These nightmarish last few months have been a breeding ground for expressions of consolation. This is natural. Reeling from the Covid-19 plague and the concomitant social isolation, the seeming declaration of open season on Black Americans, and the much-publicized assaults on peaceful protesters, we all welcome comfort.
Well, we do sometimes. Calls and messages from loved ones have been balms to my troubled mind in these vertiginous weeks, but I have been more than a little perplexed to discover that I have so many friends in high places. The senior executives of virtually every company that I’ve had even the slightest commerce with have conveyed their “most sincere wishes” for me and mine, many going so far as to assure me, a person whom they have never met, that they are here for me. (Yikes.) But this obvious insincerity and overdone intimacy — discomfiting though they are — are only a staple of an emergent genre of the digital age, the corporate “statement.”
I suppose it was only a matter of time before the genre worked its way into higher education, further corroborating the existence of the “neoliberal university.” In the past weeks, our inboxes have swelled with statements from the leaders of our institutions expressing their sadness, outrage, and condolences during these difficult times, and reaffirming their and the institutions’ commitments to the things that they are supposed to be committed to.
Such messages have followed reliably on the heels of all past local, national, and global tragedies. Our moment, with its cascading catastrophes, is distinguished by its sheer volume of pat “statements.” But, rather than justifying the administrative “statement,” the magnitude of our collective misfortunes and the frequency of these disingenuous missives undermine the entire genre.
Sometimes the well-intentioned gesture is downright insulting, exacerbating the wounds it is intended to heal. Now is just such an occasion. In our present circumstances, reaffirmations of commitments to abstractions can seem an affront.
What does it mean to reaffirm a commitment to an ideal, in the face of far-reaching tragedy? For me, each deployment of this rote consolatory tactic conjures an image of out-of-touch administrators seated around a table, supremely self-satisfied after having passed what they view as a momentous measure. “All in favor of reaffirming our commitment to diversity, say, ‘Aye.’ . . . It’s unanimous! I’ll write to the community at once.” Perhaps that’s the wrong visual. Perhaps our leaders view their affirmations and reaffirmations as incantatory, and we should be imagining a coven convened.
Whatever the provenance of these platitudinous statements — ivory-tower cluelessness or magical thinking — their extraordinary proliferation in the past weeks has had the same effect: It has thrown into high relief the pathetic barrenness of the genre.
It may seem that I’m being too hard on our poor, overworked leaders. After all, we all know the difficulty and awkwardness of having to summon comforting words for grieving or seething loved ones. What are the words for such moments? What good are words, even?
The problem isn’t just that reaffirmations of values are pat, recycled from one statement to the next nearly unaltered. The problem is what the need to reaffirm suggests in the first place — namely, that previous affirmations haven’t done much good. If your original affirmation and the reaffirmation after that didn’t yield change within the institution or the larger society, what on earth makes you think — or should make us think — that this fresh reaffirmation matters?
Don’t get me wrong: college presidents and chancellors have an obligation to address their communities in times of distress. But what we need are not flourishes or quotations from ancient philosophers or abolitionists, not laments detailing the anguish of our institutional leaders, not autobiographical anecdotes, and certainly not more affirmations and reaffirmations.
We’ve reached the exhaustion point for heartfelt yet toothless statements and symbolic gestures.
The autobiographical touch is especially counterproductive. Invariably an attempt at showing empathy, it is almost as invariably ineffective. As critics of empathy, like the Columbia professor of African American literature
Saidiya Hartman, have argued, the empathic gesture can have the deleterious effect of erasing the people who are its targets, replacing the experiences of the would-be consoled with the overidentifying consoler. And it frequently engenders even more frustration. The temerity of the white administrator who tells me that he shares the pain and outrage that I — a Black man who has himself been wrongly arrested, detained, and harassed by the police — am feeling at the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd!
The attempts at identification are often so strained that their deployments seem mockeries of the aggrieved parties’ anguish. My guard always goes up when, in instances of the “statement” genre, I see that much-abused introductory construction “As [insert identity of the writer], I . . . ” — a lazy stab at identification that, more often than not, only exposes the ignorance of the condoler. This move has become so widely and so unthinkingly invoked in our diversity-saturated age that I’m hardly surprised to see it descend into caricature, as we see in the parody-defying June 4 statement of the University of California at Irvine’s dean of biological sciences — a paragraph-long message glibly attributing the biological sciences’ commitment to racial diversity to the “tens of millions of tiny microbes, over 390 thousand types of plants,” and “nearly 6,500 mammal species” that the field studies. (Met with vigorous backlash on Twitter, the dean’s
original message has since been removed and replaced with an apology.)
What universities can do to console their communities in the wake of tragedies is to explain what concrete steps they have taken in ensuring that these tragedies do not happen again. They should detail their commitments not to abstractions but to real groups of people and real departments and programs, in the form of allocations of finances and personnel. Statements are natural places for reckonings, venues for self-reflection in which educational leaders offer frank assessments of their roles in preventing and abetting injustices. Perhaps there are times when the need for immediacy makes such concrete commitments and honest self-assessments impracticable in initial statements. That’s fine, but a first statement needs to include dates by which the community should expect to hear back about those vital matters.
We’ve reached the exhaustion point for heartfelt yet toothless statements and symbolic gestures. Political organizers have kept sight of their policy demands in the face of even the most extravagant symbolic gestures on the parts of political leaders, such as the Washington, D.C., mayor’s recent overture of painting 16th Street with “Black Lives Matter.” We must follow their lead. It’s high time that we in academe held our institutions accountable and insisted that they performed the function for which they always have been intended — the advancement of humankind and of society.
“Thoughts and prayers,” however, do not advance a single thing. Such token responses are little more than capitulations to the status quo and are, for that reason, terrifying.
