Conflict in the Academy

A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals

M. Morgan, P. Baert

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137521286
• eBook ISBN: 9781137521309
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Examining an intramural conflict that erupted within the English Faculty at Cambridge University in the early 1980s, this book develops a theoretical analysis of disputes as they unfold within the academy and explores the broader historical shifts within Higher Education and how these related to developments in Continental Europe.

1

Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup?

Abstract: This introductory chapter poses the question of how a dispute that erupted in the early 1980s over whether a young Assistant Lecturer in the Cambridge English Faculty was to be made permanent became such a widespread controversy. We explain the significance of our book in the context of existing literature, and detail our methodological approach and the empirical resources we will draw upon, including interviews, archival research and content analysis of various forms of published material. We also elaborate our pragmatic approach to theory, and the critical synthesis we forge between positioning theory and cultural sociology. Finally, we briefly summarise the case, and lay out the broad structure of the book.

Keywords: cultural sociology; MacCabe Affair; positioning theory; pragmatism

Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004.

The research for this book is based upon the reconstruction of a historical case in which neither of the authors was directly involved. This case involved a dispute over whether a young University Assistant Lecturer in the English Faculty at Cambridge University would be upgraded to a permanent position. What might conceivably have been quickly forgotten as merely a trivial and routine difference of opinion within the workplace very quickly turned into a cause célèbre, seen as illustrative of fundamental shifts taking place within both the university system in England and within the particular discipline of English Studies at the time. The event rapidly swelled to heroic proportions, drew vast media attention and became invested with considerable moral and symbolic consequence. One of the first questions directing our research is how and why this took place.

It is not our concern in this work to evaluate the common assumption that academics tend to overestimate the significance of their own internal squabbles.¹ However, we would like to suggest that tired clichés of ‘ivory towers’ and ‘dreaming spires’, or even more self-complementary myths of universities as platonic institutions directed towards disinterested enlightenment lead to an unhelpful black-boxing of these zones of social life from attentive sociological enquiry, usually on the odd assumption that the ‘real world’ is somehow always going on elsewhere. This book intends to contribute toward a growing literature that refuses to content itself with such popular accounts of academia as a withdrawn and therefore somehow asocial zone, and which instead takes the reflexive academic analysis of the social processes of academic life seriously (e.g. Bourdieu, 1988; Camic, Gross, Lamont, 2011; Collins, 1998).

Of course it is true that much of any debate, including this one, can be explained – or we would rather, explained away – by recourse to the individual ‘personalities’ of those involved, and since academia may have a tendency to attract and inflate already overblown egos and then set them competitively against one another like few other sectors of work, it would seem likely that such personalities would play an even larger role within academic disputes than within controversies elsewhere. To add to this, it has been suggested, somewhat unfairly perhaps, that ‘self-obsession, never rare in academe, is especially common in English Departments’ (Bayley, 1981: 135) and so it may be tempting to disregard what came to be known as the ‘MacCabe Affair’ as a simple case of egotistical pettiness getting the better of collegiate civility. But such egos are neither born, nor shaped, nor expressed outside of social space, and this book attempts to show the distance that can be travelled in understanding such disputes without resorting to psychologising their participants. In other words, it attempts to mark out elements of the specifically social and performative dimensions of such affairs and suggest that a case-analysis of this particular dispute might reveal insights into academic controversies more generally, and in so doing reject Simpson’s doubt that ‘the conclusions one might draw from these events can be extended beyond particular individuals in particular institutions at a specific time’ (1990: 268).

A couple of caveats are however necessary. Firstly, whilst it is our belief that the social sciences neither can nor should entirely avoid normativity (Baert, 2005; Morgan, 2014), our interest in this dispute is primarily analytical. Many of the participants involved will no doubt take issue with some of what has been written. Where erroneous information has been included or accurate information excluded, we appeal to the reader to trust our good faith in seeing this as a product of the difficulties involved in reconstructing even a relatively recent past event from disparate artefacts, rather than our own attempt to take a stake in the affair. Secondly, and this applies particularly to the following chapter, in any episode that brings to the surface enmity in the way that the MacCabe Affair did, differing accounts of what constitutes the ‘facts’ inevitably abound, and no doubt our own description cannot entirely avoid this process of presenting a located perspective on reality, as reality itself. Even the uncontested ‘facts’ of the narrative we offer are themselves, of course, never free from mediation. Later in this book we attempt to show how the performative fixing of these ‘facts’, as facts – what Goffman (1959) called ‘defining a situation’ – for the interested audiences, as well as for posterity, was a key element in the strategic unfolding of the dispute itself.

