Identity Politics and Academia

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I’ve seen a number of people recently post an article published on Vox, written by an anonymous college professor*, about the threats to his career and his “academic freedom” (whatever that term means anymore) posed by today’s college students and their “identity politics” (whatever that term means anymore).

I spent quite a bit of time deconstructing the article, at least in my mind. It’s worth noting that the anonymous professor only mentions one specific incident, in which a presumably conservative student reported him to the administration for having communist sympathies or something. That incident went nowhere.

I eventually came to the conclusion that the anonymous professor has a serious problem with regard to the tenuousness of his career, but that his beef is with his university, not his students. Why are professors’ jobs so shaky, and why are universities allegedly so quick to punish professors for offending people mostly age 18 to 22 (who are supposed to be there to learn from said professors)?

One could point to the increasing corporatization of academia, or the increasing tendency to treat students as consumers. Luckily, Amanda Taub, a fellow former-lawyer-turned-writer who deserves better than to be compared to me any more than that, addressed these issues quite thoroughly in a post at Vox. She notes that not only is there a serious problem in academic employment, but that many people are all too willing to dump the problem off on a bunch of teenagers, who make an easy target, quite frankly:

[A]n article about the employment challenges for today’s budding academics probably wouldn’t have been shared 190,000 times on Facebook. The professor’s article didn’t inspire columns in the National Review or the Wall Street Journal because their conservative authors are so concerned about the working conditions of adjunct professors.

Rather, the article garnered so much attention because it seems like it’s raising new evidence that identity politics is a bad thing — not just a kind of discourse that some people dislike — by identifying real harm. In January, liberal writer Jonathan Chait took a stab at doing something similar in New York Magazine, critiquing political correctness by claiming it was an attempt to “expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies,” and that such efforts were doomed to undermine the freedom they sought to protect. And now the Vox article seems to suggest that the harm is to academic freedom: even the professors are scared! These kids today with their identity politics are threatening the academy!

It’s not surprising that people are eager to grasp at such conclusions, because without some kind of real harm to point to, critiques of identity politics collapse in on themselves. AsMatt Yglesias wrote in January, the term “identity politics” is generally used to refer to feminist or anti-racist critiques, but that assumes that traditionally marginalized groups are the only people with an “identity.”

“The implication of this usage,” Yglesias wrote, “is that somehow an identity is something only women or African Americans or perhaps LGBT people have. White men just have ideas about politics that spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal.“

[Emphasis added.] [Edited to move certain links to DoNotLink.] (h/t Nate.)

See also:


[Yes, the anonymous professor made a comparison to a TGIF sitcom in 2015. ABC stopped running TGIF in 2005. -Ed.]


On a final note:

* Of course, the stock image accompanying the article was of a white dude with his mouth taped shut.

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