The secular American university is worth keeping

A secular academic and a Hindu sage met under a very tall tree. All the surrounding houses were torn-up or collapsed. The world had ended, for the usual reasons, and while it wasn't precisely Mad Max, it was clear that democratic liberal society had broken down, and mankind was ruled more by force than by law.

"Did we do this?" the academic said. "Is this our fault?"

"I don't think so," said the Hindu sage. "Everything falls apart eventually. It's the nature of the Kali Yuga."

"Yes, the Chinese have a saying, 'The Empire united must divide, the Empire divided must unite.'"

"It's probably the fault of the Chinese," the sage joked. "We really should blame them."

"But don't you think there was some pent-up resentment that caused this to occur? That we created myths—in my case the myth of meritocracy and in your case the myth of Hindu exceptionalism—that didn't really sustain the populace or enable good governance? And that we in some cases empowered those at the top of society to act with impunity and disregard for those below?"

"What were you?" the sage said. "A professor of...cultural anthropology?"

"Dance and performance studies."

"Ahh yes," he said. "And did you get tenure?"

"I was professional track," the academic said. "I managed an MA program for actors and directors looking to add some academic and theory chops, so they could teach in conservatories."

"Don't you need an MFA to teach?"

"In America, but we mostly had foreign students."

"So...I'm confused? How did you cause this? Did any of your actors and directors become warlords?"

"Many of them espoused right-wing nationalist sentiments!" the academic said. "Some of them made me quite uncomfortable, particularly the Indian students with the way they'd talk about Muslims in Bollywood and stuff like that."

"And you said nothing to them, because you were worried about your job."

"I was complicit."

"Acha," the sage said. "Okay...hmm...I'm confused. Is the problem that you espoused a secular humanist ideal with features (i.e. meritocracy) that led to insufficient regard by those on top for those below? Or that you failed to sufficiently defend that ideal?"

"I don't know! I'm asking you. You're quite literally sitting under a tree, wearing a saffron robe, chanting all the time. Don't you have some wisdom to impart?"

"Personally, I don't feel complicit. I followed my dharma at all times."

"So you are pure. You bear no responsibility for this."

"No," the sage said. "None whatsoever. And I don't even know that I intended to stop this societal collapse in the first place? I was a custodian of a certain body of knowledge. I preserved that knowledge. Whether the knowledge was good or bad—it wasn't given to me to know. Maybe it's bad in some places and good in other places. I just don't know."

"So you take no responsibility for the destruction of the secular state?"

"No," the sage said. "I wasn't convinced it was that worthwhile a project, honestly. I didn't act against it directly, but I didn't support it, no. To be honest, it seems like you are the one with illusions. You are the one with shame and with difficulties. You and I are both learned people, but we obviously have very different underlying assumptions about the world."

The academic went to his home, which was quite nearby (within walking distance). They lived on unincorporated land, but there was a town center nearby, of sorts, with a cafe and some boarded-up buildings. There wasn't too much crime, because nobody had anything worth taking! The academic had a cabin. He'd invited his daughters and their husbands to live there. Let's not delve too deeply into the political economy of this town. The global trade network wasn't totally dysfunctional. Money still meant something. You had to pay taxes in it, after all. But when you called the cops, they didn't come, the roads weren't getting repaved, natural disasters were frequent, and you had to learn to do a lot of things yourself. You simply couldn’t pay most people to do the things that needed doing.

Day to day life for the man was quite difficult. His problem was his family. He'd invited them here ostensibly for their own good, because their jobs were remote and they had no hope of buying a house in any major city—he'd been like, “I have a lot of land, you can build your own place!”

But the husband of one of the daughters, John, didn't understand that you had to go out and do it! You watched some YouTube, you befriended some locals, and you built the fucking house! Or you lived in a trailer! Or an RV! The academic didn't care how it got done. The academic had hired contractors to build his own cabin, years ago, but that simply wasn't how it was done anymore. Either you did it yourself, or you got friends to do it, or it didn't get done.

The other daughter, Emilia, and her husband, Fred, had done it. They'd bought a trailer and had it towed to this land, and Emilia had done all the sewage and power hookups, and she had complained constantly it was too small, but at least it was done, and they were out of the academic’s hair. They'd done it last summer—you needed to do these things in the summer, because the winter was long and cold and it was impossible to build anything.

