Poisoning the Ivy

The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Vices of Higher Education in America

Michael Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315503431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"This is a dirty book about higher education." So begins Michael Lewis's provocative new book, one that calls into question the conventional wisdom and about the excellence of American higher education. Lewis argues that teaching and research on America's campuses are plagued by mis- and malfeasance. He further argues that these troubles are the paradoxical implications of professorial self-conceptions. The academic claim of moral and ethical specialness, according to Lewis, unexpectedly creates an environment where hack work or even no work at all is tolerated and in some cases actually rewarded. Through his chapters on "The Seven Pedagogical Sins" and "The Bad Joke of Scholarship, " the author traces the trajectory of the effects of collective denial on the quality of education in America. In his final chapter, Lewis offers a series of reforms intended to reverse faculty permissiveness.

Chapter 1
An Almanac of Academic Betrayals

The Phenomenology of Denial

This is a dirty book about higher education. No, you don’t have to cover it in brown wrapping paper, and you won’t have to hide the fact that you’ve read it from your friends (unless they happen to be professors). But it is about some very dirty things done by people who lay claim to the highest moral and ethical standards. And perhaps more important, it is about a failure of nerve on the part of those who allow such behavior to continue even as they abhor it. In a significant way, it’s a book about paradox, about laudable principle too easily prostituted in the service of base motive; about ostensibly progressive reforms that have instead encouraged the debasing of high purpose; about elegance and honor made masks for squalor and humiliation.

A Litany of Woes

Among academic professionals, whining has become endemic. Spend twenty-four hours on any college campus, with any group of professors, and you will be subjected to a litany of complaints that make it appear that these self-proclaimed champions of truth are an endangered species. To hear them tell it, they are a beleaguered band who persist in their heroic calling in spite of conditions that would drive lesser mortals to early sorrow or at the very least a change of career. In their litany of woes they claim to be abused by latter-day philistines who are constantly after them to abandon the disinterested pursuit of truth for a slavish embrace of shortsighted utilitarianism. They are overworked, forced to teach two and sometimes even three courses a semester by administrators who conveniently forget that professors must spend several hours in preparation for every hour in the classroom (not to mention, of course, the additional time needed to counsel students). They are forced to accept this inordinately heavy teaching load in spite of other burdens: After all, are they not expected to maintain the viability of their academic homes by serving on committees dealing with everything from curricular and personnel matters to speaker invitations and student housing? And who else on the campus is charged with the awesome responsibility of scholarly contribution to a body of knowledge in constant need of replenishment? Moreover, they must respond to these demands and burdens without adequate support staff (it is the rare professor, they will tell you, who doesn’t have to share the services of a secretary with a minimum of five or six others).

And if that weren’t bad enough, they are expected to do all these things in a physical environment that leaves a great deal to be desired: Their offices are too small, the windows are sealed for an air-conditioning system that doesn’t live up to expectations, and their health, it seems, is constantly threatened by the chemicals in the carpeting—not quite as bad as a coal mine, a foundry, or a textile mill but only marginally more inviting. All this, however, they might tolerate if only professors received their just financial due. Here they are, men and women who have sacrificed their youth to the rigors of protracted training in their respective disciplines, men and women with years of study behind them, people who have paid their dues in equal measure with other highly trained professionals such as physicians and lawyers, yet compared to what these professionals can command, they will tell you, their salaries are a mere pittance. In sum, the professorial litany of woes portrays a work life where highly talented and trained individuals persist heroically in their tasks ever at odds with those who, insensitive to their value, would have them serve lilliputian ends at an equally diminutive level of compensation.

