POLITICS MARCH 11, 2011
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
Should academics join the government?
Last month was decision time for the many academics who left their tenured jobs to work in the Obama administration. Universities standardly grant leave for at most two years, at which point a professor must either return or resign. Some, of course, can hope to be rehired later, but prudence often rules. Many of my acquaintances made the choice to return to writing and teaching. A few have stayed on. For a long time I’ve been comparing my free and sheltered life to those exposed and difficult lives, with a mixture of relief and guilt. I keep thinking of Cicero’s acerbic commentary on philosophers who refuse to serve the public realm: “Impeded by the love of learning, they abandon those whom they ought to protect.” Even worse, he accuses them of arrogant self-indulgence: “They demand the same thing kings do: to need nothing, to obey nobody, to enjoy their liberty, which they define as doing what you like.” It’s difficult not to hear that voice in one’s dreams, even if one believes, as I do, that writing itself can serve the public good.
While I pondered my own regal privilege and the recent choices of my friends, I happened upon a book that sheds as much light on such choices as any I know: A Liberal Education, by Abbott Gleason. Gleason is a respected historian of Russia in the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods. He taught in the History Department at Brown from 1968 until his recent retirement—but with a two-year stint in Washington running the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a leading think tank focused on Russia and its surrounding states. Gleason’s father Everett, also a historian, made the opposite choice, leaving his tenured position at Amherst and taking on the jobs of chief of the current intelligence staff for the Office of Strategic Services, and of deputy executive secretary of the National Security Council. So Tom (as I always knew him, when we overlapped at Brown) grew up in two worlds, and this early experience informed his later choice.
Gleason was a child of WASP elite privilege, and he ultimately came to detest narcissism and egotism in all its forms, even those that masquerade as revolutionary zeal. That’s what makes this memoir, written with a lovely sense of irony (Orwell is his favorite stylist, and it shows), so tricky and so fascinating. As Tom depicts his early forays into left-wing politics while a Harvard undergraduate, some of the commitments were genuine—he ran real risks in the South during the civil rights movement. But there was also a lot of narcissistic hype, as he came to believe that he and his mostly Jewish friends (he congratulated himself both on having such friends and on being able to keep up, almost, with their smarts) would someday run the world, in a far better way than it had been run before. Meanwhile, as he shows, his own life contained stunning pockets of unexamined arrogance, particularly in his role as a husband who just expected that his wife would like everything he liked and do whatever was most convenient for his career. (It is a testimony to his interest in genuine self-knowledge that the marriage has endured and flourished.) The tale Gleason tells is, ultimately, one of patient self-unmasking and self-recreation, as his radical effusions gave way to a cautious and deeply unfashionable liberal individualism with conservative elements (the love of community attachments that he depicts historically in his best known book, Young Russia).
Where government service was concerned, Gleason took issue early on with contemporaries who denounced everything that went on there as corrupt, while saluting one another with canned revolutionary slogans. But he also knew how life in Washington, with its constant jockeying for reputation and power, its severe restraints on self-expression, had drained his father of joy over time, and he was determined not to be drawn too deeply in. After two years of what he regards as useful and enjoyable public service he had had enough. He had learned something—a richer sense of the reality of political choices, a new confidence in his grasp of the whole range of issues affecting Russia—but he saw that beyond a certain point staying there would not satisfy his desire to understand.
But why the academy? Gleason’s portrait of that life (my life, the life of those returners) is far from rosy. He trenchantly puts before us so much vanity, so much anti-Semitism, sexism, racism, so much disdain for the legitimate demands of students, that the reader begins to wonder why he didn’t run screaming away. He’s particularly rough—rightly—on Harvard, where both professors and students alike operated (and maybe we should use the present tense!) on an unearned assumption that they were indeed kings and that they would rule the world with their superior endowments.
