Fostering Dissensus In Academia

At a recent Modern Language Association (MLA) panel on “The Future of Critical Exchange in Academe,” two professors discussed how to overcome conformism within the academic profession and foster critical conversations within the Humanities.

In his speech, “Critical Affiliations,” Professor Jeffrey Di Leo described two types of professors,

– a female “Professor Jones,” who adheres to the critical credo “if you don’t have anything positive to say about a student or colleague [then] it’s best not to say anything at all, at least not in public,” and

– a male “Professor Smith” who “has made a career out of telling people that they’re wrong, in particular, everyone that does not believe the same thing he believes.”

“In this presentation I’d like to maintain that if a compassionate caring form of critical exchange entails removing the critical from critical exchange, then I’d rather see our profession move toward a more combative, confrontational style of critical exchange, even if it means ruffling a few feathers,” asserted the University of Houston-Victoria professor.

He also argued that the Humanities are plagued by two problems: “faint praise” and “shroud[ing] negative commentary in anonymity.”  “From letters of recommendation for students and colleagues to peer review of colleagues’ performances in manuscripts, faint praise runs rampant in our profession,” he said. As for anonymous criticism, Prof. Di Leo argues that “Anonymity deflates critical exchange, for it does not allow the recipient of anonymous comments to respond to the true source” and said this was hypocritical.

For example, if a professor receives anonymous criticism, he or she lacks the capacity to rebut these criticisms, and therefore to construct a better argument or manuscript for future publication. Professor Donald Hall told this correspondent that he thinks that the Society for Critical Exchange, which arranged the session, means “critical ‘conversation’ by ‘exchange,’ nothing more rigid than that” when it refers to the concept of “critical exchange.”

West Virginia University Professor Hall argued in his presentation for an academic “[d]issensus, as defined largely by Jean Francois Lyotard…” and for hiring practices which emphasize diversity. “I suggest that without profound theoretical/identity political/epistemological differences in our departments and classroom exchanges all learning is inhibited if not wholly precluded,” he argues.

In his article, “The Gadamerian Imperative on Diversity in Exchange,” from which he drew his MLA comments, Prof. Hall promotes the theories of German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. “In a sense, Gadamer’s diaologic model represents an ethics of engagement with colleagues, neighbors, and fellow inhabitants of the planet,” he writes, “for as Jean Grondin, [Gadamer’s] biographer, notes, ‘As Gadamer often says … “The soul [of his philosophy] consists in recognizing that perhaps the other is right”’… or as Gadamer himself states in Truth and Method, we must remain ‘fundamentally open to the possibility that the [other] is better informed than we are’…” In other words, he writes, “…if we recognize that we need, in profound and fundamental ways, the viewpoint of the ‘other’ in order to learn anything about our selves [sic], our limitations, and our mistakes, then we are compelled to respect the ‘other’ as the one who makes our intellectual life possible” (emphasis in original).

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.