The stereotype of university professors as entitled babies who are oblivious to the “real world” takes on new urgency as the pandemic rages. Encouraged for decades by well funded conservative extremists, it’s become pretty standard for pundits and politicians to dismiss professors as spoiled, elitist, and selfish. Not surprisingly, it’s a stereotype that many university functionaries, including administrators, have accepted as well. Worse still, some professors have themselves come to internalize it, thereby discouraged from asking questions about anything “administrative,” including apparently hasty top-down decisions that may bypass our contracts or cripple our institutions’ academic viability.
For decades, then, professors have been getting the message that they are barely tolerated by many in the state capitol, and by variously titled chairs, deans, provosts, and presidents who, increasingly, assert their own managerial identities by differentiating themselves from us. Faculty members who are occasionally privy to administrative conversations often express surprise and distaste at the degree to which supposed faculty obliviousness and incompetence feature. It starts to seem as if many administrative-types don’t merely believe anti-faculty stereotypes but also bond with one another over them. There is perhaps no more effective way for rookie administrators to perform their new bureaucratic identity than to join in the familiar banter about impractical, coddled, and lazy faculty.
In the midst of higher education’s pandemic response, then, is it any wonder so many university administrations plow ahead with critical decisions, making little effort to substantively collaborate with faculty? After all, haven’t professors exempted themselves from the right to participate by virtue of being self-exiled prima donnas who care far more about their arcane research than balance sheets or the public good? Is it any wonder that even those of us who are the object of these stereotypes may still feel shamed and silenced by them? “Maybe it’s true,” we may think. “Perhaps a professor of English (or geography or music or mathematics) has no business speaking up given the life and death urgency of the moment.”
Except, of course, that the dismissal of professors’ voices is mostly based on an impressive pile of half-truth and hooey. Yes, some small percentage of U.S. professors come from elite backgrounds, land plum positions, and go on to live and work in “splendid isolation from the world.” In most cases, though, professors are actual flesh-and-blood people. Often, we have taken on staggering student loan debt and struggled for years, working as waitresses, census takers and retail clerks in the increasingly desperate hope of snagging tenure-track positions at humble regional universities in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Kentucky.
When we join these institutions, we are required to fully immerse ourselves in increasingly bureaucratic university service, provide individual attention to understandably beleaguered students, and research and publish in our areas of academic expertise, many of which are not arcane in the least. We spend our workdays teaching, lobbying for critical research equipment, making cold calls to prospective students, working through piles of accreditation forms, and writing tons of student recommendation letters. This, mind you, is if we are one of the lucky ones. For the majority of instructors, who are adjuncts or otherwise undervalued academic laborers, work demands and anxieties are usually far greater.
Only vanishingly few of us, then, ever catch a glimpse of anything resembling an ivory tower into which we might retreat with quill and parchment while kingdoms rise and fall around us. We are, rather, members of the communities in which we live, often small towns where we buy our groceries, fall in love, get mammograms, and send our children to school. We anguish along with our neighbors about gun violence, climate change, access to medical care, and the opportunistic fascism and viral pathogens sweeping through our nation.
Yes, the vast majority of instructors in higher education are privileged by race and class, a reflection of the unacceptable stratification that deforms all of U.S. culture and society, and not just higher education. Only when compared to the most shamelessly exploited members of society — especially the essential service workers now required to put their lives at risk for peanuts — do professors, as a whole class, appear to be an especially entitled, elite group. It is no accident that, with respect to pay, status, and the other factors that insulate a group from the pains of the world, professors are rarely compared by critics to CEOs, hedge fund managers, or even university administrators. Evidently, there is something especially appealing and effective about scapegoating professors and other educators for the hideous erosion of the American middle class.
It has long been clear that U.S. professors have been targeted for derision and elimination by conservative extremists. Just as evident is the fact that anti-professor stereotypes are rooted in the assumption that, while folks in private business, technology, medicine, entertainment, and sports might deserve some degree of prestige and pay, professors and K-12 teachers generally do not. This is in no small measure a result of concerted conservative efforts to exploit the longstanding American love affair with anti-intellectualism. In the U.S., it seems, it has never been especially difficult for unscrupulous plutocrats to funnel populist outrage toward books and those who love them.
But the tensions and exigencies of the pandemic make it ever clearer that it’s not just conservative extremists who use stereotypes to justify vilifying and marginalizing professors. It is also a growing cadre of professionalized university bureaucrats for whom professors’ supposed impracticality and pampered entitlement rationalize our exclusion from critical decision-making. At best the scenario that unfolds in one in which faculty are hapless children with wise and benevolent parents. At worst, we are self-centered nincompoops who must be flattered and manipulated into accepting policies that we have had no voice in creating. If, in the midst of crisis, we consent to such treatment — perhaps persuading ourselves that university administrators really do know best — will we ever again be allowed to sit at the big table with the grown ups?
The Virtual Pedagogue 