Easily Distracted

In the last week, I’ve heard a lot of staff and faculty talk about how hard it is going to be to teach and advise students in the near-term future, how much they now feel that they have to second-guess everything they might say and how much they feel a risk of whatever they say being misquoted or appropriated and misused.

Teaching and advising and counseling are all intimate practices if they’re done in the way that Swarthmore and other small liberal-arts colleges aspire to do them. Which means they involve vulnerability on all sides. It means that they can, potentially, take up as much emotional and intellectual energy as both teacher and student have to spare and then go well beyond that. One reason that I think committed scholars at large research universities were at least passively acquiescent in the gradual outsourcing of some undergraduate instruction to adjuncts and graduate students starting in the 1980s was simply that they were grateful to be relieved of the heavy emotional and temporal weight that committed face-to-face teaching and counseling places upon professionals.

That weight is harder and heavier to carry depending upon the way that students and colleagues read your identity and personality. A professor or administrator with an open emotional affect may find themselves with more clients than someone with a more forbidding or severe affect, which is no one’s fault: it’s just how we read people and how we present to be read. But that affect may not match up with we can actually provide to students and advisees either intellectually or emotionally: a severe-seeming person may connect in more ways with more people than someone who seems open and inviting.

More pressingly, students often make assumptions or demands for support, empathy and guidance from women, people of color, and GLBTQ faculty and staff that they don’t make from white male professionals. I’m really glad when I can mentor or connect with a student in a way that goes beyond the classroom. I’m also very aware that there are students who wouldn’t think to seek me out for that guidance but would make very strong demands from faculty or staff that they perceive as being closer to their own identities and backgrounds. As one of my colleagues likes to put it, “the students aren’t going to be in your office crying on your desk very often, but they’re there every day doing it to me.”

Even when students are right about their perceptions of a similarity of background, that means the work of teaching and advising is unevenly distributed (which a major reason why it is critical to pursue faculty diversity), and those faculty and staff thus have to do more to protect their time and their energy. And sometimes the students are wrong: some likenesses they imagine and bring into a teaching or counseling experience are not there at all. Which puts that teacher or advisor in a very complicated position, not wanting to spurn or turn away from the responsibilities of the job, needing somehow to get things clear at the start, but also not wanting to have to spend the rest of their professional lives condemned to recount deeply personal histories of their own lives every September to a student who is seeking somebody or something to hold onto. That’s my privilege, to not face that dilemma. It’s also a place where students need somehow to find more places to put their trust, to take more chances, while also to be themselves more heedful and self-aware about what they’re asking of the teachers and advisors they turn to preferentially.

Trust is the big word here. You cannot trust again and again when your trust is always broken, never returned. I know that. But teaching and counseling, if they’re going to be small and focused and human and intimate, can’t happen in the absence of generosity. Generosity that leads to creativity, to taking chances, that produces a diversity of models and practices. This week has reminded me yet again that Swarthmore and places like it have badly oversold themselves as bubble utopias, but even if we finally gave that pretense up, our remaining distinction will rest on practices that require this special kind of generosity, one that is increasingly in short supply in the world around us. If we can’t manage that much, we might as well come out with our hands up and surrender to the MOOC.

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I’ve been married for almost 27 years. When I was dating my wife in college, I was the child of an upper middle-class professional family and she was from a working-class background. I did a lot of what would now be called “microaggression” early in our relationship, around social class. Obviously I was forgiven or tolerated for it, for which I’m very grateful. Life and time and experience and my wife taught me lessons that my undergraduate courses couldn’t. I’m still learning. But we also both know that even after 27 years and knowing each other better than anyone else, we often still don’t know exactly what the other person needs that day, is feeling or thinking. Sometimes we guess wrongly, occasionally profoundly so. I sometimes think, given that families and partners and long-time friends often get that kind of thing wrong, how can I or anyone else hope to get it right with a student that we’ve only known for a few weeks or at best a few years?

