William Deresiewicz gives himself broad leeway in his recent Chronicle Review essay on how out-of-touch academics tried, and failed, to swallow America. Too broad. He begins by conflating academe with progressivism generally, reading a set of conservative electoral victories as rebukes of the culture of higher education. Los Angeles elected a Republican as district attorney: Take that, Proust scholars!
He tips his hand, however, when trying to characterize the cultural revolution that academics have purportedly been imposing top-down on the country. In addition to the familiar complaints that academics want to abolish prisons, borders, and gender, he tells us that the out-of-touch elite want decriminalization of all drug and property crimes, a bizarre phantasm disconnected from even online discourse. So too with his claim that this nefarious cultural force insists that “the state is evil,” which fails to capture views on the subject among even avowedly left academics, many of whom have dedicated themselves to the idea that the state is something to struggle over to improve the lives of constituents. And Deresiewicz veers into outright ranting when he dismisses the humanities for failing to follow the scientific method, as if this were somehow a new phenomenon rather than a disciplinary tradition, one he surely knows well as a former English professor.
Deresiewicz is right to note a disconnect between academe and the American public, and indeed, academic quibbles over terminology — such as “Latinx,” his primary example — can often land with a thud. Yet in his rush to trumpet the defeat of loony academe, Deresiewicz fails to follow his own advice to “sit down, be humble, listen, and learn.” Academics in the humanities have themselves proffered his criticism of the elite capture of social movements and of identity-group representation. There has been a robust discourse emerging from the academic left criticizing the very sort of disconnected, elite politics he decries as an emanation from academe itself. And the replication crisis exists in the physical sciences as well as the social sciences, because the problem involves incentive structures for publishing, not just politics.
As for Deresiewicz’s broader interpretation of the conditions that produced Trump’s re-election, it takes a peculiar lack of humility to pin the blame on woke academics — as though the culprit were his erstwhile enemies in the English department rather than the inflamed political and economic atmosphere all around us. Never mind that shaving away the Harris campaign’s progressive edges was no doubt a poll-tested strategy against a Republican Party that itself systematically tried to raise the salience of certain culture-war issues, closing its campaign with the message that “Kamala is for they/them.” Such strategies and counter-strategies may have mattered little in the end for a candidate who failed to distance herself from a historically unpopular incumbent, because Trump was able to ride a global anti-incumbent wave that unseated parties perceived to be responsible for post-Covid inflation no matter their political orientation.
But Deresiewicz is not interested in letting reality get in the way of a hot take. Or, as he might put it: Having become beholden to theory, he has floated away from empirical observation. And his theory is restorationist, even vengeful. In a brave new America that has rejected the supposed values of the contemporary university — just look at those public opinion polls! — his is a call to Make Academia Great Again.
In a more measured recent essay for the Review, Michael Clune argues that by increasingly describing the import of our work in political terms, academics have invited political pushback. There may be some truth to this, but a look beyond the humanities shows it to be an insufficient explanation for the reactionary wave cresting toward the academy. Researchers studying human sexuality, public health, vaccine development, and climate change have all faced attacks from public and private actors in recent years, regardless of their engagement in politics. Political actors frequently misrepresent empirical research — as in claims that human-genetics research supports racial hierarchy — or attack scientists. Politicization is coming for us whether we like it or not.
In any case, there are good reasons for academics to understand our work as political. As Clune himself observes, the runaway cost of higher education, a system that acts as a ticket to material comfort in America, accentuates the system’s reproduction of American class relations over generations. That fact is political. The institutions that employ the professors whom these authors decry are themselves powerful political and economic actors and major employers at the state and local level. Elite private institutions and large state systems alike have seen their endowments balloon amid the wider financialization of the American economy, becoming major investors interacting with markets from timberlands in post-communist eastern Europe to real estate in California. And university life itself has been transformed by wider political and economic shifts in recent decades. Increasingly, tenure has become the rare redoubt of a select few, while untenured academics with little long-term job security take on an expanding majority of the university’s chief function of educating students.
