Deconstructing an email chain - David Stoll

I would like to go into a few events preceding Jay Saper’s ’13 March 24 Campus opinion, “Building a healthy academic community.” Let’s start with the email exchange that Saper forwarded to hundreds of fellow students, as well as to the faculty of the Sociology/Anthropology department (SOAN), the Center for Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, and the economics department. The exchange began on the morning of March 17 when Saper emailed Economics chair Peter Matthews that he was “deeply appalled and tremendously offended” that the department was endorsing a “hateful lecture” that afternoon. Before the lecture took place, Saper demanded that the Economics chair issue “an all-campus apology and clarification” for scheduling it.

Wellesley economist Phil Levine’s lecture was going to be hateful, in Saper’s view, because it associated low-income non-marital childbearing with a “culture of despair.” I should note that, before Saper spoke up, Levine was putting “culture of despair” in scare quotes because he was aware of the need to steer between liberal and conservative indignation on this subject. At the talk, which I’m sorry to have missed, Levine recognized Saper during the Q & A period and Saper had difficulty turning his remarks into a question, whereupon Levine cut him off and went to another questioner. Saper concludes that the economics department was trampling on free speech. Possibly Levine should have given him a third minute; possibly Saper could have done a better job of formulating a question.

In his Campus opinion a week later, Saper goes on to indict “the rich white man,” “the systemic oppression which he perpetuates,” “the privileged institution of marriage that is doused in patriarchy and inextricably conflated with capitalist profit,” “the idea of the nuclear family,” “marriage promotion activities,” “hate-filled white men,” “those who spew from a platform,” “absurd structural privileging of dominant white masculinity,” “tenured professors who are disproportionately white men … trampl[ing] on … our junior faculty members” and “the patriarchy and white supremacy to which Middlebury College is committed.”

This is a very broad indictment. Jay Saper has every right to challenge a speaker in the economics department. What wasn’t such a good idea was labeling the speaker as hateful and demanding that a department apologize for scheduling him.  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.

I’m also trying to imagine how my teaching will be affected if Jay decides to apply his criteria to my teaching. In SOAN 103 I assign Carol Stack’s All Our Kin, a classic ethnography of black welfare mothers in the 1970s. I assign it because it explains a moral order that is very different from middle-class morality. It is also a salvo in a longstanding political debate over the “culture of poverty”— a concept in the history of sociology and anthropology which many of us view as patronizing but which, now and then, might still come in handy. In the case of Carol Stack, she argues that the fatherlessness of lower-class mother-headed families has been exaggerated and that non-marital childbearing is more functional than many observers assume. One of Stack’s merits is that she gives readers enough information to disagree with her if they wish. I tell my students that they are free to adjudicate this debate any way they wish — fatherlessness is a large and growing phenomenon in our society, not just among low-income black Americans, and it is worth our attention. But judging from Saper’s indictment, any such even-handedness on my part would be privileging dominant white masculinity. Instead, I should teach my students that any worries about non-marital childbearing should be avoided because such doubts could be construed as racist. Come to think of it, since Carol Stack describes unflattering behavior on the part of the mothers (they sometimes hit their kids), maybe I should drop All Our Kin from my reading list: it could be taken as a negative characterization of the mothers.

Saper believes that he is advocating diversity, but I wonder if he has thought through the implications of demanding that a contrary speaker should balance any guest speaker who might arouse controversy. Judging from Saper’s indictment of white men, marriage and the nuclear family, anyone who refers to race, gender or families will have to be considered controversial and will require the invitation of a contrary speaker. To be fair, this will have to include responding to anyone on his side of these issues, which means that we will need to invite conservatives to Middlebury College to defend traditional conceptions of race, gender and the family. If this isn’t what Saper means by diversity, then perhaps he is not advocating diversity in any conventional sense of the term.  Instead, he would appear to be trying to impose his own position as the only ethical one. If this is what Saper has been picking up from his SOAN courses, I am fascinated by his progression from deploying critical theory (which can be used to deconstruct any category including SOAN courses, Jay Saper and myself) to issuing marching orders.