Good teaching and advising (and learning and being advised) require the freedom to experiment, to come at matters from several angles, to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. Which means they also require making mistakes and courting misrecognition. There is an irreducible element of risk. No amount of sensitivity training can get away from that risk. The only way to avoid it is to brutally standardize all moments of human interaction, to create a technocratic infrastructure that regulates and records anything that might involve the risk of getting it wrong. The history of the last century shows that in complex modern institutions, if you invite that technocracy in the door, it rarely needs a second invitation, and it never departs until it manages to thoroughly hollow out and distort the host institution.

Doing what we do right–in a human way, without technocracy–does involve taking responsibility for mistakes, both individually and institutionally. Generosity in teaching and advising requires honesty and transparency to work, and a strong measure of humility as well, on all sides. That much needs a good deal of repair and rethinking at Swarthmore and institutions like it, plainly. Nor should anyone call systematic forms of racism or discrimination a “mistake”. The security guards that Seema Jilani describes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner weren’t making a mistake, weren’t engaged in ordinary oversight or misrecognition. Whomever is pissing on the Intercultural Center isn’t just “Whoops, I didn’t get that this bothers you”. Sexual assault isn’t a case of “oh, I didn’t realize that wasn’t consensual”.

But if there isn’t other space left in most of what we do as teachers, advisors and community members to make mistakes, space left to misunderstand, space left to not give in all cases what someone needs or wants, space left to talk past or not hear, space left to try things, space left to give what we individually know how to give and refuse what we individually aren’t able to provide, we’re pretty well done. All the creative, generative possibilities for the future of a liberal arts education depend upon that.

I didn’t support the campaign to have fraternities restricted or banned at Swarthmore, largely for reasons I articulated earlier this academic year.

I do support the students who’ve filed a Clery Act and Title IX complaint against Swarthmore, and similar groups of students at other campuses.

I might disappoint those students by qualifying that support in the following manner: that I don’t think they yet have a completely clear view of the alternative processes or outcomes that they’d prefer. Once you start a conversation about the difficulties involved in building a better system, you might have some appreciation for why most administrations in higher education have settled for so long for the complex, contradictory and unsatisfying systems of reporting, counseling, and judiciary review that have been built up over the last three decades.

Let’s start with the support first, though. The first and foremost reason that I think this development is a very good thing for Swarthmore and institutions like it is that the filing plus an independent review by consultants will at last create a documented, independent body of testimony and evidence about student experiences and administrative procedures that everyone can use as the standard reference point for going forward.

Ever since I’ve arrived at the college in the mid-1990s, I’ve known students that have alleged that the college handled reports of abuse, assault, harassment or rape inadequately. I’ve had a pretty wide range of committee assignments since I’ve been at Swarthmore but one area that I’ve had no involvement with is judiciary procedures. The one time I served on the Dean’s Advisory Committee almost two decades ago, we mostly discussed alcohol policy, though with little address to the role of alcohol in assault or rape allegations. Without personal experience, I’ve had nothing else to use to evaluate those student allegations except trust in the students I know and trust in my colleagues in the administration, which have pulled in opposite directions. I do know from experience that students sometimes are profoundly wrong or exaggerated in what they say about other aspects of internal process or decision-making at the college. At the same time, I’ve known that sometimes faculty and administration don’t accurately hear or mentally transcribe what they say to students. So without anything direct to go on, it’s been hard to know what to say. Was this a common problem? A sporadic one? What kind of problem was it: a problem with specific procedures, with particular staff members, with a generalized culture, with a specific kind of incident, with the entire society around us? Most of the students I’ve heard from are students I trust very deeply, but they’ve almost always been telling me about what friends or friends of friends have said, not speaking about their own direct experiences. The constant thrumming of discontent has always worried me.

One reason that those stories were vague or indirect was the completely legitimate reason that victims often don’t want to go public, don’t want to have to endure skepticism and hostility, don’t want to have to repeatedly tell a story of trauma, don’t want to be responsible for educating everyone else about victimization.

