The Academicization of Everything
How the bad habits of academics create problems in politics
I’ve had a post along these lines as a back-burner idea for a good while now, but was moved to type out a version of it because of the flurry of attention given to this Sam Adler-Bell piece on “wokeness.” (In classic me fashion, I’ve dragged my feet on writing this long enough that people have probably lost interest. Which may be a good thing, actually…) In particular, he draws unfavorable attention to the close relationship between lefty politics and academia, primarily because the language used becomes very insular:
Of course, many good ideas, theories of change, and histories of oppression and struggle have been generated on campuses. The wider dissemination of such stories has been a salutary hallmark of our era. I, myself, am a beneficiary of a radical education. But I have had to unlearn many of the ways of speaking I cultivated as a student radical in order to be more convincing and compelling off campus. The obligation to speak to non-radicals, the unconverted, is the obligation of all radicals, and it’s a skill that is not only undervalued but perhaps hindered by a left-wing university education. Learning through participation in collective struggle how the language of socialism, feminism, and racial justice sound, how to speak them legibly to unlike audiences, and how others express their experiences of exploitation, oppression, and exclusion — that is our task. It is quite different from learning to talk about socialism in a community of graduate students and professors.
The way this is phrased is pretty much a version of the “filter bubble” idea, namely that thanks to the connection with academia and education polarization, progressives are just too used to preaching to the choir, and can’t communicate with people who aren’t already bought in. I tend to agree with the thesis that there are a lot of problems with progressive politics that are related to pathologies of academia— as I said, I’ve been kicking the idea around for a while— but I don’t think that’s quite the right right explanation. Or, at least, I would be a little more specific about the reasons for the poor communication— I think it’s less a matter of filter-bubble type insularity than some other characteristic habits of academics creeping out into the world of politics with bad results. Some of the characteristic pathologies of the nastier arguments around progressive politics that I see everywhere online now are things that I first noticed as characteristic pathologies of academic arguments fifteen to twenty years ao.
The first of these is a kind of preoccupation with very precise and rapidly shifting terms, but the problem is more with the latter part than the former. That is, I don’t think the issue is necessarily the use of excessive jargon for discussing these issues. Jargon is really just specialized vocabulary, and people are by and large pretty good at adopting new vocabulary for things, provided it is introduced in a way that fixes the idea in their mind. There are a whole host of terms in use now, including current shibboleths of the political right like “Critical Race Theory” or even “wokeness” that started out basically as jargon terms, but are now thoroughly assimilated into political debate. The demand for precision in terms isn’t a bad thing necessarily, as long as the terms are defined as they’re introduced, and they’re used consistently enough for people to follow along1.
The problem with the language of progressivism is more that it’s constantly changing, at a speed that feels hard to keep up with. The changes are generally more a matter of emphasis than any substantive shift in what issues or groups are being referred to— the overlap between “BIPOC” and just “People of Color” is nearly 100%— but they’re rapid changes accompanied by a strong insistence that only the newest term be used.
This is very characteristic of life in academia, where scholars are constantly forced to argue for the novelty of whatever they’re working on. One common way to demonstrate novelty is exactly this kind of language shift— a subtle refinement or narrowing of the issue being discussed accompanied by new terms. If you spend a lot of time dealing with research, you get used to tracing this kind of evolution of terms (often in reverse, doing a kind of linguistic stratigraphy as you move back toward the original sources of a field). If you’re not really plugged in, though, and are just looking in on a field every now and again, it can be confusing to come back a year or two later and find that everybody’s using new words.
This is a problem, politically speaking, because the vast majority of people in the voting public are just looking in every now and again, usually in the run-up to an election. When the preferred terminology for talking about a set of issues changes faster than the election cycle, it’s bewildering to voters who aren’t super engaged with politics. Which, unfortunately, is most of them.
Another characteristic academic obsession contributing to political problems is the drive toward maximalist claims. Again, this is a tendency that seems to come out of academic research incentives— not only does whatever you’re working on need to be novel, it needs to be important. A clever technique to laser cool a new element can’t be sold just as an incremental refinement, it has to be the first step toward a revolutionary new platform for quantum computing or precision sensing or some other buzzword-of-the-moment. A new movie isn’t just a self-contained work of art, it’s got to be a statement about the whole zeitgeist. And so on.
