Watch What You Say

The negotiated settlement between Steven Salaita and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has brought that sad episode to a close. Salaita, a scholar of indigenous studies, gave up a tenured position at Virginia Tech for the Illinois job, but following a series of tweets critical of Israel’s assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, he was fired before he ever taught a class. This was a clear-cut attack on academic and political freedom, and the situation became a major embarrassment for the university, resulting in formal censure by the AAUP and a lawsuit from Salaita. After months of protracted legal maneuvering, including discovery filings that revealed the extent of donor influence on the decision to fire Salaita, a settlement was reached in November.

We can respect Salaita’s decisions, and his take on the settlement, while still being clear about the overall effect of the entire affair. Few within the American university system could avoid recognizing UIUC’s actions as a further erosion of faculty independence. Nor could the faculty fail to recognize that, in terminating the nascent employment of a tenured professor, the university deepened the notion of a Palestinian exception to academic freedom. These conditions are notable, and disturbing, on their own. But I further believe that they demonstrate one of the most profound and disturbing evolutions in the contemporary university: a pervasive culture of fear. As someone who has spent his life in the academy, having grown up on a college campus, spent five years as an undergraduate student and six as a graduate student, and who now works at a university, I am struck again and again by the fear that attends so much of academic life.

I’ve witnessed this fear myself on the job market. Like most who pursue an academic job, I’ve consumed a great deal of advice in a variety of forums — books, websites, social media, conferences, conversations with peers and mentors. Amid all the details about CV formatting, whom to ask for letters of recommendation, and similar logistics, a single strident piece of advice emerges repeatedly: Watch what you say. This advice is voiced in a variety of ways, sometimes as an explicit directive against speaking out about specific issues, sometimes as counsel against engaging politically at all, sometimes as a vague admonition that “people are always watching.”

Regardless of its particular form, advice of this nature tells early-career academics that a key aspect of securing a job is to present oneself as entirely unobjectionable, to sand away the aspects of one’s self-presentation that might offend, well, anyone. This advice, undoubtedly, is well-intentioned. Indeed, if your only concern is building a career in the academy, it’s probably correct advice: Refusing to engage in any behavior or speech that suggests controversy probably does help to secure a job. But if we take a broader view of the traditional role of the academy as an incubator of provocative and dangerous ideas, this situation is a slowly unfolding disaster.

Note that this advice to carefully watch one’s words comes at precisely the same time that more and more people, both within and outside academe, are calling for more public engagement by professors. Many have counseled that we must define our value to the broader public, particularly at institutions that are funded partially through public money. I agree with all of these calls for more public expression, but consider the deep unfairness of asking for it at the same time that young scholars are being told to watch what they say. Graduate students, tenure-track faculty, adjuncts, and instructors — all are being asked to participate in the public conversation, yet do so under fear of profound consequences for saying the wrong thing. The Salaita affair was an extreme case. But that case sent a clear message to administrators at universities that would prefer to avoid political controversy: It’s easier to stop controversial hires, like Steven Salaita’s, before they are made. In a brutally competitive employment landscape, it’s best to deny entry to potential headaches than to remove them.

And for administrators, social media is an obvious place to start. Many observers of the academic labor market argue that Twitter and Facebook are becoming essential to developing a professional reputation and can mean the difference between a hiring committee recognizing your name or simply seeing you as another faceless CV on a pile.

It can be easy for graduate students and other pre-tenure academics to feel like they can’t afford not to engage on social media. Then, the problems reveal themselves. Set aside the specific question of Israel and the passionate engagement of someone like Salaita. The cultures of Twitter and Facebook are quite different from those of academe. Social media is often insouciant, off-the-cuff, and subtle in its vocabulary and signals. It can also often be vulgar, in a way that makes sense within these cultures but that can be off-putting to those outside of them. That’s the fundamental fear: that the pressure to be on social media compels people to interact in a forum where it is very easy to be misunderstood.

