Public intellectuals and the false binary of hope & pessimism
NSFS: Not Safe for School, your snark-filled antidote to racism and corruption in education. Follow @postphdtheblog on Twitter and @allisonharbin_postphd on Instagram
Dear friends and fam,
This week I’ve been pondering about the false binary of optimism and pessimism, and what, exactly, am I fighting for via NSFS?
Yesterday, I was interviewed by Shira Zilberstein, a sociology at Harvard University and a researcher with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, about the use of newsletter platforms amongst academics, and in between the formal IRB-approved questions, I got a weirdo glimpse into the habits of those of us academics performing the role of public intellectual via newsletter.
While any writer will tell you, it’s the content, not the platform, I couldn’t help but wonder what this sociologist was looking for, or more to the point, what hypothesis they are operating under. I think we can easily understand the connection between the erasure of stable professor positions and the increase of academics looking to continue their scholarship via different means and to a slightly different audience. We can also understand the rise of newsletters to be directly connected to the erasure of even humble paying journalism gigs and the need for writers to be able to produce their own work and perhaps even get paid a bit to do so.
At any rate, she asked some fundamental questions that got me thinking about the purpose of NSFS and its future.
What sets of data do I look at?
How much does feedback impact what I write?
What was the goal of having a newsletter in the first place?
Who else am I reading?
What do I feel optimistic about in terms of education?
I had to refrain from loudly chuckling and saying LOLZZZ to this one. This was a Serious Study. “LOLZZZZ” doesn’t exactly translate into usable data, after all. So, I thought about the question-- what did I feel optimistic about?
The question was not, what do you fear most will come to pass, nor was it, what mistakes of the past does education need to avoid in the future?
As my mind flipped through my crusty Rolodex of hopes and dreams, I didn’t even try secondary education. That place is so dark, I’m pretty sure any hope that lives there is just a trickster god dressed up as Legislative Reform for Teacher Training and Curriculum.
So, I kept searching my brain for nuggets of optimism about education writ large. Somewhere, deep, deep inside me, in a place where my belief in the easter bunny and elves sleeps perfectly preserved, I found a small little “realistic hope” for education:
There is absolutely no way the adjunct crisis won’t evolve, at least in some small way. Supposing tenured professors with power started giving a fuck about the future of the pursuit of knowledge, and the welfare nation of PhDs that teach 75% of all undergrad classes in the U.S. for an average of 26k in pay with no benefits, surely, goddess-willing, begin to make a modicum of changes that might set us on the path of a living wage for PROFESSORS, YOU KNOW, SOME OF THE MOST HIGHLY EDUCATED PEOPLE IN THE U.S. WHO LIVE AT POVERTY WAGES THX NEOLIBERAL POLICY.
See? I am optimistic after all.
As the interview went on, I spoke aloud for the first time my beliefs about the role of the public intellectual, the responsibility of educating, and just how intertwined I see the responsibility of the public intellectual with activist work.
For me, and my weirdo trauma-filled path of becoming a ‘public intellectual,’ I see all of the privilege afforded by my education, opportunities, and rigorous training in critical thinking as a responsibility to use my skills and knowledge to at least try to make the world around me a little bit better.
When Post-PhD was nerd trending a couple years back, and I poured over the “data” of the seemingly endless pile of “me too” emails in my inbox, I realized that my little whistle-blowing blog had always been far bigger than myself and my own rather negative experiences in academia.
If I could make just one person going through the hell that is trying to fight with a bureaucratic beast that is the university hierarchy feel a little bit less alone, a little bit more sane, well then I figured the blog and my perhaps over-exposure of my own personal story was worth it.
I felt the same way when I entered secondary education following the whole PhD and Post-PhD debacle: if I could help one kid into college, just one, then it would have all been worth it. And then, when I descended further into the depths of public high school hell by jumping out of the frying pan of public school and into the hungry flames of charter schools, I adjusted my personal goal. It was no longer “help get one kid into college,” it was instead about empowering and arming with knowledge just one kid who had started to internalize and believe what all the teachers and principals around them were sayings: that it was their fault they attended a decrepit school where only 22% of the teachers had an advanced degree or more than one year of teaching experience.
You see, for me, activism is about the tiny little things you do as much as it is about fighting loudly and with my words for justice. So, when I was in the trenches of the classroom, or speaking to a bunch of academics about the reality they refused to see (despite inviting me there), my goal had to become realistic. Which is to say, my optimism had to become realistic.
God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change. Courage to change the things I can and the wisdom and to know the difference.
Countered by Angela Davis’ “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change, I’m changing the things I cannot accept”
Somewhere between the two, the figure of the public intellectual oscillates. We must always know that individuals get far less done than invested communities, we must always keep our sense of self in an open dialectic with knowledge, because in order to survive, we must adapt to the continually changing landscape of knowledge itself.
As I mull over the prescient words of Jonathan Kozol from nearly 35 years ago, and compare them with recent data on high school graduation, college attrition, college graduation, and know on a very profound level that nothing substantial has really changed in how we regard BIPOC communities in this country, I have to keep my head afloat.
I have to believe in the power of individuals to make small but critical interventions to move towards becoming a society that knows the value of difference and diversity just as surely as they know the importance of education and critical thinking.
But I also have to know that as an individual, I can only control my actions, my words, and my beliefs. That any change I ever make will necessarily be a drop in the bucket. And that has to be enough.
As Kanye West says, there’s no church in the wild. For activists, hope must come in small forms and always in tandem with pessimism, which isn’t its opposite, but rather part and parcel of that awkward dance we do between fighting for change and radical acceptance of our present reality.
ExCiTiNg NeWs: Post-PhD is coming back! I hear you and see you my dear fellow academics, and I have taken your feedback to heart. This time, Post-PhD will be in the form of a newsletter, where I’ll be talking about higher education specifically and sharing the backstory of Post-PhD the blog. I’ll share resources, personal stories, research, and advice. This time it’s pay to play, so to speak, for $6 a month. If you can’t afford that, you know I’ll have your back.
So stay tuned for that, and wish me luck building it out on the backend!
Reparation Opportunities for the Melanin Deficient:
Radical pragmatism: what's your skill set? What are you particularly good at doing? Find a way to use it to make one person's day better this week. Like I said, activism and restorative justice can take place in the smallest of ways.
Until next week and as always, I'm listening.
Allison
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This is why I love Black futurism, or Afrofuturism: It allows an honest inspection of the past in order to re-imagine the future. Afrofuturism evaluates the past and future to create better conditions for the present generation of Black people through the use of technology, art, music, and literature.