To sympathetic but unwary listeners, listeners convinced that enlightenment holds the key to human progress and that the higher learning American academics presumably practice is one and the same with this desired state of intellectual grace, the litany’s depiction of woe must be cause for considerable alarm. If things are as bad as their professorial informants claim, the cause of enlightened human progress suffers almost daily injury in the very precincts where they should expect it to be kept free of harm. Moreover, it would take an exercise in Panglossian denial to keep from realizing that this sorry situation is only likely to worsen over time. Heroic though they may be, professors are no more than human; they have their personal hopes to nurture, they have families to support, and there is no reason to believe that notwithstanding their heroism, they have an infinite capacity for resilience in the face of sustained disappointment and abuse. On learning of the troubles afflicting the academic profession, those who want to believe that its selfless minions are our last best hope can only shudder at the prospect that disillusionment will make exiles of the best and the brightest, their places taken by an inferior breed. If such a prospect does not portend the onset of a modern dark age, there can be no faulting those who take it to at least signal the fall of a long winter’s night.

Enlightenment’s friends should indeed worry about the state of the academy and its future, but not for the reasons given in their informants’ incessantly dolorous recitative. The professoriate’s list of complaints does not, I am happy to say, accurately describe the conditions of its work life. Professors are not being pressured to abandon disinterested intellectual pursuits: Those so-called philistines are far more likely to interest themselves in what the football coach does than they are to worry about the absence of practical utility in the work of a medievalist or a sociolinguist. They are not overworked: A three-course load implies a likely investment of no more than eighteen hours per week for no more than thirty weeks a year, few students seek professorial counsel on a regular basis, and most academic committees meet no more than once or twice a month. Their access to support services is not inadequate: Department secretaries frequently complain of boredom bom of not having enough work. Their physical environment is anything but oppressive and unhealthy: It would be hard, if not impossible, to convince most American workers that the academic workplace is anything to complain about. And if on the face of it they earn less than some professionals, they are nevertheless well paid: Covering all ranks, their average or mean salary is approximately $48,000¹ for no more than a required thirty weeks of essentially unsupervised work in situations where employers make generous health insurance and retirement contributions and where office space, lab space, telephones, and other equipment (not to mention secretarial and professional assistance) are provided cost free. That’s the good news.

What’s Really Wrong

There is, however, some bad news as well. The higher learning is in fact profoundly troubled, and (irony of ironies) those most responsible for this trouble are those who loudly proclaim their heroic defense of the academy: the professors themselves. Contrary to their self-portrayal, they are not struggling against all odds to hold back the long night threatened in their litany of woes. Some, it sadly must be said, are little more than two-bit princes of the very darkness they claim to abhor, sociopathic manipulators who consciously subvert the academy’s permissive traditions as they promote their interests and satisfy their appetites.² These rogue professors are frequently joined in their subversion by those who apparently have confused academic life with academic work. Such professors love the academic life—its freedoms, its exclusiveness, and its consequent prestige. They seem to be under the illusion that living the academic life is the same as doing academic work. For these very special people, an occasional stroll with a student down the shaded walks of a campus quadrangle is apparently the equivalent of holding office hours; reading the New York Times, as long as it occurs on campus, is scholarship; gossiping with colleagues at a cocktail party is meaningful intellectual exchange; sharing alcoholic beverages with two or more students constitutes the meeting of a seminar; and maintaining an active membership in the faculty club suffices for university service. There’s no malevolence in all this, but as any student who has wasted untold hours waiting for professors who fail to show up for appointments or any publisher who has pursued more than one fugitive manuscript for months and sometimes years beyond an agreed-upon deadline can tell you, this confusion between living the life and doing the work is hardly less subversive to academic purpose than is the conduct inspired by more malevolent passions.

To be sure, these subversive elements—the malevolent princelings and their allies, the virtuosi of academic style—probably do not constitute anywhere near a majority of the American professoriate (my research and experience suggest that we are talking about no more than 30 percent of the faculty on any campus³), but the damage they do far exceeds what might normally be expected given their numbers. That this is so is in no small measure attributable to a massive abdication of responsibility on the part of the academic majority, those academics who appear to honor the purposes and requirements of their profession. Scrupulous where their own work is concerned, they are nevertheless complicit in the malfeasance and misfeasance of their wayward colleagues, complicit by virtue of a tolerance for wrongdoing and dereliction, together with a mind-boggling ability to rationalize that tolerance. Hearing evil, they close their ears; seeing evil they shut their eyes. And even those who allow themselves to see and hear, more often than not harbor the evidence of their senses in silence lest they be accused of violating that universal (and indeed perverse) professional injunction— “thou shalt not speak evil of colleagues.”

