The Twitterization of the Academic Mind

Things fall apart fast these days, often on Twitter. One university (the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) fired a faculty member for tweeting. Another (Drexel) initially defended a faculty member who tweeted, although that professor later resigned. Scholars on Twitter have criticized academic articles. They have criticized each other.

Twitter, it turns out, has many problems. Even its billionaire CEO acknowledges that it is a site for trolling, misogyny, and racism. It has been used as a tool for tracking dissidents. It’s been a go-to site for disinformation agents of the Russian Federation as they attempt to sabotage American elections. Twitter is a favorite among conspiracy theorists, authoritarians, and capitalists. We academics are merely fellow travelers.

But do we have to be? I don’t think we do.

Academics do not lack for means of transmitting scholarship and ideas. We teach, write, and lecture. These are the time-honored activities of the scholar. The University of Oxford began publishing in 1478, little more than two decades after the appearance of the Gutenberg Bible. And the first book published in British North America was printed by what amounted to a university press — the “Cambridge Press,” set up in the house of the Harvard College president. University presses are still doing well, if not thriving. Sales of scholarly books through November 2017 were up 5 percent over the previous year.

There is a big difference, however, between a tweet and an act of scholarly expression: a seminar, a lecture, a refereed article, or a monograph. Scholarship takes time. It is, as the English professor and social theorist Michael Warner has written, a form of expression that unfolds across “longer rhythms” and through “more continuous flows” than the news headline. Yet it is easy for academics to become frustrated by the temporality of scholarship. It often feels like inaction. It feels depoliticized.

Twitter doesn’t feel this way. It is punctual and abbreviated — two of Warner’s keywords — and it stands closer to politics. It also stands closer to self-promotion. It satisfies what Jeffrey J. Williams has called the “promotional imperative” in contemporary academic life. Indeed, the internet abounds with advice columns for academics hoping to get started on Twitter. These columns often speak in a double voice: Twitter will make your work more relevant and political, thereby enabling you to advance your career. Tweet and be cited. Tweet and be hired. Tweet and change the world.

In the process, unfortunately, tweeting erodes the very social legitimacy that enables academic culture to exert its influence on the political realm in the first place. Academe is a public apart from the public world of politics or entertainment. Academe is constituted through the sustained attention of academics themselves. And it is closed to those who cannot understand its conventions or think, speak, and act through its particular registers. Yet academe is legitimated by this exclusivity — not an exclusivity of wealth, birth, or social connections, but of shared inquiry. Engage with us, say our learned journals, but only after you have constituted yourself as one of us, learned to write with our distinctive rigor, and developed the habits of mind we have cultivated across centuries. We profess not in sound bites, but in peer-reviewed studies.

Granted, scholars routinely communicate with publics outside of academe. We appear on radio programs or in podcasts, or in the editorial pages of newspapers. Academics publish books for general audiences and host documentaries. Yet our outreach to other, broader publics is legitimated by the conventions of our scholarship. When academics speak to those outside of academe, we speak as academics. We communicate our research findings. We synthesize scholarly debates. We provide critical new perspectives. And, collectively, we provide a bulwark against the hot take, the meme, and the quip. The world may come to us for simplification, but we give it complexity. There is power in that complexity. But it is a power that evaporates the moment we reduce our considered findings to a tweet.

Of course, Twitter has its defenders in the academy.

Aren’t some academics supremely successful, these defenders ask, at educating the public through their tweets? Indeed, such defenders might note that in a recent Twitter dispute, discussed in the pages of The Chronicle, the historian Kevin Kruse (265K followers) ostensibly bested the right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza (1.14 million followers). Kruse explicated across 28 tweets the racial realignment of political parties in the United States, revealing D’Souza’s claims about the subject to be mendacious.

Back in academe, Kruse is an eminent historian and the author or editor of highly regarded books from the university presses of Princeton, Oxford, and Chicago, as well as of commercial books written for educated readers outside the academy. D’Souza, meanwhile, makes assertions. But such assertions hardly represent original, testable scholarly knowledge, nor do they represent the synthesis of such knowledge for a public audience. His books are printed and distributed by religious or partisan publishing houses, and he regularly makes provocative accusations that are later demonstrated to be false.

If some broader public can be found on Twitter — beyond partisan filter bubbles and Russian government bots — then that public would come away from the Kruse-D’Souza dispute having learned that an eminent Princeton historian can be almost as relevant as a TV personality who once mocked the survivors of a mass shooting. By design, Twitter has no protocols for distinguishing between the serious and the unserious, between the learned and the ignorant.

While Twitter debates between scholars and provocateurs reduce academics to mere peddlers of opinion, Twitter controversies between scholars themselves do just as much harm to the profession. Academic Twitter is often held out as a site of scholarly community, and sometimes it is. But scholars are not immune to the site’s structural disposition toward rancorous factionalism. Academics have taken to Twitter and other forms of social media to contest questions of scholarship and politics, and the resulting speed, ferocity, and imprecision have revolutionized how we treat our interlocutors. Scholarly methodologies are referred to as “dumb.” Essays by scholars are described as “stupid.” Amid one controversy, scholars and members of the public resorted to a demeaning nickname for an academic author with whom they disagreed. Twitter promises speed and publicity, and it delivers. It encourages scholars to perform in real time for an audience of the like-minded, enabling a form of solidarity that is by turns sycophantic, hyperbolic, or cruel.

Ours is a time that calls for more judiciousness, not less. The humanist culture incubated by thinkers over centuries faces a test greater than any in a generation, and we must meet that challenge with our best thinking, not our quickest. Even journalists today are becoming concerned that Twitter has drawn them “deeper into the rip currents of tribal melodrama,” drawing them away from judiciousness and circumspection. My skepticism of Twitter is not a skepticism of activist scholarship, or even activism by scholars. We bring wide-ranging knowledge to important public questions, and we should be heard. Rather, I am concerned that our participation in Twitter is tacitly endorsing a commercial platform that subverts democratic discourse and collapses the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of debate. Scholarship demands cultivated habits of mind, considered distance, and the unfolding of time. Twitter does not.