Now though he had these other people around. And he didn't really object to their presence. His cabin was pretty big. It'd been built for him to host company—he and his friends and relatives. His wife had left him—she was down south somewhere, in government housing. Seemed to be doing okay. He didn't talk to her. Anyway, he didn't hate having his daughter and her husband and their two kids around. It definitely made him feel safer. He just wished the husband could be a true partner—someone to rely on—someone who saw that in this new world, they only had themselves.

After walking into his house, the academic poured himself some coffee. The house was full of noise: two separate people having meaningless meetings. A babysitter who, thankfully, had bicycled over today and was play-acting some games on the living room floor with the two toddlers.

An hour later, while the academic was cooking some sausages, his son-in-law emerged from the basement: "Have you talked to your friend about getting us a quote for that construction?" John asked. He’d started talking about modular housing lately, but it was all back-ordered! Everyone knew that. But still he wanted ‘quotes’ and conversations.

"I have."

"Well can he get back to us?"

"Sure."

"What's going on with that?" said John's wife, Nina. Just her disembodied voice rang out. "Is that going to happen? Or should we talk to someone else?”

These people were in his living room and his kitchen and his basement. Each night they cooked their dinners in his house. What was the academic going to say? He'd tried explaining to Nina, his daughter, who he loved very much and thought was an empathetic and kind-hearted guest in his home, that Don wasn't really a contractor. That he knew a lot about construction, but he didn’t build houses for money, because what would be the point? With his abilities, Don could get as much money as he wanted; but he couldn’t actually buy anything with it.

Moreover, Don and the academic weren’t really friends. They were just guys who knew each other, because they'd cooperated last year to evict some squatters from the town library. Don was a great guy, who had lots of skills and believed strongly in the ideal upon which this town was founded three hundred years ago: the ideal of small-town democracy where people cooperated on what was important and otherwise left each other alone. Don and the academic were desperately looking for a town librarian, because the town had this beautiful, sturdy Carnegie library. And it was full of books that the academic had scrounged from other defunct libraries. But they needed a human being to take responsibility for this building and the knowledge it contained. And to do that, they had to be able to promise their new librarian that they could house her and her family, and that the life she’d live in this town would be honorable and worth living. They couldn’t really pay her, because money was mostly meaningless, so she’d really need to trust that Don and the academic could take care of her.

The academic's word and his reputation were on the line. Don had suspected (rightly) that no librarian would trust him. He’d thought maybe the academic’s old-world credentials might lend more legitimacy to their efforts. The academic so far hadn't convinced anyone to take up their offer, but both Don and academic believed it was deeply, deeply important. The academic had offered to do the job himself, but Don had said, "No, people in this town don't trust teachers. To them the teacher is the government. But librarians are something different. That's someone we support, who serves us. If someone comes up here just on our say-so, I think that'll be very meaningful—it’ll be a bond of trust that this town will feel compelled to honor and sustain, just like you and I feel compelled to honor Andrew Carnegie’s bequest to us of this beautiful building. And as a result maybe in a hundred years there will still be someone in that building to carry the torch of knowledge."

That was the basis of his relationship with Don. They liked each other, but it wasn't about liking—it was about mutual respect. And part of that respect was Don knowing that the academic didn't really expect Don to respond to his son-in-law's email. Because Don did not want to spend a few months assembling a house for someone he barely knew, no matter how much money was in it. Don could be working all day long, building all kinds of houses, if he wanted the hassle, but he didn't. He only wanted to work for causes he believed in, and housing John and Nina simply wasn't included in that list of causes.

But what could you say? It all became very emotional. The last time they’d talked, Nina had said, "But I have an MBA—you would've hated if I'd gone to library school! Would've thought it had absolutely no future. But fine if you need a librarian then I'll become a fucking librarian!"

