It is hard to bring up status anxiety in American academia, although the anxiety is continuous with the wider social order:

• A social media account near filled with the latest accomplishments, telling a projected auditor, a fantastical me-reflection, who they are with, their in-group to which “you could only wish to belong.” In between these pathetic signals, a shot or two of the dog, a child, a gorgeous day framed neatly—no, perfectly—like an online advert. Is this the broad and inclusive love of knowing shared with all, open to the searchers, the messy fools, and hard-working people sunk in limbo?

• The long-last, big-time fellowship won. Now this one is on the inside, and when they write their next book, they display the inside prominently. They invoke the in-group. They make a showcase out of the things that were afforded. Are they sharing these with all? Does the rhetoric deny that? Are they claiming authority indirectly by association? There is no criticism of the institution that enclosed them.

The Judith, Cleveland, Ohio, May 2025, photo by author

There is a nouveau riche of academia, an academic bourgeoisie: they love their distinctions, and they display them first prominently, then subtly (for the initiated). But knowing the world and co-constructing society demands the abandonment of cool, perfect, in-grown, closed-talking forms and spaces. The rough, messy, incomplete, and unpolished should prevail as part of the useful and the available.

These claims are complicated and demand some unpacking, as well as the diffuse charge. First, about knowing. The world is everything that is and the openness of time, and to approach it is to be open to everything that is changing. Thus, knowing the world cannot admit of perfection, for that is some closed thing.

There is a nouveau riche of academia, an academic bourgeoisie.

But knowing is a social process, too, admitting of perspectives.  Indeed, our perspectives on the world are something. Closed-talking reproduces the mistake of a closed “world.” It traffics in insular things, not the circulation of discourse open to everything and to change. 

This much bears on reasoning, the consideration of everything so as to arrive at considerations in favor of believing something. Reasoning must not be closed-talked, or it preempts the consideration of everything and its changing, the acceptance of perspectives in time. Basically, it sucks for knowing when people’s social relations and sense of what’s out there changing get closed in.

And did I mention warmth? Being cool is a way to shut down perspectives. Being warm opens them up. Has it ever struck you how emotionally cold, even terrifying, it feels in the most status-anxious spaces of American academia?

Co-constructing society, of course, is a practical activity that begins with the practice of exchanging ideas of what to do and why. So, the theoretical things just mentioned come into the collective undertaking. But once one sets to actually making society together, again the challenges of perspectives, emotional generosity, trust, sharing, and respect sink in. These cannot be cold, perfectionistic, or exclusive, or they alienate ordinary people. There can be no a priori extraordinarity in a well-functioning neighborhood for all who live there. As Frank O’Hara: wear workshirts to the opera.

Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve, May 2025, photo by author

In recent years, there are baseless insinuations, sometimes claims, that academia is more elite than other sectors of American society. I find this hard to believe. American society is structured by status inequality, mainly through wealth. But American academia is not immune to this, that Rousseau called “inflamed” amour propre (in the words of scholar N.J.H. Dent), the vain love of “moi” in deep insecurity over one’s rank and comparative standing. Vanity, too, builds up comparative advantage through stacking status markers higher and higher. The insecurity downcasts the “nobodies” into the shadows outside the halls of high tables.

The thing is, if American academia wants to properly go democratic again as it has notably aspired at times in U.S. history, then one thing its champions should jettison is the closed murmuring of status. They must live a resolutely open life where knowledge is for all, especially those farthest from the academic game by dint of poverty, oppression, alienation, stigmatization, and shame. They must face the psychological and practical difficulties of those finding it untenable, although desirable, to pursue the mind’s original joy in seeking to make sense of the world. This is a catholic aspiration, lower case “c.” The “original joy” is Lucretius’s way, says Nussbaum, of understanding wonder and the child.

The only good academic is as good as the trash collector.

One way to open up knowledge transmission is to unlock institutions and to make them anew. This is the hard work, the main work. But it also requires people who, from inside the institutions, are sick and tired of their being-on-high or being-above-it-all, who find exclusiveness as toxic as patriarchy and racism. I am one of those people. I hate the owning of knowledge-institutions through status markers. The only good academic is as good as the trash collector. But you wouldn’t know it if you served as a janitor or dining hall worker in the hegemonic universities of the U.S.A. I did. In no sense was the knowing continuous across these roles and stations.