And yet, there is just the delight of finding something out and teaching it to others. It’s deeply moving to see Gleason find, slowly, the subject that grabs his passions and, ultimately, sustains his life. Moving, too, to find that he connects his curiosity about Soviet history with the capacities for self-criticism and self-change that he slowly developed, and with his evident capacity for thinking critically and creatively about academic institutions. (He almost became provost while I was at Brown, but withdrew from the final group of two because of a health issue.) In the final chapter, he talks about his current struggle with Parkinson’s disease. As his body increasingly eludes his control, there is still the abiding pleasure of doing some work every day, learning just a bit more, being just a bit deeper as both thinker and person. He’s still getting a liberal education, and that, in the end, he suggests, is what life is really about.
I admire and honor my friends who have made Cicero’s choice for service and who stick by it. They are giving the world something that we who write all day are not. Reading Gleason’s powerful memoir, however, reminds me that it is not just cowardice or truculence that keeps us here in the study. It is something in which a reasonable person could reasonably hope to find the meaning of a life.
Martha C. Nussbaum is professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago. She is the author of From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and the Constitution and Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
12 comments
Exceedingly well written and sympathetic review. As to the question in the teaser: "Should academics join the government?" aka Was Cicero right? Nussbaum's answer is "No, not necessarily" and she she rejects Cicero's accusation. I find myself agreeing with her, though I am not an academic and no government would want to have anything to do with me in any event.
- basman
March 11, 2011 at 8:22am
Exceedingly well written and sympathetic review. As to the question in the teaser: "Should academics join the government?" aka Was Cicero right? Nussbaum's answer is "No, not necessarily" and she she rejects Cicero's accusation. I find myself agreeing with her, though I am not an academic and no government would want to have anything to do with me in any event.
- basman
March 11, 2011 at 8:22am
Academics have become specialists, focusing on a single subject, or a subject within a subject, or a subject within a subject within a subject, and come to see everything through that lens, often making them unsuited (dangerous even) for service beyond the academy. Outside the academy, the law has become similarly specialized, and lawyers, once the generalists, have come to see everything through the lens of their specialties, often making them unsuited (dangerous even) for service beyond the law. I mention this similarity between academics and lawyers because the author of this post is both an academic and a lawyer, and I am curious whether she considers the myopia of specialization (in the academy and the law) as making many (most) academics and lawyers unsuited (dangerous even) for service beyond the academy and the law.
- rayward
March 11, 2011 at 9:39am
Even the quickest glance at Nussbaum's own work shows no such myopia, so maybe she won't be the best person to answer rayward's question, but it's a good point. But perhaps the current academic job market will fix this problem: a new generation of scholars is rising who have had to grab at any part-time or one-year job they could get, so that they're being exposed to fields and subjects related only tangentially to their specialty or not at all, with teaching loads that leave no time to think about their own research, thus dooming them to keep getting temporary jobs outside their field. Those who flourish in this environment will become regular Renaissance (Wo)Men. (Except for the ones who actually once specialized in the Renaissance, of course, since they'll get to think about that for only a week or two in some survey course, assuming budget cuts still allow the continued existence of survey courses that mention the Renaissance.) Of course, such people will never become prominent enough to be placed in government positions, so never mind.
- frippo
March 11, 2011 at 11:21am
Academia has a lot of problems, but academics joining or not joining a given government is not one of them. Really, what would a philosopher or humanities teacher be doing in government? It's a non problem. I suppose that lawyers and economists would wish to join the government to gain practical experience.
- arnon
March 11, 2011 at 12:32pm
Seriously, arnon! What could someone who has studied history or foreign languages or political science do for the government? How could the ideas of philosophers like, say, Locke or Rousseau have any effect on civic life? And check out the book review section of TNR: a lot of deep thinking with no bearing on politics whatsoever.
- frippo
March 11, 2011 at 1:27pm
"A Liberal Education Should academics join the government?" Could this article be written in a fashion to exude more insularity? This is an era of high unemployment; Republican class warfare aginst public employees; austerity in government; budget crises; cuts to the safety net and a general polarization of politics. Please, find meaning in your study because it is doubtful you can contribute anything to government or the picket line.
