By lotu5 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or FAL], from Wikimedia Commons

Most everything I’ve read about NYU’s Avital Ronell misses what should be the most significant point of the messy affair. Yes, Ronell should not be defended in knee-jerk fashion nor piled on by acrimonious former colleagues. Nor is it enough to bemoan the impact of the case on the classroom. What we really need to be doing, in light of this case (though we should have been doing it anyway), is examining the power of celebrity within the faculty and our responses to it, for it is the authoritarian impulse unleashed by our constant bowing to our most successful colleagues that threatens our communal standing as scholars and that, along the way, allows situations like this one to arise.

I was lucky when I started grad school at the University of Iowa: Robert Scholes and Gayatri Spivak had just left. Though I admired the former and respect the latter, I would not have liked to be a student of either. They were stars, and I instinctively draw away from star orbit. Partially as a result of their disappearance, by luck and not design, I ended with a wide-ranging graduate education of just the sort I wanted, not one dominated by any particular vision. I was left to my own devices, though with expert and scholarly support available when I asked for it.

I was fortunate, for Iowa, at least at that time, was rather unique for a top-tier graduate program. There were a few professors who walked down the halls trailing graduate students in their wake and ordering their lives. Most were content, instead, to help more than direct. Few of them were out to expand their legacies through acolytes who spread the gospel of the great one. As scholars should be, they were content to do their own work and to teach students how to do theirs.

What I learned was to rely on myself and to support the self-reliance of others when I stepped into the classroom myself. A couple of times, early in my most recent teaching career, I applied for grants and fellowships, but I wasn’t happy doing so, feeling I was conforming to the ideas of others rather than following my own direction. Also, I quickly found that I didn’t like the judgments on academics that have come to dominate our professional lives, judgments based not so much on our scholarship itself but on accolades and measurables. If you have been granted money or have won fellowships (that is, if you have kowtowed to the system), you are acknowledged as superior to your colleagues–the inherent value of your work becoming irrelevant in the face of these external considerations. I had a dean tell me once, approvingly, that at a school where she had formerly taught, no one gets tenure unless they bring in, through grants, the equivalent of their annual salary. I shuddered. I could never succeed at such a place. Nor would I want to.

At the same time as my desire for independent scholarship has grown, I’ve become more and more egalitarian and communitarian (not necessary opposites to the individualism of self-reliance I also value). When I edit anthologies of scholarship, I don’t seek name contributors; when I go to conferences, I am not drawn to the star panels. I have never been willing to fill out the paperwork for honors I had been nominated for, so always turn them down: I don’t want to compete with my colleagues but hope to bring them all to be noticed, and equally (when their scholarship shows promise and their teaching shows effect). Yet I am fighting a losing battle: even at the relatively obscure campus (not to put it down: I love the place) where I teach, people are jockeying for status. We (and I mean the “we” of academia) are not a community of scholars but are squabblers willing to step on anyone or anything else to reach the rewards in what we have been mistakenly led to believe is a zero-sum game. We have become as bad as the most craven bureaucrats of government or corporation, looking to our own advancement alone.

Our entire system facilitates this, encourages it. Retention, promotion and tenure are based on questionable quantifiable measures and not on how much one has improved students’ and colleagues’ work while doing one’s own. Sure, we mumble about “collegiality,” but that generally means little more than “Do I like this person?” We’ve created a system that allows people to amass “achievements” that are scandalously bereft of impact or benefit to anything but the one particular career in question.

Rather than wringing our hands about abuses of the system by people, like Ronell, who are unwilling to recognize the responsibilities of their own positions within the power dynamics of academia (and to act without abusing them), we need to be working to change those dynamics. We need to be creating, in our departments, new ways of making collaboration and cooperation the centers of our non-teaching activities—and returning teaching to the center of everything. Self-aggrandizement should be turned away from, not encouraged.

We can make this happen if we step back from our own needs for ego salve. We can make this happen if we start thinking a little more of our work (especially our teaching) and a little less of ourselves.