In the movie Examined Life, Slavoj Zizek wanders about a garbage dump talking about ecology as involving a profoundly conservative set of beliefs, as the contemporary exemplar of ideology. Zizek asserts that the impulse toward “saving the planet” or conservationism is not, in fact, a “liberal” impulse, and so his position is that the more radical gesture is in fact to turn away from “nature” as an ideological good.
Now, whether you agree with Zizek or not about the politics of ecology, I think his formulation here is a useful one for thinking about the “liberal” professoriate. Because here’s the thing: professors, as a group, are not, actually, a bunch of radicals hell bent on destroying the fabric of culture and society. I realize this is a shocking assertion to make. We’re supposed to be brainwashing the youth with our lack of family values, with our political correctness, with our antipathy to all that is moral and right and true. Especially those of us who teach in humanities disciplines.
But let’s think, for a moment, about what your average English professor (or history professor or philosophy professor) actually does in a given day.
- We introduce students to cultural artifacts (literary texts, historical documents, philosophical treatises, music, works of art) and attempt to convince them that these objects hold some sort of intrinsic value to humanity and thus should be studied and preserved.
- We insist that our students meet certain agreed upon academic standards of research and writing, which involve writing in standard English, following the protocols of proper citation and formatting, and using authoritative and peer-reviewed scholarly sources.
- We produce scholarship that is about conserving and preserving the status of cultural artifacts that give insight into the human condition. (Even scholarship that is critical of “traditional” approaches or texts ultimately does this; even scholarship that introduces new approaches or texts participates in an economy of conservation and preservation of ideas/texts/thoughts that are “worthy.” There is no outside of power and all that.)
- We work at institutions that are authorized by government and society, performing various bureaucratic tasks to insure the continuance of those institutions. (While I know those who like to attack the professoriate think that we lead lives of glamor and intrigue, I am going to go out on a limb and say that there is absolutely nothing less glamorous and intriguing than the regular slog of committee work. Even grading is more glamorous and intriguing than committee work.)
- We live solidly middle-class lives that are grounded in a mythology of meritocratic achievement, and however self-aware we may be about the lie of meritocracy, our livelihoods depend on meeting various benchmarks and jumping through various hoops (the process toward earning a Ph.D., the job market, the path toward tenure and promotion, etc.)
For the most part, none of us are changing the world. For the most part, we are boring as hell.
And beyond all that, I really don’t think I have all that much influence on my students’ beliefs about anything. For example, I have been waging a war on the passive voice in student writing for, lo, these many years. In paper after paper that a student submits I will attack convoluted sentence structure and unnecessary wordiness. In class I will insist that this is not the best way to write and I will model how to write differently. I’m sorry to report that my lectures and my lengthy comments on papers go largely unheeded. And students don’t even actually care about the passive voice. They don’t have a deep commitment to it. Do you really think that if I tried to convince my students to become atheist, communist, queer rebels that I would have that power? Really?
You’d think conservatives would actually love a person like me. I mean, instead of getting out there and organizing and protesting and sticking it to The Man, I spend my time reading books, harping on students about the quality of their prose, and spending endless hours in meetings and doing paperwork. I mean, sure, I might read books and teach books that “offend,” but as Auden so wisely notes, “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper…”
But so if I believe these things (and I do), you may wonder what the point of teaching is or what the point of an academic life is. And my answer is that I believe in carving out a space for contemplation and ideas that is distinct from a space of utility. I believe that in the conversations I have with my students they learn to think deeply and critically about their beliefs, even if their beliefs remain the same. I believe that the work that I do contributes to the growth of my community, and I believe that there is something to be gained for all people from aesthetic pleasure in everyday life.
Amen. Seriously, I’m you in another, parallel life.
I’ve tried writing that many, many times so it doesn’t come off sounding creepy. It doesn’t work. I usually comment as ReadyWriting, but I’m already logged in to my students’ WordPress blog and I’m too lazy to log out.
Keep fighting the good fight.
Wow. What an interesting post.
I guess I’ve always thought there was something radical in insisting on standards, on contemplation, on clarity, and on the value of expertise. It seems to me that the worst parts of contemporary public culture are those that prize opinion over information (‘truthiness’ over truth), that insist on perpetual speedup and routinization, and that play off a general ill-informedness.
As it turns out, the humanities academy does skew left: it could be that being educated makes people more liberal, even if their prose remains convoluted. That’s pretty radical.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. We’re a pretty bourgeois lot, deep down (and resistant as hell to change of many sorts). I’ve often thought that if conservatives were sincerely concerned about the under-representation of Republicans in the academy, it would be ridiculously easy to convert the professors who are already there. All you’d really have to do is throw us a few bones, in the form of funding for Stuff Professors Like (way cheaper than buying off the elderly and the military), and stop actively insulting us.