Carried over to politics, this tendency pushes everything toward gigantic blow-ups and completely intractable polarization around maximalist positions. Every off-the-cuff remark is parsed for connections to deep societal problems, and can become the basis for endless infighting and recriminations. Every policy proposal is analyzed as a reflection of or infringement upon fundamental rights, making even small compromises look like a deep betrayal. The end result is dysfunction and paralysis.
The final academic pathology that I see all too often in politics these days is a kind of supercilious dickishness in dealing with people who disagree. This, again, is deeply rooted in the incentives of academic research, where you have to not only tout your own work as novel and important, but also disparage everybody else’s work. The classic example in science-y disciplines is to refer to some past problem as a “trivial example” of whatever you’re working on. Or if you’re worried that the author of that might review your paper, you might soften that a bit and call it a “proof of principle.” More broadly, there’s a very pronounced tendency for academics to talk about their own work as if it’s so obviously true that only an idiot or a monster would disagree about its interpretation or importance.
This carries over into academic politics a lot— I see a ton of it in intra-faculty debates— and now bleeds over into progressive politics, particularly online. This is perhaps expressed most clearly in my absolute least favorite Twitter politics tropes, namely “It’s not my job to explain [issue] to you” and its close cousin “You need to educate yourself.” That’s classic dickish-academic stuff, transported to a non-academic context.
This is a problem because while “supercilious dick” is survivable as a tenured professor, it’s maybe the single least viable identity in electoral politics. On both ends of the political spectrum— there’s a decent argument that the biggest problem faced by Mitt Romney was that his patrician bearing reads as (or can be made to read as) dickishness. Someone like G. W. Bush, who is every bit as much a child of privilege, skates by because he presents as a bumbling hayseed instead. More recently, there’s a case to be made that the progressive disasters in San Francisco have more to do with Chesa Boudin and the recalled school board members coming off as supercilious and dickish in their responses to concerns raised by members of the public than any actual policy moves they made.
So, I do sort of agree with Adler-Bell that there are problems with the close connection between lefty politics and academia, but I disagree a bit about the source. I don’t think it’s a matter of insularity per se, but more a matter of (perhaps unconsciously) carrying over the worst of the habits and manners of academic life into a very different context.
This is coming late in the day because I needed to let it sit for a while and then read it over fresh before posting. I’m sure I still missed some unfortunate phrasing that will require a bunch of follow-up; if you’d like to know as soon as that happens, here’s a button to get this in your inbox:
If you’d like to be the first (maybe) to point out what I said wrong, the comments will be open:
There is a failure mode relating the the demand for precision in language, namely the tendency to get sucked into long and futile arguments about how “That’s not really Critical Race Theory…” or whatever. But that’s a different kind of problem than the larger problems of academic argumentation being applied out of context.
I am HYPED for the chance to tell you you're wrong! Or, well, missing something.
1. One issue I've seen a lot that I do think stems from academia is the idea is that I think it way overestimated "teaching people things to change their values" as a theory of change. The idea that "teaching people the evils of capitalism" is an effective vehicle for fighting capitalism seems very doubtful.
2. There's a real tendency to overestimate how singularly important ideological frameworks are. For instance, there have been plenty of times where anti-capitalists have done great things for workers, but it was the stuff like unions and the political parties that anti-capitalists built that did that, not necessarily the anti-capitalism itself. When Catholics started building their own unions to push back, they were really good at it!
3. I get the impression that the academy overestimates how coherent peoples' thoughts on politics are. If you talk about how people should buy this great, manly, foreigner-beating electric truck, there are worries that it'll reinforce certain beliefs about masculinity or xenophobia, rather than the important part about "selling EVs!"
4. You see a lot of focus on "we need to change how we talk about X" in left-wing politics. It makes sense in an academic context, where the way we talk and write about topics really matters, but in a political context, it's different. If Democrats change the way they discuss issues, will voters even notice or care? If they do, will it be in a way that actually increases your support? (My guess is that when this does work, it's mostly when the framing moves to be more centrist.)
The core problem is arrogance and lack of empathy. You can sometimes convince people to change their mind if they think you're on their side. But if someone reads you as an enemy - especially one who looks down on them - there's nothing in the world you can do to convince them.
Class insularity is enough to produce that problem on its own, but the nature of the class in question does make it especially bad. Woe to any country ruled by academics.