But Nina wasn't a librarian! She didn't love books. She was a bureaucrat, basically, albeit at a private firm instead of for the government. But this wasn’t about the past. The academic had his own past. He had devoted his life to dance and performance studies. Which he’d thought was very valuable and he'd loved studying it, but he understood now that the degree program he'd run had not been a good use of his time or resources. In this final act of his life, he'd like to help build up this town. Or maybe he should devote his life to family instead? Maybe family was all that mattered? If he built a home, that would be important too. But would his kids even be able to keep it? Would they be able to maintain it? Why give them what they couldn't successfully steward? Jesus Christ, his whole life had become like something from the Bible! He was quite literally...who the fuck? Who was it from the Bible? He didn't know the Bible that well...but weren’t there some old patriarchs in there who had to choose between their kids? Joseph? Israel? People like that? Shoot, the academic couldn't remember. He was old. Annoying. The sage could probably have remembered some Hindu person, but the academic had never gone to church or read the Bible, so he couldn't remember the name of some old person whose story might've been really helpful to him at this moment. Instead the academic mostly knew about Erving Goffmann and other theorists, whose names were also honestly escaping him at the moment. It’d all seemed so important at the time, but now he really wasn’t sure.

The next day he needed to get out of the house, because otherwise he'd be pressed into service taking care of the kids if their babysitter didn't show up, so he walked up the hill to this tall tree, where the sage often sat. It wasn't technically the sage's land—it belonged to the federal government, and if they wanted to pay a human being to chase the sage off this land, then that was their prerogative. The academic certainly wasn't going to do it. At this moment in time, land belonged more or less to the person who was occupying it. Thinking about it, the academic was actually glad the sage was here. It was a very picturesque spot, with a lot of psychic power, and he supposed much worse people could've appropriated it.

"Hey," the academic said. "I feel like we had a nice chat the other day. Can I sit here with you?"

"Yes," the sage said.

The academic had this urge to chatter, but he didn't know if the sage wanted him to talk. He felt pretty unworthy, honestly, like the sage had completely demolished him.

"Hey," he asked the sage. "Who are you? You're, like, the dad of Gowmukh, aren't you?"

"Yeah," the sage said.

His son was a doctor at the medical center. Gowmukh owned a car and lived in a little compound surrounded by a very tall stone wall.

"And were you born in India or something? I mean what's with the robes and the hair and the powder smeared on your face?" The academic had learned not to talk about other cultures that way, but at this particular moment he just felt tired and wanted to get his point across.

"No," he said. "I was born in New Jersey."

The academic sat there for a bit in the grass, staring at the old Indian man, with his robes and his prayer mat and his little tins of food. The academic thought, you know...this is a performance. This man's son is a doctor and very well-respected and powerful, but fundamentally this is a man who is displaced from his own home, same as me. But he's just dressing it up with all these accoutrements that make it look very meaningful. These are accoutremonts given him by his culture! And people respect them! I am not of his culture, and I definitely respect this act of his. But I too have a certain wisdom and a certain knowledge. My own accountremonts were the letters "PhD" and my title as a professor. I have allowed people to disrespect those things, and I have even invited disrespect at times. But on a fundamental level, people respect the fact that I was a professor. I have this cabin and this land because I was a professor. Don, who is a powerful man, takes my calls because I was a professor. I am a patriarch and a leader, because of my own learning. You can say it’s right or wrong, but I have a certain social status that came to me as a result of the years I spent in study.

"Hey...if you want to be on this hill that's fine," the academic said. "But winter is coming. Let's find somewhere to be. We used to have a senior center here, but it got defunded. I guess we paid some lady to take care of it? And then we stopped paying her. I don't really understand what happened. But let's find somewhere to be?"

"You could come to my home. It is a cottage behind my son's house, but still within the walls," the sage said.

"I have a house too. But it's full of these people who are not gonna leave. It's basically their house now. I assume yours is the same way. Psychologically, I mean—it’s not really yours."

"Ahhh," the sage said. "Hmm, yes." He made one of those equivocal gestures that the academic was trained to analyze and understand. The sage was open to…something. But he didn’t yet want to commit.

"Okay, so let's...find somewhere to be."

"Right this second?"

"No, not right this second," the academic said. "But yeah...today. Let's make some calls, talk to some people. I think society going forward will need a place for people like us."

"Okay," the sage said.

