The Rise of the Pedantic Professor
When academic self-regard becomes an intellectual style
By Sam Fallon March 01, 2019
In recent weeks, Donald Trump’s pursuit of a border wall between the United States and Mexico has worked its way back in time — to the Middle Ages. Trump has happily agreed that his proposal is a distinctly "medieval solution." "It worked then," he declared in January, "and it works even better now." That admission proved an invitation to critics, who inveighed against the wall as, in the words of the presidential hopeful Senator Kamala Harris, Trump’s "medieval vanity project."
The response from medievalists was swift and withering — not just for the president, but also for his opponents. Calling the wall "medieval" was misleading, wrote Matthew Gabriele, of Virginia Tech, in The Washington Post, "because walls in the actual European Middle Ages simply did not work the way Trump apparently thinks they did." On CNN.com, David M. Perry, of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, insisted that "walls are not medieval." And in Vox, Eric Weiskott, of Boston College, urged readers to "take it from a professor of medieval literature: calling things you don’t like ‘medieval’ is inaccurate and unhelpful."
Readers who doubted that the moment demanded a defense of the Middle Ages could be forgiven. In a political battle of such high human stakes, the question of whether calling Trump’s proposal "medieval" constituted "an insult to the Middle Ages" (as the Vox headline put it) might seem worryingly beside the point. But the wave of furious responses was entirely predictable. In their parochial, self-serious literalism, they exemplify a style that increasingly pervades public writing by humanities scholars — a style that takes expertise to be authoritative and wields historical facts, however trivial or debatable, as dispositive answers to political questions. Such literalism is bad rhetoric, a way of dissolving argument into trivia. It’s also bad history: At root, it betrays the humanities’ own hard-won explanations of how we have come to know the past.
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This betrayal is deeply ironic, for literalist interventions usually profess to offer a more nuanced approach to history, one alert to how the needs of the present shape representations of the past. Weiskott, for instance, emphasizes the role of Enlightenment historiography in inventing the categories "ancient," "medieval," and "modern"; he argues that "the very idea of a backwards Middle Ages came out of Enlightenment thinkers’ high opinion of themselves relative to their predecessors."
The insight that there is no such thing as raw history — no grasp of the past that isn’t framed by those who tell its story — didn’t come easily. It was one of the achievements of such 20th-century historians and philosophers as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (whose Dialectic of Enlightenment lies behind Weiskott’s critique), Michel Foucault, and Hayden White, the great theoretical historian who died last year. For White, historical meaning emerges through history’s narrative forms. "The facts do not speak for themselves," he wrote. "The historian speaks for them, speaks on their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole whose integrity is … a purely discursive one."
This view of history, controversial at first, has by now become something close to conventional wisdom. Graduate students in the humanities can hardly escape reading Adorno and Foucault, and if they miss out on White, they absorb his arguments indirectly. So it is odd that, as scholars unite around the idea that historical writing constructs the past that it studies, they should at the same time turn to literalism as their favored mode of public engagement. To read the work of humanities scholars writing for a general audience is to be confronted by dull litanies of fact: a list of the years in which Rome’s walls were breached by invaders (take that, Trump), an exhaustive inventory of historians who have dunked on Dinesh D’Souza
This last came in a fall 2018 essay, published in the Boston Review, dissecting Trump’s habit of accusing his critics of witch hunts. "Today’s revival of the term," Jonathan Beecher Field explained, "is problematic because it gets the metaphor so wrong: though they wish to dismiss it as spectral, Trump and his cronies face real, non-spectral evidence that is stacking up against them." One might respond that, since Trump’s obvious intention is to characterize the evidence against him as spectral, he gets the metaphor precisely right, even if he’s lying. The problem with Field’s diagnosis runs deeper, however. It lies in the category mistake that dogs any attempt to fact-check a metaphor. There’s nothing wrong with a remedial lesson on the Salem trials, but it won’t have much to tell us about Trump’s brand of freewheeling mendacity.
Such confusions of fact and figure — as when references to "medieval" walls are taken as serious claims about the Middle Ages — evince just the sort of error that Hayden White resisted: a blindness to the figurative modes (or "tropological strategies") that animate all discourse, history included. "It is this sensitivity to alternative linguistic protocols, cast in the modes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony," White argued, "that distinguishes the great historians and philosophers of history from their less interesting counterparts among the technicians of these two crafts." As fact-grubbing becomes the preferred mode of public scholars, that sensitivity is in ever shorter supply.
The question is how it happened: how, even as the humanities absorbed the insight that history is fundamentally figurative, their public voices sank to new lows of literalism. It is tempting to blame an environmental culprit, and the media ecology that professors enter when they seek out nonacademic readers offers some likely suspects. Twitter’s enforced brevity privileges the factoid; conversely, its endless threads — the favored genre of the Princeton historian and social-media star Kevin Kruse — tend to collapse discursive arguments into data dumps. Or perhaps academic literalism is diffused from the mainstream venues where scholars often publish. Vox in particular, setting out as it does to "explain the news," has built a brand around a house style that blends earnest righteousness and complacent, self-satisfied wonkery.
But the real answer may lie elsewhere, in the anxiety with which humanists watch their marginalization in the university and in the public at large. Battered by a program of relentless austerity that has virtually shuttered the academic job market, cowed by the increasing institutional prestige of the STEM fields, and wearied by the provocations of Trumpian reaction, the humanities increasingly seem at risk of disappearing altogether. Under the circumstances, who could blame historians and literature professors for clinging to the shreds of authority left them? Among those shreds, no doubt, is the possession of expert knowledge, a form of capital whose readiest currency is the potted fact.
From this perspective, the point of literalism is less the facts themselves than the performance of expertise — the reminder that being a professor still counts for something. In an essay for The Chronicle Review last year on right-wing critics of academe, Benjamin Paloff urged academics to fight back: "If people understand nothing else about your expertise, let them appreciate how hard-won it is, that it represents work that is long, difficult, and, yes, ‘elite.’ " But as hard-earned and ill-treated as it is, expertise deserves better than the pedantry of academic self-regard.
Perhaps no one could have better diagnosed the literalist style than Hayden White, who showed that historical narrative is irreducibly tropological — that is, figurative — especially when it claims to be otherwise. Literalism, too, is a trope. And as tropes go, it’s a profoundly limited one. What it offers is less an idea of history (such an idea might indeed have something to say to the crises of the present) than a celebration of the humanist as expert — a celebration as dull and empty as expertise for its own sake will always be.
Sam Fallon is an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York College at Geneseo. His first book, Paper Monsters, will be published this year by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
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