Academia and the World's Ills

This post is about five words that I find more and more commonly used in daily communications on academic campuses—certainly in my institution, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I have been teaching for longer than I care to remember. These are words that, I conjecture, reflect a kind of mentality (that I explain at the end) and that I find worrisome, for reasons that I will also explain.

I wish to be clear that even though almost all my colleagues use these words all the time, what I have to say here is not meant to accuse any of them of willful miscommunication or bad communication. At most, the accusation can be of thoughtlessly following the crowd (which is, actually, no small accusation in a setting supposed to be all about critical thinking). Another thing to make clear is that I am by no means advocating the banning of such terminology—on principled grounds, certainly not; think instead of what I am doing as a prompt to get us to reflect more on the words that we use and why we use them.

Some of the expressions that I find troublesome are already well-discussed and I will not repeat them here. I refer to: “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” “social justice,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “micro-aggressions,” and “implicit bias.” Some of them (“safe spaces”) clearly do not belong on college campuses. Others (“trigger warnings” and “social justice”) are not clear. Others (“diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “micro-aggressions”) are ill-defined or not defined at all (I think, sometimes knowingly and even intentionally), and they often involve double-faced-ness (officially: “We want to include all voices and experiences”; unofficially: “Perhaps not so much members of a certain group”). Others (“implicit bias”) are not actionable (suppose I am on a search committee and I cogently argue against a candidate who happens to be gay; is this my implicit bias against gays kicking in or am I arguing from good motives? And if I have good reasons for why I reject the candidate, does it matter whether I act from implicit bias or from non-implicit bias?)

The expressions I’m after are not all as hefty, but they are indicative of the changing climate on campuses.

Here they are:

(1) “Reach out”: as in, “I’ll reach out to Richard to set up a meeting.” In the not-so-distant past, we used to use “email” and “contact,” as in: “I’ll email Richard about the meeting,” and “I will contact him and see what he says.”

Well, what’s wrong with “reach out”? Other than being technically incorrect, it connotes helplessness, need, lifting someone out of a ditch, or something along these lines. At first, I thought I was just imagining this connotation, or that it was one born out of my non-abilities as a non-native English speaker. But no, I was not imagining it; here’s the Oxford English Dictionary (on-line): “reach out [mainly North American]: seek to establish communication, with the aim of offering assistance or cooperation: his style was to reach out all the time, especially to members of his own party; anyone in need of assistance should reach out to the authorities as soon as possible.”

So there you have it. Unless by definition all our jobs in a college are miserable (which they are not), we now use an expression connoting need and assistance to communicate with each other on a university campus. This nicely belongs in the same group as “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”

(2) “Share”: as in, “I’ll share this email with you” and “Can you please share this document with us?” We used to use “forward” and “email,” as in: “I’ll forward this email to you” and “Can you please email us this document?”

Well, what’s wrong with “share”? Just one thing, really: it connotes a world in which children hold hands and skip together in a field of flowers. It connotes children’s activities in kindergarten (as in: “Children, children! Please share your crayons with each other!”). It connotes breaking bread together (as in: “Let’s share a meal together soon.”)

So there you have it. Like “reach out,” “share” dips into the mentality of “Let’s all be nice to each other” which is, don’t get me wrong, a great mentality for certain contexts. But when used in a university, it symbolizes a certain way of thinking that has come to prevail (see below).

(3) “Empathy”: as in, “We need to hire an administrator who is empathetic” or “I want a department chair who shows empathy.” Now, when people use this word, do they really mean what it means?

To state the obvious, “empathy” is a specific word in the English language (duh!), and this usually means that, no matter how close it is to other words in meaning, it has its own unique one. The word to which it is closest is probably “sympathy,” but “empathy” and “sympathy” mean different things; specifically, “empathy” has a component that is missing from “sympathy,” which is sharing the emotions of the person for whom you have empathy. To empathize with someone who is feeling sad is to also feel their sadness, whereas to be sympathetic towards someone who is sad is to understand and feel some compassion for them sadness.

Now, sharing someone’s emotion by also feeling it is a feat that is very hard to pull off, and, believe me, there are some emotions and feelings that you do not want to share. But regardless of these difficulties, which of the two—sympathy and empathy—do we want our colleagues to have (especially if they are administrators)? If I have to choose one, then I choose sympathy. Why? Because, as others have pointed out, empathy is a dangerous emotion, and one of its dangers is that it can block the critical distance often necessary when dealing with a situation. A dean, say, who empathizes with a crying teacher in her office is a dean who will (at that moment at least) not be able to critically assess the teacher’s complaint. Sympathy allows for a general understanding of the situation—of where the teacher is “coming from”—but also of what needs to be done.

So why this insistence on empathy when we have a perfectly more adequate alternative?

A part of me wants to say that we are just using this word as a catch-all term for “being good.” But if so, why not just say that? Why not say, “We want someone who is decent [good, understanding, etc.]”? My hunch is that this is not the reason for the insistence on empathy. My hunch is that we are using it because it dips into that very same mentality that “reach out” and “share” dip into. I’ll get to this mentality in a bit.

