Reasoning With Zealots While Under Attack by Those Same Zealots

An old friend of mine had a go-to joke that made me laugh every time.  Whenever we were watching a TV show or movie, or talking about a natural disaster, or reacting to news about an unprovoked attack by an animal or a person, my friend would say: "What if we tried to reason with them?"  A flock of locusts descends on a town: "What if we tried to reason with them?"  A series of tornadoes tears through the Midwest: "What if we tried to reason with them?"  Rage zombies dismember and eat humans in a post-apocalyptic hellscape: "What if we tried to reason with them?"

In a December 2024 column, I referred to a vivid example of the naive idea that my friend was mocking:

The second movie in the "Mad Max" saga, the 1981 classic "The Road Warrior," includes a scene in which The Humungus, the leather-daddy leader of a murderous post-apocalyptic biker gang, makes an offer to a band of survivors who are holed up in a fortified oil refinery.  He shouts: "Just walk away.  Give me the pump, the oil, the gasoline, and the whole compound, and I'll spare your lives.  Just walk away.  I will give you safe passage in the Wasteland.  Just walk away and there will be an end to the horror."

A terrified survivor says to her compatriots: "You heard what he said!  It sounds reasonable!  We don't have to die!  All we have to do is walk away!"  Everyone rolls their eyes, because obviously there would be an immediate slaughter of anyone who walked away.

More recently, though less colorfully, I described the tendency among "sober-minded" Democratic leaders as well as academic types (like me) to imagine that we can always reason with our opponents, if we could only take a "to be fair" approach to those who aim to destroy us.  In "'Will Self-Criticism Save Colleges?' Is This a Joke?" on March 31 of this year, I asked rhetorically: "[W]hat 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."

Today, I return to this topic to address it from a different angle.  Even if my argument in that March column were wrong, which would be to say that academics should generally be self-critical and give our opponents ammunition to use against us, there is still the question of whether there are times when an otherwise honorable strategy is a bad idea, for strategic reasons.  That is, even if we could figure out a way to reason with the locusts, the tornadoes, the zombies, and The Humungus, might there be times when trying to have a good-faith conversation might not be the best use of our time and efforts?

I emphasize that I am in no way backing off of my arguments in that March column.  As I will emphasize below, there truly is no "reasonable-ing" our way out of the current crisis, because the other side is not misinformed or confused but rather is fully aware of what it is doing.  Even so, a recent column by a fellow academic caught my eye.  It did so in the bad way that results in essays that get my attention being the focus of columns like this one, but it did have the surely unintended effect of making the anti-academia argument even weaker.  And that is interesting.

In "Why Higher Ed Won’t Look Itself in the Mirror," published last month in The Chronicle of Higher Education (paywalled, unfortunately), a professor in Penn's Graduate School of Education argues that the problem with professors is that we are stubborn.  Worse, we are snobs: "[C]ondescending dismissal is also a terrific way to avoid the hard questions about our own complicity in the degradation of the university."  Indeed, the sub-headline relies on that dreaded accusation as well: "It’s easier to dismiss our critics with condescension than to reform."

I should say that the author of that piece, Professor Jonathan Zimmerman, was previously unfamiliar to me.  That is not n slam (as in, "Who the heck has even heard of this guy?") but simply to say that we work in different fields and thus would be unlikely to run across one another.  And his previous pieces for The Chronicle, including critiques of the capitulations by Columbia and Northwestern in the face of Trumpian threats, suggest that he is hardly a wingnut.  This is in contrast to, say, the historian who is loudly leaving Harvard after 40 years (to move to the University of Florida, natch) while reportedly "alleg[ing] that efforts to diversify graduate programs and faculties had amounted to an 'unspoken protocol' that for years ensured that white men were systematically discriminated against."  Oy.  White grievance again.

Zimmerman is not that.  Unfortunately, his recent column tries to make a virtue of a different kind of obliviousness.  He begins by recounting an incident at an academic conference in which he asked (during a Q&A session) whether academics should look in the mirror and blame themselves and "wondered what those of us who work in higher education might have done — or not done — to bring about this awful moment."  He says that no one answered his question, but someone did object to a metaphor that he had used at the end of his question (the kind of objection that right-wingers love to use while rolling their eyes about "PC culture").  Zimmerman then writes: "So the panel began with a diatribe about Donald Trump’s assault on free speech and it concluded with a warning to watch our words."

What?  The complaints about Trump's attacks on free speech are not about watching our words.  Trump and Republican governors are saying that no one can say things with which they disagree, and universities are indeed firing people for seeming not to hate, say, DEI and trans people as much as Trumpists want everyone to hate them.  Saying to someone, "Hey, you used imagery that makes some people uncomfortable" in no way stops that person from saying what Zimmerman wanted to say.  And even if what he wanted to say was deliberately meant to offend, being told that he has offended people does not infringe on his freedom of speech.  "Your free speech offended some people here" is free speech.

So the column did not get off to a strong start, to say the least.  But the substance of the author's claim is that there are a lot of things that are genuinely wrong with higher education.  He is concerned because we have supposedly stopped teaching the virtues of democracy and seek only to vilify America ("[I]n some quarters the West itself was imagined as a source of oppression rather than liberation"), because we have de-emphasized teaching in favor of research, and because we are apparently no longer presenting both sides of every issue.

