When contemplating an ingratiating letter he has just written, the redoubtable Morris Zapp, in David Lodge’s academic satire Small World, wonders whether his praise is “a shade too fulsome.” He quickly dismisses the thought as he remembers one of the cardinal laws of academic life: “It is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one’s peers.”
Lodge’s novel trades in caricature and satire, but sycophancy in academe — sometimes amusing, sometimes stupefying, occasionally dismaying and disgusting — is familiar to all of us. And as academic employment becomes increasingly contingent, sucking up becomes increasingly aggressive.
We all know the types — toadies, appeasers, apparatchiks. We’ve all witnessed students who write fawning emails to get into a class, professors who pander to students for good evaluations, graduate students who emulate their professors’ dress and habits, untenured colleagues who routinely flatter a senior colleague’s work, conference attendees who swarm luminaries, yes-men who echo administrators’ proposals, fund raisers catering to the whims of prospective donors, and so on.
Dante and Shakespeare have considered sycophancy, and found it catastrophic.
Tenure allows a degree of autonomy that is denied workers in areas such as sales or advertising. While kissing the ring might help one’s career, it hasn’t been a general job requirement in academic life — until recently. The elimination of tenure lines and the rise in contingent employment makes the working environment far more conducive to sycophancy. And the intensely hierarchical all-administrative university contributes further to the fostering of flunkeys.
Sucking up is more than an annoyance, fodder for humorous anecdotes, part of the price we pay for getting on or getting by. Some of our greatest writers have considered sycophancy, and they’ve found it catastrophic.
No one sets flattery in so harsh and clear a light as Dante. The punishment for flattery in Inferno exploits the longstanding association of flattery with excrement. Those who were full of crap in life are literally immersed in it after death. The crudeness of the word Dante uses for excrement, merda, leaves no doubt about the contempt with which he views flatterers. The poem indulges in the rough humor often accorded sycophants. Dante greets Alessio Interminei, a courtier from Lucca, by quipping, “I have seen you before / with your hair dry” — mocking his filthy condition. Interminei’s response — to pat his excrement-covered head — heightens the jest.
Dante’s Hell does not present flattery as a separate category of sin. Malebolge, the eighth circle of Hell, has 10 divisions, which include panderers and seducers, flatterers, thieves, sowers of schism, falsifiers, and hypocrites. Dante links flattery to these other kinds of fraud. We might note that he, in fact, lands flatterers deeper in Hell than he does those who have committed the sins of tyranny, heresy, and even murder. How, we might ask, is Alessio Interminei worse than Attila the Hun or Alexander the Great, tyrants who “plunged their hands in blood and plundering,” but whose crimes are punished above in the seventh circle reserved for the violent?
Dante, whose sense of community was powerful, reminds us that sins that are variants of fraud — lying, hypocrisy, flattery — have effects that go beyond the immediate situation. Fraud creates a culture in which all interaction is suspect, in which simple, frank exchange cannot be taken for granted. Fraud debases our community, creating uncertainty, doubt, and distrust. Murder, so long as it stops short of a war of all against all, has limits. We immediately recognize it for what it is. Fraud, by casting a shadow on all interaction, is endless.
Shakespeare, too, in King Lear, describes flattery’s destructive capacity. Some journalists have commented on similarities between the fawning which pervades the Trump White House and the play’s opening, in which the aging king, who “hath ever but slenderly known himself,” calls upon his daughters to “say which of you shall we say doth love us most.” This deeply misguided request sets in motion a round of banishments and preferments. The worst take control, and only their tendency to turn upon each other puts an end to the cycle of violence. At the play’s conclusion, the royal family is wiped out, and the good who survive are utterly dispirited.
Midway through, Shakespeare stages a confrontation between Kent, the faithful adviser banished by Lear, and Oswald, a “serviceable villain” whose ambitions find expression in ready abasement. Kent beats and humiliates him, but Cornwall, Lear’s son-in-law, confronts the indignant Kent, who mocks him with a show of courtly ingratiation and then insults him. Cornwall’s fury is accompanied by a telling comment about the consequences of sycophancy: “These kind of knaves I know, which in their plainness / Harbor more craft and more corrupter ends / Than twenty silly-ducking observants / That stretch their duties nicely.”
For Cornwall, honesty can only be understood as another ploy within a corrupt system. In a world rife with flatterers, Kent’s frankness is a “garb,” a ruse he adopts that is itself a kind of sycophancy. “Plainness” is, in Cornwall’s cynical view, treacherous because it obscures motivation. Obvious flattery, because it reveals itself as such, is less menacing. In a society shot through with sycophancy, the default position is flattery, and we lose the ability to discern truth.
While we chuckle and commiserate over fawners in the academy, let’s also ponder the wider damage. Will we see flattery and sycophancy as a character flaw, a reprehensible individual failing, or will we recognize it, as Dante and Shakespeare did, as a systematic attack on the community in which we act?
We cannot eradicate sycophancy in academe, especially as it mimics generous behaviors like friendship, collegiality, and sympathy. But we can mitigate it. Tenured faculty should discourage and avoid sycophantic exchanges. They can create a less hierarchical atmosphere within departments, making clear to untenured colleagues and graduate students that bootlicking will amount to a strike against, not for, them. Professors can call out such behavior and resist the promotion and hiring of administrators who crave fealty.
Search committees can avoid the hiring of candidates who are on a purely administrative path and who do not remain long in a position before moving on. And most important, scholars must argue forcefully for the maintenance of tenure-track lines. The university has strong roots in an artisanal tradition, in which faculty members have considerable autonomy and independence but often choose to work productively together. That tradition is worth preserving, and sycophancy — pervasive and insidious — poses a gradual but serious threat to it.
Deborah Parker is a professor of Italian at the University of Virginia. Mark Parker is a professor of English at James Madison University. Their book Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy is being published this month by the University of Virginia Press.
