More on Professors

Here is Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times about how we need more professors to become public intellectuals. The article is a funny kind of thing because when I read it I got mad about it. And that's funny because I've made some very similar complaints here.

When I see it under someone else's name I can be a lot more critical. That's a ridiculous statements but the leader at the top of the page says, "Don't expect too much... 15 minutes or less." This is as smart as I can be on any given day in 10 to 15 minutes. And that's not very smart. So, let's start with the problems in Kristof's piece.

On the issue of academic marginalization: Kristof thinks (and I agree) the world needs more inspired generalists. This would be particularly true of the United States where Bill Nye (the Science Guy) has become the advocate for realism in the American culture. There is a systemic flaw (there are many but I want to write about one) in the academy and it has to do with the process of becoming a professor.

When you apply for a graduate school you have to submit a document stating your research intentions. And you know when you write it that the final result has to be a new and original contribution to the area you are working in. So. What are you going to do? Are you going to bet 4 years and +$100k that you can succeed in coming up with something new in an area that is very general and already has about a thousand books written about it or are you going to pick something very particular that no one else has researched yet? Kristof thinks you should do the latter but it's the riskier bet. And if you spend four years and pile up another $100-200k debt and don't come up with something you can use to get a job in academia, you're properly fucked. You know how long it takes to pay off $200k in student loans on what an adjunct prof makes? Forever. You'll be paying off loans with your social security - if there is any left by the time you apply for it. So the smart bet is specialization. And then you get a job (if you are very lucky) because you specialized. The next step is tenure and to earn that you have to publish and publish. Anything new can get published. It doesn't matter how arcane it is. Kristof acknowledges this in his backhand way. Publications in a newspaper don't count. Speeches made to thousands of people don't count (unless they are part of a conference). Being a dutiful and conscientious public intellectual doesn't count. Moving the conscience of a nation doesn't count. TED Talks really don't count (unless we are keeping track of the warm strokes to your ego). You need to teach and publish. So, if you do all that and you are very very lucky you get a tenured position. It is worth pointing out that since 1970 the number of tenured professors in the United States has increased only 10% despite hundreds of new schools opening and a massive increase in the percent of the population that goes to university or college. Luck is a very important factor.

Now you have another difficult decision to make. You feel very strongly about a number of issues and you want to bring your own knowledge to the discussion. Some of the administrators above you in the hierarchy (administrative positions have increased 240%) will be with you, some will be against you. Do you risk pissing people off - not just in the community at large but in the community you work in every single day? How many people do this outside of academia? What percentage stand up for their beliefs when it has the potential to cause them grief they can easily avoid by keeping their mouths shut? Academics have, I believe, a higher standard they ought to live up to but in order for them to do so we (meaning you, me, and everybody) have to make things just a little easier for them. I was looking for a site I sometimes visit that keeps track of the insane hoops academics are made to jump through, so I googled "professor complaint" and the first 5 pages of results were either instructions on how to complain about a professor or complaints against professors as a species. It is important to remember here that tenure isn't the last promotion a professor can get. There is a lot of money after that. Not just in salary either, the big money is in equipment, assistants, space to work, and other support.

Moving on. Kristof quotes a fellow at the Brookings Institute, "Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research." The Brookings Institute isn't a university, it's a think tank funded by ExxonMobil, the Carnegie Corporation, the Republic of China and Qatar (among others). As a think tank public advocacy is it's reason d'être. So long as it keeps up its advocacy for causes its donors support, it has no need to worry about money. Researchers at universities need a constant influx of money from private and corporate donors. The trend is away from corporate donations and toward corporate partnerships that give the corporations control over everything from the patents generated to curriculum and hiring. And we all know how much corporations love public advocacy. 