Another and more important reason, it turns out, is that we have told students that our judiciary procedures require absolute confidentiality from everyone involved in a hearing, so that the students who took the step to most clearly document cases of harassment, assault or rape believed they were required to keep that documentation secret, whether or not they were satisfied with the outcomes of the process. (The student publication the Daily Gazette has published a very good series of investigative reports on this issue that helped to bring this point forward.) So our procedures, intentionally or not, have helped to maintain an environment where it is impossible for the community to have documented knowledge or awareness of the incidence, character or resolution of assault and rape and yet equally where survivors and victims can do little but informally or privately testify about their experiences. Small wonder then that there has been a recurrent, corrosive murmur about the untrustworthiness of institutional process: there has been no way for that murmur to be anything more.

Which is why clear, documented, transparent scrutiny from several different bodies is a good and necessary outcome. It’s the only way to move forward.

Whatever the investigations find, however, there are some persistent contradictions in the advocacy of the students filing the complaints that will prove hard to resolve.

Some changes will be easy to make, and may already have been made. Particularly on reading the investigations in the Daily Gazette, I don’t have any hesitation about saying the following:

1) That a student reporting harassment, assault or rape should never, ever be asked if he or she was drunk or in any way culpable. I don’t even think it’s relevant to ask whether the complainant clearly said no or made an objection to harassing behavior. As many critics have pointed out for decades, that puts the impetus on the person being approached to say or do something, as if the person making an approach can safely assume until something is said that it’s ok to make sexual advances or remarks. If someone’s reporting, the baseline assumption should be that there’s something to report and that the person reporting is a victim of another person’s actions.

2) That sympathy for and counseling to victims be absolutely hard-wired into the reporting process. It’s my impression that the college has moved pretty forcefully in this direction already.

3) That once a report is made, there’s a public record of the report, without names, creating a verified, public database about the incidence of such reports and their resolution. I think from 2011 onward, Swarthmore and most other colleges have fixed that part of the process, in response to federal requirements.

4) That some accommodations of victims should be made much more expeditiously than we have done. For example, moving accuser or accused to other dorms should happen without a lot of hassle or delay. To be honest, I think that should even happen more quickly in cases where there are strong personality conflicts–most residential colleges have tended to treat most friction in living spaces as a “learning experience” that relates back to diversity.

5) That we can do way better than force victims to sit down with the accused in a small room and have to testify to peers, faculty and administrators who may or may not have training or experience relevant to rape and assault cases, in an environment that is at best indifferent to the mental well-being of the victim.

6) That we shouldn’t ever restrain victims from speaking about their experiences. Confidentiality is a powerful but exceedingly dangerous sociopolitical technology that should be used only in very specific and limited contexts. Academic institutions are prone to the massive overuse of confidentiality across a very broad range of practices and procedures, and this is one of them.

However, rethinking judiciary procedures in specific is likely to be a bigger problem.

Here’s the chief contradiction I see among the advocate groups who have been pushing for changes at Swarthmore and other campuses. Some of the students involved, including some at Swarthmore, argue that they would like to see much more expeditious actions taken against reported rapists or assailants, most typically quick movement on expelling offenders and creating some form of permanent record or notation of the reasons for their expulsion. (See for example Tucker Reed’s account of her experiences at USC.)

At the same time, some advocates respond that they would prefer for action to be taken by administrative processes within their institutions rather than by the external legal system, for a number of reasons. First that the legal system is by any standard even slower at producing results; second that it is often far more violating or traumatic for victims than the worst collegiate procedure; and most interestingly third that many of the victims report some degree of compassion or concern for the future of their attackers, preferring that they simply be removed from the community rather than suffer criminal penalties. (At the same time, most victims quite legitimately reject outright that they themselves be compelled via a judiciary process to participate in the rehabilitation or education of their attackers.)