We then are served with this summarizing assertion: "Professors generally refuse to admit any of this, which compounds the problem. We are like little children who close their eyes in the hopes that nobody can see them."  Again, what?  Nothing in the paragraphs that went before that claim includes anything that academia writ large "refuse[s] to admit," and certainly no one imagines that no one else can see us.  We have been having vigorous arguments about whether it is the job of academics to rah-rah so-called Western civilization forever.  We go through waves of reform efforts to improve teaching.  We debate whether, say, it is my job as a tax professor to assign readings by authors who claim against all evidence that tax cuts more than pay for themselves.  Should biologists teach "intelligent design"?  Should geologists be "open-minded" and assign texts asserting that the earth is 6000 years old?

Have those decades of debate solved the big problems?  Of course not, because these are arguments about balancing, and there is always a way to argue that something is out of balance.  I have strong opinions about some of those things, but the fact that I have not gotten my way does not mean that academics are refusing to look themselves in the mirror.  It means that they did not see things the way I do, which is hardly a surprise.  We professors are not pretending that the outside world cannot see us, but we are saying that those people (both inside and outside of academia) who pretend that these issues are easy to fix and therefore that disagreements are all in bad faith are selling simplistic nonsense.

Does that make us "condescending"?  Well, what is the right way to say, "You know, what you're talking about here is a lot more complicated than you seem to think, and you're wrong to accuse others of stubbornly refusing to listen to you, because you're misdiagnosing the problem"?  I suppose that one can say "I disagree with you" in a zillion different ways, with all kinds of tonal variations that run the gamut from sympathy to exasperation, but it is tendentious in the extreme to claim that academia is in trouble because professors stubbornly refuse to agree that they are complicit in the problems on which Zimmerman focuses.

Again, however, the larger point here is not whether academia is full of a bunch of stubborn, out-of-touch people who refuse to engage in self-reflection.  I clearly think that such a characterization is nonsense -- even though I could write for days about the times when I have seen things that I wish we would change -- but the question that I promised to address earlier in this column is whether there is a time when self-criticism that would otherwise be sensible must be avoided.

That is, with the decades of attacks by Republicans on higher education having metastasized into what the Trumpists are now doing, what should we do?  My column in March argued in essence that we should never hand the other side ammunition by saying that "we kinda suck, right?"  That is not because there are no ways in which we do kinda suck (all institutions -- and people -- do), but because the response from those who are attacking us is not going to be, "Well, let's talk about that and reach a reasonable solution." It will be: "See, even they admit that they totally suck.  Let's finish the job and get rid of all those losers."

Because of the nature of the people who attack higher education, I have no basis on which to believe that there would ever be a time when it would be wise to reason with them.  People who are not interested in reason cannot be moved by reason.  But if there were times when trying to do that might make sense, this is not it.

Consider, for example, the not-unreasonable complaints about university teaching.  Zimmerman's argument is that the public at large lost faith in academia because we stopped caring (or perhaps never cared) about being good teachers.  More than that, he suggests that from within the maelstrom of Trumpists' attacks on higher education, we should be trying to improve the quality of classroom teaching.

But why -- or, better yet, why in the world would we do that now?  The idea is apparently that we can improve matters by making a genuine effort to address an issue that supposedly helps to explain the public's purported dislike for us.  But that is worse than naive, because it presumes that if the public in general started to like the cut of our jib, we would suddenly rack up political wins.  Hmmm.  Iran war?  Reproductive rights?  Gun control?  Ending ICE abuses?  Childhood vaccines?  The public in general has very made itself clear, on all of those issues, that it opposes by large margins the Republicans' positions.  Yet no one even bothers to ask whether the next mass shooting will dislodge the ruling party from its highly unpopular position.

Back to Zimmerman, who notes that Trump went after science because of the money but then claims that "the big problem in higher education is not our scientific-research apparatus, which was the envy of the world before Trump took a sledgehammer to it. It is our abandonment of the ideal that propelled us to build up universities in the first place: the cultivation of citizens."  Is that true?  Which is actually two questions: (1) Is it true that we abandoned the ideal of the cultivation of citizens? and (2) Is it true that that is "the big problem" here?

The answer to (1) is only "yes" if one thinks that "cultivation of citizens" has a clear meaning, one favored by the people who get misty-eyed about teaching "American greatness."  And the answer to (2) is not only "Hell no," but again, "Hell no, because fixing that problem would change nothing about what the American (and global) Right wants to do to higher education."  The "big problem" is a concerted assault on higher education's very foundations, an assault that is funded and led by a moneyed class that does not like the suggestion that they might not deserve their privilege.

These are not people who are upset that college professors are not given adequate training to become excellent classroom teachers.  They disagree with the very idea of the value of higher education.  The hapless, habitual former presidential candidate Rick Santorum once responded to Barack Obama's call to make higher education available to all young Americans by sneering, "What a snob!" then adding that Obama wanted to "indoctrinate" people in "his image."  Trump put Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department in his first term, then one-downed himself with Linda McMahon in his second.  He and his supporters drive top talent out of the country and consider it a win.  

What if we tried to reason with them?

- Neil H. Buchanan