Easily Distracted

A lot of people were wondering, in the aftermath of the investigation into Ward Churchill, about whether many scholarly works have the same kind of dubious manipulations of evidence when examined closely. Quite a few people inferred from the apparent reluctance of many faculty to routinize such scrutiny that where there is smoke, there is fire.

I really don’t think that’s the issue for many scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Part of it, as I’ve suggested before, is that we know that some people with very valuable insights and ideas are also prone to odd parsings of texts and evidence. Foucault is a classic case of it. Even if you disagree with him on every philosophical particular, his work is still “good to think” for a practicing historian. If nothing else, he leads you to think about some things having a history that you never were inclined to regard as historical before. We also know that scholarly lives are in motion, and people who write a crap book at some point in their lives also write fantastic work at other points. That’s true even in the sciences: you don’t toss out path-breaking scientific work simply because the person who did it at a later point in their life turns into a raving loon.

I think thought that many of us twitch a little at the thought of microscopic scrutiny because we never quite make peace with the heuristic and practical limitations that we place on our research projects. That was brought home to me this past week when I read through a colleague and friend’s paper at our conference. She’s writing a transnational history of skin lighteners, and her work to date on the subject simply blows my mind. She’s found out all sorts of amazing things, and developed some really interesting interpretations of that history at various key points.

The reason her paper also makes me feel odd is that my first book addressed skin lighteners a bit. Reading my friend’s paper, I feel excitement but also a kind of strange sense of shame. Why didn’t I know all this then? Did I stop my work too soon? Not read enough? Not look at enough? She’s found sources, materials, facts, that I couldn’t even have guessed at when writing in 1989. Nothing that contradicts anything I said, or makes me out to be fundamentally wrong, but there’s just so much more information, nuance, texture.

I ought to feel great about this. It’s the normative picture of knowledge that we paint for outsiders, about how knowledge gets richer and better and deeper as time goes on. In the sciences, I think there’s far less anxiety about having past work revised, overturned, superceded, though even there, plenty of people rush to the barricades of the paradigms in which they were raised. In the humanities, I think the conflation of the personal quality of mind of scholars and the scholarship that they produce is what makes this kind of progression of knowledge an anxious rather than invariably welcome phenomenon. We are our books and articles, in some fashion, and so when someone comes along and says, “You were wrong” or “You didn’t know enough” or even just “There’s so much more to it”, you often feel a kind of faint twinge to the ego, an implied rebuke. It’s wrong to feel that or think that, but hard to shake the sensation nevertheless.

Margaret Soltan in the last couple of months has sometimes posted links to stories about the wretched state of many European university systems once you go below the level of the elite few institutions at the pinnacle of a given national system in Europe. Such universities are poorly resourced in almost every respect and burdened with indifferent and ridiculously hierarchical bureaucracies both inside and outside the university. Even systems that were previously not so badly off have been increasingly loaded down with utterly counter-productive forms of bureaucratic rationalization and attempts to improve “productivity”, as in the case of British higher education.

South Africa’s universities have long been staffed with simply amazing, world-class academic talent. The output of South Africa’s historians, for example, is the central scholarly fact of my own field of specialization, structuring every research project and academic debate. When apartheid died, the new South Africa inherited a system whose top institutions were comparable to prestigious institutions anywhere on the planet. It also inherited a system whose less selective or well-funded institutions were among the many victims of apartheid: dumping grounds, often a cruel joke aimed at hurting rather than helping the black majority.

There’s no question that a new South Africa needs new universities, and needs new purposes for its universities, new directions. There are a lot of people who need training, jobs, everything that a good educational system can provide, at all levels of instruction.

Of the things that made me nervous contemplating the directions South Africa might take, universities were high on my list. There was the possibility of a kind of “catastrophic success” that several postcolonial African nations had with deracializing educational systems. Before Zimbabwe fell to far greater disasters, it had a problem with producing far more highly trained high school and university graduates than the economy could possibly absorb. That’s not so terrible though. What would be worse is taking all of the accumulated strengths of the best South African universities and destroying them with ill-conceived smash-and-grab forms of bureaucratization and nationalist ideological programs.

I would say, based on a lot of reading and listening this past week, that there is a serious danger of that happening here, both the squeezing of existing universities to conform to narrow nationalist agenda and the intrusion of numerous ill-advised schemes of bureaucratic monitoring and reporting, as well as programmatic reorganization.

A lot of what I’m hearing about is being done in part to achieve greater centralization, ostensibly for better implementation of government objectives, and for reducing what bureaucrats now see as problematic forms of academic autonomy and independence. I’m not going to go into the details, except to say that a couple of the things I’ve heard about or read about from a variety of sources have made my jaw absolutely drop.

This is one of the things I’ve struggled desperately to get some of the internal and external critics of academia in the United States to understand. The people who are calling directly for new forms of governmental oversight or new regimes of internal bureaucracy within universities should really know better, but even some of the critics who don’t directly ask for anything of this sort (or who claim not to be doing so) have to recognize the dangers in the kind of complaints they’ve offering, at least in the manner they’re being offered. A lot of the same kind of talk elsewhere in the world is the direct cause of the ruination of higher education. The people who think American higher education is similarly ruined or valueless seriously have no understanding of just how bad things can get, and how quickly they can go bad.