All of these points make sense but they pull in opposite directions. For one, the idea that we should be sufficiently sympathetic to rapists or assailants within a community to not seek criminal penalties, just removal, is in tension with the frequently-repeated dictum that rape is rape, that we shouldn’t see rape that involves two drunken acquaintances who’ve had consenting encounters in the past as any different or lesser than “stranger rape” that leaves the victim severely injured. Nor is it fair to leave the determination of whether to treat rape as a criminal violation reported to the police as a burden on the victim. But requiring or mandating a criminal report in all instances creates problems: by their own account, many victims might be less likely to make a report if they knew that was the outcome, both out of anxiety about the process (knowing, among other things, what an adversarial system will do to distort or manipulate the victim’s experiences) and even out of reluctance to visit criminal penalties on their attackers.

If that leaves colleges like Swarthmore with a need to have a better or different judicial process, what should that look like? I’ve always been a bit unhappy with the pseudo-judicial systems that many universities maintain: they’re demonstrably prone to manipulation in other ways and on other issues besides rape and assault.

If the desired outcome is that an attacker be expelled quickly, and that there be a record of the reason for the expulsion, that’s going to create some serious burdens on the institution. First because that’s a fairly serious penalty that requires something like if not identical to the presumption of the American judicial system: a presumption of innocence until due process is observed. Let’s say you expel a student after three years and put on their transcript, “Expelled for sexual assault”. The expelled student can rightfully say that you have deprived them of the benefits of three years of tuition and the expected lifetime benefits of completing a Swarthmore education. Considering that in recent years, students have sued universities even over what seem like open-and-shut issues like low grades in a course, it’s not unreasonable to expect that more frequent expulsions with clear transcription of the cause will lead to litigation, with potentially large damages being sought.

Meaning that the standards for a finding of assault in an internal procedure would have to be high enough to withstand scrutiny in a civil proceeding and also that they probably ought to be in that being expelled and having a transcript with a note as to cause is a serious penalty if not as serious as a criminal finding of rape or assault might be. If so, that’s likely to run counter to what the critics of current policies are seeking, in several respects. The counseling of victims would have to be utterly firewalled away from a judicial procedure (the degree to which that’s presently the case is the source of a lot of frustration, in that we’ve formerly had deans serving both as the advisors for a judicial procedure and as counselors to victims) and the judicial procedure would have to operate with something like the presumption of innocence for the accused if not with an openly adversarial approach to evidence and questioning, which walks us right back into the problem of seeming unsympathetic or skeptical towards victims. In a small school, it’s going to be very difficult to have one institutional structure that puts no burden on victims, openly acts as their advocates and counselors, promises them justice, redress and healing and then have another institutional structure that can’t promise anything of the sort and then have those two structures interact to produce a coherent and decisive outcome very quickly. It’s going to be equally hard not to have that kind of two-sided approach, however. The students seeking change shouldn’t expect that it’s going to be easy or even possible to create an internal procedure that does all or even much of what they advocate.

They should also consider that building such a system might have many unexpected or unanticipated consequences. For example, if the process has to withstand legal scrutiny, it might be hard to keep other kinds of criminal actions (involvement in drugs, underage drinking, non-sexual violence, even intellectual property violations) wholly out of the loop of that system, to make other kinds of infractions subject to more informal, confidential mediation. We might almost have to have three (or more) separate systems or to define sexual assault, rape and harassment as offenses which are so completely different in impact and gravity that nothing else requires the same kind of process or procedure. In the case of the latter approach, it probably won’t be long before someone argues that some other class of offense or harm is equally serious and requires the same kind of handling.

