“Isn’t that elitist?” a student asks her classmate, who has suggested that we cannot formulate an opinion about artificial intelligence without first consulting an expert in human cognition. Or else it’s a mild objection — “That sounds pretty elitist” — to something I’ve said about the skill required to properly translate a Modernist poem. Or it could be outright hostility — “Elitist!"— leveled against the suggestion that public policy is best formulated by those with extensive policy experience.
Whatever form it takes, students bring their anxieties and confusions about expertise into the classroom. I answer their questions with questions: Aren’t you here to gain skills and capabilities that most people lack? Isn’t this a selective institution where one advances through classes to attain degrees, where even the faculty have ranks reflecting experience and expertise? Aren’t you part of an elite simply by being here, and aren’t you here in order to join an even more exclusive elite?
The disconnect between egalitarian ideals and the pursuit of specialized knowledge and professional advancement reflects a discomfort deeply rooted in our democracy, and the ascendancy of Donald Trump has only amplified the confusion, with the president’s appointees, allies, and surrogates simultaneously scoffing at the need for expert knowledge and presenting themselves as experts, often with reference to credentials that turn out to be misleading or invented. Despite their contempt for the intellectual elite, they seem desperate to be recognized as part of it.
No single figure represents this credentialing mania as unsettlingly as Richard Spencer, the neofascist who has made a cottage industry of suing public universities for space to hold his rallies. The conversation that surrounds his appearances tends to elide an essential detail: the distinction between being invited to speak and just happening to be on a campus while you are speaking.
At Michigan State University this past week, no program, faculty, or student group sponsored Spencer’s event. The same was the case at the University of Florida in October. As public institutions, these universities felt that they had a legal obligation to rent this guy space, as they might for a wedding. Typically he is allowed on campus only during an academic recess, when few others will be around. The University of Virginia, where Spencer’s white-supremacist rally erupted in violence in August, didn’t even rent him space; he and his tiki-torch parade simply showed up.
Spencer, who has a master’s in the humanities from the University of Chicago and pursued a doctorate in history at Duke University before dropping out, knows that claiming to have spoken at a prestigious university lends a veneer of legitimacy that ranting under a bridge does not. An invitation to speak is an honor in academe — scholars routinely list invited talks on their CVs — and to receive such an invitation, one typically needs a substantial record of professional achievement. Spencer’s shenanigans belong to a pattern not of rejecting the notion of expertise, but of preserving its appearance without building its substance, of burnishing credentials without earning them.
According to its website, Spencer is “President and Creative Director” of the National Policy Institute, which might be impressive to those who do not know that the institute is little more than a backyard kiddie pool that Spencer inflates for himself. He is not, as he and his followers claim, taking his whitewashed ideal of civilization into a lion’s den where young minds are spoon-fed multiculturalism and gender equality (while learning, of course, how to cure disease, build infrastructure, run businesses, improve institutions, and create and appreciate culture). At his events, the crowds of protesters and journalists are orders of magnitude larger than the small handful of his supporters — only a few came to see him at Michigan State, where the event was held during spring break on a part of the agricultural campus so remote that few students would have known that it belongs to the university. He might as well have been preaching to the squirrels.
We do not need to look far for similar examples of intellectual cosplay among those seeking to benefit from Donald Trump’s ascendancy. Sebastian Gorka, the nationalist ideologue who was forced out of his position as a deputy assistant to Trump in August, and who, despite his questionable credentials, insists on the prefix “Dr.,” touts himself as a founder of the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security, whose address is a post-office box in Budapest, and whose website, which does not appear to have been updated since 2005, “is soley [sic] to provide access to information published by the Institute” — that is, by Gorka himself.
Or one can look at Joseph Otting, Trump’s pick for the powerful position of comptroller of the currency. (Otting was sworn in to office in November.) Until he was nominated for the post, Otting had long claimed to have received his graduate degree from Dartmouth’s School of Credit and Financial Management. The problem is, Dartmouth has no such school, and Otting has no graduate degree.
Then there’s Lynne Patton, who strongly suggested that she is a graduate of Yale and of Quinnipiac University’s School of Law, but whose most significant professional credential appears to be planning Eric Trump’s wedding; she now runs operations in New York and New Jersey for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And there’s Melania Trump, the first lady, whose claim to have an architecture degree from the University of Slovenia has been debunked. The list goes on. Trump himself frequently praises his own “Wharton” degree, presumably because it sounds fancier than “Penn” and implies that he has an M.B.A., and has long allowed the claim that he graduated “first in his class” to appear in media profiles. In reality, our “very stable genius” has an undergraduate degree, without honors or distinctions.
These populists, who excoriate intellectualism, yearn to be taken seriously as intellectuals.
Whether these misrepresentations stem from self-delusion, anxiety over thwarted ambition, a cynical intention to deceive, or some combination of the three, the palpable desire of these populists who excoriate intellectualism to be taken seriously as intellectuals speaks less to a rejection of expertise than to a fundamental incomprehension of what it is and how it is acquired. And this is probably not their fault.
The inner workings of academe are opaque, except for the fancy titles and ceremonial self-congratulation — the “pomp and circumstance” — that remain the most public-facing aspects of the academic life. No wonder, then, that some assume that expertise is little more than the public display of personal opinions, and that they merely need to give those opinions an institutional imprimatur. Much like their approach to party politics or the “administrative state,” those riding Trump’s coattails are not seeking to tear the building down so much as to fill it with tenants who look like them.
What they are missing is how much work is invested in producing actual knowledge, how a degree is the sum of that labor and not a piece of paper. Such hardheaded effort, which seeks to account for or accommodate recalcitrant data rather than exclude it, is the hallmark of expertise.
For Spencer to claim that he has “spoken” at the universities that have acceded to his demand for space is window dressing, like Trump’s suggesting that Time magazine put him on its cover after he hired someone to mock up an issue, or saying that you’ve received a Purple Heart after someone handed you one.
The work required to be invited to speak on campus is far from easy. You typically have to labor through a serious problem, often over many years, while confronting the incongruences between your preconceptions and reality. In that sense, the path toward intellectual legitimacy is much straighter than the populist travesty of it. It’s school, after all. You have to do your homework.
It is a lesson that academics, sensitive to accusations of elitism and invested in their own egalitarian ideals, would do well to remember, and to embrace more publicly. If people understand nothing else about your expertise, let them appreciate how hard-won it is, that it represents work that is long, difficult, and, yes, “elite” in a way that no personal preference can be. Let them know that we build our own expertise by building on one another’s, and that, more than any ideological leaning, it is this eagerness to work together on intractable problems, against the lure of convenient pseudo-knowledge, that distinguishes a community of scholars from playacting. It’s the difference between a university and Trump University.
Benjamin Paloff is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures and of comparative literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
