Is the Reckoning at Hand?
As an ex-academic I like to keep my finger on the pulse of what goes on in higher learning in America. One gloss on our recent election argued that the Democratic party has become the party of the faculty lounge, a rejoinder with enough truth, given differences in voting habits and education levels, to merit consideration. In part because of their disciplinary nexuses as well as the ways in which they’re trained, college faculty tend to be an unusually self-confident, but also ideological, lot. Many find it hard to believe – protestations of humility notwithstanding – that other people might disagree with them or, if they do, such disagreement is evidence of anything other than ignorance.
It is, in some ways, baked into the project. Socrates was known to complain of his sophist interlocutors that they refused the wisdom that would better their condition. Philosophy as well as religion promotes the idea that some people possess a better understanding of the human condition and how to ameliorate it and their job is to bring that message to the otherwise uneducated masses. The educational enterprise has an essentially messianic mindset. How could it be otherwise? The whole idea of the classroom, traditionally, at least, before professors figured out they could bypass preparation by resorting to small groups and peer “learning,” was that novices learned from experts, and recalcitrant learners who resisted instruction were a problem that needed to be solved.
But politics is not a classroom. The socio-political world we inhabit has so much complexity to it that no person or group of persons could possibly manage and communicate it all, much less dictate to it. Our liberal democracy has two underlying assumptions: the vastness of the enterprise doesn’t allow for centralized decision-making (the errors of thousands of people are still more likely to produce good outcomes than the certainties of one), no matter how convicted those decision-makers are of their rightness; and our operative ideas of the person and his or her inherent dignity requires that that person be the primary decision-maker for his or her own life. Granted, that person might make what we regard to be bad decisions, they may in fact objectively be bad decisions, but the price of bad decisions is one we are willing to pay to protect the freedom that acts as a cocoon around our personhood. To make decisions on behalf of another is to somehow diminish if not eradicate that person’s humanness.
Thomas Frank (PhD University of Chicago) in 2004 wrote What’s the Matter With Kansas?, a book that expressed incomprehension that "regular" people would vote against their own best interests, which Frank understood better than they did. This attitude of “I know what’s good for you better than you do” is so prevalent in academic circles, and a prior so unexamined, that it results in shocked – SHOCKED! – dismay every time the rejection of the claim repeats itself. But it’s not as if the cultural superiors have not been given due notice: the “uneducated” masses make it pretty clear they don’t like being told how to live or what ought to be important to them by a person who has never swung a hammer, milked a cow, sweated some copper, or knocked heads on a gridiron.
I’m agnostic concerning the question whether academics actually know better than their less educated fellow-citizens. I regard the question as largely irrelevant. The relevant question concerns the grant of authority to replace someone else’s judgment concerning his or her life with your own and what the source of such a grant might be. And here the tautological nature of the argument seems to elude many in the academy, who believe that the conferral of a degree by the academy gives to its members precisely that right to interfere. I certainly get the temptation: as someone who has devoted my life to the study of politics I am quite often stunned by how ignorant some people can be when it comes to how politics works and to what I would regard as prudent decision-making. But then I remember that I as a parent often think my children make bad decisions, but such thinking not only doesn’t permit me to substitute my judgments for theirs, it doesn’t even permit me to tell them they’re making mistakes. The deft handling of such conflict at the interpersonal level in a relationship contoured by love and immediacy doesn’t scale well and certainly doesn’t translate into relationships determined by power differentials. It's hard enough to convince my children that in such conflicts I'm not prioritizing my interests over theirs. How could I possibly convince strangers of it?
Since I still operate on the margins of those circles I was not surprised by the shockwaves through the ivory tower at the results of the presidential election. As someone committed to the idea that politics in general and presidential politics in particular should occupy a much smaller space in our attention and our sense of well-being than they do I didn’t share the cataclysmic sense of impending doom. The people have spoken – you dust yourself off and move on to the next election, half of which your candidate will lose. You better learn how to handle disappointment.
In a recent New York Times essay Professor David Blight of Yale University suggested that the election of Trump might be the “reckoning” that universities need. Mind you, a “reckoning” might not be exactly the idea he has in mind, for a reckoning in this sense is a final judgment by which good is rewarded and evil punished. A “reckoning” for the university might well mean a casting-down into the dust, and I doubt very much Professor Blight wills one in that sense.
Nor does he really seem to think that any such reckoning would result in condemnation for the academy’s misdeeds. The prolific use of scare quotes throughout his essay indicates the problem on the one hand -- namely, the separation of academics from the rest of America -- but also a kind of ironic detachment from it. I think it’s fair to say that Blight doesn’t really think the university has done anything wrong per se but that it does have a reputation problem it needs to solve. Rather than self-correction, the academy just needs better PR.
Blight consistently refers to those on campus as “us” and non-academics as “them.” Criticisms of the academy by “them” are typically hedged in such a way to indicate that “they” neither understand the academy nor its central importance.
“The worst thing we university liberals could do right now is to keep wondering why “they” hate us, why blue-collar workers seem to vote — as we understand it — against their own interests in sidling up to an authoritarian in a red tie who courts other billionaires, or why human nature itself did not come through for us and make the arc of history bend toward justice as we define it.”
One can't help but wonder why that would be the worst thing university liberals could do. Wouldn't such introspection help fend off the reckoning? And might not some of the skepticism for what passes as academic "research" be well placed, as well as that concerning the heavy-handed application of the underlying ideologies? And might not taxpayers have some sort of interest in the quarter billion dollars the University of Michigan has spent on its largely ineffective DEI initiatives that now employ 241 persons on the campus?
