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On the motives of academics and administrators in promoting faux “social justice” initiatives

Brian Leiter

Some interesting comments from the earlier thread, that might warrant separate discussion:

"Canadian philosopher" writes:

Professor Lowrey argues that there are three elements that together threaten to undermine the academy. The “new Ptolemaism” is one piece but is combined with: (2) the Foucault-inspired insistence that academics identify a hierarchically arranged binary and then work to invert it; and (3) the surprising alliance between two groups: (i) the professional managerial class currently running universities; and (ii) a large percentage of social science and humanities faculty, which both, for different reasons, see the traditional/current university as in need of reconstitution, if not outright dismantling. My experience, which includes multiple terms as chair of a department, suggests that all three phenomena exist to different but significant (and generally increasing) degrees, and may well add up to a non-trivial threat to universities as most people over the age of fifty understand them. A particular concern that professor Lowrey raises is how the public and its elected officials will view the value of supporting institutions of higher learning if they are remade in the way she fears.

Philosopher Charles Pigden (Otago) writes:

[T]here is one thing that Lowery suggests that rings true to me. A lot of people in academia, especially in the humanities, fancy themselves as champions of the underdog and speakers of truth to power. Since actually championing the underdog or speaking truth to the genuinely powerful (at least in the kind of way that might actually make a difference) is time consuming, often boring, and (even in a relatively free society) mildly dangerous, and since it is often inimical to a successful career, this is not a role that they want to fulfil in reality. Hence a lot of their intellectual energy is devoted to creating fictitious narratives in which they champion underdogs and speak the truth to power without actually championing any real underdogs or speaking the truth to any dangerously powerful people. Getting rid of a gender critical feminist (for instance) is a great deal safer than challenging the neoliberal ideology of a university president. If you can pose as a champion of the underdog and a speaker of truth to power whilst ingratiating yourself with the neoliberal regime, that kind of hits the jackpot, by combining the ego gratifications of being a tribune of the people with the career benefits of being a lackey of the establishment. Consequently this is what a lot of people do.

And "Chronos," agreeing with Professor Pigden, writes:

At my university there are some social science and humanities people in other fields who don't publish lots nor (for lack of a better description) have significant research programs. I think research is quite difficult to do at a competent level and often hard. In its place these people turn their attention to changing their university, and, basically, become focused on social projects. There is something fine with this since one should be concerned with one's place of employment. But it seems to me that this inward focus often gives people gratification without having to go far from their offices.

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11 responses to “On the motives of academics and administrators in promoting faux “social justice” initiatives”

  1. Gay Scientist

    "Chronos" makes an excellent point when they write, "I think research is quite difficult to do at a competent level and often hard. In its place these people turn their attention to changing their university, and, basically, become focused on social projects." My only caveat there is that, even at a "research institution"/R1, not all areas are equally placed for rigorous research. Take, for example, the English Dept. I highly doubt that anyone would recommend axing the English Dept. We all recognize that writing/reading are core to the project of a liberal arts education. But, in reality, how much research can a professor of writing do without veering off into a totally other discipline? I.e. brain science and psychology, etc. And there is, in a sense, only so much a professor of literature can write about without spinning one's wheels.

    While research is hard, yes, sometimes it's less about being hard than it is about not necessarily being research-driven. Both types of work are needed at a university, though. I think that what we see in the humanities is more a product of trying to overlay a research project methodology from the sciences onto the humanities. And I would suggest that the humanities don't "make discoveries" in quite the same way, if in the same way at all. The stress between these two outlooks creates a neurosis that I don't think has been properly explored or discussed.

    The humanities, in a move to create as much respect for themselves in a world that increasingly dismisses what it offers at school, tried to hi-jack and co-opt the research methodology of the more empirical areas. (E.g. Franco Moretti's Stanford Literary Lab.) They will continue to do this until the culture comes back around to thinking that it's cool to study books in school or there is some final scientific discovery (say, a pill) that literally makes one a better reader. Whatever that may mean.

    In the end, plenty of profs have been teaching writing/reading for decades, and I'd imagine that none of them have a sure fire way to improve a student's ability to write better, other than some basic heuristics and lots of brute practice. If there was a way, say, wouldn't we all be adopting it?

    Thus, it seems that some disciplines are necessary in academe because we always need to re-teach the new students how to do XYZ thing. And that discipline may not be ripe for "new discoveries" because there's nothing to discover except teaching the art of it over and over again.

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  2. Colin McGinn

    The only championing I've ever seen in American universites is self-championing, and if that means destroying one's colleagues so be it. This of course is quite characteristic of American culture (sic).

