So here’s my question for you (assuming there are still people who have this blog in their blog readers): What is your assessment of the state of faculty democracy, in your personal experience? How would you describe the balance of power in your own institutions? What cases do you think are worth talking about? And what, if anything, do you think is worth reading on the topic?

Write a word in the comments, and we’ll see what we can collectively come up with!

My objection to this question, which has been strengthening for months like steeping tea, is the following: strictly internal politics aren’t actually politics. “Academic politics” as commonly discussed is an oxymoron and a terminological error. Loosely speaking, I would draw the following distinction: politics is about social change; but “academic politics” are merely a form of internal quarreling central to the reproduction of institutional order.

Now I agree, as someone is sure to object, that the internal affairs of a department can involve scheming and bickering and back-room deals; yes, they involve structures of power and domination, (occasional) resistance and (very seldom) subversion; certainly, they have institutionalized decision-making processes, like democratic voting or dictatorial edict. And some of these structures and processes are commonly thought to be political. But to call all of this stuff “academic politics” is, in my view, a confusion of certain means used in politics, with politics itself.

What is politics, then? — one might reasonably ask at this point. Or less grandiosely, what do I mean by politics here in this post? The term politics is obviously used to refer to a bunch of semi-overlapping things: for one thing, there’s the official “political sphere” (the thing one discovers in the politics section of the newspaper with its speeches and pundits); for another thing, there’s everything that people do to interfere with and alter social reproduction, which only seldom overlaps with the “political sphere”; for another thing, the term “politics” can be applied to anything — it becomes a traveling metaphor that can be used in whatever other contexts one likes. I guess my view, not terribly well formed but sufficient for this argument, is that politics (in those modern worlds that have it as such) is the key secular boundary zone between the sacred and the profane, a space filled with both utopian projections of nonactual, future (and presumably “better”) worlds and with bitter and inevitably compromising struggles to implement some fractions of these utopian projections.

The important term here is world: what’s purely personal or interpersonal is not politics, on this account, except insofar as it reshapes the world and not just the individual circumstance within that world. The suffering of the oppressed, for example, is not political until it is explicitly politicized. Hiring a new person in a department is not a political act, unless it happens to be part of a reworlding project. I read “the personal is political” as saying not that everything is political always and everywhere, but that issues arising in personal life are potentially open to being politicized, and are themselves the outcome of past political struggles whose outcomes have become sedimented as social order. This means, as a corollary, that a lot of life, for those of us who are unable to be politically active at every moment, goes on in some comparatively nonpolitical space of the ordinary grind, what Lauren would call ongoingness or Robert Desjarlais would have called struggling along.

Now, in academia, especially in the loosely postmodern social sciences or humanities, there are plenty of people who do hold that everything is more or less political, or more precisely perhaps that everything related to the workings of power is political, or anyway that everything related to disagreement and contestation is political. But is every fight a political fight? And is every social practice that involves power therefore political? Not necessarily, it seems to me. To clarify the last paragraph: true enough, any social practice is always potentially political, but it seems to me the passage from something being potentially political to being actually politicized is itself a social process. If we think everything is always already political, then we are likely to overlook the intricate processes of politicization and depoliticization, of breakage and reintegration in ordinary life, at work around us.

I admit that part of the urge to argue that everything is political comes from a perfectly valid intuition that the boundaries of what’s politicized are themselves sometimes politically organized. For example, if in the face of feminist critique traditional gender roles are cast as a matter of sheer human nature, that can amount to a political meta-argument that gender roles are not something that should be open to political struggle. In this case, we might say that the boundaries of politics are themselves unfairly politically constricted. (I am in a sense trying to constrict the boundaries of politics here in this post, though only in a conceptual sense and not in a way that would inhibit any concrete issue from being politicized.)

But the converse case can occur, too, which is where the boundaries of politics are outlandishly extended, not for any properly political reason but simply because politics can become a word that’s fetishized and appropriated as part of the academic ascription of value. Take the old canard that academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low. This appears to have been codified as Sayre’s Law, and it claims that “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.” This is an idiotic claim, I have to say: I defy any reader to produce a contested tenure case that rises to the intensity of sheer collective sentiment felt, for example, by pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian activists. But at any rate, what I think is happening in talk about “academic politics” and its bitterness is that the banality of maintaining the institutional status quo is simply being dramatized and over-valued by calling it politics. What better way to glorify the administrative tasks of inefficient and indecisive faculty governance, than by sanctifying them as politics and raising them metaphorically into the historic sphere of revolutions, empires, fundamental social transformations? The boundaries of politics in this case are not wrongly constricted but hyperbolically ballooned. And the concealed politics of the status quo are, if anything, masked and misrecognized by the illusion that one is doing politics through one’s involvement in minor strife about institutional operation.

