which is that good educational outcomes in a small college like Hamilton (the focus of their research) most heavily derive from two factors. First, whether a matriculated student made friends relatively early, and second whether a student at any time in four years felt well-seen and accurately understood as an individual by a professor or administrator. When you’re well-seen, you’re given a narrative about who you are and what you are good at, about your best possible futures, that then reorganizes and makes coherent all the experiences you have in college and structures your future choices. They note that being understood well doesn’t have to be entirely positive in its content: you can be told that you’re underachieving, that you’re chasing the wrong goal, that you need more discipline. As long as that seems true to the recipient, it lays down a highly generative pathway.

What’s striking about the latter finding is that the authors find that the distribution of reported experiences of being seen well in this fashion follows a power law: a small number of professors are responsible for a very large number of reported positive experiences. I’ve always found that meaningful in multiple ways—among them, it suggests to me that the people who are really good at seeing what a student is and what a student might become could teach other professors and administrators how to do that work. But in the context of what I’m talking about now, it means that there are professors who do see potential in their students accurately and don’t just read for objective information in a transcript. Some faculty are actually perspicacious: they see backwards to infer a great deal about where a student is coming from, intuiting information that hasn’t been shared with them, and they see forward to see capabilities and possibilities that are at best implicit or nascent in the student they’re evaluating or choosing.

Chambliss and Takacs caution that one of the worst things that can happen to a student, on the other hand, is when a professor takes the chance to evaluatively describe them or claims to see them well and is completely wrong, inarguably so. If some people are good at it, others are very bad at it. Arguably somewhere in the middle are professors who are persuasive to the students they describe or envision, so that there isn’t the instant revulsion at being badly misperceived, but where the professor’s intuition about a student’s best path forward turns out in the fullness of time to be completely wrong. Say if you’re talking to a student who expressly says that they’re really good at detail and that they really love challenging quantitative problems because that’s what the student has been trying to persuade themselves of, but where it turns out that the student’s unspoken, unconscious aspirations are actually towards artistic imagination and sloppy leaps of intuitive action. I would say that sometimes professors just mirror what a student says about themselves, figuring that to be a kindness or a useful service—or at least a way to avoid the dangerous presumption of being wrong, or the burden of responsibility that comes from entering into this kind of judgment in the first place.

But some professors are in a pedagogical and interpersonal sense what Philip Tetlock refers to in another context as “superforecasters”—they have a capacity for seeing what might be and they make judgments accordingly. Including the kinds of judgments that John McWhorter thinks went unfairly in his favor. Consider that he has validated judgments of his potential, you’d think he might want to credit the possibility that he was seen well, and not just as a patronizing token useful to a trendy project of racial diversification.

There’s a deeper current to consider here where we slide from the capabilities of individual professors in assessing character, potential, or talent. At this deeper level, I move towards my own ideological stomping grounds, and I think so too do many of my academic colleagues. We move in a straight line from Langston Hughes’ question “What happens to a dream deferred?” to the suspicion that if only we could see deeply enough we would find that most people have potential or capacity to do and be much more than they are—or more to the point, than they will be allowed to. That there are many dreams still deferred. And we think that thrown into the deep end of many situations, as it were, more often than not, that potential will show itself, to the benefit of the person so thrown, but also for us all.

This faith has its problems, though it’s not merely a left-liberal gospel: there are conservative versions as well. Our hope that all people might be capable of all things mistaken. Sometimes people drown. Sometimes the thrower is one of those bad-at-seeing people, and they throw a person in the wrong pool. Sometimes the person dog-paddles enough to keep from drowning, but they never learn to swim. Sometimes they take a big dump in the water and drive all the other swimmers out.

I can’t imagine, however, that anyone with any sensitivity can believe that we have eliminated all the ways in which those kinds of sage judgments about capability and possibility of many people are prevented or thwarted by structures beyond the control of the people involved. So many people are never even given the chance to show what they can be or be seen by someone who might find the spark inside of them and fan it into flame. So many people are unseen at precisely the moment that it would be most powerfully transformative for them, and at least some our potential, for all of us, is path-dependent. A lot of us talk a big game about how it’s never too late, but that’s a lie: by 14, it’s likely too late to begin the work to become an Olympic athlete or a world-class orchestral musician; by 30 it’s likely too late to take the first steps to a medical career; by 50 it’s too late for many things, and the best a perspicacious teacher or mentor can do is see what you could have been.

I just think that McWhorter is simply wrong when he thinks that meritocracy ought to be so tightly tuned that only the absolute best, only the absolutely hardest worker, ought to be given the best rewards, the best chances, the most opportunities. If nothing else, there’s tremendous evidence that the hardest strivers who achieve the most in higher education don’t necessarily pay that off, for themselves or for others. The Harvard “Happiness Study” is one of many bodies of evidence to suggest that the highest achievers end up hurting themselves, end up failing the people who depend on them, and often end up selfishly withholding some of what they could have joyfully granted to their institutions and their societies—or they give up so much so unrelievedly that they burn out and fade away. On those grounds alone, you want people who are more like what McWhorter describes himself as—slightly undermotivated, less confident, less cocksure, less intense, the B+ or A- performer, to be in the mix of people chosen for further opportunities and responsibilities. You want satisficers, not maximizers.

But also, if you’re going to share your inner experiences of how you felt, what you thought, how you judged yourself, have some humility about the inner motivations and thoughts of the people who judged you. It might turn out that some people saw in you what you could not see and that they were in fact right. It might even turn out that some of those people quite rightfully and righteously want to be able to see far more kinds of people, far more possibilities, than our institutions and social order presently allow, that the most perspicacious teachers know that we are so much poorer in dreams, in contributions, in futures than we might become, because they insightfully see all around them so many possibilities going to waste.