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  3. Shane Wilkins

    I think Charles Pidgen’s comment above is absolutely correct. But, rather than merely continuing the critical examination of the bad behavior, perhaps it would be helpful for us to also hear from folks whose universities are doing things which are actually impactful and beneficial. Perhaps this would help those who are interested get an idea of what successful political or community engagement would look like. Suggestions on how to actually shift the conversation on campus would also be welcome, I think.

    My first thought, for what it’s worth, is that any project or initiative ought to have specific measureable goals or outcomes, so that any proposed initiatives the university undertakes could be assessed as successes or failures, reasonable expenditures vs costly boondoggles, etc. So if the university stakeholders agree, for instance, that the university needs an initiative to increase political engagement and informed citizenship, then they should identify how they intend to measure this outcome, and how any proposed initiative activities would contribute to those outcomes. (A quiz on students’s knowledge of current events? # of students registered to vote, etc.)

    Encouraging this level of specificity would, I think, discourage preening. (If you care so much, why didn’t you show up to any of the meetings? Or do any of the work?)

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  4. Jason "Incentives Explain the Social World" Brennan

    It's useful to think of faculty and administrators as generally being locked into a zero-sum battle over resources and power. (I don't want to say they think in class terms all the time, but generally faculty have individual interests that align with each against admins and vice versa.) Admins want faculty to be somewhat uniform, easily replaceable, complacent, pliable, predictable, and so on. Faculty want money, freedom, and so on for themselves. They want admins to serve them, while admins want faculty to serve them.

    These social justice issues create an opening for administrators to wield power over faculty. If everyone agrees that racism is beyond the pale, then there is an incentive to expand the concept in various ways in order to justify controlling faculty speech, course content, and the distribution of cash. It creates grounds for producing new administrative centers, such as offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). It creates grounds for having students credit hours pushed into social justice causes, often with classes taught by admins rather than faculty, and with course content that did not go through peer-review.

    In turn, individual faculty can benefit from playing along with this and capturing some of those resources and power for themselves against other faculty. While overall DEI and other social justice causes tend to help admins more than faculty, individual faculty can benefit from helping create this transition or shift of power.

    Further, DEI and social justice causes create weird fundraising opportunities for universities. They announce that they suffer from systematic racism or other problems, and instead of, say, shutting themselves down to protect minorities from racism, they can demand and get money from corporations, governments, and other donors to create new centers. So, oddly, universities can turn their self-effacing declarations of their own moral failures and systemic corruption into cash. My own employer, Georgetown, is a great example of this. It–rightly, I think–made a big deal about how the university benefit from the sale of slaves, but then somehow used these sins of the pas to raise lots of money, money which will for the most part do little to eradicate racism (indeed, will probably help perpetuate it) but will help the administration and a few faculty members. A cynical person might think this is all self-interested rather than motivated by a genuine concern for justice.

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  5. Milton

    One additional factor deserves consideration, namely, the currently influential idea that there is no such thing as neutrality. This idea is held as dogma within many social-justice circles. (The most influential example of this, at the moment, may be Ibram Kendi's pronouncement that there is no such thing as a neutral or non-racist policy; every policy, he insists, is either racist or antiracist.) If you believe that there's no such thing as neutrality, then if you are not constantly fighting against injustice, you're supporting injustice. Hence, if your scholarship is not fighting against injustice, then it is promoting injustice; if your discipline is not fighting against injustice, then it is promoting injustice; and so on all down the line. This strikes me as a crucial feature of the contemporary social-justice mindset, and crucial to understanding the sort of phenomena discussed in these posts.

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  6. Gordon Barnes

    Well said. I think that’s exactly right. Certain academic departments now for a coalition with admins for their mutual benefit, under the banner of social justice, and the current moment, together with the appropriate moralizing rhetoric, renders them immune to any questioning or criticism. Anyone who does that risks being branded as something unspeakably evil. It’s a brilliant maneuver, really.

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  7. Canadian Philosopher

    In practical terms, the most important issue raised by Professor Lowrey is the surprising alliance between the upper administration and large swaths of faculty, mostly in the humanities and social sciences. From the perspective of senior administrators, their jobs are made quite difficult by tenure and its protections, which entail a large salary number on the books that cannot be reduced or redirected in response to outside pressure. In many cases, elected governments create an unfair situation by requiring institutional changes (say, in response to the evolving work landscape) without providing sufficient, or more typically any, additional funding. So, administrators feel themselves, not unjustly, to be stuck between two immovable objects.

    This is exacerbated by the fact that Deans and VPs are, increasingly, a professional class, who often land at a university for a five-year term of CV-building in the attempt to secure a better post somewhere else, or higher up at the current institution. This requires making changes so one can point to "initiatives" undertaken while at one's previous job. The traditional faculty governance structure, which includes strong tenure and academic freedom protections, is by its nature a large inertial damper to change, so offers little more than frustration to CV-builders. Any power to control or remove faculty more easily would be a *huge* new tool in the management toolbox, and this is where the opportunity for an (unholy) alliance arises. A professor who sees the university as an instantiation of oppression – e.g., an old boys club focused on dead, white, European males – will also, with high probability, look askance at its entire structure, even faculty governance, as something that is the byproduct of, or that functions to enable, the oppression that they wish to eliminate/invert. This is where seeing things in simplifying binaries can play a role.

