This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Sunday Kind of Post on Wednesday

Having glanced at the religion of some religious professors (see Sunday Kind of Post II), let us glance at the religion of some secular professors. We have already seen, from the writing of Jonathan Culler (see Sunday Kind of Post I) that among a lot of university professors there’s an open disdain for and and indeed a sense of threat from religious America, a country where American Airlines pilots ask their Christian passengers to get up and proselytize their non-Christian (see addendum to Sunday Kind of Post I), and Nascar hoods advertise Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ (see yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle on line), etc.

It’s a class thing - religion, like smoking, is perceived among the professoriate as tres prole - a sign of credulity, fear of truth, kitschiness, sentimentality, smugness. Religion tends to be associated in many professors’ minds with incorrect political and social positions - opposition to abortion, support of the death penalty, opposition to same sex marriage. Professors connect religious belief with unquestioning faith in leaders, both religious and secular, and with faith in and willingness to die for abstractions like Nation.

The corporate nature of religious activity - everybody gathering every week in synagogues and mosques - tends to give withdrawn independent minded professors the creeps, just as religion’s sometimes histrionic aspect (the weeping televangelist, the babbling charismatic) appals professors, whose demeanor is tightlipped and ironic. Put most broadly, professors find baffling and embarrassing strong emotions and strong belief (emotionally, as I’ve suggested in earlier posts, despair is acceptable and even admired among the professoriate, but things like the “good news” aspect of Christianity, for instance, and the gladness that sometimes accompanies it, are really over the top), and religious people dramatically and openly exhibit these. Religious people are irony-impaired. They have never learned to put quotation marks around words like virtue, love, soul, country, faith, belief, and leader. They have never encountered the word contingency.

Despite all of this, it would be wrong to call professors themselves secular. Professors have their own sect, with its own deity and doctrine. While Buddhists adore Little Buddhas and Christians venerate Baby Jesus, professors revere The Smartest Child.

No one should be surprised that intelligence in itself is a god-principle for professors. A philosophy professor at Duke put it well recently in response to a controversy on his campus about “intellectual diversity” (apparently almost the entire faculty is made up of Democrats):

"If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too."

Intelligence here functions first as a principle of political analysis. This professor’s
foundational creed, based on a mystery, is that most Americans are stupid. Stupidity, understood according to classical liberalism, is the inability to perceive the complex truths of social life and to improve the world based on those perceptions. Because most Americans are too stupid to intuit forms of enhanced social life, they seek out political leaders and arrangements that maintain the status quo, whatever that happens to be. They are like dogs who always expect their food bowl to be in the same place. Hence, they are “conservative,” and attracted to conservative politicians like George W. Bush. Bush’s main appeal to stupid Americans and his most notorious characteristic to smart Americans is that he is stupid. I have rarely been to an academic dinner party in the last few years that did not feature a ritual obeisance at some point to the following articles of faith:

1. Bush is stupid.
2. We are smart.
3. We should be President.

Just as the reason for most Americans being stupid is enigmatic, so the reason most American university professors are smart is enigmatic, too, although this professor’s analogy to basketball players suggests some genetic determination, some Bell Curve form of belief. Some people are born physically taller than other people, and some people are born cerebrally over the heads of other people, and who can say why? But it makes sense that many in the first group will dominate the sport of basketball and that many in the second will dominate the faculties of universities.

If you will allow me to pursue the genetic feel of this argument, we could go a little further and suggest that just as children of very tall people are liable to be tall, so children of very smart people are liable to be smart - indeed, genetics being what it is, we might expect that these children will be even smarter and taller than their parents. And this I think is where the core of the religious life of professors tends to reside.

Non-professors love their children and wish them well; professors love their children and demand that they be worshipped as transcendent geniuses. Professors are the only social class I’m familiar with for whom having bright but not brilliant children is considered a tragic mishap, a grotesque twist of fate, an assiduously not-commented-upon freak of nature, akin to Gregor Samsa waking up an enormous insect. Just as Christians like to contemplate miracles like Jesus’s turning water into wine, professors like to gather in their livingrooms with an audience and contemplate the miracle of Jason beating the local chessmaster at chess or speaking Chinese to a visitor from China or listing all the State capitols in alphabetical order in three minutes. Just as there are intense disputes among religious sects pertaining to the relative powers of various saints and prophets and seers, so academic parents are constantly undermining one another’s claims to having the Smartest Child by carefully tracking little lapses and failures on other claimants’ parts (didn’t get into the best private school; is brilliant in history but gets low A’s in math). All sect members can be identified by their common and striking mode of child raising which I won’t spend time describing here... But ask yourself: If you were the parent of the reincarnation of John Stuart Mill, how would you raise your child?