Superiority?

“...[some] identify as one of democracy’s primary risks ‘the tyranny of public opinion.’ Academics, because they think on a much higher level (or so the argument goes), can help us to resist this tyranny and thus ‘help make public opinion more self-critical’; academics are needed ‘to check the more hasty and unconsidered impulses of popular feeling, to train the democracy.’ It hardly seems necessary to describe this point of view as elitist. It says that there is a race of superior creatures who by virtue of having acquired advanced degrees are entitled to provide guidance and correction to the benighted many who have only gone to college or perhaps ended their educations early.

I have elsewhere labeled this thesis ‘academic exceptionalism,’ and a year and a half ago a group of historians provided a spectacular example of this form of hubris, when, in a letter to the American people, they pronounced on the candidacy of Donald Trump and directed us to vote against him. In effect they offered themselves as all-purpose seers who knew what ailed us and who came prepared with a remedy – their wisdom. I reminded the historians (in a piece published in The New York Times) that what distinguished them from those they purported to instruct in political wisdom was the possession of an advanced degree, not a possession of some form of moral/political superiority. If a historian tells me that his or her research reveals the dark side of some policy, I will listen attentively because that historian will, at least with respect to that subject, know more than I do. But that knowledge cannot and should not translate into giving me marching orders when I enter the ballot box. I might factor what the historians told me into a political decision, but that would be quite different from acknowledging them as my political guardians.

A less suspect version of the ‘democracy needs us’ argument involves the claim that students who spend four years engaging with complex, nuanced texts will emerge as potentially better citizens than those who have not had that experience. This is really the same specious argument, made less obviously silly by the fact that it is students and not arrogant faculty members who are at its center. But good citizenship and the knowledge required both to achieve and implement it are not taught exclusively by colleges and universities; those who end their formal education at the 12^th grade can still manage to acquire and act on an understanding of civic duty. Moreover, and this is the central point, good citizenship is an occasional byproduct of what happens in a college classroom; it is not – or should not be – the chief aim of those who preside over that classroom, and it is at least curious to defend an enterprise by pointing to one of its unintentional effects.”

~Stanley Fish