The New York Sophist

During the election , any election we are treated to numerous “persona on the street” interviews where people announce they are “ready for change.” Supporting change is like supporting our troops, willfully dodging the more difficult and concerning act of supporting what kind of change or what activities our troops are sent off to do. Supporting change in general – saying “it’s time for a change in X (the variable standing in for the place where government meets or the large, nondescript category of political activity like “the economy” or “Wall Street,” etc) is really saying that you don’t want to get into the important, specific, researchable elements of why you should support something. You just can’t be bothered to be engaged.

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This reminds me of the shocking, and continuously shocking frequency of poor opinion among those who should know better, i.e. professors. Many expressed to me no concern that young people were devouring the Harry Potter books at breakneck speed, claiming “well, at least they are reading.” When I pointed out they would have a different opinion if it turned out they were reading Mein Kampf, I was met with silence. Many colleagues opposed this with that bane of evil, the mobile phone: “At least they are reading and not on their phone all the time.” With the average mental age and culture of my colleagues hovering around 78 years old, I suppose they wouldn’t know that what one primarily does on a phone is read and write. Professors pine for the epistolary age, not even thinking about counting the thousands of words that students write every day on text message, mostly about the ineptitude of the professor to provide a meaningful class. I resolve in 2025 to eliminate my expectation that a professor should know better.

Supporting change, or reading, is also like supporting the university, or tenure. What good are these things as they are? Should they be defended for merely existing? There are many good arguments out there for tenure or for having universities, but we have abandoned most of them. In our froth to retain students, stay open, be competitive, we have reduced the entire arsenal of arguments to one: You’ll have no chance of getting a good job without these skills. But this begs several questions: What good jobs are out there that are directly connected to the university experience? And secondly, does the university teach or provide skills?

It’s anecdotal to be sure, but most of my students are ready to go for a career that isn’t much of one. They will work at one place, then another, then another – skills notwithstanding. What does work is their ability to speak, listen, communicate, and most importantly – rearticulate ideas back to the people who are sloppily groping their way toward a conclusion. The university provides a practice ground for expressing opinion in a meaningful way, a way that gets people to speak back to them or rearticulate their ideas to them so they can be re-expressed in a different way. This practice is somewhat essential not only for career oriented people, or someone who wants a job, but for people who plan to exist and function in a democracy. Expressing doubts about an opinion seems like an ability that the university could really get behind, particularly in a world where we frequently see someone shot or stabbed because of a disagreement about who was in line first.

Skill is a fraught term at best, generally a cover for discrimination – “She didn’t have the requisite skills for the position” is an unassailable position to take for an employer that discourages pushback. However, critical approaches on what counts as a skill reveal the term to often serve as a discriminatory smokescreen. Irena Grugulis, Chris Warhurst, and Ewart Keep note in the introduction to their book The Skills that Matter, most are your race, class, and luck of your educational experiences at a young age. Transferable skills tend to gravitate around whiteness, maleness, and middle-classness. So serving the corporate demand for “communication skills” or “teamwork” need to be interrogated by the university to determine if this is something that is actually demanded. Better yet, the University could just ignore the corporate demand for skill and teach appreciation, practice, and evaluation of critical thought through speaking and writing.

Tenure is another thing that’s easy to defend without a lot of specifics. Defending this as the ability to set the agenda for your research and then what becomes of your teaching seems pretty straightforward. The discussion of this kind of research freedom becomes easy to eliminate when the university, such as mine, pulls back all the research support it can. There’s little value to a tenured position if there is no sabbatical, no course reduction, no office to help you secure a grant or apply for a fellowship, and so on. A redefinition of tenure as having the expertise to evaluate whether students have demonstrated evidence of grasping, understanding, grappling with, or taking into consideration the elements of the course could be helpful. Things like assessment on objective measures fail because we then seek out what is easy to measure and measure it. It’s much more difficult and complex for a teacher to make a professional judgement on the quality of a student’s work and defend it. What is it based on? The professor should be able to show some example of what that quality would be like and explain the gap. This is the function of a rubric, as far as I understand it, but so many rubrics are boxes that contain points and serve as ways to distribute points to students who, from the first day of class, are preparing their case for passing during the last week based on the distinction between a 2.5 and a 3. The ancient argument of the sortie consumes many professors’ time at the end of the term as they hear “Well there’s not much difference here between getting 3 points and getting 5.” This reduces the professor and the student to equals who are at the mercy of the “syllabus as a contract” and interpreting it based on the objective standards of point distribution based on the rules established in this document. Instead, the professor should work on the articulation of what excellence is and how to meet it, with them as the gatekeeper of their field. Tenure is about quality standards, not a permanent protection from political disagreement. It should be thought of as where the power to interpret quality lies. This can of course extend to research as well at those institutions that are not quite to the point of being a “skill factory” like mine is quickly becoming. These confrontations on the level of critical interpretation are vital for students to practice articulation of why and how they might have met these difficult, non-objective standards of excellence set up by someone very well read, very practiced in what they are teaching.