Not that this will happen, since there’s a lot more political capital to be gained by fomenting resentment against academia, but a girl can dream.
To add on to Aimée Morrison, didn’t Stephen Colbert say, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias”?
And this is exactly the root of the fear and hatred right-wingers have for the professoriate. Critical thinking is like kryptonite to right-wing doctrine.
Structurally academia is very conservative. But, often radical projects have very conservative structures. The USSR under Brezhnev was a very conservative society, but it rested on conserving the radical transformations made under Stalin. In a like manner a number of academic courses, although I have no idea what overall percentage, have a radical content despite their very conservative structure. Again this should not be surprisng. The Socialist Workers Party in the early 1960s in the US used to dress the same way as republicans did. I think the complaint by some conservatives is with the radical content of some classes not a claim that the structure of academia is radical. Obviously classes taught by Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, and other leftists were very similar to those taught by people on the right in terms of methods and structure. It was the content that differed. It is also easy to see why some people might be offended by people for instance defending communist dictatorships especially if their family included refugees from such places. Imagine a professor defending Nazi Germany or South African apartheid? Might that not be offensive to Jewish and Black students? So I think this post is completely off track. The opposition to radical professors is not about lack of traditonal forms. Rather it is advocating political agendas that some people find offensive. Again I do not know how prevalent this practice is in academia, but Marcuse and Davis are certainly two examples from the past of professors advocating a radical and revolutionary political agenda in the classroom.
I have a medieval-designed gown hanging in my office. I’m right up there with the radicals of the 13th century. :/
Well said. I think that the confusion comes because we are small c conservative in our commitment to preserving and transmitting various aspects of human heritage. But one of my students remarked in a paper recently that the more ze learned, the harder it was to defend a simple proposition because things were so complicated.
And really, modern “conservatives” are anything but. They are very radical, and care nothing for history, heritage, how things have been done, etc. Instead, they are gleeful about undoing it.
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, capitalism abhors uselessness, where ‘useless’ is defined as that which cannot be quantified or incorporated into an overall calculus of utility. So the passage from Auden that you quoted — “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper…” — is a little more subtly subversive than you’re allowing. I’ve never read it to be about the benign nature of poetry.
I don’t know if anybody has ever watched Fox News in the morning (an occupational hazard if one ever tries to run errands in the morning in my town), but it really reminds me of my most boring classes. The use very simple sentences and lots and lots of repetition with the key words and phrases verbally highlighted. The first person will say the same phrase 3 different times in very slightly different ways, then they’ll have other people come on to say something very similar with that same highlighted phrase. It’s just like a very simple drill-and-kill lecture in which you’re supposed to bubble in the missing word on the scan-tron exam at the end of the course. I kept expecting one of the people to turn to the camera and say, “Now you say…(whatever that day’s catch phrase was)”
It’s brilliant on their parts. For people who have only known this kind of education, it is familiar, gives Fox an air of authority, and gets folks to memorize their talking points, you know, for the upcoming exam. Exactly the opposite of NPR.
I have to say that professors may not be changing the world but they are molding the minds of our future and in turn changing the world. It’s a very challenging task and I credit anyone who takes it on. I do understand the difficulty faced with consistent nagging or repeated discussions on the same topic but I’m sure that it doesn’t go unheard, keep at it!
The opposition to radical professors is a ruse to convince careless professors that they are radical.
To take some of the cleverest people, and to instill in them a deep allegiance to ‘middle class values’ while enlisting them as gatekeepers to social advancement necessary for the meritocratic myth, is one of the most profoundly conservative/anti-progressive things that a society can do.
To do so while simultaneously providing such ‘liberal academics’ with their beloved ‘loyal opposition’ (i.e. the anti-intellectual right wing noise making machine), enables the powers that be to focus completely on accumulating wealth and influence whilst the academics can sit around smugly congratulating themselves for ‘growing their community’ by being disengaged from ‘the sphere of utility’.
Actually growing one’s community is critically important work that itself constitutes radical change (and while it may be divorced from the stereotypical capitalist notions of ‘the sphere of utility’, but in reality it is extremely useful). But to actually have an effect on community is extremely hard to actually do so while convinced that you cannot ‘change the world’, and it may be extremely hard to do while employed as a professor and thus necessarily supporting the status quo.
[...] think this is true of all of academia. Dr. Crazy had an interesting post the other day about the essential conservativism of college professors: You’d think conservatives would actually love a person like me. I mean, instead of getting out [...]
[...] “A Dirty Little Secret about Professors,” Dr. Crazy. Dr. Crazy points out that the real life of a liberal professor is a far cry from life changing as we can rarely even get students to care about changing their grammar (let alone their political beliefs). [...]