During my lifetime, I’ve failed only one written test. It was the North Carolina motorcycle driver’s license test. I failed it twice.
The first time was because I was arrogant. The second time was because I was lazy. When, on the third round, I passed the written test and aced the driving part, I swore I would never give up that hard-won endorsement. It’s stayed with me far longer than the bike, which I kept only for a few years.
Anyone who’s blown off studying for a test or not spent enough time practicing for a big game knows how easy it is to fail, how easy it is to convince yourself of your superiority. As faculty members we all know (and maybe have been ourselves) smart but lazy students — the ones who don’t perform to expectations because, clearly, they just don’t try hard enough. How many times do we excuse ourselves with wouldas, couldas, and shouldas when “didn’t” is really the only thing that matters?
If I dash off a half-baked query letter to a national publication, or do a crappy job on a grant application — because, well, why wouldn’t they want me? — then I don’t deserve a response. I know that. It usually stops me from sending those sloppy drafts.
But there are, of course, other, more interesting ways to fail. I’m partial to the much-quoted wisdom from our macho rough-riding president, Teddy Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs … and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Too many of us in academe fall short in the arena because we do not “fail while daring greatly.”
People who opt for a faculty career are often the good kids, the ones who obeyed the rules. And if we did get kicked out of school, it wasn’t for beating up our peers or smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, but more likely because we refused to participate in school prayer or argued with teachers about the causes of the Civil War.
We are the people who believe that ideas matter. When we were young, we believed passionately that passionately. In my junior year in college, a rosy-faced tow-headed boy in a philosophy class accused another student of “criminally misreading” Nietzsche. I thought those nerds were going to come to blows over the eternal return of the same and I loved being in a place where hermeneutic interpretation mattered more than football. (Though people did, of course, also get riled up about football.)
Many people go into academe because they care more about what they’re reading or studying than they do about sports, money, prestige, or — as is turning out increasingly to be the case in academe — job prospects and security.
But I wonder if the current system and climate in higher education prohibits anyone but the comfortably tenured from being allowed to fail while daring greatly in their scholarly work.
Graduate students often have to conform to the worldview of their advisers. Job seekers are counseled to contort themselves to seem like a good fit for each of the hundreds of positions for which they’re applying. Those trying to earn tenure are told to be careful to make sure their work doesn’t stray too far afield of what’s conventionally accepted.
We live in interesting times. Scholars in the humanities can’t afford to stop making the case that what we do matters.
Such conservatism — warranted or not — is certainly the easiest path. Digging another posthole doesn’t require much bravery. When students are told at their thesis defense, “You now know more about this topic than anyone in the world,” I’m not sure that’s always such a great thing. It’s less scary to become an expert on something that no one else knows (or cares) anything about than it is to jump into a large and ongoing conversation with ideas and opinions that others will disagree with and denounce.
And yet, when I think about my past as an editor of scholarly books — sitting in editorial meetings while making a case to publish a manuscript — I remember how often I said, “No one’s ever looked at this before.” That’s what I’d heard the other editors saying and what I’d learned to look for in a manuscript. We were in the business of making available new knowledge.
I would practice pitching those projects to friends and family, in preparation for the annual sales meeting. Whenever the response was, “So what?,” I realized that authors hadn’t taken the argument far enough to draw out the implications of what they had to say. Often I had to carry an author’s argument further than he ever did in the book. I had to make the case for why anyone should care about it enough to plop down the cash for it at a bookstore.
That step — why does this matter other than the fact that no one has used this data/material/dusty archive before? — is the one that often goes without saying.
Some authors don’t answer that question because they take it for granted that, because they are interested, others will be, too. Or, and this is more damning, they think it doesn’t really matter if anyone finds the work compelling or important.
The timidity we find in much academic work is a product of a system that — while professing to cherish academic freedom — doesn’t foster academic bravery.
It might seem naïve and perhaps quaint to talk about courage in writing, but it’s something I think a lot about, particularly the ways I myself fail to dare greatly. For a while now I’ve been trying to write a piece about the paucity of women who are public intellectuals: Who are they? Why are there so few? Do they tend to lean toward the right? I would also like to write about two extraordinary books that have made a major impression on me lately: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. Especially when read together, those authors have helped me think and teach about race, the African-American experience, and my own personal and ethnic history.
And yet, while I’m obsessed with issues of gender and race, and want to think hard about those topics, I find myself reluctant to enter a national conversation that promises to get divisive. I realize I’m not quite audacious enough to wade into water that will no doubt overwhelm and risk turning me into a target for trolls.
Every time we write for publication, if we have anything worth saying, someone is going to disagree or say that there are invertebrates who are smarter than the writer. It’s a lot easier to criticize and critique than it is to create. While I welcome serious disagreement, there’s something so distasteful about the tone and tenor of the “debates” you find online today, particularly when it comes to issues of gender or race, that I find myself pulling back into the anodyne, the bland. In other words, I fail.
Any time I start to gain courage, I end up reading an essay like Kelly J. Baker’s recent one on Vitae about the abusive emails she receives regarding her scholarship, and my spirit wavers. Will I be able to handle an onslaught of hateful responses and get back to my keyboard? Yet I know I’m fortunate to have a tenured position where I can afford to take risks. I need to remember that, and treat it as a responsilibity, not a luxury.
We live in interesting times. Scholars in the humanities can’t afford to stop making the case that what we do matters — that art helps us to live. We need to be able to convey that to our students, especially those in STEM fields who may not have gained as much exposure to music, literature, art, or theater.
Our work must pass the “So what?” test. We have to look up from a close reading of a few lines of poetry to say something bigger about why it matters — to draw out the largest possible implications and make a case that touches the farthest reaches of our own small world.
