The central argument of this editorial by Boaz Barak, from a few days ago, is that we “restore trust” in academic institutions by maintaining “professionalism” in the classroom, by refusing to “be political,” which here means taking partisan positions. “When we erode the boundaries between the academic and the political, we ultimately harm both.” Many people have raised major objections to this. Historians, for instance, might very reasonably ask how to avoid politics when teaching about the 20th century, even outside the United States. And of course this one more in a long line of NYT editorials written from and perhaps mainly about Harvard.
There really are two main points being made here, and they are worth being clear about because this editorial is not the only place in which they are expressed. The first is a matter of principle, maybe even ontology. If there can be no policy without some kinds of scientific knowledge – social science, administrative science at a minimum – so too it is the case that science, even in this broad sense, cannot tell us precisely what policy should be, what the state should do. Yes, accepted!
The second claim is of a very different order. It is that people, by and large, are resentful of universities and especially of the cultural elitism they are thought to represent – and as a corollary that using one’s privileged position in the university to advocate for specific policies is, in fact, counter-productive and is only likely to draw the fire of the politicians who want to capitalize on the generalized resentment that we are assured exists. Barak says that the current administration is doing irreparable harm to the institutions – but, still, the way to combat it is to give evidence of professionalism beyond the partisan. If these people could be convinced by evidence we would not be here.
I am sympathetic to the desire for professionalism. Even sympathetic as I believe I am to the notion of the university as a space apart both from the public and from the private – or, perhaps, overlapping with both – understanding the kind of work that goes on in the classroom as this writer does leads nowhere in particular. We can agree that collaborative work on hard problems, often leading to failure, has a salutary effect. But I do not agree that “trying and failing to solve hard problems teaches students that there is such a thing as an objective truth and our first attempts to find it are often wrong.” If the student in question is one of these identitarian fundamentalists we hear about but who seem actually very hard to find, indeed the classroom may give them some practice in the necessary skill of working with people with whom you may not have a great deal in common except for the problem at hand. To some degree that might be meta-political, but it’s not a different lesson that we might expect to be taught by military service or many other kinds of jobs.
I have spent a certain amount of my scholarly career writing on or near the Dreyfus Affair. It is thus remarkable to read the following paragraph:
All academics are experts on narrow topics. Even when they intersect with the real world, our expertise in the facts does not give us authority over politics. Scientific research shows that vaccines work and climate change is real, but it cannot dictate whether vaccines should be mandated or fossil fuels restricted. Those are decisions for the public, with the scientific evidence being one factor. When academics claim authority over policy, the result is not an increased effect on policy but decreased trust in academia.
Again, in principle, I agree that science does not simply dictate policy, and that academics should not claim authority over politics, or anyway that it’s silly for them to do so. But that’s not, by and large, what’s happening here. A few scholars of the Middle East, racism in the United States, or Constitutional law aside, most academics who are intervening politically in the ways Barak finds so objectionable are not doing so on the basis of their scholarly expertise, but as a matter of conscience and as citizens. So at least is my strong sense. And Barak is echoing in this above paragraph the language of the anti-Dreyfusards, who said that scholars and artists had no right to object to the arrest and imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus – this was a matter for military intelligence, for political men placed so as to understand the issues at play. The argument then was antidemocratic. Barak does not mean to be quite doing that, but that's certainly the meaning of the intervention in the present.
How are we to think about the university in society at this moment? Big question! I think we can safely leave aside the absurd idea that Harvard, or anywhere else, can professionalize its way out of the Trump administration’s sights. The question that should matter to us is a larger one – if there is resentment, and not just in the current administration, what is its source? To even begin to answer this question what we need is not a defense of professionalism, but an understanding of how higher education currently fits into the American class system, and in particular of the social reproduction that is supposed to be taking place in universities but I think largely no longer is.
