"Will Self-Criticism Save Colleges?" Is This a Joke?
Imagine that you regularly receive notification after notification asking you to upgrade from an unpaid subscription to "premium" or some such thing on an app, a streaming service, or some other joyful convenience of modern life. Yes, I know that this strains credulity, and perhaps I am the only person who receives such persistent messages. No one ever complains about such things, right? But please stay with me.
After receiving a flood of such messages trying to get them to pay for supposedly superior service, a person might think: "Gee, I'm tired of these messages, but they won't go away. But wait! Maybe if I finally give in and buy it, this will all stop happening, right?" If you are a person who would harbor such a hope, you might be a Democrat. You also might be an academic. Allow me to explain.
Giving in and buying the product will obviously not stop the onslaught. In fact, it will make matters worse, because you have now revealed yourself as someone who falls for an upsell. There is also a decent chance that your name will be added to a list that other marketers will use to target suckers -- er, "suggestible" people. The marketers do not say, "Oh, that's nice. They said yes, and I'll leave them alone from now on." They salivate while saying, "Wow, that idiot paid for our crappy Premium package! Time to offer them super-premium, then super-duper-premium, then diamond premium, then elite ultra-premium with a cherry on top. Let's bleed 'em dry."
Why am I analogizing this to Democrats and professors? Because both (and of course there is meaningful overlap of the two groups) have demonstrated over time that they think that giving an inch means giving an inch, full stop, which means believing that the party that has taken an inch will say, "Oh, that was reasonable of them. How lovely! We can all get along now."
This was, after all, the fundamental idea behind the self-devouring Democrats who first created the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980's, then took over the Clinton Administration (getting the new president to drop any pretense of being an actual Democrat), and then spent the ensuing decades telling everyone that the best strategy is always to give more ground. The mantra of the Clintonian "triangulators" was, in essence, "Republicans say we suck, and to be fair, we do. Maybe they'll be nice to us if we act more like them."
How did that go? The Democrats-shouldn't-dare-acting-like-Democrats crowd soon created multiple conservative groups (masquerading as non-conservatives) with names like Third Way. Get it? Because heaven forbid that we align with one of the two existing ways. Democrats? Ick! By the time of the 2020 election cycle, they had pushed the party so far to the right that it was easy for many Democrats to say, "Well, Ronald Reagan had it right when [fill in the blank]," and mean it. Only three weeks ago, The American Prospect (very much not a triangulation magazine) ran a piece with the brilliant headline: "Centrists: Better Things Aren’t Possible," with the telling sub-headline: "Third Way’s strategy session for Democratic moderates lacked any vision other than a hatred for progressives."
And did Republicans reward Democrats for moving their way? No, they simply kept moving further to the right, becoming more openly bigoted and authoritarian, and going from calling Democrats "pathetic" to accusing them of being "groomers." One can almost hear the Biden types thinking to themselves: "But I was so reasonable and told them that they had a point! I never imagined that they would then move on to accusing my side of being child sexual abusers. Why did my accommodating and fair-minded demeanor not win them over?"
The answer is, as it has always been, that Republicans are bullies who not only smell weakness but revel in exploiting it. Both Clintons, Obama, and Biden -- along with the other Democratic nominees whom the triangulators deemed acceptable, like John Kerry and Kamala Harris -- said over and over again that they were reasonable Democrats, by which they meant that they would ignore their own voters in pursuit of some mythical swing voter somewhere. Did Republicans respond by treating the Clintons, Obama, or Biden with respect during their years in office? No. No, they did not.
On the academic side of things, it is a deeply ingrained belief among professors that every accusation should be taken seriously. Years ago, I started dating a woman who was not a professor, and after a few weeks of getting to know each other, she said something like this:
You know, every time I ask you a question about yourself, you first tell me why it might be reasonable to think five bad things about you, only to finally get around to saying that none of those things are true -- probably. The answer to, say, "Are you going to tell me the truth?" should be "Yes," not "Well, I have to admit that there are circumstances in which even honest people might not tell the truth, and although I hope you'll believe me that I'm honest with you, it would be entirely understandable if you thought otherwise." Just stop it!
