Preparing for my third year review as an assistant professor, I showed my best friend in a different department at another university the outline of my self-evaluation. He read it and said, “Oh, no.
“Good,” I said. “Give me feedback. I like feedback, especially the serious kind.”
“Listen to this,” he said. “You are perfect.”
“Not really,” I said.
“They too,” he said. “At least for the purposes of this document.”
He explained that my words were very honest. I was seriously committed to explaining what I had done, where I had gone wrong and what I thought I still needed to learn. That’s how I roll, because, at least when it comes to everything but condescending to those who believe that pineapple on pizza is acceptable, I have a sense of maturity.
The task, my friend explained, was not to use this as a real meditation exercise. That would be held for me. All I had to do was be arrogant enough to not be vulnerable.
After reading a zillion horrible college application essays that do just that, and boastful and unsatisfying career letters—including top management positions—I thought, Really? Do we not admit mistakes?
I was thinking about this in the context of the strange rhetoric about higher ed and the current political climate. On the other hand, government officials say that higher ed is broken. On the other hand, many inside higher ed insist that it is already great. It always has been, always will be.
University presidents who agree with some of the criticisms of senior leaders have been called vulnerable to a fanatical and corrupt federal government. Let’s be clear: Few in the top brass believe what the feds are doing is OK, let alone legal. Presidents are not only trying to protect their institutions, but also the lives of those in their communities. Calling them cowards doesn’t help anyone.
And there’s no doubt that DC is full they are not hypocrites politicians who have benefited from degrees from the same fancy pants institutions are now determined to tear them down. They are on a campaign of destruction that has done irreparable damage to our society. These actions are bad and must be opposed.
But because I am a very cynical person myself, I keep thinking about the ways in which we have become so dirty that we have been scorned by society, including some of our graduates.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how corrupt higher ed is. Concerns about cost are partially valid. We are not successful enough in terms of education discounting, and our internal explanations rarely influence the public. We all work hard to get students, but are we doing enough to keep them? Those who go to college, with no degree and no debt are rightfully offended.
Are we doing a good job preparing students for what comes after they leave campus? In the humanities, we have long treated graduate school as an automatic outcome, and many senior executives have not thought beyond producing it. That’s a real limitation.
But the thing that seems to anger our little friends in Washington the most is our work on diversity, equity and inclusion. Nationalization often raises protests and anger, although that is not the norm among students or faculty. However, I have been thinking about where we can go astray in our pursuit of social justice.
My own struggles in recent decades have had to do with making sure students don’t step on each other’s feet and keep quiet with each other. In general, it is those with special privilege who are the fastest to stand up for those who see them as oppressed, whether those people need it or not or don’t want their concern, and beat down anyone who, in their estimation, does not pay attention to the social minimums. We have taught a generation of students how to think and behave in the police. To some extent, that’s a good thing, because there are still more people at risk—more so now than last year.
But because I am please am not perfect, I have been reflecting on my part in all this and what I could have done better. For the past four decades, my fancy-pants education has not included women or people of color in any of my literary studies, except for Emily Dickinson here, Brontë there. Even in the enlightening course taught by Henry Louis Gates Jr., I did not read critics of color literature.
After teaching for a long time, I realized how that shaped my view not only of art but of myself: seeing the representation of women, let’s say, only through the eyes of men. I vowed that my students would never have the same knowledge or ignorance as me. So, I created a syllabus that looked, to me, like America. Students did not need to make grades in gender studies or in any other fields dedicated to those who have been excluded for a long time where I had to adjust my thinking about what counted as books. With the academic freedom to teach as I felt was right, they read a lot of different voices.
Because I came to teaching late, after a career in publishing where I was exposed in the 1990s to critical legal studies and critical race theory, I was aware of the structural inequalities built into our laws. I do DEI training with a yes, yes, yes state of mind. Nothing new to me, but it never hurts to be reminded.
On the other hand, colleagues complain about this same training, which is often not sophisticated or informative. Many feel they have been called out as people with overt or overt bias. They come in, keep giving out the same books, inviting the same number of writers, noting the same genres, until the students back off. Everywhere, the environment was the opposite of integration; there was hostility.
When I think about how my syllabus changed, I wonder if I made a mistake in my little way. Or maybe I went too far. Have I removed some of what made me a writer—male and pale—to make room for others? I still included Dr. King and Orwell, but I had little room and little patience for patriarchy.
Because I believe that language affects thought and vice versa, I chose my words and those of others. I stopped assigning jobs to horrible people, or people whose bad deeds were exposed. I became a guardian of anything that provoked bigotry, bigotry or moral indifference. In other words, I had become a judgmental, irrational, self-righteous person.
Now I think where that got us and what happens when you tell a bunch of people that they’re wrong, their values are wrong and they’re a basket case. I woke up one morning in November 2016 and thought, Oh shit, what did we do?
I don’t think the current state of higher ed is as simple as resisting or changing. That is a media game. It’s about really looking at what we did wrong, what we did right and what we can think about changing if we want to matter again. (And that we check for ourselves instead of being shoved down our throats by politicians.)
Recently Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education at Penn, made the case that we are not keeping our promises. And 10 professors with deep intellectual chops at one of our prestigious institutions he said the same thing. Maybe we all, we all know exactly where we stand in a high position, can agree that we need to make some changes.
Or we can do it in a reading way and say, “We are perfect.”
