The Blog

2020-

2020-12-02 f
CONTINUING FALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION I
“I am just beginning to understand how I have harmed communities of color with my words. I am learning that my words — my uninformed, careless words — often express an ideology wrought in whiteness and privilege.”

The Moral Contortions of the New University

Intellectual curiosity has been replaced by pro forma attention to representation.

You might recall the strange case of Matthew J. Mayhew, a professor of educational administration at Ohio State University. In late September he co-wrote an opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed enumerating the many supposed virtues of college football. A week later he issued, in the same venue, an abject apology for the piece, which, he now confessed, had not recognized the various ways his support of collegiate athletics perpetuated white supremacy, and had failed to center the voices of people of color. “I am just beginning to understand,” he wrote, “how I have harmed communities of color with my words. I am learning that my words — my uninformed, careless words — often express an ideology wrought in whiteness and privilege.”

One could not help but try to imagine the struggle session to which Mayhew was subjected that week, from which he emerged as if reborn. It seems hard to deny that he is sincere in his follow-up piece (the common view that he was writing as if a gun were held to his head misses the mark), but also totally and radically converted from one way of seeing the world to another, a conversion that typically occurs only when there is significant social and institutional pressure.

For what it’s worth, I have long believed that college athletics programs are racist, and for that among many other reasons I have long argued for their abolition. But I came to this conclusion precisely by not renouncing the inner voice of my reason and conscience. In the end Mayhew’s conversion has more to do with such a renunciation than with any mundane self-correction resulting from the consideration of new evidence. He is renouncing his former standing as a rational individual in order to blend into a mass movement that very emphatically makes no room for his individual rationality. This is an anthropological pattern that repeats itself, over and over again, in the history of new religions and of mass movements that have the character of religions even if they have no explicit theology: the effervescence of self-abnegation.

Read both pieces for yourself, and try to reconstruct what might be going on. What makes this particular road-to-Damascus moment so intriguing to me is what I was able to learn about Mayhew’s career prior to the conversion for which he was destined to become widely known. Although he and I are both technically academics, Mayhew is someone with whom I would have absolutely nothing to talk about if, by some unlikely twist of fate, I were seated next to him at some rubber-chicken-and-ice-water teaching-awards dinner. I consider myself a pretty wide-ranging conversation partner. You tell me you work on cosmic background radiation or Antarctic ice-core paleoclimatology or Jane Austen, and I will be into it. I will recognize in you a share in a common project that unites us under the umbrella of the university as it was understood from the 18th century until around 2008.

Mayhew’s career, which began well before that critical year but was also a harbinger of it, has been built entirely on tracking and echoing the transformations of the university itself. He obtains research funding for projects with names like “Assessment of Collegiate Residential Environments and Outcomes,” and publishes in volumes with titles like The Faculty Factor: A Vision for Developing Faculty Engagement With Living Learning Communities. He has an h-index, according to Google, of 34, which indicates that he is doing whatever it is he is supposed to do according to the rules — which increasingly is to say, the algorithms — that shape the profession. And this is where I think his spectacular public recantation is significant: Hewing so close in his career to the vicissitudes of the institution that both pays him and constitutes the object of his study, Mayhew sooner or later could not fail to embody and express, through his own personal conversion, the conversion of higher education to whatever you want to call this peculiar new sensibility that has transformed large sectors of American society in the Trump era. (read more)

______________________

Permission is hereby granted to any and all to copy and paste any entry on this page and convey it electronically along with its URL,
______________________