T here is a growing folder on my office desk. On the front, in large, black print, is the word “RESENTMENT.” Students stopping by during office hours eye the folder with anxiety. No worries, I tell them, it’s strictly research. Yet when my colleagues have stopped by and seen the folder, I see little anxiety. Quite the opposite: I get knowing smiles. And when I talk about my research on resentment with colleagues at other institutions, I’m eagerly met with stories.
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T here is a growing folder on my office desk. On the front, in large, black print, is the word “RESENTMENT.” Students stopping by during office hours eye the folder with anxiety. No worries, I tell them, it’s strictly research. Yet when my colleagues have stopped by and seen the folder, I see little anxiety. Quite the opposite: I get knowing smiles. And when I talk about my research on resentment with colleagues at other institutions, I’m eagerly met with stories.
A member of my graduate cohort could not apply for a job because her dissertation committee’s director had a “row” with the head of the search committee there — 20 years ago. An emeritus professor told me she refused to speak at meetings because newer faculty members interrupted her, a sure sign of disrespect. A friend at another university insists that his sabbatical was denied because his humanities research was seen as “frivolous” by a jury of science professors. What impresses me about these stories is their specificity: There is a cause — an injustice — and an effect — a feeling of resentment.
Why in the world do my colleagues react so knowingly? And why are the stories they share not about love gone awry or a politician’s latest outrageous statement, but about the mundane minutiae of everyday academic life? What is it about academe that makes us such experts of resentment?
Perhaps resentment is embedded in the matrix of academia. The philosopher Robert C. Solomon wryly noted, in his book The Passions, that “resentful people make excellent guards, police, librarians, school disciplinarians, clerks, detectives, scholars, and babysitters.” What these professions have in common is how they look at their subject. Guards and police watch for suspicious behavior; detectives accusingly question witnesses; scholars “interrogate” the subject of their study. As Solomon suggests, resentment plays out in both universal and particular ways. Resentful people seek others to resent; they never miss the minutiae of a single, resentment-propelling detail.
Part of our job as intellectuals is to expose resentment for what it is: a substitute for thought.
The attention required of scholarship requires us to consider material in a way that is both global and local. We glean and savor every detail: the surprise in data; the object out of place; the flicker of the eyelid that may be rich with meaning. We look for patterns where there is chaos and chaos where there are patterns. We pick apart power dynamics in our research and can’t help seeing them in our professional and everyday lives. Often the result is productive. But at times, our focus gets carried away. We employ “the hermeneutics of suspicion” in assessing texts and don’t easily switch out of its mind-set, that everything is a symptom of something else. As teachers, we look over the classroom, scanning for interested and uninterested students. We listen to our colleagues for their innovations in their disciplines and secretly ponder how we could appropriate them in our own research.
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The life of the mind becomes more than a way of seeing the world. It becomes a way of feeling toward the world, too. As theorists of affect remind us, the line between the rational and the emotional is ice-thin. Seeing the world critically morphs into feeling the world negatively. It’s easy to dismiss an uninterested student as unintelligent; easy to dismiss a colleague’s innovation as nonsensical jargon. In academe, it is easier to be a gatekeeper than to be an innovator.
Pursuing the life of the mind comes with emotional costs. Academics spend so much time being skeptical of one another’s ideas that it becomes natural to be skeptical toward each other. Poking holes in an argument can be a professionalized way of poking at the arguers ad hominem. The critique of ideas during the distinguished guest speaker’s Q-and-A can leave the auditorium and migrate to the faculty pub, where it degenerates into gossip about how he became so distinguished in the first place. We all too often mistake emotion for reason in our scholarship — and in our dealings with one another.
R esentment is essentially the feeling of being wronged by someone with more power than you. In academe, such feelings come with the job: associate professors can feel resentful toward full professors; small departments toward larger; a newcomer to a discipline at a teaching-intensive institution toward a well-regarded scholar at a research-intensive institution. Every striation of academe spurs resentment: the hierarchies of administration, the nebulous work of committees, the new hire whose salary may be higher than yours. Surrounding each step in academic life — graduation, employment, publication, promotion — is a labyrinth that draws out our vulnerability and makes us feel powerless. And with this powerlessness comes the idea that power is something others have — perhaps the tenured, or those in administration. Someone benefits from your hard work — and that person is not you. Thus academe plants the seeds of our resentment.
And while Pierre Bourdieu, David Lodge, and others have turned academic resentment into delightful depictions of the species Homo academicus, we need to be more practical and honest about how fundamentally disabling resentment can be. Most importantly, resentment encourages us to misread each other.
Consider some typical targets of academic resentment:
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A professor has been given a lighter teaching load than others, and the rest of the department resents it. What they do not know is that the professor is an alcoholic in recovery.
The assistant dean for international affairs is late to every meeting — obviously not pulling her weight. She is also a mother whose work-life balance requires that she answer emails during her son’s soccer games and stay up for hours of late-night internet conferencing with recruiters from time zones across the world.
A student misses class frequently and asks his professors for notes. The student is also working overtime to pay his last tuition installment and save up for the next one.
Fixating on the first half of each of those examples would be to commit a resentful misunderstanding. Others have more privileges than me, this logic goes, others don’t work as hard, others demand too much of me. We bask in how other people make us suffer, and we disdain them for how they make us suffer, which in turn proves our superiority. In thinking along those lines, we verge close to the emotion that Nietzsche so warned us of, ressentiment. Our academic identity becomes invested in its own powerlessness. We see our only moral value in our smallness.
Resentment short-circuits the intellectual process. It may resemble thinking, but resentment ultimately has little intelligence. And it never comes with a solution. It just keeps going and going, broadening the scope of its toxicity and finding new circumstances to blame for some perceived wrong. The cost is thought itself, and often, the institutions of thought. A resentment toward a more diverse student culture spurs hefty tomes about the decline of the “American mind” — excellent material for conservatives to add to their own critiques of the contemporary student. A resentment toward the haughtiness of the tenured turns into a book-length diatribe about academic tenure — eagerly read by those seeking to destroy it.
In a time of an eroding civic discourse and tightening budgets, in which those outside and inside higher education encourage us to fight among ourselves, academics need to band together. Of course, opportunities for resentment only increase as new academics attempt to position themselves in a virtually nonexistent job market, as established academics are increasingly ranked, and as budgets are slashed in the name of the latest managerial mantra.
In dealing with these real challenges, resentment is, in effect, an easy way out — it fosters a sense of powerlessness and drives us apart. Part of our job as intellectuals is to expose resentment for what it is: a substitute for thought. The profession needs to come together: not only for a consistent voice, but also for a more ethical approach toward one another. Now, more than ever, we must see people as people, not as simply part of the machinery of academic life.
It would be naïve to think it entirely possible to avoid resentment among the drama and flutter of everyday academic life. And it would be foolish to dismiss as mere resentment the legitimate anger felt by those trapped in academe’s cycle of exploitation. What we need is to reflect inward with an eye toward solidarity. This is difficult, given how we have built our identities around the traps that academe has baited for us: status, rank, output. Resentment distracts. It aspires to make trust impossible and to blind us to alliances that are in plain sight. But what we need most is a sense of self-awareness: that we are not alone; that our stories are complex; that we have more in common than we might think. We need to stare resentment in the face. When we do, its viciousness betrays its smallness, and it scuttles away, leaving us to do the hard work that is seeing one another.
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Douglas Dowland is an assistant professor of English at Ohio Northern University. His book, Weak Nationalisms: Affect, Nonfiction, and America since World War II, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press.