Coming out of a several day long reflection on my own identity, I feel like this is the time to reflect back on something else I have talked about here before: the attitudes of other academics. I want to preface this by saying this is by no means an absolute. Most of the academics I know and associate with do not fit the criteria I’m about to reflect upon. Don’t take me wrong. There are good folks.
I’ve been reflecting on what I think is wrong– since something is most definitely wrong– with academic culture. And I think I have it isolated as one center point around which the other spokes spin: arrogance. Many academics have a huge problem with hubris, arrogance and the anger/snark that it generates.
This is no real surprise to anyone, I’m sure. If you’ve been in a PhD program, you know that part of what a PhD program does to people, as part of how it is built, is create a caste system of the beloved and the tolerated (or sometimes the abused). Think about your PhD experience and try to remember the person or people that your program chose to anoint and who was always given more love, more support, regarded with more respect. If you can’t think of this person, one of two things happened: either 1) you found the magic program where everyone actually was treated the same or 2) you were one of the chosen people. One motif that runs through the whole thing is that the people who are treated with higher esteem never, ever see it. That one is an absolute. I’ve never once heard one of them say “oh, wow, they totally let me get away with something they nailed you for” or “it sure is nice having to do less.”
I was a weird bird. I was, in the minds of the others in my PhD program, one of those “chosen” folk, as I was on a fellowship that many envied (ironically the fellowship, while an honor, messed up my financial aid so badly that I had to take a private loan to survive my first year, and not teaching alienated me from people). But once we started actually attending classes, the fact that I wasn’t one of the chosen glitter-ponies became clear. And I don’t say that to complain; other people pointed it out to me. And there are reasons, but most of those reasons are personal and I don’t air other people’s dirty laundry. But over the course of five years, a number of people talked to me (and about me) about the politics of our situation. And I want to say “oh, I had such a weird experience,” but I didn’t. All the places I’ve worked have had the same political structures (at least in academia), and as I keep in touch with my peers from graduate school (including the one I live with and confide in), I see it elsewhere, too.
So I said it shouldn’t be a surprise. Here’s why. If you’re NOT an academic, this might surprise you, but if you are, this is me telling you something you know: it takes a certain type of person to be a scholar. Generally speaking, there are three binary divides that while they aren’t perfectly accurate (binaries are rarely perfectly accurate) but more or less allow you to understand people in the academy: there are people who are either super-confident or hugely self-doubting, there are people who care intensely about others to the detriment of self or those who are myopically selfish, and there are those who shoot straight or those who play the political game. If you combine the left or right of those binaries into a single personality type, you get a good 80% of academics: either the meek and humble (self-doubting, care more about others, straight shooters) or the arrogant and domineering (over-confident, selfish, political gamers). As you might guess, then, the arrogant, even if they are a minority, are pronounced and tend to rise to positions of “power,” the power part being in quotes because, let’s be honest, no one in academia is that powerful. Not vs. a person with “real world” power.
The arrogance part is most certainly problematic. In reality, there are only two traits in that list of six that I listed which are problems: the self-doubting and the selfishness. Those are, distilled down, two opposing viewpoints. the self-doubt leads to people being mobbed (because others smell blood in the water). It’s a shameful issue to suffer from, but it is quite common. It happens to me sometimes. But the selfishness, particularly when amplified through the lens of academia, can be downright frightening.
And that’s because, as so many have noted of late, academia isn’t a meritocracy. It doesn’t matter how “good” you are at this. There are circumstances that simply being good at this job cannot overcome. You need allies, and a little luck, and people who will listen to you and give you a chance. Without that, you’re left in a nearly untenable situation. And I am not talking about myself in this case. I had a rough go, but I managed to get to a place where I am respected and I love my colleagues and I’m publishing a book and I’m going to finally be on the tenure track and all that. I did “it” as much as there’s an “it” for young scholars. I did it late, but I’m in the right position. Things went okay for me.
But that arrogance I mentioned… I see it all the time. It is particularly prevalent in areas where there aren’t many jobs for majors– things like philosophy, history, literature, creative writing, theater. It’s amplified more if that’s a field, like for example here literature, where to become a PhD a person basically builds expertise in one thing, perhaps one thing as narrow as the works of a single author. This does a thing to a person. And I say this as someone who actually resisted being an expert in one thing. I know what this does to people from a different result: I’ve been anointed those around me on numerous occasions as the expert on my race (even though in the same breath arrogant people in the know will claim I don’t do that right). When you’re the expert on something, you start to feel as if you control that thing. It’s your wheelhouse. You’re the one who handles that. And this is what many career academics dream of. They want to be the person who controls their piece of knowledge.
