Critical Thinking Is Downstream of Human Feeling
Crazy faculty and rhetorical spandrels
There’s a lot of really heavy stuff going on in the world, but I find myself weirdly captivated by a lurid case at UC-Berkeley, which leapt into the national spotlight after a student protest at a football game. There are long and detailed reports on it from the Chronicle of Higher Education and KQED, and it’s pretty wild stuff. The professor in question, Irene del Valle, has admitted to a wide range of pretty disturbing behavior directed toward a professor at a different California university, but insists that she’s justified because he’s hacked her electronics in ways that are just wildly implausible.
My initial reaction was basically “I wish I didn’t know any of this,” and I think that remains my core response. It keeps popping back up, though, including blog in posts from Kevin Drum and Josh Barro, both of whom use it as a platform for commentary about campus political activism more broadly. Barro in particular is somewhat scathing about the “identity-based” defenses mounted of del Valle by her graduate students and some colleagues.
I suspect that’s misreading the situation a little bit, almost to the point of stretching for the maximally uncharitable interpretation. I say that in large part because of a really familiar quote from late in the KQED piece about the case, from one of del Valle’s students, Alejandra Decker:
“Those reports — anyone who reads them, I think we can all admit that they are difficult to read because they paint Professor Ivonne in a way that personally I’ve never seen,” Decker said.
I call this “really familiar,” because it almost perfectly fits one of the standard beats of any modern scandal story. Whenever somebody is accused of doing something terrible— ranging from online harassment to murder—you can count on at least one quote of the form “These horrible actions are not the person I know.”
What makes this pop out to me is that in a lot of cases, those kinds of quotes are held up as exemplifying a whole bunch of the ills that social-justice activists are out to combat. Depending on the particulars of the accusation, the fact that friends of the accused say “This is not the person I know” can be attributed to any number of systemic and/or implicit biases.
In this case, though, the quote is preceded by Decker’s disclaimer that “organizers still stand by del Valle, and that it’s not her place to judge a woman’s actions when in turmoil and isolated” and followed by the direct quote “It’s a woman’s actions in her biggest moments of survival.” Which is part of what leads Barro and to a lesser extent Drum to attribute this whole thing to social-justice activism run amok.
My take, though, is that del Valle’s supporters aren’t suffering from woke derangement or whatever pejorative name you might want to put on that. Instead, they’re just being… human. They have close personal relationships with del Valle, and can’t believe that their friend and mentor would do anything so crazy. So they don’t believe it, just like any of the other friends in other stories expressing shock and disbelief that the very nice person they know could be capable of whatever they’re accused of doing.
The social-justice gloss on the student defenses of del Valle is a kind of rhetorical spandrel— some elaborate decoration that’s incidental to the basic structure. Given the milieu they inhabit, social-justice language is what they reach for when they want to resolve the contradiction between the friend and mentor they know and the unhinged behavior she’s admitted to. They’re taking it a bit further than most dismayed friends in scandal stories, but it’s not anything unique to the college-activist population. On the contrary, it’s a very universal human reaction.
(To the extent that there’s any take-away from this whole sad tale, it probably ought to be a “There but for the grace of God…” kind of thing inspiring the social-media activist set to cut dismayed friends and neighbors in other scandals a bit more slack…)
The very first substantive thing I wrote here was titled “Critical Thinking Isn’t a Thing”, and in a lot of ways this is an example of what I was talking about. On one level, you might be tempted to hold this whole episode up as an example of students lacking in “critical thinking,” in that they’re failing to recognize that del Valle’s actions and their responses fit into a very familiar pattern. And, you know, there’s some irony here in that, if you listen to what faculty say, nobody should be more capable and practiced in “critical thinking” than graduate students in postcolonial studies.
What I would say, though, is that this illustrates the core problem with a lot of the ways that people invoke “critical thinking skills” in academia. As I wrote back in July of 2021, though, these were never an infallible path to good outcomes:
What we can do is provide students with a set of analytical tools and a kind of aspirational idea about the importance of questioning the world. Those tools and that attitude are infinitely flexible, though, and can be brought to bear in many different ways, not all of which will lead to conclusions a particular member of the faculty will find congenial. Particularly in the sorts of situations where the information we have access to is genuinely ambiguous, in the way that “critical thinking” is supposed to allow us to address.
What we see in the defenses of del Valle is the deployment of a well-refined set of analytical tools toward an emotional end. Their friend and mentor is accused of disturbing behavior, and they want that not to be true, so they’re using what they have at hand to find a justification they find congenial. They just happen to have access to the CNC milling machine of academic rhetoric, where most people in this situation only have hand tools.
Anyway, this whole business is very sad and disturbing, and I hope everybody involved gets the help they need to move on to a fulfilling life. Preferably somewhere out of the public view.
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I found that CHE article on this case so unsettling. The only thing I can say that's sympathetic to del Valle is that it's true that the 3rd party Twitter/X account by "David C. Porter" mentioned in the article is really weird and unsettling when you read back in its timeline and I guess I could see how someone who was in a paranoid frame of mind could let it seep into their brain. But all the conduct she acknowledges is really indefensible.