    The results are already bizarre and disconcerting. For example, I have, as a matter of fact, heard administrators express the wish, in full seriousness, to eliminate Classics, English, Philosophy, or History, as bastions of outdated and oppressive ideas, precisely at a time when those departments are increasingly filled with professors who are themselves calling for the elimination of traditional curricula, evaluation methods, and courses (I am not sure whether such professors see an inherent risk to their own interests here, though many of the harshest critics are to be found in newly created departments, such as Cultural Studies, which seem to be immune to threatened cuts). Accordingly, something like an HR-mandated initiative, which may be in some sense perfectly well-meaning, can serve as common ground between two naturally opposing forces, i.e., (i) administrators working to undermine traditional faculty governance and (ii) (at least some) faculty themselves.

    I used to ask myself why VPs would be so enthusiastic about such initiatives, which they really seem to be. Governments do not tend to add money to the budget for them, and many professors, especially the older ones, are skeptical, as are many parents and students. So, what is going on? One hypothesis is that the initiatives serve to weaken traditional academic freedom protections by creating a category of speech that can get even a tenured professor fired, so they are a glimmer of hope for administrators looking for power to put a dent in that huge salary number, or at least keep faculty in line as changes are made. Or, perhaps they create a climate that is subtly hostile to traditional academic pursuits and, accordingly, will encourage older professors to retire earlier than they otherwise would, at which point they can be replaced with contingent faculty as needed. Alternatively, maybe the administration will just wait for the old guard to retire naturally and be replaced with a complement that constitutes a better ally because it is itself suspicious of traditional university structures. Perhaps the initiatives offer fundraising opportunities, as Professor Brennan points out above. There are certainly many factors involved here and I wish to avoid simplifying binaries myself.

    Note, further, that HR initiatives inevitably come with substantial reporting requirements to prove departmental compliance. This means that they represent an additional layer of control over rank-and-file faculty, once again, right at a time when senior administrators are grasping desperately for the power to wriggle out from between the two seemingly ineluctable pressures hemming them in. I think many are just trying to find something to make their jobs easier. Nonetheless, the point of faculty governance is precisely to act as a counterweight against rash or harsh responses to external pressure, so the attempt to undermine it in the name of some academic theory, Foucauldian or otherwise, is not in the long-term interests of faculty.

    Simply put, things like faculty governance, tenure, and academic freedom do not help administrators to deal with their greatest stressors, and their weakening or elimination would make administration easier in the short term by an order of magnitude. If Professor Lowrey is right, then the high-level support for HR initiatives has some connection to the desire for increased control over professors. I think she is worth taking seriously on this.

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  8. Brian Leiter

    I think this is an excellent and important point.

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  9. Dean C. Rowan

    "I have, as a matter of fact, heard administrators express the wish, in full seriousness, to eliminate Classics, English, Philosophy, or History, as bastions of outdated and oppressive ideas…" This is just guilt by association, right? One can identify indicia of oppression in, say, syllabi or the canon. This requires no new initiatives. See, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/19/opinion/sunday/harold-bloom-canon.html. But the fact that such controversies were and continue to be publicly aired would seem to be a salutary sign. So the call for elimination damns the enduring disciplines merely because they endure?

    If these HR initiatives are a pretext for weeding the faculty, then why haven't more administrations jettisoned faculty accused of Title IX violations? Do campus policies offer greater protection for faculty charged with harassment than for, say, those charged with inadequate commitment to DEI?

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  10. Brian Leiter

    This is also a very apt observation: "Anyone who [criticizes the faux "social justice" folks] risks being branded as something unspeakably evil." It surely explains part of the phenomenon I described in an earlier post (paragraphs #4 and after): https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2021/03/philosophy-twitter-has-become-the-fox-news-of-the-wokerati.html

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  11. Canadian Philosopher

    Guilt by association? Perhaps, but I have a hard time understanding it. Opportunism maybe? A cruel joke?

    Title IX doesn’t apply in Canada so I cannot offer any informed opinion on that, but I think the pressure here is not explicitly to weed out faculty but instead to respond to stressors that happen to be lessened by processes that also contribute to weakening faculty governance; meanwhile, others are seizing on that as an opportunity to accelerate their preferred remaking, creating opportunities for strange bedfellows. It remains too early in the process to want to be *seen* as opposed to traditional academic values even if acting to undermine them is considered an acceptable way forward if there is good payoff down the line.

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