By the time newly minted Ph.D.’s take their first jobs, they are fully aware that academic etiquette requires obliviousness (or feigned obliviousness) to everything their colleagues are doing—everything, that is, except what they choose (usually with hyperbolic zeal) to advertise. Paying uninvited critical attention to collegial effort or its absence is inevitably regarded as unprofessional or a transgression against the most jealously guarded of all professorial protections, academic freedom. Since irrefutable truth is such valued currency in the academy, criticizing one’s colleagues in the absence of proof far in excess of even that demanded by juridical standards would most certainly be taken as indicative of just such a transgression. Knowing, for example, that Professor X meets his classes infrequently and irregularly is hardly a sufficient basis upon which to call him to public account; the academic standard of “irrefutable truth” accepts as credible only that evidence of malpractice not subject to exculpable interpretation. Eyewitness accounts from students? (They were there, he wasn’t.) Not good enough! (They obviously failed to appreciate Professor X’s desire to foster their intellectual self-reliance, and who can criticize him for that?)

Occasionally, despite the professoriate’s best efforts to ensure their exclusion,⁴ truth-telling deviants do show up on faculties. But their presence rarely if ever makes a difference. They are, after all, deviants, incorrigibles whose refusal to play by the rules of complicity marks their message as symptomatic of their own waywardness. When they insist that the emperor is not only unclothed but also luridly pleasuring himself, the response they are most likely to elicit is disgust at their unabashed voyeurism.

There is trouble in academe, but it is hardly the specter summoned up by the professoriate as it attempts to rally support for an extension of its prerogatives and perquisites. It is not trouble imposed by rapacious outsiders whose presumed ignorance and shortsightedness marks them as implacable foes of truth and reason. It is trouble generated from within the citadel.

The Spirit of Exalted Specialness

In An American Dilemma, his landmark study of American race relations, Gunnar Myrdal argued that, paradoxically, it was the egalitarian ideals of the slaveholders that led to the promulgation of the “doctrine of natural inferiority” and consequently the most destructive system of slavery in human history. The slaveholders, because of their egalitarianism, had to justify the departure from their ideals that chattel slavery implied. They did so, Myrdal suggested, by denying that any departure had occurred; arguing that since the Africans were not quite human, the moral imperatives of egalitarianism did not apply where they were concerned. This diminution of the Africans’ humanity, he reasoned, in turn permitted a repressiveness largely absent in other slave systems.⁵ Regardless of the validity of Myrdal’s formulation as applied to the specific instance of American slavery, his emphasis upon paradox in human affairs is instructive, particularly as it implicates good in the capacity for evil. Slavery would have been bad enough (it is never less than morally repugnant), but it is, ironically, the good—as represented by the slaveholders’ egalitarian creed—that rendered American slavery profoundly evil in its unrivaled repressiveness.

American academic life is today beset by this paradoxical implication of good in evil. Indeed it is this dialectic that renders academic malpractice so troubling. The behaviors that constitute academic malpractice are in themselves surely not laudable, but in many respects they do not differ from what you would expect to find in any precinct of the working world. No matter what the job category, it wouldn’t take much investigatory effort to turn up a numerically significant array of self-aggrandizers, exploiters, malingerers, and incompetents. And unless the behavior of such individuals turns out to be grievously and publicly consequential (i.e., when the stockbroker’s insider trading scam comes to light, when the contractor’s shortcuts result in the collapse of the school’s roof), these penny-ante desperadoes and goof-offs within our midst are likely to be left to their own pursuits and indulgences. Moreover, if we leave aside the moral issues involved in what these stalwarts of deceit and default are up to, the costs of their acts appear to be bearable. The work of society does get done in spite of their malfeasance and misfeasance (less efficiently, no doubt, than would be the case if the deviance in question did not occur), and we seem willing enough to live with a certain amount of what might be called “ordinary wrongdoing.” Indeed we take the expectation of such wrongdoing as a mark of sophistication and its absence as an indication of foolish naivete.