We feel that the historical case study is a valuable tool for sociological analysis in that it allows theory to be developed organically from within a natural setting. Even though, since the event has passed, we do not have direct access to this natural setting, we feel that we are able to reconstruct elements of the event in a manner that retains many of the strengths of the extended case method as it was developed by the Manchester School of Anthropology. The case study approach is particularly useful to our aims in that it provides the possibility of identifying actors’ own projected ‘definitions of the situation’, and offers the ability to analyse the various sedimented layers of social meaning that go into creating complex relational social interactions. Whilst in comparison to more extensive approaches to social research, intensive case analyses no doubt lose out in terms of generalisability, they nevertheless gain in their capacity to revive holistic accounts of social behaviour that are key to theory construction and modification (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We reconstruct this particular case from a variety of empirical sources – interviews with direct participants and onlookers, contemporaneous media reports, more scholarly accounts of the case that were written both at the time and retrospectively, a published transcript of a debate that took place in the University’s historic Senate House and became the most visible and staged public performance of the affair (in what follows SHD citations refer to this document), archived correspondence of the English Faculty, and archived minutes from English Faculty Board meetings. We use these empirical resources in two main ways. Firstly, in the more conventional manner of the historian – in order to gather direct and contextual information about the episode. In this manner, the empirical resources serve as springs of information from which we are able to resurrect a version of the past (as seen from the present). In this mode, we pick and choose from the range of resources as and when they prove useful. Secondly, however, we also analyse many of these empirical materials as instances of the dispute itself. We treat them, in other words, as examples of the performative enactment of the affair. In this second manner, we try to show how the different empirical resources each occupies a different level of public address so that for example, in the case of letters written to national newspapers or comments made on the television, the audience is clearly maximally undefined, whereas comments made inside closed Faculty Board meetings were instead performed to a very limited and clearly circumscribed set of known individuals. We argue not only that these different zones of public address affected the resultant performances themselves, but also that the level of public address itself became a site of contestation in the affair, with one camp attempting to open it up as widely as possible (e.g. by requesting exemption from confidentiality rules governing Faculty Board meetings), and the other attempting to close it down as narrowly as they were able (e.g. by claiming that it was only locally comprehensible, and denying any validity at all to the frenzied media accounts that circulated it).

Since the episode unfolded three and a half decades ago, methodological problems arise in that some participants are no longer with us, and the memories of others have faded (‘mercifully’, in the words of one interviewee). However, since the Owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk, retrospective distance from the event also provides the advantage of seeing the event in the context of its broader historical landscape. Therefore, in comparison to many of the reports that were excitedly penned in the immediate wake of the events, our study is afforded the possibility of more adequately judging the controversy’s status as expressive of definite shifts in the history of English Studies, higher education in England, and England as located within an evolving international scene more broadly. Similarly, whilst our own disciplinary location outside of English Studies provides challenges in terms of discussing a field with which we are substantively unfamiliar (we do not assume to offer much in the way of insight into the literary-critical content of the debate), it also allows us the possibility of approaching practitioners of the discipline as a somewhat exotic species of intellectual labourers, and diminishes any emotional temptation to take sides in assessing the affair. What can be said of chronological and emotional distance, however, cannot be said for institutional distance, and some familiarity with the workings of the University, we feel, has been useful to our project.

Theoretically, the book endeavours to demonstrate the virtues of adopting a pragmatic approach to theory selection and development, which sees theory not as separable from the particular empirical situations it is called upon to understand, but rather marshalled on the basis of its expedience in helping elucidate such specific settings (e.g. Baert, 2005; Mills, 1959; Morgan, 2014). Moreover, building on insights that challenge the philosophical marginality of metaphor to the human perception and comprehension reality (e.g. Blumberg, 2010) we regard the use of concepts and metaphors as not so much ways of uncovering hidden truths than as ways of re-describing and reformulating social phenomena. Sympathetic to Richard Rorty’s (1980) philosophical stance, we see an important value of sociological research in its capacity to put a new spin on old ways of seeing the world (Baert, 2005), and therefore argue for something of a bricolage approach that selects and combines different theoretical frames on the basis of their ability to cast the research object in a new or interesting light.

In particular, the book shows how positioning theory is able to augment a cultural sociological perspective in analysing intellectual disputes and controversies. We find the new school of American cultural sociology, which itself takes critical inspiration from a variety of disparate sources (including the late Durkheim, Parsonian functionalism, phenomenological sociology, symbolic anthropology, Turner’s (1957) pioneering account of ‘social drama’, and structuralist semiotics) to be analytically productive in its refusal to understand disputes and controversies as natural effects of the occurrences out of which they are built, demonstrating instead the importance of drama, performance, ritual, symbolism and notions of the sacred to understanding how ‘events’ become culturally constructed as such (e.g. Alexander, 2003). Nevertheless, as we elaborate later in the book, we find it necessary to disregard cultural sociology’s methodological guidelines of ‘bracketing out’ non-symbolic factors (e.g. Alexander & Smith, 2003) by instead first analysing the various material pressures that helped facilitate and shape the affair (Part I of the book).