- LawrenceGulotta
March 11, 2011 at 4:47pm
frippo "Seriously, arnon! What could someone who has studied history or foreign languages or political science do for the government? How could the ideas of philosophers like, say, Locke or Rousseau have any effect on civic life? And check out the book review section of TNR: a lot of deep thinking with no bearing on politics whatsoever." What exactly would a philosopher like Rousseau or Marx do in a government position? Do you think they would have more influence that way? Gaston Bachelard worked as a postmaster and William Faulkner also sorted mail at one time. I suppose that counts as government jobs.
- arnon
March 11, 2011 at 5:10pm
Whether today's academics, however specialized they may be, or whatever their discipline, have something to offer government today--of course many do--isn't the, ie Nussbaum's, issue. Her issue presupposes that, as evidenced by her opening about many of her colleagues hitting the two year decision point. The issue is a personal one and moral one. For those are the terms within which Cicero cast the matterr. should they, ought they, join government. As I read this short thread, only Lawrence Gulotta addresses this issue, even though I miss his point. Lawrence are you saying Nussbaum is engaged in virtually solipsistic navel gazing because of the "real problems out there"? Are you saying that her piece is misdirected because the "real problems out there" overwhelm anything an academic might have to contribute? Or are you saying, as a variant of what I first asked, "For God's sake of course academics should shed their insular existences and join government (and do whatever else they can) to confront these great problems? If what you are saying is any of the above, I disagree with each one. And I disagree your characterization of today's times as being of such crisis that academics' government service is a no brainer "ought" for the greater good. Rayward, to come back to where I began in this short post, your point about myopic specialization is an overgeneralization of such magnitiude that it is useless here. This, right from the opening bell knocks the shit out of it: ...Last month was decision time for the many academics who left their tenured jobs to work in the Obama administration...
- basman
March 12, 2011 at 3:35am
Baseman: The great academics in government service, such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., confronted this issue. It is a real issue, and I don't mean to minimize the stress this decision can create in the lives of serious people. I don't believe today's problems, whether economic, social, or political, are insurmountable. Academics have an important role to play, inside or outside government. As a twenty-five year plus veteran of government service, I cannot really say I've encountered too many philosophers working in the vineyards or doing the "Lord's work." The saying among the rank and file is, "We have seen them come, and we have seen them go." Returning to academia is a better option morally, than joining the ranks of the shameful, business elite. When so many dedicated public servants are being treated like cattle, their union rights under siege, and long-term unemployment common in the workforce, the moral anguish felt by intellectuals such as Ms. Nussbaum, needs to be placed in perspective.
- LawrenceGulotta
March 12, 2011 at 7:15pm
Lawrence (it's basman not aseman) It's always a pleasure to read your posts. I agree with your first two paragraphs. I can't see what government service philosophers can perform as philosophers. I don't agree the being a member of the business elite is necessarily shameful. Any society which is capitalistic, or is partly so, will necessarily have a business elite. And good and bad will abound within it as in other segments of society. Accordingly I wouldn't necessarily assign a higher moral status to those in academe or to those choosing it over business. Note for example the recent revations of Libyan connections shaming some in academe as well as their institutions and the shameful history of academic accommodation of evil and tyranny. Finally, apart from rejecting the travails of one group--say disenfranchised workers or the unemployed--as measuring the triviality of the discrete, authentic travails of other groups, Nussbaum in this piece is without anguish. She uses the theme of her piece as the occasion to think it about it some, to illuminate her thinking by her review of both Abbott Gleason's book and his own experiences, as she calmly, cooly and collectedly arrives at her conclusion that writing, researching, thinking, studying and teaching comprise, as she so nicely says in closing, "...something in which a reasonable person could reasonably hope to find the meaning of a life."
- basman
March 13, 2011 at 1:57am
If you are referring to thieves like Summers, please not. They just add to the layer and layer of crooks in our government and can hide behind the achievements of real academia.
- MSA70
March 21, 2011 at 9:56am