Most young people are not invested in a career unless they want to be a doctor, an airplane designer, a bridge inspector – something like that. There are more than a few of them, and for these disciplines there are hard and fast abilities that need to be learned. Teachers are the best resource for determining what and how these things should be learned and understood. The core curriculum and the liberal arts come in to the grey areas of this – what to say when your boss indicates that perhaps a reduction in final checks of a wing, or a reduction in the quality of bolts on construction of a bridge would save millions, how will the former student engage? Will they feel a need to, or will they feel like they’ve done their part for the points in the box? Will they have a taste for engaging with those who are empowered to decide in ways that matter?

Getting into the specifics of change, reading, tenure, skill, etc is what the university should be up to. It should be a begged question detector – opening up the more difficult and taxing conversation that we are too lazy to have these days. Much easier to binge a series on streaming media which requires all the effort of a finger to indicate that you are “still watching” – yes, you are active! The university can be one of the last places where we have space and time to have this kind of tough and taxing engagement, an example of how it can be rewarding to “end” a conversation unsure, unrewarded, and unexpectedly thinking about it hours later when trying to go to sleep.

The responses have been poor, to understate it. I see little action plan and a lot of reaction to something that was apparently “hard to imagine” – most of the population voting against foreigners and for America first. I’m not sure who finds that hard to imagine, but it shouldn’t be rhetoricians. But here we are – everyone upset and calling for the most extreme responses in scholarship, teaching, or what have you. Some favorites: Argumentation can’t be taught anymore and that we should only work on the scholarship of fascism.

I have some other ideas that I think are pretty good responses to the election, and none are totalizing or extreme. I think that campaign discourse really locks us into a bad frame when it comes to post-election communication: “This is the most important election of our lifetimes!” (this was said to me when I first voted in Bush vs. Clinton vs. Perot). “Your vote your voice!” and now “the country is doomed!” – we did have a civil war where states turned against the Federal government, and somehow we survived. This crazy extreme response is a bit ungrounded. Here are some things I am thinking about:

Assign more Constitutional reading and assignments

I think that the obsession we have with fact-based assignments for argumentation and/or public speaking is a death sentence for invention. Creating arguments about possibility should be what we are teaching, not “how to look up a peer-reviewed article.” For Christ’s sake, they won’t have access to them in a few years because we continue to support ridiculous paywalls from greedy bastards like Taylor and Francis, who do nothing but count money. Instead, show them how to craft reasonable claims based on past claims, arguments, and moments of controversy. I think rooting that in the Constitution and controversies about rights or governmental powers is a great way to root them in research and evidence that is not paywalled, but free to access as well as showing them how speculative arguments are based on facts/data/information and attempt to move decisions/actions/attitudes based on that. I think this will be a helpful way to intervene in what I see from the national election – an inability to imagine otherwise (both students and faculty are struggling with this). The Constitution is an imperfect document written by imperfect people that has been misunderstood in many ways over its life, then corrected with newer, better misunderstandings. And it’s a discourse that holds power over our daily lives. It’s the perfect pitch upon which to teach some rhetorical practices, particularly ones that claim understanding, truth, or historical continuity about something.

Change Tenure Standards

We have a wealth of amazing research out there, buried in a journal that isn’t accessible unless someone pays over $50 to access it. Most Americans (and even more people globally) don’t have access to our journals. Let’s change our departmental tenure standards to encourage faculty to try to aim their work at public(s). We don’t want to be in another situation where scholars face a devastating election result and all they can do is post links to a limited number of offset copies of their 2017 essay discussing how failures in communication could lead to a fascist state. We need to be in that discussion, as it’s happening, in the publications that people are linking to, sharing, quoting, and texting their family about. We need to encourage graduate students to write in public-facing ways. This intervention can help those who can’t afford or don’t need college to get access to some of our insights and lessons. Furthermore, it can have the added benefit of offering something – anything – against the rising tide of discourse that says universities are just forced liberal education camps. Let’s show them what we are up to.

Create a campus culture of debate

One of the biggest benefits for the plutocrats of election discourse is how distasteful, painful, and horrifying it is to have to talk to a liberal/MAGA person. By not engaging one another as humans capable of changing our attitudes about things, we engage one another as problems, issues, or blights. Democracy, like driving a car, is a cooperative endeavor even though it appears to be an individual act. Encouraging debates, that is the tradition of switch-side debate, where people advocate for positions that are not their own hardcore commitments, allows people to experience debate not as the performance of passionate authenticity but instead the attempt to reach audiences and have them reconsider their attitude about something. The focus on the role of language and rhetoric in shaping what we feel and think is vital to democracy. Changing position is the only real politics available if you want to live in a democracy – you have to believe people can change their minds. We’re losing this idea if we haven’t already. Encouraging such activity as a normal part of the educated life is an important change that I hope to try to push for going forward.