I suppose as something of an afterword, I’d also suggest that the students bringing the complaint should not be quite so cynical about the possible outcome of an independent review. I support the filing of the Clery Act complaint because I think the more investigative processes the better and because it’s the only way to create more trust in the long-term in the community. But it’s important not to treat investigations of this kind as a zero-sum contest that can either be won or lost, and to therefore “work the ref” by creating a pre-emptive narrative about the intentional insincerity of your opponent and therefore the pervasive untrustworthiness of everything “they” are doing. I think a probing investigation–whether by consultants or the federal government–is likely to find that the mistakes and problems of institutional process over the last twenty years are a product of messy histories (ranging from the crazy-quilt contradictions of in loco parentis at colleges to an ever-shifting legal environment). If so, there is no “they” who has acted with devious intention, nor any “they” who are out to hurt the institution. When I look at this filing, I don’t see sides, I see a lot of people who want the best for Swarthmore and higher education and who are doing the right thing as much as they can in the way they see best, and in the case of the students, doing it with great courage and determination. This isn’t zero-sum: it’s the rare kind of dispute where there are ways for everyone to come out a winner, if only everyone will leave enough space for that to happen and have enough generosity to agree that once we get past the obvious changes, there will be difficult puzzles that can’t be so easily solved.

One of the questions about “ethical pedagogy” that I keep circling around, as long-time readers of this blog know, is what kinds of teaching or engagement faculty should pursue with students beyond formal courses. It is a cliche to say that learning mostly happens “outside the classroom”, but as far as residential undergraduate colleges go, it’s a vitally necessary declaration. Of all the things that bothered me about Benjamin Ginsberg’s self-gratifying attack on all things administrative in higher education, The Fall of the Faculty, it was his scorn for “learning outside the classroom” that annoyed me the most. Because the disdain of faculty for anything outside of the formal classroom is yet another way that we are paving the road to adjunctification and MOOCification.

The problem, both ethical and practical, is how to carry out deliberate pedagogy inside the life of a residential college community. If my classroom pedagogy is built around eliciting and honing the widest variety of modes of interpretation and expression for my students, about exploration and freedom, my teaching in community has to be as well. There are no grades to hand out, no assignments to mark up. But another thing that’s different is that in community what students and colleagues say and do has a direct impact on my own life as a professional. The classroom is a bounded space: a student’s explorations of the content can hit the walls around the course hard but that’s still a learning experience that the student and I can almost always recuperate positively. A college community is a much bigger space–and its boundaries stretch out into the world. Even if there weren’t a pedagogical dimension, faculty have to care about how their community is perceived, about what it does in the world.

The stakes are different than inside a class, and yet in a way they’re not different at all.

Some years ago, I was speaking with several students I knew and liked about this problem. They told me that they felt frustrated that faculty largely ignored students who were involved in activism, or if they paid attention to them, they did so as passive cheerleaders. Real decision-making, they complained, was inaccessible to them.

I wrestled a bit with a feeling of irritation, because I’d had the conversation before. I’ve had it since. I wrestled a bit with a feeling of chagrin, because I’d been one of the students who’d said just this sort of thing to faculty in the 1980s. I wrestled with a feeling of weariness, knowing how I would have taken it then if a 45-year old had told me he’d been one of the students who’d said this sort of thing back in his salad days yadda yadda yadda. Which of course is the first reason we don’t have these conversations more often: a sense of futility, a sense that all this has happened before and will happen again, a sense that we can’t help but be assholes in some way if we get involved in the discussion. Which is in so many ways counter to the ethos of education, which rests always on the belief that we can somehow find a way to teach what we ourselves couldn’t learn nearly so well under the same circumstances before.

So I couldn’t just walk away.

I tried to make a few points. That for one how an institution decides anything is opaque to everyone not because secrets are hidden but because deciding and changing and acting are particles and waves all at once: here in some unpredictable meeting or moment, a decision is made by a few people or even just one person; over there in some diffuse, fuzzy way a hundred people wake up and every morning edge towards doing something in a different way. That a person who the flow charts say has all the authority in the world can find it impossible to simply make something happen, and there a thousand people can think they’re grasping a nettle and find instead that they’re dancing with the wind.