On the other hand, we find positioning theory – which has already been used in order to analyse both intellectual interventions (Baert, 2011) and the possibility of resolving disputes (Harré & Slocum, 2003) – helpful in its emphasis upon the relational strategies that lie behind struggles over meaning-making, showing how social actors compete, both in isolation as well as in ‘teams’, to position themselves, others and ideas in meaningful relation to one another. ‘Positioning’ here, refers to the way in which any intellectual intervention, as interpreted by its audience, attributes characteristics to the author and to others (Baert, 2012). It also offers a more dynamic alternative to the relatively static notion of ‘role’ as frequently employed in dramaturgical analysis (Davis & Harré, 2007), and helps emphasise the manner in which locating oneself and others in social space is always a relational affair; occurring against or alongside some other. For instance, we describe how one camp in the struggle attempted to position the other as retrogressive, and in doing so, implicitly cast itself in the structurally progressive role. We also show how it is not just actors, but also ideas themselves, that become objects of positioning moves, and describe the way in which labels, such as the term ‘structuralism’, were pushed and pulled in opposing directions, one side working towards elaborating positive connotations, the other invested in positioning such labels, and those to whom they are ascribed, as toxic. We treat intellectual interventions (such as speeches, lectures, books or media articles) as both performances, that is, as social relationships between actors and audiences, as well as performative, meaning that we see them as doing something – bringing something about – and feel that the notion of ‘positioning’ captures both these dynamics particularly well.

Such positioning occurs continuously in social life, but becomes particularly visible in cases of dispute as such cases are characterised by the breaking down of the collective norms governing cultural classifications and the reassembling of social reality from the liminal wreckage of shared symbolic life. As there appears to have been a general awareness prior to the staging of the aforementioned centrepiece of the affair – the Senate House debate – that departure from the University of the Assistant Lecturer in question was more or less a fait accompli (e.g. Kermode, 1997: 267; MacCabe, 2014), we suggest that rather than an actual debate that might have feasibly led to a reversal of decision on the matter of his being appointed, the affair, and in particular the Senate House discussion as its emblematic scene, is better understood as having opened up opportunities for those involved to dramatically position themselves, their opponents and their ideas, in front of a captive audience. The metaphor of the stage underscores this performative perspective, which explains why we will pay special attention to the setting and other dramaturgical props and devices that accompany and influence positioning. We shall learn how positioning and counter-positioning always takes place against a background of values, some of which are shared even amongst the fiercest of rivals, showing, for example, how opposing camps in this case both made a huge effort to position themselves and their allies in line with the core principles of their shared academic profession. At the same time, however, we acknowledge the problems involved in importing what was originally a social psychological theory into sociological analysis proper and we overcome these issues by emphasising the different levels of social context that acted to structure and inflect the positioning moves that were made, and through stressing that positioning is often the product of teamwork, and especially so in this particular case.

We see this research as filling a gap within the existing literature in the sociology of intellectuals, which has typically centred its attention on the intellectual trajectory of writers – their social background (e.g. Bourdieu, 1991), their formative years (e.g. Gross, 2002; 2008), their intellectual development (e.g. Camic, 1987; 1992) or their influence (e.g. Lamont, 1987; Baert 2011). Rather than conflict, this literature has tended to focus on the cohesive or collaborative aspects of intellectual life – how writers or thinkers come together and develop networks, or how intellectual schools are formed and maintained (Collins, 1998; Farrell, 2001). In distinction, since the 1970s, and inspired in part by Thomas Kuhn’s work, a great deal of literature has emerged paying attention to the empirical study of controversies within the natural sciences. Such studies have been interested in the moments at which ‘normal science’ has been put into question through the accumulation of anomalies within a governing paradigm, and a controversy has resulted. This research agenda has typically focussed upon empirical observations of knowledge-in-the-making and shown the deeply social mechanisms through which scientists struggle to assert authority over particular fields (e.g. Barnes, 1977; Martin, 1991; 2014; Latour, 1988; Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). However, nowhere near as much empirical research has been conducted during this period into controversies as they have unfolded within the humanities, in part, no doubt, because the notion of paradigm shifts holds far less traction in these more multi-paradigmatic, porous and pluralistic disciplines. There are notable exceptions, such as Sapiro’s (1999) study of the conflicts between French writers during the Second World War, but they tend to operate outside the university structure and are usually set in politically charged contexts. Whilst certainly illuminating a variety of other ways, even Bourdieu’s celebrated attempts at uncovering the power structures underlying French higher-education institutions do not dwell on the actual conflicts that take place within the system itself (Bourdieu, 1988; 1996). Collins’s (1998) broad-sweeping historical account of the acrimony arising from conflict over limited ‘attention space’ within the philosophical intellectual field (Collins, 2002) and Abbott’s (2001) acknowledgement of the role of conflict in the evolution of academic disciplines are similarly informative, but lack systematic fine-grained empirical detail. Alongside certain isolated recent contributions (e.g. those appearing in Gingras’s (2014) recent edited collection), this book provides one of the first systematic sociological attempts to provide a detailed e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup?
• Part I  The MacCabe Affair in Context
• Part II  Symbolic Struggles and Performative Positioning
• Bibliography
• Index