Sometimes I write sequels to columns when they generate a lot of comments, blog discussion, and e-mail. Usually, the first column is based on my own experiences and intuitions. In the second one I try to respond to issues and compelling criticisms raised by the readers.
Last month, when I tried to explain why professors are so unpopular these days, the initial response—mostly from inside academe—suggested that I was being overly provocative. Professors, like other professionals, attract some criticism, readers said, but we are still regarded with moderate respect. At worst, we are treated with indifference: Most people don’t care about us as much as we’d like to think they do.
And, besides, worrying about whether people like us is a little neurotic.
I was beginning to believe that my initial theory—that I am just a disagreeable person—was the best explanation for all the hostile remarks I’ve heard over the years about professors. But then my column started to make the rounds of the conservative blogosphere, and the tone of the comments and e-mail shifted to one that sounded both threatening and familiar.
Essentially, the message was that a large segment of the population thinks humanities professors are a bunch of left-wing elitists who hate America, are overpaid, underworked, focused on pointless research, and unwilling to teach undergraduates.
That perspective has been represented most recently by Glenn Beck’s accusation that professors are systematically lying about our national history. A few years ago David Horowitz published a who’s who of professors who have been reviled by the right: The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery 2006). One blurb on the book’s cover says it “reveals a shocking and perverse culture of academics who are poisoning the minds of today’s college students.” And, of course, that point of view is familiar to anyone who remembers the culture wars of the 80s and 90s. American populism is eternally self-renewing, and that’s probably a good thing, since academe—as well as other institutions—should be accountable to the population at large and not just to itself.
But I was disappointed that most readers from outside academe did not notice the self-critical elements of my essay: Once they find out someone is a professor—particularly in the humanities—they just assume that person has a whole set of clearly defined beliefs and attitudes. There’s no need to read the essay, and there’s no need to construct any new arguments in response, or build any new alliances.
We’re trapped in a polarized state of indifference to each other’s complexities and conflicts.
So after teaching for 10 years at a Christian, liberal-arts college in the rural Midwest, and writing articles critical of academe under the pen name of a notoriously populist painter, it’s almost a pleasant surprise to find myself categorized as an arugula-eating leftist. It makes me feel like I belong in academe, after all, despite a background that might otherwise have made me a card-carrying member of the Tea Party.
I was born in Camden, N.J., and I grew up in a working-class, Catholic neighborhood where professors—when they were discussed at all—were regarded as dangerous subversives (they would turn you into an atheist and a Democrat), but they also had a lot of power to determine your future, so you had to please them if you went to college.
Of course, I didn’t know any professors back then—neither did anyone in my immediate family—which made it easy to demonize them. As a new undergraduate at a Catholic university, I regarded professors with suspicion, particularly if they had ostentatiously liberal sensibilities. I believed that they did not like people like me, and I might not have been wrong in some cases.
Even now, I don’t really feel at home in some academic contexts, like the big, national conventions: I still regard other professors—particularly from elite colleges (like Harvard University, where I eventually earned my doctorate)—as people living on some other social plane, against whom I have some reflexive and defensive grievances. Always, they seem concerned with social justice, but those concerns almost never extend to working-class Americans, as such, including all the adjuncts who increasingly do the teaching at our universities.
In the small community of academics with working-class origins, it is sometimes noticed that professors at major universities—the ones who attract most of the public’s attention—seem to be mostly from the upper half of the income spectrum. I suspect that they are clustering even higher now than they were at any time since before the 1960s.
With few exceptions, elite positions are seemingly filled through a kind of closed system in which academic pedigree (itself the outcome of prior class position) stands in for the more blatant old-boy network of an earlier period. As a result, a large percentage of the faculty members of our leading universities have a limited understanding of the way most people live; they cannot be expected to sympathize with the alienating experience of moving between social classes, or the strain of paying for an education coupled with the fear of not finding a job afterward.
My entire education took place in the shadow of such anxieties, so I think I understand why many people who feel coerced into attending college at great expense, while still being potentially shut out from economic opportunity, might resent those for whom an elevated social position seems to have come as a matter of course. People resent professors even more when they seem to attack the institutions that give people’s lives meaning, such as the military, the church, and the traditional family. Denouncing any of those things from behind the shield of tenure and potentially at taxpayer expense is offensive to most Americans.
It is also offensive to many professors who are not at elite institutions.
The “public be damned” attitude of some academic provocateurs ignores the impact that their grandstanding has on higher education as a whole—on the lives of professors farther down in the academic-status hierarchy. Professors at elite institutions can do as they please; they are not going to bear the brunt of cutbacks inspired by their more extreme remarks, or be regarded with suspicion by their students, most of whom think as they do because they come from the same social stratum.
Again, most professors are not part of that small, elite culture of pseudoradicalism. Outside the major universities, most of us have more ordinary social backgrounds and more moderate views. We are people who worked hard at school, won scholarships, invested many years in our educations, became admirers of traditional disciplines, devoted ourselves idealistically to scholarship and teaching, and trusted the system.
A lot of us entered graduate school following the promise of tenure-track jobs being available in the not-so-distant future—the familiar “labor-shortage hoax.” But an increasing percentage of Ph.D.'s in the last 40 years have ended up working for poverty-class wages with no benefits or job security. Far from being a leisure class, most college teachers are sharing the economic stresses faced by millions of other displaced, downsized, and outsourced workers who see no relief on the horizon.
Yet, for some reason, most graduate students and adjuncts remain unrealistically aspirational: They do not work together to reform the academic labor system because they still believe that they will, somehow, become tenure-track professors on the basis of individual merit. The thousands of adjuncts who staff most college courses are like the part-time warehouse worker who doesn’t want the rich to pay more taxes because he buys a lottery ticket every day.
Whose interest does it serve for most academics to alienate themselves from the working class, and for the working class to regard all professors as elitists with whom they have no common interests? What is it going to take for academe to become part of a broader movement for economic opportunity, instead of being perceived—sometimes rightly—as an impediment to that goal?
Those are larger questions than I can answer in a column. But some changes could take place within academe—in addition to the ones I suggested last month—that could begin to disrupt the unproductive divisions between professors and the broader public.
First, academics should begin to think of ourselves as workers rather than members of an elite profession. We should stop competing with each other individually and look for ways to build solidarity across the divisions of discipline, institutional hierarchy, and academic rank.
Second, academe needs to work harder to deal with the ways that social class has isolated its leading institutions from the perspectives of most Americans.
Third, we need to take the economic concerns of our students more seriously at the undergraduate and graduate levels. It is no longer enough to merely teach subjects we happen to find interesting.
Meanwhile, we need to work together to improve our image in the public imagination. Most of us are working long hours with our students and managing the business of our institutions for relatively modest salaries—when we are reliably employed at all. But a large number of people are convinced, as an article of faith, that we are all millionaires who engage in pointless research with the goal of indoctrinating students into radical beliefs. We need to work harder to crowd out the more polarizing examples of academic work with evidence of our enormous dedication to furthering the public good.
Given enough evidence of good-faith efforts, we might begin to move away from the tired clichés of the culture wars toward a new coalition that aligns academe with the interests of most citizens.