This is very zen.

I also pointed out that the students in question hadn’t really bothered to ask some basic questions about how things worked and they still weren’t asking them–I was sitting right there ready to answer, but they’d rather complain and demand instead of being curious and asking open-ended or basic questions. One student countered that this was, essentially, above their pay grade–that they should be able to propose and someone (faculty, administration, “Swarthmore” in the abstract) should then dispose. Which really did nettle me as much as it would if a student skipped four or five class sessions and then asked me what was on the test. I’ve been pointing out for almost two decades that most of what students want to know about things work is readily knowable, but they have to put the work in–and when they’re given indirect answers accept that sometimes that’s because the way things work is indirect, when they involve confidentiality it’s because there’s something that probably should be confidential. For all of the invocations of democracy, consultation and consensus, I find that students harbor the belief that when it’s something they want, there should be a quicker and more authoritarian way of making it happen, that all it takes is a declaration, a policy, an order. Or that there are no costs, conversely, to turning every decision into a massively consultative and communal process, as if no one will have to actually work on that process.

We ran over a few other points. That students, no matter how passionate they are about the college, have a different and more short-term interest in it than faculty, staff, alumni or trustees do. That a decision that will have consequences for the next forty years affects other groups much more than it affects them. That maybe there are a few things yet that they don’t know about Swarthmore, the world or themselves, that the position of a student–and of any scholar–ought to involve a measure of humility by design.

I explained why I didn’t agree with these students on the specific issue of the moment that concerned them. We had a good discussion on the particulars, and I gave them a few ideas about where they could push further with some hope of gaining ground if they were serious about the issue. And then these folks went back a week later to demanding what they demanded and complaining that no one was listening to them. Now this, I have to say, I didn’t do back when I was a student: I was actually much more drawn to the faculty who were doubtful about South African divestment first because I learned things about the issue from them (they tended to be the people who knew something about the issue) and because it was much more useful for sharpening my own advocacy than talking to someone who patted me on the head and told me to keep fighting the good fight. And they were vastly better than the administrators whose job it was to placate and defer us, or the faculty who frankly thought they could manipulate us into serving as foot soldiers in their own intramural conflicts with colleagues. But even in the case of administrators and trustees, I understood very well that they were doing work in meeting with us and listening to us, that we were asking for time and attention in an environment where both were scarce. I appreciated what we got in that respect even when I didn’t agree with the outcomes. Now, mind you, the faculty I gravitated to were being good teachers in challenging me–they didn’t treat me as they would a serious professional enemy, which would have been terrifying. But the more there is a high emotional and political cost to that kind of engagement on the faculty side because students regard it as impossible or insulting that there should even be a challenge, the less it will happen.

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Which brings me to the instance of the moment that has me thinking in these circles again. The college has invited our alumnus Robert Zoellick to be one of the honorary degree recipients at graduation this year, and some students have argued in terms that invite no dissent that this is absolutely unacceptable: that Zoellick is a key “architect of the Iraq War” and that his association with the World Bank, Goldman-Sachs and the Republican Party make him moral anathema regardless of whether there are highly specific decisions or initiatives for which he bears the primary blame that warrant such condemnation.

And I read the discussion and thought, “Is there even a point to entering it? Would I be welcome at all? Would this just be The Man sticking his nose in?” But then of course if no one does, that just feeds this sense that no one is listening and no one cares. More importantly, it leaves this particular viewpoint a free space to define what the wider community thinks and believes. And if I’m thinking pedagogically, even the students who question the invitation could make their case more effectively, because right now they’re making a case that is disturbingly broad and rather careless with evidence.

I teach a class where one of my possible “teaching outcomes” is to help students who come in with a critique of the World Bank and development institutions to refine, strengthen and extend that critique. I’m personally a very strong critic of the Bank’s history and many of its current policies and a strong critic of the history of development institutions and the idea of development as a whole. I agree with Matt Taibbi’s description of Goldman-Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”. I think George W. Bush’s two administrations were a major political calamity. I think the Iraq War was an extraordinary failure, a violation, and that many people who should face serious professional consequences for their role in it have escaped very lightly.

