Salaita and the Two Cultures

All politics is local, so it would be unwise to read too much into the  8-1 vote by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees against hiring (or unhiring) Dr. Salaita. But if you look at the sixteen UIUC departments that voted no confidence, the STEM disciplines and even some of the important social sciences (economics, psychology) are conspicuously absent. This is worthy of attention because there is little doubt that the views of the major STEM departments would not have been easily ignored. I have seen reports that suggest that people were reluctant to vote against Chancellor Wise because she is well liked and there is a desire for stability due to a recent history of administrative turmoil. I also suspect that the pro-Salaita campaigners did not help his case by trying to turn this into a wider movement and wedge-issue against Israel. (I am not denying that they were justified in doing so, not the least because right wing Zionists clearly tried to get a hostile critic fired from his job, but it might have been better to have focused exclusively on procedural and constitutional issues rather than turning it into a movement building moment.)*

Even so, the list of departments that voted no confidence points to an important cultural, even sociological divide.** Folk in the Humanities have not come to grips with the fact that many of the professionals in STEM disciplines are, in effect, extremely successful fundraisers and managers of highly skilled technicians. The culture is not corporate in a GE or Wall Street sense, but on the STEM sides of campus there is a different atmosphere from the Humanities. This is not to deny that there are many genuine intellectuals among STEM types and that they have broadly liberal-cosmopolitan views, but their ethic and self-identity is not tied up with the very possibility of permanent, even intense disagreement.

Moreover, STEM folks are, in effect, at-will employees; when the grants dry up, they can get eased out. (Of course, in practice many have skills that are in good demand inside and outside the academy.) Classroom education is ideally based on (charismatic) lecturers with elegant powerpoint slides that need to be memorized (in practice it is often taught by folk that do not have very good language and communicative  skills); education in a STEM field is not really about free-flowing and passionate discussion. (Of course, there are exceptions.) While we all know some STEM-scientists that also have activist sympathies (in ecology, climate science, marine biology, etc.), there is no natural sympathy or affinity with social causes and expansive views on education and debate. (This is, in part, due to the influence of bad images of science generated in past philosophy.)

In so far as universities present themselves as places where ideas are genuinely debated and creativity is valued, the Humanities play an important totemic, even status-enhancing role. It's okay to have Humanities Centers, and funky art galleries, and world class chamber music. But, in reality,  the Humanities are a fig-leaf for the permanent fund-raising activities of the rest of campus (no different from the role of the arts in modern city-planning.) We are good for the luxury life-style that gets projected in glossy folders and fancy clips (cf Veblen); but our concerns are not well understood, and, evidently, we are not very good at conveying the significance of these to our STEM peers, who, of course, have to balance the demands of scientific integrity, publication pressure, managing complex work environments, and grant-making salesmanship. There is really little room for error, and the focus is on getting the job done; politics is a major distraction that, if allowed to surface, may disrupt even destroy a lab's functioning.

 

*What makes this case so awful (beyond the very serious hardship Dr. Salaita faces for giving  up a job and moving his family, etc.) is not that he wasn't hired. It's perfectly legitimate for Deans/Provosts/Presidents to look at dossiers and say to a department, 'I am not so sure about this candidate...let's have a serious conversation.' Honest people can disagree about Dr. Salaita's tweets and to what degree that raises concerns over his attitude toward students, and that might have lead to investigation of his student evaluations (etc.) [see here for my views]. But that's not what happened here: his appointment was targeted by folk who really dislike his political views. It very much looks like his appointment was treated no differently than, say, lobbying Congress; the university ought to keep such  lobbying at a more distant arm's length.

**I thank Jonathan Kramnick and Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis for facebook discussion.

 

Comments

[Mark Behets]

Sometimes those Powerpoint slides of STEM lecturers must not only be memorised but even understood :-)