The liberal bias in the humanities and social science isn't a selection bias. There is no political agenda in the hiring committee. Same as there is no political agenda on the admission boards. The process of learning about any subject that falls into the humanities or social sciences has the effect of making a person more 'liberal'. That's using the American political spectrum. There are plenty of conservative professors in Canada in both faculties. In fact, I would argue historians are, by education, conservative. If history teaches you anything, it teaches you only very bad shit happens fast. Young people all want to change the world (or, if they are lazy, for the world to change itself). By the time they graduate they have learned every change in the world so far has produced an enormous body count and so they become conservative. Just not according to American nomenclature. So long as conservative means 'free market radical' they will be limited to economics. And maybe a few other disciplines that aren't particularly interested in how the world actually works.

In architecture, where I have the most direct experience, I would say my (tenured) professors were all far more conservative than I am. There were one or two Red Tories (conservatives with socialist leanings) but no Reds per se.

Kristof ends with a plea that professors not cloister themselves like medieval monks. And I agree with that too. But there is a reason medieval monks cloistered themselves. It was because the world they lived in became extremely hostile to them. And I think the same thing is true about professors. The world doesn't want to hear what they have to say. When the presidents and prime ministers of advanced nations start hurling anti-intellectual screed, when the government cracks down on "political speech" by librarians (as happened here in Canada, the political speech being discussions with kids in the third grade and helping people compile their family tree), when the mayor of Canada's largest city calls professors "leeches on the system" in a city council meeting, I would be cloistering myself too.

The worst part about the Kristof article is that he is right (in a very general way). I have argued here before that Matt Taibbi is the closest thing America has to a public intellectual (since George Carlin died). Maybe I should have given Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson more credit. The reason I was trying to find the site I mentioned about the lives of professors was because I read a very moving article I wish I could link written by a professor who just found out she has breast cancer. She had originally scheduled her scan for more than a year before the cancer was found but had to keep putting the appointment off for the everyday inconveniences being a professor entails. They don't have it easy, living off a kind of luxury welfare. The best professors I know, and in fact most of the professors I know, live their jobs. They don't ever really stop working. They become what they do and it is who they are. They have no private lives in the sense most people do. It's an incredible dedication to a vocation.

This entry is already a little long but, fuck, like I care whether any of this scrawl ever gets read by anyone. The second best lecture I ever attended in my life was about professions of the gown. There are, my professor said, some professions that require their practitioners to wear gowns. Judges, priests, professors, and sometimes lawyers. The reason they wear gowns is as a symbol of their collective purpose. Each judge is supposed to rule as any other judge would. Priests all perform the same sacrament in the same way. Professors share a common purpose and a common charge. The gown marks them as instruments of society. As a professor, and as a judge or priest, their duty is to society as a whole and not to some portion of it or to their own advancement. The gown is also a kind of visible submission to a more permanent order, a more lasting truth, than the world outside can offer. Judges are the voice of law, that abstract compact between people. The priest is the voice of an eternal g*d. The professor speaks only the truth as it is then known and is dedicated to making the current state of truth more faithful to reality. Of course some judges are corrupt, some priests pedophiles, some professors lazy and self-aggrandizing. The symbol of the gown finds its ultimate affirmation in the expulsion of priests, who are symbolically and literally defrocked.

This is perhaps the best argument against both Kristof and me. Public advocacy has little place in this culture of the gown. The role of professors is to relate the truth all the time to the best of their abilities. Public advocacy always reduces the conflicting ideas and simplifies them to a position that is right and a position that is wrong. There is no room for subtlety and, therefore, less fealty to the true state of things.

It is also worth pointing out that if there were thousands of professors making vigorous political stances on the issues of the day, how would we know? There is a limit to what the New York Times or the New Yorker (the publications Kristof takes as the bench mark for public advocacy) will print. If you are outside of those limits, you are left with few means of making your positions known. You can have a blog, I guess. You can speak at rallies that don't get covered in the news. You can organize talks in your local community center or church. Chomsky's main point about the potential from public advocacy is the how small the spectrum of acceptable opinion is. In the years since he first described it, it has only gotten smaller.