I should say that sometimes academic life actually is involved in politics. Hiring certain professors is politically controversial — anarchists, for example — and can indeed pose the spectre of a different institutional world than was previously known. And the political significance and implications of academia are in fact really complicated to analyze. (Good thing for me, because my research project would be too easy otherwise.) But the important thing is that academia’s political entanglements are not given, are not always already instituted in every academic scene, are somewhat contingent and for that very reason need to be shown rather than presumed.

But someone reading this far will still say: in the end, every action and habit is always reshaping a world, one cannot arbitrarily decide that some such actions “count” as transformative politics while others don’t. To which I respond: it is the height of feeble megalomania to fantasize that everything we do matters to the world, which is beyond us and not easily changed.

«La loi attaque la fonction publique», s’indigne Noël Bernard, maître de conférence en mathématique à l’université de Savoie, à Chambéry, et membre du Snesup-FSU, premier syndicat du supérieur. Il dénonce «le recrutement massif de contractuels», «l’autoritarisme instauré pour le président d’université et son cénacle», «les équipes qui seront pieds et poing liés aux bayeurs de fond privés».

“The law attacks the public function,” exclaimed Noël Bernard, a master of conferences in mathematics at the university of Savoie, in Chambéry, and a member of Snesup-FSU, premier union for higher education. He denounced “the massive hiring of contract workers,” “the institutionalized authoritarianism for the university president and his circle,” “the research groups that will be bound hand and foot to those who lust for private funds.”

The teachers have their own group, “Sauvons l’université” (Save the university), with its own call for action.

They explain, “Nous y défendrons une conception de la production et de la transmission du savoir qui ne peut être réduite à la vision étroite et utilitariste imposée par le gouvernement.” (We defend a conception of knowledge production and transmission that cannot be reduced to the narrow and utilitarian [instrumentalist?] vision imposed by the government.) They title their proposal, “University presidents don’t speak in our name: For a collegial university.” The Loi Pécresse amounts to a warrant for a “hyperpresidency” that could become a “form of despotism.” And they conclude:

La collégialité dans la vie et le gouvernement de l’université constitue, et a toujours constitué, le socle de l’institution universitaire : la préserver n’est pas une option mais la garantie d’un enseignement et d’une recherche libres, comme cela est le cas dans les meilleures universités du monde.

Collegiality in the life and government of the university constitutes, and always has constituted, the foundation of the academic institution: to preserve it is not an option, but the guarantee of free teaching and research, as is the case in the best universities in the world.

They don’t specify, really, what they mean by collegiality, except to lament their lack of “voice” in university reforms. Does it mean a relationship of equality and peership among academics? Does it mean a kind of cordial solidarity? Sometimes in the U.S., it’s taken to mean a kind of professional kindliness, an impersonal intimacy, a durable, reciprocal obligation to one’s colleagues, and so on. In this context, though, it’s striking that collegiality is explicitly linked it to academic freedom. In the U.S. context, as far as I’ve seen, this connection is seldom made: we often construe academic freedom as license to be politically controversial, as license to disagree, rather than as a feature of our professional relations as such. Here, on the other hand, academic freedom seems more a matter of democratic decision-making than of freedom of speech, more a matter of governance than of license to be disagreeable.

A similar kind of complaint is expressed by another group, “Sauvons la recherche” (Save research!). They say that the government has ignored the advice of the scientific community and instead proposed a false autonomy for universities which really amounts to a subjugation to political pressures. (One particularly interesting claim is that long-term research will be diminished and only short-term research will get private funds.) They propose (unsurprisingly) more autonomy and a revised system of budgeting. I’ve noticed an interesting rhetorical moment in all this: an appeal to the global system of universities is often used to legitimate national French educational politics. In Sauvons L’université, this took the form of a comparison to the “best universities in the world”; in Sauvons la recherche, they begin their petition by citing the president of Harvard:

L’enseignement et la connaissance sont importants parce qu’ils définissent ce qui, à travers les siècles, a fait de nous des humains, et non parce qu’ils peuvent améliorer notre compétitivité mondiale”, ainsi s’exprimait récemment D. Faust, présidente de l’université de Harvard.

“Knowledge and teaching are important because they define what, over the centuries, has made us human, and not because they improve our global competitiveness,” as D. Faust, president of Harvard University, recently put it.

It would seem that they must be quoting this speech, though the quoted passage doesn’t exist in the original text in the same form. But in any event, it’s odd that the pathway to French academic reform passes through through the rhetoric of Harvard.