Academic malpractice would not therefore appear to be more than usually troubling. But in this instance appearance does in fact deceive— and in no small measure. Academic malpractice isn’t just “ordinary wrongdoing.” It can’t be, because the very essence of academic purpose intensifies its negative consequences, both moral and functional.

Colleges and universities (whether we are referring to two-year community colleges or to major research universities) aren’t, according to their own claims, simply firms that happen to be in the business of providing educational services; and being a professor (according to the professors) isn’t just having a job in one of these firms. Academic institutions do not justify their existence on the basis of a fee for service exchange, and professors do not justify themselves as functionaries whose work is necessary to that exchange. It is not mundane purpose that defines the academy’s essence but exalted purpose that does so. Some academics (those primarily on the faculties of graduate research universities) lay claim to being discoverers of truth, and all academics consider themselves purveyors of that most scarce commodity. Put another way, the academy defines and justifies itself in terms of its service to something quite extraordinary: “the way things really are” and might become in all conventional as well as esoteric venues of the human experience.⁶

The academy is an institution whose essence is paradox—so much a part of the secular world, a world in which day-to-day life is infused with the values of utilitarian exchange, yet almost sacred in its professed rejection of these values. If the church is God’s sacred outpost amidst the doubting, unbelieving multitudes, the academy, according to its apostles, is truth’s fortress amidst the multitudes who in shortsighted pursuit of immediate gain neglect its redeeming promise.

It is impossible to ignore this geist, or spirit, of exalted specialness on American campuses. It is physically manifest in an architecture intended to elicit awe. Old buildings, having in reality outlived their usefulness, are kept alive as if to proclaim that in the academy, at least, usefulness, such an everyday concern, must give way to something beyond utility, something so pure that it can resist the ravages of time. New buildings mimic the old or are designed to disguise their temporally specific purposes. There are periodic ceremonies, convocations and commencements, the purpose of which is to confirm the academy’s elevated separation from the everyday. Marking the beginning and the end of their own version of a year (which lasts from early September to late May), academics don their gold-tasseled caps, velvet-trimmed robes, and hoods of investiture, and after a procession accompanied by fanfare and flourish, assemble to hear one or more of their number confirm the academy’s interlocutory service to truth. With almost no prodding whatsoever, professors can be counted on to characterize what they do as a calling rather than a job. They must, they say, have the protections of tenure (the presumably permanent appointment) because truth, in whose service they passionately toil, invariably antagonizes the utilitarian masses. Without tenure surely some (the more powerful) among these masses would seek, with un-doubted success, to deprive them of the opportunity to translate their love of truth into epistles of enlightenment. Because truth and reality can make no accommodation with untruth and illusion, those who champion its cause, they will tell you, must be free in its service, free to seek, find, and communicate its essence without compromise.

It would, of course, be naive to believe that all academics are sincere in their claims to exalted purpose. The majority, arguably, are, whereas others only make these claims to mask nefarious or dilatory intent. Embraced sincerely or not, however, the ideal of professorial service in truth’s cause has a conscious presence for all academics. As such its moral and ethical implications cannot be ignored, not even by those who would cynically use it to cloak their self-serving behavior.

Ordinary wrongdoing, when it occurs in the academy, is thus hardly ordinary at all. It represents a grievous departure from those moral and ethical precepts that are to the academy’s justifying purpose what the tree’s limbs are to its trunk. Truth cannot be served dishonestly; to do so is a contradiction in terms. If it is to be served, it cannot be held hostage to the pursuit of personal gain and advantage. It cannot tolerate incompetence. And it cannot be left to the languid mercies of the lazy and the irresolute.

Where utility and immediate gain a...