(4) “Non-judgmental”: right up there with “empathy” is the insistence that we be non-judgmental. I’m never sure what this exactly means (I’m actually writing a post on it to explore it), but it seems to reflect the attitude that when we communicate with each other we suspend a certain kind of criticality and that we understand where the other person is “coming from.” It seems to call for an empathetic attitude, actually.

But the problem is that we are judgmental all the time: it is part of our fabric as human beings that we judge: we engage in artistic and aesthetic judgments (“Nature is beautiful”; “Richter is one of the best painters of the 20^th century”); moral judgments (“slavery is a moral abomination”); practical judgments (“Taking the train is better than driving”); scientific judgments (“Darwin’s theory of evolution was revolutionary”); and various other types of judgments.

There is another problem with the desire to be non-judgmental, which is its sheer hypocrisy (or, to be nicer, its sheer arbitrariness). For there is never a problem making judgments in academia when it comes to certain things, things that range from the expected (e.g., tenure and promotion decisions, hiring decisions) to more politically charged questions (e.g., which values an institution espouses). However, since it is unclear what it means to be non-judgmental and in which areas, I will stop here.

(5) “Labor”: as in, “I will not do any more labor in this department” or “Once again, a woman of color has to put in labor and chair this committee.” We used to use just plain old “work,” but now we use “labor,” which conjures images of tilling the soil in sweat and heat under a boiling sun (often in fear of being caught by immigration), or images of standing in a factory line assembling things as they speedily come down a belt, or images of cleaning homes while the mistress of the house stands over your shoulder telling you that you missed a spot.

But now, full-time, tenure-track, and tenured colleagues, who have probably one of the cushiest, most comfortable jobs in the world, use the word “labor” to refer to grading papers, or running a department (though I admit that petty squabbles among academics can be its own circle of hell), or making a schedule, or attending meetings. I’m sorry, but this is not labor.

I willingly concede that part-time faculty who have to go from one college to another teaching five or six classes a semester, just to make ends meet, with little to no time for their own research, do labor. This would be labor in academia if there ever was one. But sitting in the comfort of one’s own home, with NPR in the background, and, say, grading papers, is not labor. And using this word to refer to academic work cheapens the actual labor that many others have to do, some just to barely survive.

The use of the above words betokens a certain mentality that has come to prevail in academia, stemming, I conjecture, from the idea that we live in a deeply bad world, a world that is unjust, that is racist and sexist and homophobic and transphobic and ageist and anti-disabled. (Of course, I am not claiming that every time someone uses, say, “reach out,” this is what they are thinking, but that the common use of such words is explained, at least partly, by this mentality.) It is a world so bad that its badness seeps into (floods?) the workplace. The world’s unjust structures also carry over to the work place, so that just as in the real world people labor, in academia we, too, labor. Just as in the real world we need to empathize with one another, so too in academia we need to empathize with each other. Just as in the real world we have to reach out to one another, so in academia also. The academy mirrors the outside world: whatever happens out there happens in here, so whatever moral and ethical relationships we decide are fit for the outside world, they are also fit for the academy. (Not all such relationships, however, are fit for the academy: humor, which does a lot to alleviate life’s suffering, is best conducted judiciously and cautiously in the halls of academia.)

But if my diagnosis is (at least partly) correct, this mentality is unnecessary. The world is a bad place, yes (for human beings and, lest we forget, even more so for non-human animals), and I am the first in line to say this (I consider myself a philosophical pessimist). We work, however, in a college setting. We are here to educate and research, to teach and learn. We are not running a hospice. And although there used to be a time when many colleges were themselves structured by injustices, that time is not now. Today, colleges are places of general equality and fairness (even equality- and fairness-obsessed).

Of course, individually we have to deal with life’s burdens, and our students come from poverty or from broken homes or from being subjected to all sorts of isms and phobias. Still, we should not confuse a college for something else. Indeed, let’s think of college as a refuge from the world, as a place where we can suspend those ethical relationships that are based in the togetherness-of-living-in-a-world-full-of-suffering-and-injustice and replace them with ethical relationships based in the ethos of education and research (and, of course, in the ethos of basic human decency, which includes sympathy and fairness, and, please, humor). After all, being professional at the workplace does not only include not making sexual jokes, but also not treating each other as perpetual victims and oppressors.

Some readers will recoil in disbelief and dismay at the suggestion that the college can be a refuge from the world’s ills. They do so because they think that the structures of institutions (and hence colleges) reflect these ills, and because the individuals who work at and attend these institutions carry the ills with them, like unwitting Trojan humans. I reject this view. Colleges are not perfect places, but they are also not reproductions of the world’s illnesses, neither structurally nor individually, and we can try, and have tried, to ensure that they are not such places. To insist that they are is to adopt the dimmest, worst view of our abilities as human agents.

I wish to repeat that my claim is not that every time someone uses the above terms the use is indicative of the user’s wayward beliefs or intentions. No. I do not know how and to what purpose each user uses these words. My claim is that the widespread use of these terms and others is indicative of a larger mentality that is prevalent now in academia, a mentality that could very well be at odds with free inquiry.