William Egginton, The New York Times, Oct. 6, 2018
The problem is not the subject matter. It’s that these scholars are marginalized in overly specialized fields.
Dr. Egginton is the author of “The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today’s College Campuses.”
Image from article, with caption: Harvard University campus
Another culture war, another hoax inflicted on left-wing academics.
This time the hoax was an elaborate, yearlong series of 20 article submissions that resulted in seven accepted papers and four publications, all in journals devoted to fields the hoaxers characterized as “grievance studies.” As they wrote in the exposé published in the journal Aero, “Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant,” within certain fields in the humanities, whose “scholars increasingly bully students, administrators and other departments into adhering to their worldview.”
The reactions have been predictable, with journal editors humiliated and defensive and some commentators denouncing the authors’ ethically questionable methodology, while others reveled in yet another demonstration of the intellectual bankruptcy of postmodern theory and identity politics. But whether one feels the urge to laugh or cry about it, the success of the hoax and its reception say a lot about how universities contribute to and feed on the tribalism of our civic culture today.
According to the defenders of the hoax, it shows that the academic fields singled out are lacking in scholarly rigor. As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker tweeted, “Is there any idea so outlandish that it won’t be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?” But the hoax reveals something arguably more troubling: how the drive to hyper-specialization that has become the rule in universities undermines the work the humanities should be doing for the healthy functioning of a pluralistic society.
The problem is not that philosophers, historians or English professors are interested in, say, questions of how gender or racial identity or bias is expressed in culture or thought. Gender and racial identity are universally present and vitally important across all the areas that the humanities study and hence should be central concerns.
The problem, rather, is that scholars who study these questions have been driven into sub-specializations that are not always seen as integral to larger fields or to the humanities as a whole. Sometimes they have been driven there by departments that are reluctant to accept them; sometimes they have been driven there by their own conviction that they alone have the standing to investigate these topics.
In either case, because graduate students and junior faculty in the humanities are expected to produce journal articles and citations much in the way graduate students and junior faculty in the sciences are, and because they are discouraged by tenure committees and sometimes by their own ideological provincialism from thinking broadly and connecting their work to larger questions of universal relevance, there is an increasing incentive to publish in journals with narrow purviews that are read by correspondingly few scholars. The proliferation of journals that few people are invested in, along with the pressure to produce ever greater numbers of articles, leads to more work being published with fewer safeguards guaranteeing its quality.
Furthermore, hyper-specialization in the humanities means that the very people who should be thinking broadly about culture and ideas, and teaching students to encounter and engage with a variety of positions and opinions, are becoming accustomed to defining their interests in the narrowest possible terms. They read and exchange ideas in hermetic academic bubbles, in very much the same way that the public has increasingly tended to read and exchange ideas in hermetic news bubbles.
How the media has responded to the story of the hoax rehearses this very tendency and reveals something about how identity politics is being weaponized in the service of tribalism. The Wall Street Journal broke the story in the form of an opinion essay by Jillian Kay Melchior headlined “Fake News Comes to Academia,” feeding a popular narrative on the right that universities are overrun by “tenured radicals” hawking fringe ideas on their innocent students. With stories like this in the news, it’s hardly a surprise that according to a recent Pew poll, political party affiliation predicts whether one believes universities are having a positive or a negative effect on the country.
The solution is not to attack those scholars who are devoted to studying marginalized people. The solution, rather, is to ensure that the study of the marginalized not itself be marginalized — or self-marginalized. The experiences of racial and gender minorities are essential aspects of history, literature and philosophy because they are experiences essential to all societies, and always have been. When disciplines are reformed to include these stories as well as the stories of how they became excluded in the first place, then they are benefiting knowledge as a whole.
But if we encourage the balkanization of these fields in the misguided belief that the humanities should be structured and evaluated on the model of the sciences, or in the misguided belief that only certain scholars have the authority to investigate them, then we’ve taken away their greatest insight: All human experience is relevant to the greater story of humanity.
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