The New York Sophist

I have a debate course nearly oversubscribed starting in a week. The course is a part of the University's new committment to having social justice imbedded in the curriculum.

I'm interested to see what topics they would like to turn into motions, and off we go. I'm teaching some light policy debate theory because it really does present some nice grounding for the students to figure out how to engage one another instead of just announcing the facts. 

I'm entering the class with one question: What is social justice? Would we know it if we saw it, or is that too easy? Is it a process, a moral attitude, a policy framework - what? 

I think I'll intervene with some ideas from the de-incarceration movement as well as questions about power and the U.S. Constitution - are the rights outlined in this document a good guideline or fundamental rights? 

I hope the students find the class valuable in a University and higher education system that communicate with great clarity, daily, how little they value the transformative, creative student experience and paint a future of having the attitude of consumerism, the attitude of a commodity, and the only path to success is being a commodity that consumes other commodities. 

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.

Is asking someone to consider the broader impact of supporting a policy out of place? Disrespectful? Is it hostile? Is it inconsiderate?

The Governor of Louisiana thinks so. An LSU Law professor asked students that if they felt comfortable voting for Donald Trump because of his policy agenda, they should consider how that makes people of different identities feel.

This is a great argument, one that is great because of the element of surprise. Most people who are voting purely on policy issues – something like the southern border for example – wouldn’t be connected to the rights of the groups that Trump and a lot of his supporters don’t appear to have respect for or care about.

This probably won’t go anywhere as in a classroom teaching a class a professor has a lot of protection. They have academic freedom and first amendment freedom. Professors often rely on saying controversial or surprising things to stimulate class discussion and thought. Where else in the world would highly-educated people be permitted to stimulate thought at this level without university protections?

It’s a great thing to think about for a lawyer: How would supporting the letter of the law, or a policy, have adverse communication effects that could be interpreted as a policy choice, or worse, a principled stand? Sometimes in choosing what we think is the best policy we are happy to let the lives and bodies of others serve as the lubricant to let the gears of our lives operate unimpeded. Occasionally this is done willingly, more often this is done out of a cursory awareness but an unwillingness or perception that there can be no other way. What this professor is suggesting is that perhaps the decision of how to vote or support policy should be done via a different kind of rubric, one that doesn’t force a choice.

The university today is often thought of as a job-training site. Students are there to learn how to do a job, and that’s it – it should be apolitical. This model strips the university of a number of its more important and vital functions which can be thought of through different narratives and discourses. The job training model is the least relevant namely because it would be so much cheaper to enter the job after high school and be taught by your employers. This wouldn’t take public money, it would be corporations footing the bill, and they would get employees who did things exactly the way they wanted. But most corporations would be against this; they want the university system. But why? Someone with a degree commands more salary and also probably has the tools to push back on poor decisions made by bosses, asking annoying questions and wanting reasons why the policies are the way they are.

Let’s think of the university as a seed bank, as the place that ideas we have rejected are allowed to live in a terrarium of sorts, where we can repopulate the world with the extinct ideas if we ever needed to. This is why universities teach things that are “useless” to many people outside the university. Teaching these things allow people to understand that these perspectives are around and available, and can be used if needed to address something, solve an issue, or provide some new light to old perceptions. The seed vault keeps ideas and methods alive and available in case society realizes that their quest for progress and innovation didn’t check the blind spot. This is insurance at the minimum.

But also the seed vault model encourages different ways of thinking by exposing students to types of thinking and approaches that seem incorrect and out of place. Academic freedom is essential to allow professors to introduce ways and approaches to thought that aren’t popular or automatic. We are the products of many things when it comes to our thought: The media, our relatives and friends, what we choose to read, watch, and listen to in our spare time. We need direct intervention in this, and that intervention is unlikely to come on the path of least resistance. That is, it has to come from an agitator who is protected and encouraged to agitate – a teacher.

A teacher cannot just say whatever they want. Academic freedom is the responsibility to be free to interrogate and speak however they wish about anything that will encourage or spark different ways of thinking. In this case, this incident is justified. The professor is not dismissing the people who voted for Donald Trump, he is pushing on the question of whether or not it is ethical to vote for someone purely on policy. What a question! Isn’t that what we are supposed to do, make logical decisions about what’s best for the country? This professor pushes back – best for whose country?

Unfortunately our elected officials are starting to think of dissent – even the intellectual exercise of dissent – is a threat to the country. Which is one of the biggest threats to the country that we could possibly face. If we are no longer permitted to question authority and criticize how we make decisions, what sort of democracy do we have at that point? Who is really free to express ideas? What kind of culture will that attitude produce?

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.

Known as the “grease trap” or “drip tray” or “Spill tray” of employment, the University Athletic department is one of the things that needs to be eliminated from the university in totality.

Why?

University athletics is like an addictive drug to the administration. They see it as easy mode, a way to attract tuition-paying students to the university and attract donations from wealthy alumni. These elements are unhealthy and damaging to a University ecosystem. Students who choose to go to a university for the sports team diminish the quality of instruction and education overall for all their peers. Furthermore, they receive a degree and dilute the power and respect for that degree once they go out into the world and show that the university accepts them. It’s better to not rely on that stream of revenue at all.

Alumni who have become wealthy have done so not via merit, because nobody becomes wealthy via merit. They also didn’t do it by following the rules – that is also not how it’s ever accomplished. By accident they have achieved a high level of success, making one decision instead of another, or moving an investment here or there. Most of it is just taking advantage of a market opportunity, something that a degree has a very, very low percentage in assisting. The idea that they became wealthy because of their degree is a non sequitur. It’s never researched very hard by any university.

Relying on these two sources of revenue makes the University lazy. It doesn’t have to look in the mirror and say, “What is our social value? What good do we bring to the world?” Instead, they define the good through alumni donations and new student applications. We are popular; we have wealthy alumns; we must be good. A more challenging approach would be to try to run a university without sports, and without taking money earmarked for sports.

A university without athletics will survive the coming superstorm of admissions and enrollment. Gen Z students don’t care about the athletic team except as a distant sort of entertainment when desperate. Instead they are interested in trying to help the world, trying to understand others, and genuinely learn something. This is quite a bit different from the Boomers and the Gen Xers that are funding intercollegiate athletics now out of a sense of masculine desperation as they age.

A university that would eliminate athletics would thrive, avoiding all the oversight and expenses of having these terrible athletic coaches, staff, and players on campus. They would be able to angle those resources toward study and collaboration spaces. They would be able to focus on the hard question of what to learn and why. No more nonsense. The university is often now the program that athletics sponsors. What the hell are we doing?