Your Professors Are Afraid

When people speak of academia, you rarely hear them mention fear. A primal fear of exile, of being cast out of the tribe, of seeing your life’s work, your position and status melt before you in one fell swoop. Yet it’s precisely this fear that drives the current state of academia in Michigan. Fear and animus, a profound resentment of the non-conformists—you’re either with us, or you’re against us, professor.

I experienced it myself during my few years as a professor at a small Michigan college. My colleagues were deeply afraid of the political climate on campus, fearful that being on the outside of it threatened their careers and livelihoods. It dominated almost every conversation, among those you could trust. You couldn’t have a drink in a bar or go to a dinner party without talking about it, constantly wondering whether the secret police were listening in. I didn’t quite believe it, until I watched one colleague drummed out of his job for, in my opinion, simply being an ambitious white man with vision. My turn for the chopping block came as well, subject to a tie vote for promotion, which fell conveniently along political lines.

They often were listening, in fact. The apparatchiks. The commissars. The true believers, if you will. You had to watch what you said in every conversation. The DEI bureaucrats, the administrators, and the faculty that willingly and enthusiastically endorse and further their mission. In a way, you have to respect them. They’re honest. They believe in a cause, they believe in their ideology, and they take whatever measures necessary to further it.

This same college felt the sting of an internal scandal a few years back, as a group of leftist faculty were revealed to have formed a sort of secret club, the “Super Friends,” and had coordinated their efforts to swing the college their way politically for the better part of a decade. They forgot, however, that the college could read their internal emails. No one was fired, in the end, but it caused quite the stir internally, as the administration and other faculty began to reckon with the fact that they’d been manipulated.

There was no reportage of this event, no public acknowledgement, no external scandal. I arrived the year after it happened, and heard about it in whispers from some colleagues after a few cocktails. Mostly they were astonished at how effective these activists had been, how long it had gone on, despite their sheer incompetence. How could they pull this off, when they’re stupid enough to use their college emails to organize the whole thing? How can the administration be so feckless and just sweep it under the rug? They seemed to finally understand the gravity of their predicament, and precisely how this intrigue had worked against them.