It takes a peculiar lack of humility to pin the blame for Trump’s election on woke academics.
Yet even amid the growth of an army of exploited and precarious academic workers, university administration has ballooned. Clune takes these administrators to task for undermining their responsibility to protect against political interference by attaching the university to progressive political projects in recent years. Yet far from the regression to political neutrality he welcomes, the last year has shown administrators hewing to a politics quite different from the one Clune invokes. The very schools who so like to trumpet their historical contributions to the causes of free speech, antiwar protest, and Apartheid disinvestment have openly, and brutally, cracked down on student protests in support of Palestine. These administrators — in thrall to university donors at private institutions, and who at public ones serve at the whim of state governments — represent the beachhead by which the academic Trumpism Deresiewicz lusts for will arrive on campus.
To accept the vision of academe as a hothouse of activist professors indoctrinating an army of woke conquistadors is to accept wholesale the vision of right-wing culture warriors like Christopher Rufo, who speaks darkly of a counterrevolution in the academy and American life more generally. Clune argues for a correction in the direction of “dedicated practice in the disciplines in which we are experts. Teaching students how to weigh evidence, giving them the capacity to follow a mathematical proof, disciplining their tendency to project their own values onto the object of study.” Indeed, committing to the bread and butter of teaching students is not a bad idea. But even such a seemingly simple commitment involves “politics”: Untenured academics teaching piecemeal across campuses because of low pay and lack of job security cannot devote as much time and attention to teaching students. Larger class sizes amid cuts in university funding worsen the quality of individual educations and are often felt more strongly at non-flagship and minority-serving institutions. And an unforgiving job market that incentivizes the publication of faulty or outright false results hurts the process of knowledge production and public trust in academic work more broadly.
Politicization is coming for academics whether we like it or not.
Trump’s victory should indeed occasion deep reflection for a Democratic Party that too often speaks in professorial jargon, and that, catering to an increasingly affluent base, transparently does not believe in radical or populist change, whatever their rhetoric might suggest. And Clune is right that professors from elite universities are rarely ideal voices for preaching egalitarian change. But all of that does not add up to Deresiewicz’s prescription of undermining “the ‘studies’ programs,” nor of Clune’s retreat from the public square to the chalkboard. Instead, academics who care about the work of interpreting the world and of educating students should recommit to creating the conditions in which those missions might flourish. That goal is incompatible with the abandonment of a public voice in the face of an incoming administration that has described universities as “the enemy” and whose allies in red states deploy anti-wokeness as a cudgel to defund, dismantle, or downsize public higher education.
A more promising avenue is visible in those movements committed to preserving robust higher-education systems that treat students and workers humanely. At their best, these academic labor struggles articulate meaningfully with the struggles of working-class Americans more broadly. For instance, the academic workers who now form 30 percent of the United Auto Workers overwhelmingly supported the caucus that brought the current UAW president Shawn Fain into power in 2023, helping prepare the ground for the union’s successful strike against the Big Three automakers later that year. The new leadership of the American Association of University Professors includes labor leaders from Rutgers University, where a wall-to-wall academic union joins tenured and adjunct faculty with graduate workers. And the inchoate Higher Ed Labor United marries such efforts to organizing among nonacademic on-campus staff and health-care workers.
Both Deresiewicz and Clune decry what they see as an overly self-important academy, but they themselves overestimate the academy’s importance to American politics. It would be wrongheaded to imagine professors are primarily responsible for Trump’s victory. The way forward, then, is not implementing right-wing curricula because a right-wing candidate won the election, nor is it the abdication of public engagement in the face of evidence that the public doesn’t always like what we have to say. Instead, puncturing the self-importance of the academy means recognizing that we are subject to the same forces of reaction and precarity afflicting other sectors of society. Now is not the time to abandon our crucial social role: to help to interpret the world, and to teach students who will go on to participate in our democratic life. The only way out is through.
