The Review: Yes, Academe Is a Calling. No, That's Not an Argument Against Unions.

What Max Weber and Wendy Brown teach us about academic politics now. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. Is academe a “calling”? Or just a job? The question arose recently when Nicholas Christakis, a professor of sociology at Yale, tweeted his [opposition]( to graduate-student unionization this way: “Graduate students are primarily students and trainees, not ordinary workers. Academia is a calling.” Academic Twitter largely repudiated this notion — literally hundreds of tweets made some version of the claim that the language of “calling” serves merely to mystify labor relations. As one scholar replied, “academia is not a calling, it’s a workplace.” As a response to Christakis’s argument about unionization, this might seem to make sense. But as a characterization of academic work in general, it is both historically misleading and tactically foolhardy. That’s because the institutions of tenure and of academic freedom depend for their conceptual coherence on the notion that academe is not like other kinds of work. A better defense of unionization would insist not that academe is not a calling but that the prerogatives of that calling — including especially academic freedom, but also working conditions conducive to deep research and dedicated teaching — cannot survive without formalized labor protections. To begin with the history: Although the American Association of University Professors’ brief 1940 [statement]( on academic freedom does not allude to “calling,” its much longer ur-text, the 1915 [Declaration]( of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, devotes a substantial portion of its whole to what it calls “The Nature of the Academic Calling.” The university is not, the authors write, an “ordinary business venture,” and accordingly professors will rarely be paid as well as “the more successful members of other professions.” Instead, “the dignity of the scholar’s profession” lies in the uncompromising commitment to the truth, which scholars are uniquely privileged to pursue according to their own lights and free of either economic or social pressure from both “the lay public” and “the individuals who endow or manage universities.” Such freedom from “fear or favor” is justified in the 1915 Declaration in part by the assumption that scholars cannot fulfill their major “functions” — to “advance the sum of human knowledge,” “provide instruction to students,” and “develop experts for various branches of the public service” — unless they are insulated from outside interests and influence. In 1957 those functions, and the freedom they require, received an especially soaring expression by Chief Justice Earl Warren in his majority opinion for the landmark case Sweezy v. New Hampshire: “Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.” The other foundational modern statement regarding the academic calling is Max Weber’s 1917 lecture “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (usually rendered as “Science as a Vocation,” although Damian Searls, in a recent translation for NYRB Classics, opts instead for “The Scholar’s Work”). As Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon have [discussed]( in our pages, Weber too was concerned to protect the independence of scholarship from outside agendas, especially those of the state. But he also emphasized a different kind of freedom — Wertfreiheit, or “value freedom,” a methodological injunction that scholars stay in their lane, lest they transgress “beyond the boundaries of scholarship” by proffering “beliefs and ‘ideals.’” That sounds like a limitation to academic freedom, but for Weber it’s more like academic freedom’s precondition; only a stern neutrality about values can secure a buffer against the meddling of state, church, and popular opinion in the affairs of academe. It’s a constraint that gives rise to an area of limited but genuine freedom. Weber’s short but rich text has engendered a whole industry of exegetes, arguing over everything from its epistemological entailments (are “facts” ever value-free, and anyway what does value freedom mean?) to its psychology (are Weber’s emphases on disenchantment and scholarly asceticism projections of a personal depression?). A recent and distinguished entry is the Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown’s Nihilistic Times: Thinking With Max Weber, the text of her 2019 Tanner lectures at Yale (forthcoming in April from Harvard University Press). Brown, like others before her, criticizes Weber’s categorical dichotomies (between fact and value, between politics and knowledge, and so on). “His purism,” she says, “is impossible.” But after a series of nuanced critiques, she ends up endorsing a large portion of the Weberian program, including a modest version of the depoliticization of teaching: “Weber is right,” she says, “to demand self-consciousness and care with regard to our own political views, and restraint in offering them in the classroom, even if this cannot be fulfilled in the way he demanded because, from Kant to evolution, climate change to genocide, gender equality to the Constitution, there are never facts or texts apart from our interpretation of them.” Weber “reminds us” that “analysis, discovery, critique, and reflection are fundamentally different from political action” — a distinction it has become popular to dispute. Weber’s vision of the autonomy of the academic sphere, segregated as it is from immediate political, moral, ethical, and practical ends, might seem deflating, but that deflation can also secure against academe’s “being invested in or bought by the powerful, valued only for its commercial applications or job training, and from devaluation by anti-democrats aiming to keep the masses stupid and manipulable.” For Brown, scholarship and teaching are callings in the Weberian sense to the extent that they demand a range of renunciations (of political propagandizing, moral preaching, and practical payoff), but she departs from Weber in her far more optimistic assessment of scholarship’s role in “developing an informed, politically engaged citizenry.” Historical conditions alone might account for some of the difference: Rates of both university attendance and political enfranchisement are very different between Germany in the first two decades of the 20th century and the United States in the first two of the 21st. The rather bleak compensations of learning for Weber are, for Brown, replaced by the possibility of helping to “make students worldlier,” to “incite their engagement with the world.” Kept sufficiently formal and abstract, those functions of higher learning might continue to justify the unusual degree of autonomy ideally granted to academics, including the security of tenure and the protections of academic freedom. But in that case, scholars shouldn’t shy away from the loftiness of the language of “calling.” They might instead argue that the bad conditions under which so much academic work takes place, especially among adjuncts, are noxious in part because they violate the spirit of documents like the 1915 Statement. Academic-labor politics might seek not to decouple “work” from “vocation” but to glorify the latter by improving the conditions of the former. For more on Weber, read Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s “Max Weber Invented the Crisis of the Humanities” [here]( and a conversation among Reitter, Wellmon, Merve Emre, and me [here](. ADVERTISEMENT REGISTER NOW [Join us January 9-27]( for a virtual professional development program on overcoming the challenges of the department chair role and creating a strategic vision for individual and departmental growth. [Reserve your spot]( before November 4 and use code EARLYBIRD2023 to save $200. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [How to Stanch Enrollment Loss]( By Jeffrey J. Selingo [STORY IMAGE]( It’s time to stop pretending the problem will fix itself. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [A Literary Cold Case Heats Up]( By Joe Stadolnik [STORY IMAGE]( What discoveries about Chaucer’s apparent rape accusation tell us about a disappearing field. 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Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Diverse Leadership for a New Era - The Chronicle Store]( [Diverse Leadership for a New Era]( Diversity in leadership can help support colleges’ mission as enrollments of low-income and minority students increase. [Order your copy today]( to explore whether colleges are meeting goals they set following the 2020 racial justice movement and implementing best practices to recruit and support an inclusive administration. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2022 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037