The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer put this danger brilliantly, writing that “on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. … [W]hen you write (or make a video or a podcast) online, what you’re saying can go anywhere, get read by anyone, and suddenly your words are finding audiences you never imagined you were speaking to.” This is precisely the fear that I’ve heard many times from graduate students: that their engagement on social media will be picked over by members of job committees who will misinterpret what they’ve said and hold it against them. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

This kind of Catch-22 has contributed to the pervasive sense of fear that is already endemic on many campuses. The labor issues really drive the problem. In a healthy job market, academics wouldn’t need to fear the consequences of political speech nearly as much. Scholars who were fired for voicing controversial opinions, or who felt that their ability to speak freely was being obstructed, would be able to obtain employment elsewhere. Meanwhile, institutions eager to hire the best people would find that a reputation for resistance to free expression would hamper those efforts. But in the contemporary academy, where openings for full-time faculty members are few and adjuncts fill the gaps, the leverage lies in the hands of institutions. With so many underemployed Ph.D.s, controversial faculty can be swiftly replaced. The difficulty of obtaining a new job, meanwhile, compels employees to keep their mouths shut. The academy is hardly alone in this condition. Since the Reagan/Thatcher era, the general drift of the working world is toward less- and less-empowered workers, who are correspondingly more and more subservient to the employers who dominate them. The university is a particularly intense example of this trend.

In order to chip away at the atmosphere of fear on campus, we’d need to rebuild a functioning academic labor market. Though many are fatalistic about this possibility, I maintain hope. The increasing focus on undergraduate teaching should be an opportunity to insist on the importance of faculty. Several pieces of large-scale research, such as the Gallup-Purdue Index, demonstrate that faculty are the key to effective undergraduate learning. This presents us with an opportunity to argue for the value of experienced and highly trained instructors. In the broader sense, the rise of the Fight for $15 minimum-wage protest movement, the presidential candidacy of the Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, and the growing anger over inequality and flat wages make improvements to academic labor conditions more likely. The faculty must join a broad pro-worker movement that insists that too many are being left behind in a winner-take-all economy, and a movement that demands structural reform from our institutions.

In calling for a reinvigorated academic labor market, I am obviously not making an argument that many will find controversial. More vexed, and more sensitive, is the way in which deepening political battles on campus risk contributing to this culture of fear. The past months have seen the rise of a new campus protest movement. This has created a period of flux in the university, a moment of potential for both good and bad. If it unfolds as a movement for labor solidarity, it could help to restore the academy’s place as an incubator of provocation and challenge. If it unfolds as an appeal to administration and establishment power, it could deepen the conditions I’ve described.

I understand why so many who are invested in undergraduate teaching and believe in these protests are eager to stand with student activists in all cases. But this has led to a resistance toward the kind of skeptical analysis and critical discrimination that are essential to effective left-wing practice. Yes, there is indeed a large and growing national movement of campus protesters, and in many ways, the various groups that make it up share goals and tactics. But within that broad coalition are a vast number of groups and individuals with profound differences from campus to campus. The desire to support this movement has led to a strange embrace of neoliberal policies by many leftist academics. That’s a strange and unfortunate situation, and one that begs for deeper analysis.

Take, for example, student protesters at Wesleyan University. Wesleyan’s proud tradition of radical activism stretches back decades, making the university a natural site to take part in the nationwide protest movement. Yet the initial demands of student protesters were far from radical:

• A statement of accountability by administration, essentially dictated by the protesters.
• Hiring an “equity officer,” an administrative position housed in the Office of Student Life with the mandate to “engage with students regarding equity within the confines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion, culture, gender-identity, and physical or mental disability.”
• The establishment of a multicultural center.
• A system through which students could anonymously inform on faculty members and staff whom they considered guilty of “microaggressions.”

