What if We Admit We’re Not Perfect?

Preparing for my third-year review as an assistant professor, I showed a more senior friend in a different discipline at another university a draft of my self-assessment. He read it and said, “Oh, no. No, no, no.”

“Great,” I said. “Give me feedback. I love feedback, especially the critical kind.”

“Hear this,” he said. “You are perfect.”

“Am not,” I said.

“Are too,” he said. “At least for the purposes of this document.”

He explained that my statement was too honest. I had undertaken seriously to describe what I’d done, where I had made mistakes and what I thought I still needed to learn. That is how I roll, because, at least when it comes to everything but capitulating to those who believe pineapple on pizza is acceptable, I have a growth mindset.

The task, my friend explained, was not to use this as an exercise in real reflection. That would be held against me. What I needed to do was puff myself up to the point of invulnerability.

Having read zillions of ghastly college application essays that did just that, as well as braggy and unconvincing cover letters for jobs—including for high-level administrative positions—I thought, Really? We don’t admit error?

I was thinking about this in the context of the weird rhetoric around higher ed and the current political climate. On one hand, government officials say higher ed is broken. On the other, many inside higher ed insist it is already excellent. Always has been, always will be.

University presidents who agree with some of the criticisms of higher ed are called out as caving to a craven and corrupt federal government. Let’s be clear: There are few in higher ed who believe what the feds are doing is OK, let alone legal. Presidents are trying to protect not only their institutions, but the lives of those in their communities. Calling them cowards helps no one.

And there can be no doubt that D.C. is filled with hypocrites politicians who have benefited from earning degrees at the same fancy-pants institutions they are now hell-bent on tearing down. They are on a mission of destruction that has already done irreparable damage to our society. These actions are vile and must be resisted.

But because I am my own harshest critic, I keep thinking about the ways we have messed up and earned some of the disdain directed at us by the public, including some of our own graduates.

I have been thinking a lot about what higher ed has gotten wrong. Concerns about cost are partly valid. We are not transparent enough about tuition discounting, and our internal explanations rarely persuade the public. We all work hard to get students, but are we doing enough to keep them through completion? Those who leave with some college, no degree and a ton of debt are rightly pissed off.

Are we doing a good job preparing students for what comes after they leave campus? In the humanities, we long treated graduate school as the default outcome, and many older faculty did not think beyond reproducing themselves. That’s a real limitation.

But the thing that seems to really steam our little friends in Washington is our work on diversity, equity and inclusion. National coverage tends to amplify protest and outrage, even though that is not the norm among students or faculty. Still, I have been thinking about where we may have gone wrong in how we’ve pursued social justice.

My own struggles in recent decades have had to do with making sure students don’t trample on and silence each other. Often, it’s the most privileged who are quickest to stand up for those they see as oppressed, whether or not those people need or want their concern, and then to smack down anyone who is, in their estimation, insufficiently attentive to social slights. We have taught a generation of students to police thought and behavior. To some extent, that is a good thing, because there are still plenty of vulnerable people—more so now than even a year ago.

But because I suck am not perfect, I have also been reflecting on my own part in all this and on what I could have done better. Four decades ago, my fancy-pants undergraduate education included no women or people of color in any of my literature courses, save an Emily Dickinson here, a Brontë there. Even in a lit crit course taught by Henry Louis Gates Jr., I read no literary critics of color.

After I’d been teaching for a while, I realized how that had shaped my view not only of the arts but of myself: to see representations of women, say, only through the eyes of men. I vowed my students wouldn’t have the same experience or be as ignorant as I was. So, I created syllabi that looked, to me, more like America. Students didn’t need to major in gender studies or in any of the other fields devoted to those we’ve long excluded when all it took was for me to adjust my thinking about what counted as literature. With the academic freedom to teach as I felt was right, they read a whole bunch of diverse voices.

Because I came to teaching late, after a career in publishing where I was exposed in the 1990s to critical legal studies and critical race theory, I was aware of the structural inequalities built into our laws. I did mandated DEI trainings with a yep, yep, yep attitude. None of it was new to me, but it never hurts to be reminded.

Colleagues, on the other hand, complained about these same trainings, which were often not particularly sophisticated or informative. Many felt called out as people with implicit or explicit bias. They dug in, kept assigning the same books, inviting the same demographic of writers, making the same kinds of comments, until students pushed back. All around, the environment was the opposite of inclusive; it became hostile.

When I think about how my syllabi changed, I wonder whether I got things wrong in my own small way. Or maybe whether I went too far. Had I thrown out some of what made me into a writer—the male and pale—to make room for others? I still included Dr. King and Orwell, but I had little room and less patience for the patriarchy.

Because I believe that language affects thought and vice versa, I policed my own word choices and those of others. I stopped assigning works by horrible men, or by men whose bad deeds had come to light. I became a guardian of anything that reeked of bigotry, prejudice or moral carelessness. In other words, I had become a judgy, intemperate, self-righteous person.

Now I think about where that got us and what happens when you tell a whole bunch of people they’re wrong, their values are wrong and they are a basket of deplorables. I woke up one morning in November 2016 and thought, Oh shit, what have we done?

I don’t think the current state of higher ed is as simple as resisting or reforming. That’s a media quip. It’s about really looking at what we’ve gotten wrong, what we do well and what we might consider changing if we want to matter again. (And that we figure it out for ourselves instead of having it crammed down our throats by politicians.)

Recently Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of education at Penn, made a case that we’re not delivering on our promises. And 10 professors with serious intellectual chops at one of our most prestigious institutions said basically the same thing. Maybe the rest of us, all well aware of where we stand in the higher ed hierarchy, can admit that we need to make some changes.

Or we can just do it the academic way and say, “We’re perfect.”