But that feeling of being bossy, and in control, and forcing the issue… it leaks out over the edges. If I’m in a room and we’re talking about Harold Bloom and there’s a Harold Bloom trained lit theory scholar in the room, guess what? That person gets all my attention so long as that person wants it. But when we switch topics, that person isn’t the sage on the stage anymore. And I don’t think some academics get that.
Or maybe it’s worse and they do. Because what I’ve witnessed of late is that my generation of scholars has a different sense of how this all works. We have seen that to get jobs and to be useful and to build new knowledge it requires critical thinking and the ability to do lots of things. I’ve said this before, but I’m going to say it again here now. I teach the same first lesson to people about Dungeons & Dragons that I do about being an academic. I know HOW it works. And I know how a number of things operate in quite sophisticated ways, well enough that I can reason out most situations. But the books exist for a reason. They hold all the knowledge. I don’t memorize the weights of things, the prices of things, required spell components, etc. That’s why there are character sheets and handbooks and such. That isn’t stuff you should waste your life memorizing.
I said this same thing in a job talk once, in response to a question about what I’d use if I taught a class that the previous questioner had made up for me. I answered by talking about ideas and concepts and assignments. Honestly, I impressed myself. I thought I was going to fumble the question. But when I stopped talking, the person asking that follow-up furrowed her brow and said “no, I mean what books would you teach?” And so I named a few from memory, but I said– honestly, and I hope this is true of a number of people– that I don’t memorize my bookshelf and that’s why I keep it organized carefully. I would have to go look at my books and think on that. The person… walked out. Disgusted.
That’s destructive arrogance. One of that person’s colleagues told me not to take it personal and that said person was “like that,” but there really isn’t room for someone to be like that. Let me be clear– I’m not saying “hey, everyone should respect that I don’t think people need to memorize all the books they own.” I am fine with a person thinking I’m a lesser theory scholar because I still turn around and grab a Foucault book and leaf through it before quoting him. What I’m not fine with is someone who is so certain that I’m lesser that they act with blatant, entitled disrespect. It shouldn’t have mattered if I’d said I’d teach with a copy of the collected Dilbert strips; you don’t make a sound like someone kicked you in the stomach and stomp out of a job talk. Children do that when they don’t want to eat their vegetables at dinner. We’re people who learned until we were out of school to take. We’re better than that.
That we work in a field where someone just apologizes for that is a sign of how messed up some people are.
I had another encounter, and I’ve mentioned this on my blog before but it bears repeating, with a strangely arrogant professor. There was a professor I worked with once (well, I think this professor would say I worked “for”– I was not considered a peer) who was quite a big deal in one corner of academia. I taught next to one of this person’s multiple offices, for this person was a really big deal. I teach digital media classes. This means, on occasion, there’s sound. And we overbook our classes, because we need to serve students, so sometimes that sound has to be fairly loud to reach everyone in the room. I usually shut the door to my classroom, but I’m not an usher. If someone gets up to go to the bathroom, I don’t stop class to run over and shut the door behind them. One day, during final presentations, someone got up to use the restroom and left the door open while someone else was showing a clip from a video game they’d made. It was… a little loud. Not obnoxiously so, but I can get how if you were outside that room, close to the door, it’d sound loud. This professor, this well respected scholar, ran over, yelled something unintelligible into my room, and slammed the door as hard as possible. It scared several of my students. One thought we were under attack.
Why did this person slam the door? Because my class was too loud while this person was trying to enjoy lunch.
Arrogance.
Pure arrogance.
If we could remove the arrogance from the academy it would fix so many problems, but I fear that due to the level of reward for work done, the academy attracts a certain kind of person who has been made to feel small (myself included in that measure). I think when these people who were made to feel small feel bold, they sometimes pull an Anakin Skywalker and fall face first into hubris. And once that happens, they’ll never be able to go work out in the world where if you act like a prick someone says “hey, fuck you, prick, you’re fired.” They stay in the academy when they’re actually unhappy, making cruel comments to students and attacking junior faculty.
It’s really a shame.
Right now I’m in a program where there’s no one with anything like that arrogance. And even though what we do is complicated, it’s generally easy to solve most problems. No one feels the need to be the bullheaded master-of-all. I mean it’s not heaven on earth or anything; people still take cracks at other people’s work. But at the end of the day we have a level of mutual respect and mutual understanding.
Knowing that the academy CAN be this way, I feel for everyone who is stuck in a place where it isn’t. And I wonder, when I look at the people I know who are struggling, at the people I know who have scars, what it would have been like if there’d been a grad program like the unit I work in right now. I try to imagine that five year coming-of-age without the landmines and the “well, I had to deal with stuff like this, so I’m making it hard on you” grizzled old vets.
And I think to myself…
What a wonderful imaginary academic world.