The Argot of Academic "Resistance"

On the self-contradictions of academics trying too hard to sound relevant

The President of Harvard, Claudine Gay as of this writing, a derivative scholar and an obvious affirmative action case, found it difficult to condemn calls for genocide, and it has now emerged that she plagiarized parts of her doctoral thesis. Gay exemplifies the triumph of politics over intellect, a phenomenon widespread in the academy.

The statement below was posted on X/Twitter by one Alyson Brickey¹, Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, on behalf of something called “the Palestine Teach-in Collective.” My purpose here is not to comment on the war in Gaza, but rather on the language used by this group, and on what it says about the state of intellectual and academic culture. The tone and diction — word choice — of the statement below are cliched, and worthy of analysis for exactly that reason. But these cliches — rote, practiced and institutionalized — are artefacts of power, which is why they are interesting.

The inimitable Jon Kay, once of the National Post and now of Quillette, replied on Twitter/X \that the teach-in advertised would be taken more seriously if it did not feature a notorious antisemite.² I am not sure that this is strictly true: there are some on the left for whom antisemitism is edgy, transgressive, and an earnest of commitment. Commitment for these people as for the President of Harvard is everything.

One gathers that Professor Brickey posted this statement as an act of support for this collective, and not (as I have) as an example of political rhetoric, or with any other critical or sociological intent.

The statement makes claims to scholarly sophistication on the one hand and to real-world authenticity on the other: two qualities not pointing in quite the same direction. Those tensions are paralleled by contradictions between the statement’s hyperbolic claims to victimhood and the secure state-funded position of the professoriate.

A literary sensibility is alive to the multivalent character of language, which is to say to its ability to mean several things at once, and sometimes to communicate things the author did not mean to say. The tensions evident here reveal much about the thought-world, the ideology, or what the post-modernists call the imaginary (used as a noun) of the activists behind this statement.

As a professor of English, Prof. Brickey, who likely possesses some literary acuity, might be expected to notice some of these tensions. That she does not speaks of the blind spots of the activist academy: in a world like the woke academy where serious disagreement is not tolerated, posturing and even absurdities pass unremarked, and likely unnoticed. I am not a professor of English, but am something of an amateur of literary criticism, so I will take a crack at this text.

The statement is that of a “collective,” rather than something more authentic like a committee, a board or a working group. Like “teach-in”, their word “collective” carries more than a whiff of the sixties, so already we are in world which assumes that the proper place of the intellectual and the scholar is on the left, struggling for social justice. That assumption is itself historically contingent, indeed unusual, and largely a creation of the twentieth century. But to these people it is a fixed ideal.

The statement begins by taking offence at criticism of scholars and academics by journalists and politicians. A charge of McCarthyite anti-intellectualism is immanent. These scholars’ areas of study (black studies, indigenous literature, critical race studies, other “studies”) are recited with indignation, and as though they were somehow exculpatory, prophylactic or otherwise prohibitive of critique.

The various sub-disciplines named are all focused very narrowly on matters of current concern, and make at once claims to leading-edge scholarship and to urgent social relevance. The former points to the ivory tower, to learning, diligence, precision, and erudition, and might on that basis have excellent grounds to tell politicians to shove off. But the simultaneous claim to social relevance, articulated with a rhetoric of danger and victimhood, undermines any claim to scholarly independence from social pressures. The tension is obvious, unless resolved by the prior belief that leading-edge scholarship will solve urgent social problems. That belief, however difficult to reinforce with evidence, is the governing self-conceit.

That immodest presumption of social importance is of course the desired import, present always already (as Adorno’s much-borrowed phrase has it), and here rearticulated in what is effectively a private argot understood by the collective author, and by the circles of the progressive academy, if not by many others. That closed and inaccessible academic jargon is itself in performative tension with its simultaneous claim to articulate urgent popular demands.

A position as the voice of the oppressed is central to the self-image of this “collective,” and points to a massive social contradiction between the established and secure institutional position of the academy within our society, and its now rather dated sixties-ish faux-revolutionary rhetoric on the other. The training schools of bureaucrats affect to speak truth to power, when in fact they are more often than not the cutting edge of power.

