Comments on: Physician Heal Thyself

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 14:49:48 +0000

In reply to Laura. This is why I'm kind of calling out humanists here, because I know that intellectually they understand extremely well how conversations and texts can have tonality or be expressing implicit, imagined social relations or power between speakers. We know men can redirect and appropriate what a woman just said (uh-oh, self-reflexive time: LAURA SAID THIS, I AM AGREEING), so I shouldn't have colleagues who play dumb (or are really genuinely not getting it) when I note the ways that they are redirecting or dismissing what people that they don't see as social peers are saying if those people belong to subject categories that they don't credit as being worth listening to.

By: Further or alternatively

Further or alternatively — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 10:43:39 +0000

I thought this comparison (in particular) is excellent: “But the more messianic the sentiment among those who felt born to change the world for the better, the less able they were to comprehend where they might have trespassed, where they were accidentally recruiting their own opposition. If I tell that story about something else–say, American military and diplomatic action in the world during the Cold War and after–progressives are well able to understand the basic sociopolitical engine involved.”
Recruiting one’s own opposition is a big problem for many political movements, both on the right and the left, particularly ones that incline to stridency. The pro-life movement and UKIP are two examples from what we might broadly call the right; Republican Irish terrorism is a very different example of the same phenomenon.
Where the political movement in question is peripheral, that’s broadly ok for society as a whole: people vehemently opposed to the movement and also moderates/indifferent people can all agree that that movement, for all that it might have some grain of truth, ‘goes too far’. Society carries on safely enough, allowing debate on the issue in question.
But the danger is where a movement with the stridency and self-righteousness of an extremist is combined the power, reach and social acceptability of fashionable academic/social liberalism. That leaves a problem for society. Lots of people will think that the movement has ‘gone too far’ – but what does that mean? That the people in charge – the people with the power in society – have gone too far? Recruiting one’s own opposition then has a tendency to mean recruiting opposition to the established and accepted power structures in society (including academia and the positions in which other well-meaning liberals find themselves) and undermining their legitimacy. That’s much more dangerous for society as a whole.
Moreover, when the people in charge think something is clearly right, it is only natural that there is little room left for people to debate alternatives to that view. That’s fine (for social order at least) where the views are broadly shared by society as a whole (e.g. not allowing debate on pro and cons of paedophilia), but if the views are only those of the people in charge then there is a problem: the people in charge are recruiting opposition to their views while at the same time restricting the scope for that opposition to be made public.
“When the laws changed, that didn’t save everyone. The American promise went unfulfilled, injustice still sat on its throne.” Quite. But we shouldn’t make the best the enemy of the good. Maybe the race for social justice would be better run by tortoises than hares, just like the Cold War.

By: Ausser

Ausser — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 01:35:49 +0000

I left the social sciences academy for these (amongst other) reasons, and am now one of those strange and lonely animals, an east-coast Ph.D. and former professor living in the heartland and working without fanfare at a job in industry.

There is much to say and at the same time I still cringe at the stress that speaking out and making arguments about these topics in academic circles caused me for many years, and—given that I left all that behind—I’ll refrain from going on.

But thank you, this is well-written. I intend to share it far and wide, including with a number of faculty that I know who are just now, given circumstances, penning long-winded and regrettably indulgent pieces for public consumption that, in half-feigned innocence, will of course continue to intensify precisely the cycle that you describe.

By: Laura

Laura — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 15:04:48 +0000

Dang–my long lovely comment didn’t show up. 🙁 TLDR: code switching needs to be something liberals/privileged folks do too.

By: Michael Witherspoon

Michael Witherspoon — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 14:10:43 +0000

How many students have had a paper downgraded not because its thesis was poorly supported but because the thesis conflicted with the professor’s worldview? How many have had the voice of the professor climb over theirs while arguing a point in class? How many have been in required classes as captive audience to didactic arrogance from the front of the classroom? Why would we call such learning environments a “liberal arts education”? Timothy Burke’s descriptor is “messianism.” Nancy Gibbs, senior editor at Time cautions us: “Humility leaves room for complexity and honors honest dissent.”

Yes, tenure properly protects — but also isolates. Can one wearing blinders later decry being blindsided?

By: Laura

Laura — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 13:54:21 +0000

This is most poignant: “We should be beautifully multilingual in a range of nested, situated ways of talking and being–a good humanist should be able to walk into a room of advertisers, a room of Hell’s Angels, a room of soldiers, a room of drag performers, a room of hiphop artists, a room of soybean farmers, a room of car salesmen, and adapt to the conversation given time and opportunity. Not master it, not own it, not remake it as a knowledge product–but to understand what flies and what doesn’t, what’s being said and unsaid, what’s sayable and unsayable. We’re plainly not able. Perhaps less able than an advertiser, a Hell’s Angel, a soldier, a hiphop artist. The kind of understanding that is possible if we’re far from home, in Bali or Botswana, or deep in the past, in the Civil War or the Punic War, closes sharply the closer we are to where we live.”

I have long felt this since I moved here from Arkansas, having taught at two state institutions where my students look very different from the students I had at Bryn Mawr and Villanova, but not that different from students at Temple (mostly). Having grown up in the south, I learned quickly to code switch–that’s what you’re really talking about. I still do that, just did it at my High School reunion. I talked SEC football, responded differently to conversations about Black Lives Matter. I’ve found that many of my friends here who teach, especially at the higher ed level but not exclusively, don’t do that. They assume they don’t need to, that it’s beneath them to have to have a conversation about last weekend’s football game. You can see it in the tone if not in the actual words. We had a conversation here with our faculty, and I urged them to understand that, as angry and upset as they are, they need to understand that the other side has real issues that they felt like the last administration did not address. I got a lot of push back on that. I threw in my Southern card, because most of these people grew up here or in the Northeast corridor somewhere. They don’t believe that there’s unemployment or they think, “Well, why can’t they just move somewhere where there are jobs.” They’re speaking from their own privilege.

I have also asked my friends on the other side to understand and appreciate that there are people who believe strongly that they are in physical danger as a result of the outcome of this election. I’ve asked them to stand up against that, whether that danger is coming from individual citizens or from government policy. We should all agree that no one deserves physical harm for just being who they are.