Pseudonymous Students in the Moot

To the vocal critic who has come out as a former student to me privately, and others like them:

I feel enormous nervousness about sniping, whether respectfully or not, in a public place with a student of mine, whether former or not. It feels very wrong and also, frankly, worrisomely unprofessional. And I am going to continue to do my best to keep this sort of thing out of my blog, else I fear that I would become too uncomfortable to blog at all, and hence I would lose a mode of expression that has come to be quite important to me. As I have said before, psydonymity seems to me to make these problems worse rather than better, and while I don't exclude it I strongly disapprove it in most instances.

Students I am teaching now and might teach in the future have a right to expect that they will be respected and treated fairly by me in a classroom setting, they need to know their ideas will be given a hearing and disagreements won't lead to censorship or bad grades. This is not just because students are all paying for the privilege of an education but because universities are institutions devoted to serving the full diversity of their communities in principle. These ideals matter to me, and like many teachers I know in comparable situations, I spend a lot of time obsessing about how best to do justice to these ideals, given their demands and my own human, all too human, limitations.

There are inherent structural asymmetries in the teaching scene that provoke and latch on to idealizations, resentments, transferences that play out in all sorts of messy ways one deals with endlessly if one wants to be ethical in any kind of supple and actually-responsive way to differences that make a difference among your students and changing circumstances in the classroom. I never feel particularly pleased to realize I'm being either idealized or ridiculed by a student, but the fact is that sometimes these cartoonish identifications and dis-identifications are crucial to the process through which young people find their way to critical autonomy in a world stratified by authorities and hierarchies. I consider my paycheck in part to compensate for these inevitable and necessary discomforts.

But these caricatures often continue to reverberate and amplify outside the classroom or after a course is over, playing out as student crushes demanding huge amounts of time in office hours, for example. As regular readers know, my politics include a healthy dose of pro-sex pro-perv queerness, and this gives rise occasionally to sexually playful banter that would seem to me matters of straightforward harrassment in classroom settings. As someone who has been stalked by a pseudonymous student in the Moot who eventually identified herself and then insinuated our exchanges gave her power to threaten my position professionally, I have to say I am profoundly troubled by this sort of thing. The harassment policies of the institutions with which I am affiliated ultimately protect instructors from frivolous charges, but the fact remains that I (like an ever growing proportion of instructors in anti-intellectual America) am an untenured itinerate lecturer in private and corporatized settings of higher instruction more vulnerable to vicissitudes of reputation than my popularity or effectivness over fifteen years as an instructor might seem to provide occasion for. And issues of sexual harassment are far from my chief concern. I have often worried that at least some of the highly personal invective or praise that appears pseudonymously in the Moot here might represent the skewed afterlife of some of the normal idealizations or vilifications arising out of conventional classroom dynamics in ways that might come to undermine the integrity of my teaching process as I see it.

On my blog, you may have noticed, I vent and I spar and I ridicule. Sometimes I write provisionally, improvisationally, hyperbolically. I write about topics both serious and unserious, the writing changes according to my moods and needs and shifting circumstances. Also, I frankly get a lot of nut-cases here saying nutty things who are drawn in by my excoriations of Movement Republicans or Robot Cultists and the like, and I can be defensive and hasty with newcomers who are too careless about signaling their sanity.

Now, nobody is entirely a fool and everybody is sometimes a fool -- but in the classroom my job is to find my way to opening up that part of the student that is furthest from foolish, the person who is critical, capacious, engaged -- whereas in my blog when I am confronted with foolishness I have the pleasure of not having to suffer fools lightly.

My blogger ethos and my professorial ethos are both public but they are also quite different from one another, and seem to me equally legitimate and equally vital to my intellectual life -- and of course neither of them tells anything like the whole story about me, though neither is so much a falsification as a facet of that story.

There are teachers among my readers and I am sure you have given some thought to these matters. I welcome comments. Former students are also welcome to comment, although I don't want to indulge in any discussions of our coursework together, the pleasures of our work together or your grievances with my grading or what you have come to view retrospectively as my hypocrisy on this or that topic. Our coursework is done, our community is a memory. The community of the classroom is different every time, what is possible to it is unique to it -- it cannot be imported into another occasion, nor continued on in a blog or even in a different class. However arbitrary and clumsy such gestures always end up being to a certain extent, please respect my effort to separate my blog from my classroom, and even if I can do nothing about it I really would prefer that you not use pseudonymity to make mischief with my effort to preserve that separation.

The academy -- and especially the humanities, which have long mistakenly sought to justify their existence by pretending to be technical disciplines when they have always been more like provocative and facilitative mentorships, and are indispensable to civilization on those terms and hence in my view should be defended and funded on them -- is transforming under pressure of peer-to-peer media formations with their very different credentializing processes, very different demarcations of public and private, their very different rituals of propriety and professionalism, with their very different cultures of scholarship, authorship and so on, and in a generation's time we will have found our way to a provisional settlement -- which may be to my liking or not -- that ameliorates a lot of the discomforts I am registering in this post.

But in this time of transition and precarity I have to be careful. For many, carefulness means not blogging at all, or blogging only pseudonymously, or blogging in a highly fumigated fashion. I cannot settle for any of these and still derive the benefits I have come to cherish from blogging. But I would stop blogging in a heartbeat if it threatened my teaching practice, which is after all the chief substance and primary motor of my whole public life.