Building a healthy academic community

Last week the economics department sponsored a lecture on “Early Non-Marital Childrearing and the Culture of Despair,” by Phillip Levine, an economist from Wellesley.  Levine posited deeply problematic and racist conceptions that devalued a “culture” from which he retained much distance.  I was much confused as to how he could engage in such a debate; however, soon I learned that this was not a discussion at all, but rather an unstable platform that he could not defend, leading him to dodge any serious challenges.

Levine suggested that “culture is something economists know next to nothing about.”  Yet, for some reason he went on to make gross assumptions about cultures, dehumanizing certain people and reducing them to operationalized “empirical” facts.  He refused to define success, but at the same time judged the probability of groups of people attaining “success.”  Some have “opportunities of improvement so poor that they think, why not have a baby anyways?  Nothing better is going to happen to them.”

Levine insisted that this was an “assumption [we] are all willing to agree on.”  To push his notion of disparate success values, he suggested that the “presumed probability of success in life for this room is very high, but for others it is very low.”  What exactly is such a statement really all about?  Why is he even going to argue that “statistics drive the point home that early non-marital childbearing is strongly linked to poverty?”  Not only does he fail to engage in a distinction between correlation and causation, his argument rests on the notion that non-marital childbirth is inherently bad.

The rich white man has only been so obsessed with marriage as a “necessary foundation of society” in that the oppressive institution that it be only further privileges him and allows him to evade addressing the systemic oppression which he perpetuates.  Levine fights for “non-marital birth to be avoided” and suggests that “low socioeconomic status women” would have “births otherwise [that] would occur once married” if not a part of the destitute “culture of despair.”  He vehemently declares that “the high rate of early non-marital childbearing in United States” is a “problem that needs to be addressed.”

How is it possible for a man who admits to knowing nothing about culture to make judgments about women who so choose not to participate in the privileged institution of marriage that is doused in patriarchy and inextricably conflated with capitalist profit, which widens the gap that creates the conditions for his notion of a “culture of despair” to which he deemed a failing?  The monogamous dyadic couple is not natural.  Similarly, the idea of the nuclear family is a radical new form that emerged particularly raced in post-World War II America when only white veterans received lucrative loans to move to the suburbs.  Only 23 percent of people in the US live in nuclear families and at its height in the 1970s only 40 percent.  We must stop supporting research around and providing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding that is dedicated towards marriage promotion activities; such action relies on a faulty premise that ties marriage instead of other social factors to the wellbeing of us and our children.

I am appalled that our economics department sponsored this event without allowing for critical follow up.  When controversy arises around a lecture that the school endorses, it is no coincidence that administrators stand up against all opposition to defend the academic freedom of hate filled white men as they have with Levine and with Charles Murray back in 2007.  This support only occurs because of the privilege that works to bring these lecturers here in the first place.  Undeniably the demographics of lecturers we bring to campus and the topics they present on are not nearly as diverse as they should be as a result of the biases of the faculty who recommend them.

I am certainly for academic freedom, but we cannot freely support those who spew from a platform.  We must rather be committed to those who contribute in conversation with our academic community; those who welcome challenges and see exchange as an essential foundation of healthy debate.  The unwavering defense of Levine by our administration could not be more problematic because of the ways in which he reduced dialogue simply to monologue by not opening himself up to critique.  We have learned an incredible amount from the Levine event about our school’s immensely absurd structural privileging of dominant white masculinity and failure to challenge it.

Dean Collado suggested to me that I should not neglect to acknowledge that there very well may have been faculty in the economics department who objected to Levine and the premise of his talk.  I did not deny this could have been the case; however, what I did do is point out that it does not matter if a fellow faculty member questions the endorsement of a departmental sponsored event because ultimately the only people who will actually be listened to are the tenured professors who are disproportionately white men.  Our junior faculty members are trampled on and this is just a further layer of the multidimensional oppression our institution is invested in.

To change the patriarchy and white supremacy to which Middlebury College is committed, we must all acknowledge its presence.  We must come to recognize our situational position within power structures to be able to challenge it and shape it more justly.  None of our departments are objective and our administration must let go of similar assumptions regarding its policy.  Levine’s lecture picked a nasty scab, opening a wound that will never heal until we establish structural change in the oppressive institution of Middlebury College that challenges the privileges it maintains so that it truly supports the elements necessary for lively discourse in the academic community we must strive to be.