There is also a growing feeling that the status of academia in general in Israeli society is in a steep decline. However, some say that the academic world itself is part of the problem, because it is elitist and cut off from society, and has therefore made itself irrelevant… Faculty from various fields say the high social status that once adhered to the title of professor has been eroded…

The same debates are certainly heard in the U.S., where there’s a lot of anxiety about American anti-intellectualism, but also a horde of critiques of academic elitism. It seems that Israel also converges with U.S. critical discourses on postmodernism:

One of the main arguments of the veteran professors is that the decline of the humanities is partly due to a post-modernist trend “that has given a bad name to the humanities, because they have eschewed their task of presenting a clear scale of values,” one critic of the trend says.

The most sociologically interesting dimension of the strike is that apparently it’s led by senior professors, who didn’t bother to consult their junior colleagues before starting their protest. Last week, apparently, the scientific researchers joined them in their strike. They say, however, that they don’t feel that the public is paying any attention to them; apparently Israeli administrators have taken no definite action so far, and have announced no intention of doing so. They may be hoping that pressure on the faculty will increase as the strike lasts longer.

Apparently, also, a lecturer was suspended from his job after demanding that a student leave class. The student was wearing an army uniform and carrying a gun, and the teacher was “an Arab lecturer who does not identify with the Israeli army and who does not share in the naturalness with which many of us accept those who carry arms among us,” according to a letter written in his support by his colleagues. Obviously this has a lot to do with local Israeli politics; but it also raises, again, the question of how teachers can express their ethics or politics in the classroom, when they clash strongly with their students’ views, or with their students’ very identities. And to investigate this, we would have to return to the question raised by the first article: what is happening to professorial identity today?

That’s all on the level of just trying to interpret the survey data itself. It seems to me, though, that Diana Relke, in her comment on the InsideHigherEd story, gave by far the most perceptive critique of the whole project. Initially she says, “I’m still not convinced that you can say anything about an institution by toting up how its faculty votes on particular issues,” since “the sum [of the institution] is always greater than its parts.” Which is exactly right: the politics of the institution and the political effect of the institution aren’t reducible to the ways that faculty consciously choose to classify themselves on surveys. (Case in point: according to the comment by “Unapologetically Tenured,” “people with college degrees vote Republican in higher numbers than their less educated counterparts. Thus, either indoctrination is not occurring, or it is failing miserably.”) On the contrary, all kinds of political dynamics can operate beyond the level of conscious belief – or for that matter, beyond any clearcut political metrics.

And Relke makes another major point, which is that “in my experience, the academy is rivaled in its conservatism only by the Church. And that has nothing whatsoever to do with the voting habits of the faculty.” In other words, even a single person’s politics are highly contextually sensitive — I think of those old white male Marxists who are purportedly committed to revolutionary human liberation but who are deeply authoritarian classroom teachers. One can still ask, of course, whether there are ethically troubling contradictions between their ostensible values and their practices, or whether there’s something intrinsically objectionable about these values or practices.

At any rate, a purely descriptive response to this whole debate would be that the university is complex and politically contradictory, and that those who are trying to find a single coherent political description are doomed to self-deception. And moreover that political descriptions of the university might be context-sensitive too. For instance, sometimes I’m tempted to say that academia really is not very liberal, but other times I freely acknowledge that it does have some thriving leftist subcultures, and obviously much social and literary theory has historical connections to left politics. And there are other times when what most needs saying is that the American university is also an instrument for the reproduction of class status through educational credentials – in fact, this might be its most sociologically important function. But the point is that a political analysis of the university has to account for the proliferation of contextually specific discourses about the university’s politics.

Finally, even if we had a perfectly accurate political analysis of the contemporary American university, the normative implications would remain far from obvious. If universities are dominated by liberals, is that some sort of structural necessity or a  mere historical accident? Would a predominance of liberals be intrinsically bad, and ought the faculty (or students) to be a perfect political mirror of society at large? (Do the likes of Horowitz long for the kind of affirmative action for Republicans that they might reject if it were based on race or ethnicity?) Or if universities are dominated by their donors and boards of trustees, and indirectly by the politics of the status quo and the desire for institutional self-preservation and prestige, then what are the political implications of – in short – depoliticization? What about the politics of academics’ claim to privileged truth, knowledge and expertise? Or the broader politics of “knowledge production,” of academic research into esoteric, unprofitable, seemingly socially useless topics like the structure of dark matter, or the techniques of medieval cathedral building?

If there’s anything I’ve learned from talking about the ethics of education in my own department, it’s that the morality of scholarship is fraught with troubling and only sometimes inevitable institutional compromises. I don’t know where this leaves us, except with the sense that the demographics of the political spectrum aren’t the best place to start thinking about academic politics. That said, however, the actual text of the study is much more analytical and interesting than the news coverage — it analyzes degrees of “cosmopolitanism” among faculty, for instance, and generally conveys a more sophisticated view of faculty politics than the news coverage would suggest. Moreover, it has a fascinating bibliography that I recommend, especially to myself, wholeheartedly.