In defense of Saper- Laurie Essig, Sujata Moorti and Ellen Oxfeld

In a letter to the editor about Middlebury sophomore, Jay Saper ’13, Professor David Stoll wrote:

“Since Saper is a SOAN major, and I am a SOAN professor, I am embarrassed that he appears to be using sociological and anthropological concepts to make an ad hominem argument against an invited speaker, the Economics department and all tenured white male faculty at Middlebury College.”

Jay far from embarrasses us. He is a very committed young man who is ready to use knowledge to deconstruct power and privilege. An approach that invites interaction between thinking and doing has always been central to social theory, regardless of its political bearings. From the radicals Karl Marx, W.E.B. DuBois and almost all feminist thinkers, to the far more conservative Emile Durkheim and yes, even Charles Murray, social theory has never just been a way to describe the world, but to change it.

Of course both how we interpret the world around us and what we think needs to be done will depend very much on our political paradigms. How could it be otherwise? But the tools of social theory, what C.Wright Mills calls “the sociological imagination,” give us the ability to locate our own point of view in larger structures of power, to relate our own story to history.

Jay’s op-ed about Professor Levine’s presentation was an attempt to locate the power of certain ways of conceiving research. Jay was very upset by the talk and the paper on which it was based because of the use of the terms “culture of despair” and “culture of poverty.”  These terms have long been disputed, within and without the academy, because of the way in which they pathologize the family formations of poor and racialized people. We understand Jay to be questioning the continued usefulness of these categories, especially since the talk was not tied to a particular course, which would have provided the necessary contextual information. Similarly, Jay’s comments about marriage are meant to situate the privileges of that institution as benefiting certain races and classes over others. None of these comments are directed at individuals, as Professor Stoll suggests, but rather at structures of power and privilege.

At the center of the liberal arts mission is an expression of diverse and even contradictory ideas as well as an invitation to criticize and even protest those ideas. So even if you disagree with Jay’s particular project, and even if you disagree with how Jay has pursued it, we should not be embarrassed that Middlebury is producing critical thinkers who insist that knowledge is neither abstract nor objective, but a means of re-making ourselves and the world around us. It is exactly this sort of engagement with knowledge — this sort of intellectual citizenship — that is central to the liberal arts mission.