Note the assumptions that come through Blight's hedging: workers vote against their genuine interests; Trump is an authoritarian; there is an arc of history, but only properly educated people can really discern it. Granted, he acknowledges the hubris in these assumptions, and notes that “history” has been “waiting to explode” that hubris. “History” has been waiting? And hubris explodes? These abstract references to “history” indicate that he is already 30,000 feet above the realities of our on-the-ground politics. Of course, on-the-ground things look bad for academics when considering the working class with whom academics have “lost touch,” even though “the policies that Democrats have enacted work for them.” In this election “a brilliant [!] Black woman” ran “an honorable campaign” touting a message of “unity” and “harmony” against the ugly and bitter message of the authoritarian Trump who, with his followers, must not be allowed “to own or tell our national story.” Nor, apparently, to have a voice at all. This election provides evidence that “We – a difficult pronoun in America right now” have “already lost … a part of our democracy.” Whose democracy?
Lest I seem unfair to Professor Blight, I draw the reader’s attention to an essay he wrote in The New Republic earlier this summer, which he penned as a "Joe Biden meets Abraham Lincoln" thought exercise, asking the question “ whether the Union can endure half–MAGA neofascist and half–Democratic pluralistic under rule of law.” Blight has cast his lot on the side of the angels. Even if that is a fair characterization, it is a tendentious one that will hardly restore the public trust Blight seeks. Comparing the rulings of the Supreme Court to the infamous Dred Scott decision and declaring them a threat to American democracy, Blight beseeched Biden and Harris to put the MAGA power “on a course of ultimate extinction,” thereby ridding America of “authoritarians.” He declared Trump supporters and their epigones on the Court to be “the equivalent of the 1850’s slave power” that divided “the house” in such a way that it made co-existence impossible. Does this sound conciliatory to anyone? Likely to make the majority of Americans who voted for Trump less suspicious of the academy?
Clearly a large part of the problem from Professor Blight’s point of view is that those “who did not attend college” do not trust the people who inhabit the academy and have “spoken in a small [!] but potent majority” that “they are now leaving ‘us’— universities in particular — behind.” This dismissal would naturally cause anxiety in anyone left behind, as well as bewilderment. But note again the nouns used: “history” is leaving the Trump voter behind, while the Trump voter is leaving the professoriate behind. Where is accountability lodged in all this?
Indeed, those who have not attended college mistakenly “believe we are an ideological monolith” but also it’s not a bad thing if “sentiment on college campuses” is out of touch with the direction determined by the voters, most of whom have been deceived by bad press concerning what’s actually happening on campuses, including “alleged leftist ideological purity.” Alleged? According to a Buckley Center report, in the fourteen departments in the humanities and social sciences at Yale University the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among the faculty is around 78:1. Nationwide faculty are about six times more likely to identify themselves as liberal rather than conservative, the latter of whom tend to cluster in particular disciplines such as business and engineering. The more elite the institution, the more likely the numbers skew leftward. Nor does Blight consider the significant effect such non-representative numbers has on students and faculty self-censoring, a phenomenon much more prominent among conservatives; nor, for that matter, how “cancellation” has affected some people more than others and how such actions generate ever deeper levels of mistrust. Finally, he doesn’t consider the scores of parents who are increasingly resisting the temptation to spend $60,000 to have their child turned against them and then try to navigate the world with his or her worthless “_______ studies” degree.
In a particularly portentous turn, Blight opines that members of the academy “must translate what is known” (by people like him, presumably) “to the bulk of citizens,” and “if they cannot come here, we must find them.” Well … find them where, exactly? In their factories and fields, homes and places of entertainment? Must we in the academy really go forth into all the world, making disciples of all, preaching to them the good news that “Americans’ most treasured values” includes the idea that “higher education can remake one’s life”? Unless a man be born again…
Blight appears to believe, in the tradition of John Dewey, that higher education has a special role to play in creating and maybe also preserving “our” democracy. I have complained before about this use of the possessive pronoun. Blight means that only the academy is capable of making the “whole and the parts … sing together” and preventing us from (metaphor alert) “drown[ing] in the habits of our own particularities and favorite ideologies” and help us navigate all our differences with one another. “We may not like universals anymore, but there are some, like elections, that stun millions into despair or glee.” I’ll confess, again, to not knowing what that means. How is an election a universal?
I’ll give Professor Blight credit: he recognizes that the academy has a legitimacy problem, and that it bears a good deal of the blame for the problem. But the insularity that reveals itself throughout the essay indicates the depth of the problem. The fact that this essay was published in the New York Times suggests that he’s not trying to persuade the people who he thinks the academy has lost touch with, but he’s trying to reassure those who have lost that touch. Even when they feel badly about themselves, they can feel good about themselves.
The problem with Blight's essay is not that he's wrong about Trump or his supporters, it's that he doesn't accomplish what he sets out to do, which is to establish some rapprochement with Trump voters. You don't win people over by calling them fascists, and you don't restore trust by saying that while they may have some legitimate though undefined grievances, they also don't really know either what they're talking about or what's best for themselves. There's really no olive branch here that anyone can grab on to, leaving us to conclude that either Professor Blight is knowingly offering one he intends to yank away or he's too isolated to realize that it's not an olive branch but a switch he has in his hand. I think charity requires we choose the latter interpretation.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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