The continuity of knowing occurs not at the level of content but of subjectivity. It is that that brings the objectivity, not as quality, but as process, a way of being together through knowing. Everybody’s mind counts in bringing the object into society, making that thing of the world socially stable. It must be totally open and not at all shameful to ask any sincere question about this thing that joins us in our knowing.

Shazia Sikander’s “Touchstone” (2021), Cleveland Museum of Art, May 2025, photo by author

Here’s one place that the toxins pool, though, and hurt. The who-is-better!, who-is-in?, who-is-cool??, who-is-brilliant!!! brings shame with them, the risk and threat of being “stupid,” of a perspective that doesn’t count, though your relation to the world through your mind is necessary for agency, dignity, and your world’s meaning, though it is precious as life itself. So, the insistent worry of status poisons learning from within. Academics must resolutely block it. How?

• Stop boasting about yourself on social media. Start a conversation instead of angling toward anyone.
• Take the fellowship and demand that it bring in, or open to, outsiders.
• Leave any conversation that is toxic and ignorant because it generates judgments about who-is-stupid.
• Avoid venues that are perfectionistic, cool, or slick. Go usefully messy, trust-generating (because good-willed), emotionally warm.
• If they act like they’re better than others, forget, challenge, or pity (be chagrined for) them.
• If they constantly occupy the spotlight, forget them; remember ordinary others.
• If you are too much in light, move into the shadows and be with others who are not spotlit by observing them.

But these are ad hoc, depending on particular contexts. There’s an ethical and a moral problem underneath that is quite general. The ethical problem is that (secretly, unavowedly) snobbish academics have lost a sense of the good of knowledge that contributes to the co-construction of society through socially stable things that everyone knows. This takes rigor, not only in accuracy, but in moral respect for the perspectives of others, not to bring them shame or oblivion.

And so the moral problem is that (secretly, unavowedly) snobbishness has lost the thou of learning as well as its mutualism. Every potential learner views the world and seeks to make sense of it to some degree—and this striving is part of the world changing. The sense-making seeks at the least inchoate reasons that ground judgments of what to commit to, and the commitments are forms of accountability to oneself, reflexive binding of mind into action for daily life. To face some such one is to face one seeking their own ends. You as a learner cannot be a mere means to an end, not consistently with who you as a learner are. This is a moral point couched within an epistemic one. It only gets stronger when I realize that you contribute to who I am directly by communicating with me or indirectly by way of your world changing. To respect your center of meaning is to respect myself.

Turn these things around—and the positive idea is this. To be an academic should involve seeking socially stable knowledge with each potential learner out of respect for each one and for the good of a society co-constructed by everyone’s ordinary intellectual labor. There’s an ethos in such a view, and it chafes against American academia today, even the rad profs. who populate it with cool vibes of in-groupness, but also the new authoritarian profs. who want to defend top-down judgment in the classroom based on a socially impoverished and elitist view of knowing. Both cannot handle the modest mess of socially stable knowing that includes all from where they are at, sincerely seeking—no shame involved at all, no pretense.

There’s a politics in such a view as sketched here, and it opposes the assault on academic freedom and support for research that is the norm this year from the new American regime. The view here implies academic freedom even beyond the profs., to the students, staff, and entire communities of a school, as universities have since the twentieth century actually aspired to protect. It implies governmental support to involve willing citizens and non-citizens in research and science, a continuity of education from core to periphery. Moreover, here the periphery of continuing education and early childhood education, of remote or impoverished schools, becomes central to the co-construction of society through shared, stable knowing. That the periphery becomes central breeds trust just as shared objects stabilize the sense of the world. Mutualism again.

Everybody’s mind counts in bringing the object into society, making that thing of the world socially stable.

The politics, too, like the ethos, demands that all have an equal piece of the American pie at least when it comes to learning. The politics here is of inclusion, moral respect, and of community constructed from differences in perspective. The implications of the politics come against excessive wealth inequality, unfair school funding and taxation regimes, and much more that extends beyond the scope of this reflection. A society that is co-constructed with everyone having a perspective on the world that must be involved in the ideal pursuit of learning cannot be the plutocracy or authoritarian-fascist arc of contemporary American tragedy.

Children’s heart-sketched frosting on an apple-strawberry homemade pie with a heirloom plate from one barely literate grandparent on the side, Cleveland, Ohio, May 2025, photo by author