Blowhard of the Month: Joseph Epstein

Academia is one of the few places in American society where accepted truths get questioned. Ronald Reagan was a great president? The general public may think so, but historians definitely don't. Religion is a positive force in American society, and believers are more moral than non-believers? Sociologists might beg to differ.

Conservatives, however, like accepted truths -- and the older the truth, the better. This produces a certain kind of academic who yearns for an earlier time and, secretly or not-so-secretly, despises his students. Such a man (and it is nearly always a man) has little or no understanding of any discipline outside his own, and labels his colleagues as "sour" or "depressed" or "overpaid". He is almost always to be found in an English or philosophy department, and distrusts science because its achievements are beyond him and its practitioners are too excited by the joy of learning and discovery to be encapsulated by his thesis.

Allan Bloom was that kind of academic. In his screed, The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom claimed that what American universities really needed was a healthy dose of the Great Books. Reading Plato, Bloom said, would cure the University's ills, while modern science was not to be trusted.

And here's another: Joseph Epstein. In this egregious 2005 piece from the Weekly Standard, he calls university teaching a "racket", describes university working conditions as "complete freedom", and claims academics work "fewer than six months a year". His colleagues are "obviously disappointed, depressed, and generally demoralized". They are "dour". He wonders why no one has done a study on academic unhappiness. Well, someone has.

For example, in 1999 Melanie E. Ward-Warmedinger and Peter J. Sloane studied job satisfaction among Scottish academics. They concluded that "levels of overall job satisfaction among academics are high, though not with pay and promotion". By the standards of the study, 41.5% of respondents found their jobs highly satisfying, while only 5.9% reported being highly dissatisfied.

A 1997 study by Lacy and Sheehan, published in Higher Education in 1997, found that about 60% of academics in Sweden and the US were satisfied with their jobs. Job satisfaction was lower in the UK, Australia, and some other countries.

A 2007 NORC report found that teachers were among the most satisfied of all professions, with 69.2% "very satisfied", compared with 47% for all workers (but the survey report seems to have lumped together all teachers with college and university professors).

Yale Law School surveyed its graduates from 1996 to 2000 and found that academics were the most satisfied of all its graduates, with 75% reporting that they are "very satisfied". (By contrast, only 24% of those working at private law firms said they were "very satisfied".)

Finding these sources took me about half an hour. Why couldn't Epstein find them? Because he is not interested in the truth; he is, in the words of William James, only interested in rearranging his own prejudices. And prejudices abound: when discussing a black female English professor he met at Denison University, he feels it necessary to condescend parenthetically that she was "very nice, by the way".

Epstein's conception of academia seems entirely limited to English. He shows no awareness of the existence of other departments. He maunders on about "feminism, Marxism, and queer theory", but says nothing at all about quantum cryptography or string theory. Joe: there's an exciting world out there in other academic departments; maybe you should make an effort to learn what's going on.

When he says that aging professors "discover the students aren't sufficiently appreciative; the books don't get written; the teaching begins to feel repetitive", he's not describing anything in my experience. My students are absolutely terrific, and I don't waste time thinking about whether I am unappreciated. My books do get written, and so do those of my colleagues. While some teaching is repetitive, it is easy to enliven it by covering new topics. And when he labels academics as jealous of the success of others ("Meanwhile, people who got lots of B's in school seem to be driving around in Mercedes, buying million-dollar apartments, enjoying freedom and prosperity in a manner that strikes the former good students, now professors, as not only unseemly but of a kind a just society surely would never permit.") it gives you some idea of what Epstein himself thinks is valuable.

All this is typical blowhard fodder. But wait, there's more.

In his most recent piece in the Weekly Standard, Epstein criticizes Obama's administration because (wait for it) it has too many people who attended schools like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, and Yale. Epstein dismisses such people because they "[work] hard in high school and [pile] up lots of activities, and [score] high on [their] SAT's". He seems to have no conception that good students might do well because they actually enjoy learning.

Epstein justifies his criticism by saying that "some of the worst people in the United States have gone to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools: Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Spitzer, Mr. and Mrs. William Clinton, and countless -others [sic]". Whatever you think of Hillary and Bill Clinton, labelling them as "the worst people in the United States" is ridiculous rhetorical excess. (If he gets to mention the Clintons as examples of bad people who attended elite schools, then I get to mention George W. Bush, Pat Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly. I think I win.) As for Mrs. Spitzer -- that is, Silda Alice Wall Spitzer -- it's not clear why Epstein despises her. Was it her founding of Project Cicero, which works to improve classroom libraries? Or her founding of Children for Children?

Epstein clearly doesn't believe in government by educated, knowledgeable people who attended good schools. What we need, he says, is someone who attended a second-rate religious school like Eureka College: Ronald Reagan. Reagan, Epstein tells us, was one of the two greatest presidents of the 20th century. Reagan, that most conventional of small-minded men, is, in Epstein's view, "without the least trace of conformity or hostage to received opinion or conventional wisdom." I guess that explains why Reagan believed that evolution is a "theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed. But if it was going to be taught in the schools, then I think that also the biblical theory of creation, which is not a theory but the biblical story of creation, should also be taught." Yup, it sure looks like a Eureka College education made Reagan challenge conventional wisdom there. If this passes for intellectual conservative commentary, it is yet more proof that intellectual conservatism is dead.

Or maybe, what we need is government by second-rate hacks who achieve their positions by being born to achieving fathers. You know, like George Bush and Epstein's employer, William Kristol?

Maybe Epstein thinks academics are "sour" and "unhappy" because he is, I don't know. Maybe Epstein is unhappy because his fellow academics don't put up with the kind of fact-free claptrap he displayed in these two articles, I don't know. But I do know that Joseph Epstein is December's Blowhard of the Month.

Postscript: It might be objected that I addressed job satisfaction, not happiness. So I went to the NORC survey website and, based on the interface at sda.berkeley.edu, I tabulated the happiness of "teachers, college and university" for the years 1972-2006. The cumulative results are: 37.95% report being "very happy"; 54.8% report being "pretty happy", and only 7.3% report being "not too happy". By contrast, for all professions the results are 34.1% report being "very happy", 54.6% report being "pretty happy", and 11.25% report being "not too happy". I conclude that academics are, on the whole, slightly happier than the average person.