With Sympathy for a Young Scholar

This post contains the text of a comment I posted in response to an article published by The American Conservative. It’s here because it pulls some things together, and because it is apt to remain accessible for longer than that comment. (TAC seems to sweep comments into an “Older Comments” folder from time to time, after which I think they may no longer come up in response to Google searches, among other things.)

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I have more to say on this than anyone would want to read. So I’ll just offer a few remarks, with links to the blogs in which I have developed related material.

I guess I’ll structure those remarks as a reply to the young scholar featured at the start of Rod’s article. Originally, I thought higher education in the U.S. was for teaching and learning. And in many ways, it is. But if that’s what you want to do, as a faculty member, you may have to choose a field where the more nutty types mostly leave you alone, if only because they’ll find it difficult to just read your material and tie it directly to a political cause.

But even then, you’ll be vulnerable on the level of employment. The people at Indiana University who drove me out for being a white male fell all over themselves to give a PhD and a professorship to a black woman who was not smart, motivated, or personable enough to teach high school. She was just black and female. And if you aren’t, then that day may come when your assistantship or professorship or promotion goes to someone like her.

I’m not mad at her about that. I’m not even mad at the faculty members who voted for it. It was too strange to be mad about. It’s more like, I thought I was going to climb into a car, but it turned out to be a dragon and flew away, and I was left standing there wondering, Now, what the hell just happened? And what would have happened to me if I’d gotten in?

I suppose that, in every profession, there is something like that adage about laws and sausages: if you love them, don’t ask what goes into making them. I mean, as an insider, you are always at risk of discovering how dirty or mean or fake things really are.

After being terminated from three different PhD programs for asking hard questions and sticking to principles, though, I decided that stuff about sausages goes only so far. Ultimately, higher ed really is supposed to be an intelligent, indeed admirable undertaking; and if it can’t be that for you, then you might work more productively in loyal opposition.

So at a certain point I realized that I might as well make lemonade of these lemons, and I started blogging more earnestly about corruption and stupidity within those self-flattering departments and disciplines. It wasn’t a paying proposition, but at least I got a few articles published that way.

After taking account of the academic politics that have always existed, and their more extreme present condition, it seems to me that the only academic freedom you ever enjoy may be that which you create for yourself, outside or despite the strictures of academe. For those who do place a premium on learning, there are the advantages and disadvantages of poverty, and the reward of genuinely open intellectual frontiers.

During the Dark Ages, Arabic intellectuals preserved and developed the knowledge of the ancients that ignorant Christians sought to destroy. We always thought that nothing like that could ever happen again — that, at least in the West, Fahrenheit 451 would never be anything more than science fiction. Possibly a more realistic perspective is that, where one tree begins to die, another may be just taking root.