These are not radical demands. In fact, they’re straightforwardly conservative demands, in that they increase rather than decrease administrative control of day-to-day campus life. If the students get their wish, it will ironically strengthen the hand of those in charge of the very institutions student activists seek to change. Accountability statements are precisely the type of solutions, if you can use the term, that administrators prefer: heavy on symbolism, light on material change. Hiring an equity officer and establishing a multicultural center might have a positive overall impact on university life, but both actions will continue to expand the administrative bloat that has done so much to define higher education in the past several decades. Worse, however independent these entities might strive to be, and whatever the integrity of the individuals who staff them, they will ultimately be part of the institution, and serve the needs of the institution, rather than the needs of students.

The demand for a system of anonymous faculty surveillance, meanwhile, is positively Orwellian, a nightmare scenario for any instructor. It’s hard to imagine a system better designed to create an atmosphere of oppressive fear on campus. And such a system is directly contrary to one of the left’s most cherished, longstanding commitments: opposition to workplace tyranny. The burden of fear would fall hardest on instructors who do not enjoy the benefit of tenure, making those already precarious positions even riskier. The anonymity of the system would make it impossible for instructors to meaningfully respond to complaints. We’d be left with instructors living with constant, low-level fear that their classroom conduct would result in an unanswerable complaint, one surely handled by some bureaucrat with his or her own agenda and interests. How could this outcome be conducive to the left-wing philosophies that these protests spring from?

Contrast this with the kinds of demands Wesleyan students could have made instead. For decades, Wesleyan had need-blind admissions. At various times, higher administration attempted to do away with the policy, only to capitulate to vociferous student protest. But several years ago, the university finally abandoned the policy, with only muted disapproval from campus activists. Need-blind admissions strike at the very heart of the inequality that campus activists are protesting. How could the policy’s return not be on their list of initial demands? Similarly, Wesleyan employs a large number of low-wage staff members, as most universities do. Many of these employees are people of color. Why not focus student protest on their needs, given that these are among the most vulnerable members of the entire campus community? And yet the demands are silent on the welfare of these workers.

These protests are spreading out of a very deep and real concern with racial inequality and injustice on campus, and they represent the best tradition of students’ raising their voices. But there is a world of distance between radical intent and radical effect. Far too many of these protest movements seem to be falling into the trap of the Wesleyan students. For example, Brown University has pledged to spend millions on campus diversity, and to create new administrative positions to address student concerns. The attention to equality is admirable, but we should be clear: Cutting checks and hiring more administrators is not some radical alternative to business as usual. It is business as usual. This development may prove to be a boon to minority students at Brown, and if so, it’s worth celebrating. But the tendency for these organic, grass-roots protests to end up as just another vehicle to empower the administration should concern all of us who care for the university, even those of us who support the broad goals of the protesters. If we honor what they fight for, we have to maintain the right to identify when they’ve gone wrong. The academic community, in other words, needs to engage in both support and criticism of these movements, without fear of reprisals.

The campus protests are an opportunity for everyone to grapple with the central questions of the university’s future, questions that are far too often answered by unaccountable power holders. Protests like that at the University of Missouri mark an excellent development: a reminder that a college, ultimately, is made up of its students and its faculty. Those students demanded to be heard, and they did not give up until their demands were too loud to ignore. This is altogether good news. All of us can work to make our institutions more equitable, more just, and more free. But in a culture of ambient fear, with students and the faculty frequently represented as antagonistic toward each other, this moment could easily turn toxic. The only way forward is to engage in vigorous and open dialogue, taking both student complaints and faculty rights seriously.

We have examples to draw from. Look to the University of Missouri protesters, who deposed a campus president despite the risks involved, despite the temptation to just put their heads down and carry on. Look to Steven Salaita, who fought not only for his own job but for the academic freedom of all of us. Another campus culture is possible. We need courage in the face of fear to rebuild our institutions and the values they have stood for. It’s a worthwhile goal, and worth fighting for.

Fredrik deBoer is an academic and writer. He teaches at Purdue University.