The final sentence of the first paragraph claims that many of “us” (members of the collective, and presumably scholars of whatever-studies too) are “minoritized via our race and ethnicity, and experience racial violence… on a regular basis.” Neologism is sometimes necessary — new things require new words — but this neologism exists to pack an assertion of victimhood into a demographic fact, thereby making a demand for immunity from critique. That immunity is necessary if we are to refrain from mocking its ridiculous assertions.

The second and thirds paragraphs repeat claims to victimization, asserting that safety and academic freedom alike are in danger. Obviously, mocking tweets are not unsafe. Political meetings sometimes can be unsafe, but that would be those opposed by the Antifa-adjacent violent left, which this one is not. It is, however, good to know that the left is back on the side of academic freedom.

The final paragraph announces that it speaks for “our community” (authenticity strikes again), also claiming that settler violence and genocide are happening in both Canada and Palestine. Who knew? It’s some years since I visited Winnipeg, but I must have driven right on by: have they moved the Einsatzgruppen away from the Trans-Canada highway, or was I too distracted by McDonalds?

The mention of genocide moves beyond tensions or even contradictions, and into the realm of inflammatory and morally infamous error. The word “genocide” refers in the first instance to the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews, and also to a small number of similar attempts to murder a people. To apply this very serious word to Israel’s war against Hamas, let alone to the European settlement of North America, is deeply false. The description of these last as genocides might be called an act of semantic expansion, an extension of meaning, but such polysyllabic academic terminology tends to hide the infamous lie involved in comparing Israel to Hitler’s Germany.

The final two sentences are a cacophony: the obligatory land acknowledgement (it normally comes first, but perhaps was forgotten in the current state of emergency) slides into academic freedom (not much of a concept with indigenous peoples, who whatever their other difficulties did not have to put up with academics), to a typographically emphasized statement that neutrality is not required (who suggested it was?), and then to the alleged threat of “hate”. The final clause indulges a strange locution (“hold space”) before veering off once more about “genocide.” One has the sense of a political document name-checking obligatory constituencies, and ending in that most emotive slogan, “genocide”, the blood libel of our our time.

Politics is of course the point: this statement has the one-dimensional dogmatism of sectarian politics, and that politics depends on claims to vulnerability and danger. This is in contradiction with the social position of Prof. Brickey, like many academics a state employee with a secure job in a safe place. Short of supporting Israel or criticizing transgenderism, she cannot get fired. The whiff of danger is greatly valued in the security of the common room.

Prof. Brickey’s sensibility is that of an ideologue rather than a critic, and in that she follows the President of Harvard and so many others. Her website says that her current work focuses upon a short story by the early twentieth-century writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “as a way into contemporary political conversations around incarceration, racial segregation, border security, citizenship, and abortion rights.”³ A short story by a not entirely well-known writer of a century ago seems a perfectly valid object of literary study, but a very strange way into a jumble of current topics related to race. One suspects that there was no need to find, “a way into contemporary conversations” about race, as the Professor and her cohorts were there already. It’s almost as though race were the primary concern, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman something of a conscript, her three-named Anglo-Saxon moniker lending an air of literary respectability to the current thing.

But this is not the only English professor or literary critic to hanker after social relevance. It is an occupational hazard, almost as though critics, like professors, harbour a furtive worry that perhaps their work is not very important after all. I do not share that doubt, at any rate if their work be done well, but many seem to. Arguably Johnson suffered first. More recently, Leavis saw literature as tool of social analysis, and more recently Eagleton, who is vastly more amusing. But those men could at least write: was it one of Shaw’s characters who said that nonsense is tolerable if at least phrased in respectable language?

To too many in today’s academy, scholarship is a branch of activism. The problem is that to make intellectual activity an instrument of something else, even something admirable, tends to degrade thought, imposing upon it demands for desired conclusions and for conformity to the needs of that primary thing. And when that primary objective is an urgent social problem, or even a need for personal importance, the pressure to conform is great. The reduction of thought to a secondary and instrumental status, making of it a tool in the service of something else, constrains curiosity and militates against complexity, nuance or indeed self-awareness. This stilted jumble of hot-button topics and cliched language is evidence enough of that.

1. https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/english/faculty-and-staff/alyson-brickey.html

2. https://x.com/jonkay/status/1726099735323320528?s=20

3. Is one allowed to “ibid” on the internet? If not, see note 1.