So they got together with Don, and they decided you know what? If some woman doesn't feel safe here and doesn't want to run our library—than that's fine. We will run it ourselves. And that's exactly what they did.

Afterword

I find the crisis of confidence on the part of the American professoriate to be a little strange. I think people running these institutions feel really unsettled by the fact that folks see them as villains and blame them for so many troubles. And I understand that what the job actually entails often seems very remote from anything that could be of concrete use in society.

But...I am happy universities exist! I am glad that we pay people to study Dance and Performance Studies. I read the seminal book in the field, The Performance of Self in Everyday Life (whose ideas are a clear influence on this story). And while at times it did seem a little banal (do you really need a PhD to understand that people construct their identity and perform for other people?) I am still happy that we live in a society that has ivory towers, and where we find very smart people and install them in ivory towers and let them do a lot of thinking.

Sometimes, the ivory tower seems to drive them mad, but I think that's just the natural product of a lot of contemplation. Some sages will always seek, on some level, to set down their begging bowls and use their wisdom to gain worldly power. This is one of the themes of the Mahabharata. The tutor of both the Pandava and Kaurava princes is this brahmin, Dronacharya, who has a long mythology of his own (which I know, but will not recount for you). As a youth, he was friends with a kshatriya prince, Drupada. They studied under the same sage, and they pledged bonds of eternal friendship. But when they grow up, Drupada rejects Drona’s friendship, saying:

“O Brahmana! Your wisdom is lacking and inferior, if you suddenly begin to address me as your friend. O one with a dull mind! No great king can ever be a friend with men like you. You have no prosperity, nor do you have riches. Time decays everything, including friendship. It is true that we were friends once, but that was based on a relationship of equality. No friendship can be found in the world that does not age; desire and anger both destroy it. Do not therefore talk about a friendship that has died out. O best of Brahmanas! Find a fresh friendship…A king cannot be a friend to one who is not a king. Who wants this old friendship?

So of course Drona when he's later the teacher of the Pandava princes makes them promise to conquer Drupada's kingdom, which they do! Drona takes away half of Drupada's kingdom and rules it for himself, but he lets Drupada keep the other half.

Drupada is still very resentful of Drona, so he goes to some brahmins and asks them for power that'll rival his old friend. Drupada basically says, "My kshatriya knowledge is no good. It is no match for brahmin skills." One of the Brahmins refuses, but he adds, "My brother will probably help you, because my brother loves wealth." And his brother does! The brahmin does this ritual that results in the birth of Draupadi, who becomes the wife of the Pandavas. So Drupada becomes their father in law.

Meanwhile Drona has this son, Ashvathamma, who Duryodhana, the chief of the Kauravs, purposefully befriends, because he knows Ashvathamma’s dad will never fight against his own son. So Drona ultimately ends up fighting against his beloved students, and meanwhile Drupada is much closer to them, symbolically displacing Drona as their friend and advisor. So Drona's pursuit of revenge cost him, but on the other hand—was it really wrong? Because Drona struck back against Drupada, he established the principle that learning is powerful. And due to that principle, we still respect Hindu sages. Because we understand that their learning is powerful, and that if they wanted to, they could rob us of what's important.

It's a beautiful, wonderful book. As the quote showed, I think large portions of the Mahabharata are funny and wise and interesting. It's so fascinating to dig down into the foundation from which all this culture comes from. I'm sure if I knew Sanskrit that would be even more fascinating and rewarding, and I fully believe that the Mahabharata merits a lifetime of study.

But if I engaged in that course of study, what would I do with that knowledge? In India, it seems like the answer is that sages build walls of exclusion, walling off lesser people through caste exclusion and discrimination against Muslims. Those are the moats that they’ve erected to protect their knowledge, which is very hard-won and valuable.

I think Hindu nationalism and caste exclusion are abhorrent, but I'm not sure it really matters what my abstract opinion is about them. In America, our sages have created a very different structure to preserve the knowledge that they think is valuable. The modern American secular university is in trouble, but I do think it'll continue to exist. If we choose to honor learning through the institution of the Dance and Performance Studies department, then that seems kind of...great? I mean that's the thing about learned people—they're gonna do weird things. They're gonna have notions! Drupada thought it was so kooky that Drona wanted to continue their friendship into adulthood, but he learned his lesson.