In general, I think academics' default move toward saying, "Well, to be fair ...," should be a good thing. If I thought otherwise, I would not be so ready to go there in almost every situation. Self-reflection is not only a productive habit, but the alternative to self-reflection is in the extreme being unwilling to brook criticism or ever change. When I say, for example, that although I reject trickle-down economics, I would believe in it if the evidence ever were to show that it works the way conservatives say it works, I mean it. It is difficult to imagine being any other way.
But what happens when this "to be fair" default goes meta? That is, what happens when academics say about academia, as the triangulators do about liberal Democrats, "Well, it's true that we suck"? Do we see a meeting of the minds? No, we see a feeding frenzy on the right as they destroy the very people who hand them the tools to criticize academia.
I was thus not surprised, but still depressed, when I saw the headline that I reproduced in the title of this column -- "Will Self-Criticism Save Colleges?" -- on the March 9 Newsletter of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The first article in the newsletter was: "The Self-Flagellating President: Higher ed finds new critics — in the mirror," with this sub-headline: "More campus leaders are openly agreeing with some right-wing complaints about the sector, and making the case that change will help restore public trust."
Again, this muscle-memory reaction springs from a good place. Being open to criticism is indeed healthy. The problem is that the criticism to which the self-flagellators are agreeing is some combination of utter nonsense and hyped-up anecdotes repeated on a loop. The same people who claimed that "cancel culture" was destroying campuses are now lining up to say, "And look, even those liberals admit that it's true." That will not "restore public trust." It will give critics ammunition to tell the public, "See we told ya so!"
Has self-criticism led to a meeting of the minds? Of course not. It merely creates more momentum in the wrong direction, to the point where Maya Krishnan, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, felt the need to write: "Why It’s So Hard for Professors to Say Anything Good About Academe: Against the cheap fashion of denigrating our institutions."
Yet it is not people like Krishnan who are being given the biggest megaphone. Even though The Chronicle did publish that piece, that magazine is in the midst of a veritable orgy of negative coverage of its own subject, to the point where the magazine is now touting Harvard's Danielle Allen as "Academe's most interesting reformer," gushing that Allen "is far stranger than the label ‘moderate’ might suggest. She seems irresistibly drawn to difference, disagreement, competing ways of representing the world." And then: "If you read one thing about higher education this week, make it 'Can Danielle Allen Save Academe From Itself?'"
I did read it, and it is drivel, but it is precisely the kind of self-flagellating drivel that lights up the eyes of people who like to congratulate themselves by saying, "Well surely some self-criticism can only be a good thing, right?" To be useful, criticism has to have substance, and other than the constant repetition of how academia is too something, there is nothing there. Academia does not have to be saved from itself but from hucksters who give ground until there is no ground left to defend.
Are there real-world consequences to this? Of course there are. This is why the American right is gleefully shredding the country's higher education system, which had long been one of the US's most valuable assets. The self-criticism is not taken as the intellectually honest exercise that it is presumably intended to be. It is used as ammunition.
For example, on March 20, the Trump Department of Justice sued Harvard, trying to claw back about a billion dollars of grant money and to cancel all legally required payments of future grants that have been memorialized in existing contracts. As Professor Dorf's column here last Wednesday explains, the complaint asserts that Harvard falsely assured the government it was complying with Title VI when in fact (according to the complaint), Harvard was indifferent to and actively engaged in antisemitism.
I cannot add to Professor Dorf's analysis (or if I could, I see no need to gild that lily), but the point is that the Trump lawsuit against Harvard is an outstanding example of the perils of self-criticism. In fact, most of the alleged evidence of antisemitism cited in the complaint is drawn from a self-critical report that Harvard itself created.
Obviously, people and institutions should be open to new ideas and the possibility of change. Even so, the atmosphere within which higher education now finds itself is about as predatory as one could imagine. One side is saying, "Yeah, we suck, so we'll try to do better," and the other side is saying, "No, everything you could ever do sucks, because you just admitted that you suck. Our goal has always been to destroy you, so thanks for making that easier for us, losers."
And now, I will respond to an upgrade request from a streaming service. That will solve everything.
- Neil H. Buchanan