But I don’t think there’s evidence that Zoellick played any particularly important or central role in that war and I think it’s troubling that students have implied that he did. I don’t think working at Goldman-Sachs should make someone absolute anathema. I think Zoellick did a considerably better job at the World Bank than his predecessor and that the Bank’s influence and actions demand serious consideration and nuanced evaluation. All of which and more can be a subject for considerable disagreement between political allies–or political opponents.

None of which affects how I think of my own students past, present and future, and the students of this college who came well before I ever taught here. It would take an extraordinary act of specific malice and evil before I would think to disown a student, an alumni, from this imagined community. Because the central value of a liberal arts education, as I see it, is that we exert no mastery or ownership over what our students will become, and love them all for what they are and will be. If there were time enough, I’d invite every damn one of them to get an honorary degree and give a speech some day, so I can hear about what they’ve done and thought and become.

I heard an extraordinarily moving thing from a colleague at a recent panel on the future of the liberal arts. She decided to speak on behalf of what her students had told her they valued about the liberal arts, and the first thing they said was, “freedom”. Sure, there are distribution requirements and major requirements, they agreed, but otherwise they felt that they were free now and forevermore to develop their interests, passions, skills and aspirations as they saw fit and that the college believed deeply in that freedom. You cannot believe deeply in that freedom and then tell me that a person as accomplished in his professional life as Robert Zoellick isn’t a worthy part of this college’s legacy. You can’t tell me that there is only a narrow band of acceptable political and social commitments possible from a “Swarthmore education”, that if if a student idly confessed that he might want to work for Goldman-Sachs that we should grab his ear, march him down to the Dean’s Office and expel him right there and then for conduct unbecoming of a social justice crusader. You can’t tell me that we’re about pluralism and diversity and then set a standard that more or less says “Republicans and bankers need not apply”. This isn’t neutrality or dispassion: it’s the deepest passion possible, for freedom and empowerment through education. This is what it means to have that politics: that you not just tolerate but embrace the many ways that students will go forth into life and make some use of what they’ve known and done and learned in their education. You exercise no veto over them: not now, not then, not tomorrow or the next day.

You can’t even tell me that somehow the fix is in, that this is just favoring the 1% or whatever. That’s where a student who complains ought to do himself or herself a favor and ask, “So how do these invitations go out anyway?” And here’s how: first, Swarthmore has a tradition of strongly favoring its own alumni when it comes to honorary degrees, which is a tradition I love even as it risks a certain insularity. Second, it’s open to anyone–even students–to make a suggestion at the beginning of the academic year, keeping in mind the preference for alumni. Third, it’s a sleepy, pleasant little committee that looks at the suggestions each year, and gently tries to get a list down to a manageable size of people who might be available and who might say yes, looking for pluralism and also for who might be comfortable giving the kind of speech that works in that setting. (Which, no matter who we’ve invited, has almost never been sharply political or score-settling, because our speakers generally choose to be more welcoming and inspirational to the entirety of the community gathered that day: families, faculty, students, alumni, staff, people from town.) Fourth, that same process has year after year after year in all the years I’ve taught at Swarthmore brought extraordinary crusaders for social justice, committed left-wing activists, dedicated philanthropists, remarkable researchers and scientists, poets and dreamers all to the graduation. There’s nothing more bad faith than criticizing the process the one time out of fifty that it produces an outcome that you don’t care for when the other forty-nine times you wouldn’t dream of complaining.

So is this teaching or scolding? I don’t know: both, I suppose, but that line gets crossed in the classroom too sometimes. Is it welcome? Is it helpful? Does it move things ahead or shut them down? I don’t know: but I know that what’s at stake is both more and less than the education of students this year–and all years.