Status Panic on the Campus
The transformation of professors into “content providers” only aggravates campus disruptions.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is “fighting back against efforts to intimidate professors into silence,” which—for many of us whose memories of college lecture halls are not uniformly pleasant—is yet another ACLU cause we might not support. The issues here, however, are of more momentous social and political consequence than our initial reaction might suggest.
The ACLU’s efforts—they’re raising funds to support them—are a response to lawsuits brought against students and faculty at Columbia University and elsewhere for their opposition to the war in Gaza.
The issues are complicated, but the ACLU says it is fighting against attempts to “weaponize our legal system to punish and silence constitutionally protected speech.” Such lawsuits “have become a common tool for intimidating and silencing criticism—including from whistleblowers, journalists and political protestors… not necessarily to win in court, but to entangle people in expensive litigation, using the prospect of mounting legal fees and a potentially ruinous financial penalty to chill speech. In other words, to bully people into silence.”
The plaintiffs in the Columbia case say statements by faculty supporting student protestors “somehow injured them by causing Columbia University to move classes online, restrict campus access, and cancel commencement.” Three defendants in the case are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman—members of the notorious Capitol Hill “Squad”—which might be about all most conservatives will want to know before making up their minds.
Personally, I have no dog in this fight. Both sides—all sides—seem intent on dragging their opponents into court, a strategy that seems unlikely to improve matters. This conclusion that the atmosphere on campuses will only get more poisonous, tentative as it is, was reinforced the other day in a casual conversation with a college professor friend at a public university more than 300 miles from Columbia.
This professor and I have a mutual friend who was hoping to land a job at the university, and I asked what he might do to help make that happen.
“I have no influence here,” the professor said. “I’m just a content provider.”
Now my professor friend, who teaches English, is hardly a firebrand, and there was not the slightest indication that he said what he did to make some larger sociopolitical point. He was merely speaking of how he views his role as a member of a college faculty in the second decade of the 21st century.
And, for what it’s worth, our mutual friend, the job seeker, was not looking to land a plum post in the political science department, instructing young and impressionable minds in his belief that it is time to reassess the legacy of Josef Stalin. Our mutual friend—who has spent half his adult life behind bars—was just trying to get hired on the campus maintenance crew.
We all know that the head basketball coach these days makes more money than the college president who, it would not surprise me to learn, might consider himself nothing more than a “content provider,” too. The development office now runs the show, as what we laughingly refer to as “institutions of higher learning” seem more akin to businesses than anything else.
This has no doubt been a welcome turn of events for those whose distaste for the halls of Academe stems from campus “demonstrations” and the chaos they can cause and for the predictable politics of tenured faculty. By every indication, it should be borne in mind, tenure is by every indication rarer these days than in the past, as colleges and universities rely increasingly on adjuncts.
For those of us who see the so-called culture-wars as nothing less than the historic town–gown rivalry writ large, the fact that professors increasingly see themselves as mere “content providers” will surely make matters worse, not better. Alienated intellectuals have always nursed some perverse need to identify with the downtrodden and oppressed. This is hardly going to lessen as their own perceived importance on the campuses where it was once assumed continues to plummet. This is a fine example of Status Panic which, in the Age of Trump, will only intensify.
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