I have put aside my desire for an unassailable version of expertise, and leaned instead into my attachments and emotional investments, realizing that my scholarship is only as good as the conversations it starts. — Hannah McGregor, A Sentimental Education, p. 83

To be unassailable—to be a fortress, an aircraft carrier, a Gandalf-the-White-not-the-Grey who has left vulnerability behind in the bowels of Middle-earth—is what the academic world asks of us. Our words are weapons: we tighten our arguments, sharpen our analysis, polish our prose. We look for flaws in our work and hurry to patch them up before they’re discovered by our opponents (or, worse, our superior officers). Reviews are attacks; either you successfully parry them or you surrender. Careers are made with strength, brilliance, muscle.

Most academics, of course—at least the ones you want to be around—would reject this framing of the scholarly enterprise. Academia is an ongoing conversation, they would insist, a collaborative search for truth, an always-reforming attempt to understand the world and each other. Failure is how we learn, weakness is how we grow, cooperation is how we thrive.

On a rational, aspirational level, I agree with these protesting academics. But there are parts of me that still feel that “desire for an unassailable version of expertise,” that still desperately want every final grade and article submission to be a victory. And I don’t think this is just me. Based on my conversations (on Twitter and otherwise) with fellow early-career scholars, many of us feel a little bit like we’re at war. A’s are at a premium, PhD admissions are cutthroat, research funding is limited, professors pick favorites. Academic jobs are an elusive bounty, and tenure, well, that was for the legendary heroes of the past, not for us new recruits. Combat is baked into the system in ways that nice rhetoric about collaboration and conversation cannot fix.

According to Yale Divinity School professor (and Calvin alum) Willie James Jennings, this is a whiteness problem. In his book After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, Jennings writes that the Western education system has been built to churn out copies of the “white self-sufficient man,” with “self-sufficiency defined by possession, control, and mastery” (6). Jennings thus connects the desire to own academic authority with the desires of whiteness to own property, land, and people. No wonder we use weapon metaphors to talk about writing, Jennings’s work suggests. Our schools were built to train white warriors.

Jennings’s phrase “white self-sufficient man” reveals that masculinity is also central to this problem. For bookish nerds like me, it’s always been easy to reject the versions of toxic masculinity that manifest themselves in gun culture, all-meat diets, and manosphere blogs. But it’s much harder to excise the need to be authoritative, to have gathered all the information and decided, furrow-browed, on the correct path forward. All of us in academia, regardless of gender, are taught to imitate the “rigor” and “daring” and “ingenuity” of the European and American men whose names still grace so many of our school buildings. A feminist ethics of care, solidarity, and vulnerability? You’ll have to look for that outside the walls.

We can’t drag ourselves out of this mess of mastery—that would be to double down on possession, to wrongly imagine that a bit more introspection and self-control is all that’s required to turn our word-swords into word-plowshares. No, we need comrades, we need guides.

One of my guides has been Hannah McGregor, a podcaster and academic who teaches publishing at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. I first learned of McGregor through her podcast Witch, Please (co-hosted with Marcelle Kosman), which takes a literary-critical approach to the Harry Potter books. Since then, I’ve listened to much of her second podcast, Secret Feminist Agenda, and read her recent book, A Sentimental Education. McGregor’s work has introduced me to Indigenous scholars, mad studies, and trans critiques of J. K. Rowling’s books, among many other things. But McGregor also models a different way of being a scholar, one that welcomes humor, failure, love, loneliness, and friendship into the academic process. Her work, she writes, is about “learning as a life-long process, one that navigates ideas, methods, feelings, and texts to continuously move through the complexity of living in a good way.” It is, in other words, about “trying, fucking up, listening, learning, and trying again” (A Sentimental Education, xii).

What separates this from the “failure is how we learn” claptrap I mentioned earlier? McGregor calls us to reject and rewrite the values of the academic system as it currently exists, not to rebrand it as a ready-made forum for healthy dialogue. McGregor is clear that what the scholarly world needs is not one more justice-y journal article but a generation of new voices who value each other more than they value their comfort or their CVs. And, through podcasts and public events and accessible goddamn prose, she and others like her are doing what they can to build that generation.

But here we are again: books and podcasts can’t be the only solution, because our way out can’t just be to think and speak and write differently. We also need guides who know us, guides who will help reshape our way of being in the academic world. We need friends and colleagues who will call us out on our “mastery” bullshit. I’m endlessly grateful that I have friends like this: brilliant friends whose brilliance is not the general’s kind but the weaver’s, the storyteller’s, the blacksmith’s. 

The weaver’s wisdom. What if our words were less like swords (sharpened, polished) and more like textiles—equally demanding to make, but designed to warm rather than to wound? Ursula Le Guin asks something like this question in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”: what if we thought of a story as a “carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle,” holding not the adventures of a Hero but the life-giving supplies of a community? What if this applied to essays and monographs and class discussions too? 

In an academic culture that turns libraries into battlefields, what would it mean to practice a kind of scholarly conscientious objection? What would it mean to refuse to go to war?

Photo credit: Flickr user Marco Verch (CC BY 2.0)

Josh Parks

Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.