I think the decline of the academic humanities is similar to the decline of communism in that...the people who were in charge of it seemed to kinda stop believing in it themselves! They were no longer able to straightforwardly make the case that this was a beautiful and worthwhile body of knowledge. But the point of communism was to create prosperity, which is something it clearly hadn't done. The point of the academic humanities was...what? I guess to bring about revolutionary change and unseat the existing order? I dunno. What's crazy is that if the academic humanities had been able to point to something like, I dunno, the Bible or Hemingway or Faulkner—things people know and understand and respect—and say, “We study these things,” then there probably wouldn't have been so much anger. But you can't just be like... “The academic humanities are important because of...Faulkner and Hemingway and the Bible." You've gotta actually be a scholar who studies those things and has insights into them! Most people aren't that. They study stuff like...Erving Goffman. Or video games. (I literally have an acquaintance from college who has a PhD in Dance and Performance Studies and studies video games and is a tenure-track professor!)

The task of trying to make Erving Goffman seem interesting or relevant to the average voter is really not one that I envy. And it'd be very easy for my character, who was not a tenure-track faculty member, to be like, "I'm one of the oppressed. I'm one of the dispossessed. I'm one of the people who was failed by those above me." But at some point, you look around and realize—there's nobody else! All the people whose job it was to straightforwardly defend the modern American secular university—they've disappeared! Or they're blowhards! Or people don't trust them, because they're essentially getting paid to do it. So all that’s left is…you. You have to do to make a case for preserving this knowledge, because there’s nobody else who’ll do it.

Further Reading

I don't particularly recommend The Performance of Self in Everyday Life, to be honest. I am happy that Goffman wrote in such a relatively accessible style, but I think the unfortunate downside of that clarity is that it exposes the thinness of your ideas. The book is entertaining and informative, but the impact it had on the academic world seems a bit unwarranted, which makes it hard to read dispassionately. I read it ten years ago though so maybe I'd think differently if I revisited it.

I think the book of his daughter, Alice Goffman, is much better. It was justifiably highly-acclaimed when it came out and was the rare academic book that was read by the literati.¹ It's a participant-observer study of youth in Philadelphia who, because of outstanding warrants (often due to bail and court costs), find themselves constantly on the run from the cops. There was a big controversy when it came out, because in the appendix Goffman describes being in the car with these boys as they went looking, essentially, for someone to kill. Like, they wanted retribution for the murder of one of their own, but they wanted to kill someone! They didn't do anything while she was in the car, but they easily could've, and she would've been a party to murder.

She had the trust of her participants, and as a result could write a great book that detailed their lives. It's really highly worth reading.

Wow (I just looked her up), I guess she got denied tenure at Wisconsin! Yikes! That sucks, that's the kind of person who really ought to have tenure. It seems like her book was subjected to major scrutiny regarding its veracity, but it mostly withstood the criticism! Like, in participant-observer studies, you always fudge some of the details so the participants can't be identified! That's the whole point. That’s literally how they’re done. Apparently Jesse Singal, of all people, tracked down some of her participants and interviewed them, and he says that her book mostly checks out. Good job, Jesse Singal.

Okay, so you should read her book, and she's the kind of person who should have tenure. That’s it, that’s the end.

1. I’ve read a bunch of these participant-observer studies. A lot of them are really good—better than most novels you could name! I wrote about a few in this old post. Daniel Oppenheimer recently wrote about another one, Shamus Khan’s Privilege, which has become very well-known in the field. Oh, one of the best I ever read was Ashley Mear’s Pricing Beauty, about fashion models. I think about it all the time—really helped form some of my thoughts about the difference between high and low culture. I wrote about the book extensively in this old post about why literary authors are often paid way more money than their potential sales can justify. From my post:

I read that Aimee Bender (a great story writer) sold a novel + story collection for more than five hundred thousand dollars. Now, with that kind of advance, she'd need to sell at least 200,00+ copies to recoup the investment. Now is that really going to happen? For Aimee Bender? She's going to hit bestseller levels?

Why do so many debut literary novels sell for big money?