Dialectical Thinking instead of Critical Thinking

Too often critical thinking becomes a crutch for a preference: “That’s not critical thinking” is really “You don’t agree with me so you can’t think.” We need a better way to teach critical thinking then just getting the correct position on an issue or the best position that we can think of. We must prepare students for future problems of which we can only imagine on our darkest days. One way of doing this is teaching a dialectical approach to thought. Teaching students, or demonstrating to them, that as they think and speak about something the relationship to it changes, therefore it changes in their mind to something else as they are speaking about it would be the way to go. Not sure how to do this one. I’m reading a lot about dialectical method and trying to imagine how this would go in the classroom. I’m starting to think that good debate pedagogy and practice winds up here eventually. But we don’t see good debate pedagogy these days. The focus here is the attention to the statement of thought – David Bohm style of freezing the articulation for examination of that itself – in the midst of the discussion/debate/dialogue about the larger issue at hand. This could be done with some more practice perhaps and will really help students see the university as a different place, something really impossible to predict from their high school experiences but all the more lovely for it.

These are my initial responses to the election. I will have more as I think more. Let’s try to avoid the reactions. Leave that to the journalists. Scholars should be better. Professors should profess something other than doom.

I just saw an English professor post on Facebook that taking students to the theater “Solves nothing,” but is a “nice distraction from things.”

We are doomed if English professors have given up on the political, social, and psychological transformations that theater provides.
I think we need to force people to read Kenneth Burke.

I’d like to say I have a new job but this would be equivocation. What’s really happening is my relationship with my job is totally different than it used to be due to distance in many ways.

The first kind of distance – geographical. I now live an hour and 20 minutes from the office. This is very different than a bus ride, or a 15 minute walk to the University. I miss those days but I also don’t. I think the commute is just the price for the higher quality of life that I have out here in deep suburban New York.

I do not miss living in New York City, even with all the nice food and the museums. I am totally ok with sitting here and reading in the afternoon. Or typing a post like this one instead of reading or writing something directly engaging with work.

Another form of distance is identity. I no longer identify with the University as a member of the community, if I ever did. There was a time when this was somewhat important to me, that the University reflect my values or be doing things that are not actively harmful to my work or position in the world.

Now I just accept the University as a failed structure that allows me to have the position I have. I am quite distant from caring much about the goals, vision statements, or plans of the University at all. What I’m focused on is providing the best classes I can for the students and hope to provide them some value and the means to craft value in some way. That’s really it. I also like the library and being able to study or read things to improve my perspective on the world, the people in it, the field, and my own work.

I am distant in another way too – I don’t feel connected to the events on campus. I would like to attend a lot of events that look interesting but there’s no way to justify a three hour drive for a one-hour event (or perhaps less) on a day when I wouldn’t normally be on campus. This issue creates a relationship where I cannot participate in the community in the way that I was used to or accustomed to. I hardly went to the events as it is, but now that they are even more distant it’s tough to feel connected to a community, even one where you could imagine going to different events.

The most difficult distance is the one from my old self. I recently saw a photo come up on my Amazon Echo of me in the first month of working there and I looked very different – a cheerful sort of optimism I no longer recognize. The hardest thing about the recognition and acceptance of the new job is that I really do have to accept this position, this subjectivity is long dead. That’s tough for me regardless of how cynical I am!

I think I can remain hopeful and positive about reading and writing, about posting here, about making videos and teaching. At least I hope that I can remain hopeful!

Photo by Taneli Lahtinen on Unsplash

The most valuable things for me in college were reading books and discussing them (or listening to the professor talk about them). The other valuable thing was being in clubs, meeting people and making relationships.

I don’t think either of these are possible any longer. Students are on campus a minimal amount of time due to the cost and that runs interference on these kinds of relationships – there’s no downtime. Secondly, they are taking 18 hours a term to reduce cost as well, which obviously interferes.

I also don’t think students can or want to read a book anymore. They try, but they can’t do it. So assigning a book is like assigning something they don’t know how to do. But they won’t say it, because they feel they should know how to do it.

So assigning a chapter or two is all you can do, but the students are so well-trained to think of school as cutting corners, trickery, breaking rules, deception of the teacher that you really don’t know if they read it or not.

Therefore the only reason I wanted to be a professor – to share in these experiences from the other side, to make them possible, is no longer possible.