It is shocking to me that after four years of a pseudo-fascist national administration, after an election in which one party has steadfastly refused to accept reality, after years of ridiculous conspiracy theories lacking any sort of evidence whatsoever (Google QAnon), that our beloved tenured professors and radicals are still convinced that anyone at all cares about fact-checking. The past four years have shown us pretty clearly that we live in a world in which truth is subordinate to power, and that those with power have no qualms about twisting the truth to fit their needs. Throughout history, placing power over truth has always been a fact of power and politics, and the relatively small world of university administration is no different.
On Dec. 2, my colleagues and friends at the New School economics department published a piece entitled “The New School is in Crisis” in Jacobin Magazine. The piece astutely addressed the dramatic and disruptive steps taken by incoming New School President Dwight McBride in order to address the financial stresses into which our institution has fallen. These steps have included firing 122 members of essential staff during a pandemic, offering voluntary separation packages to long-standing senior faculty, cutting database subscriptions necessary for research, and the unnecessary closure and merger of certain departments. All these cuts have taken place while the school sits on millions of dollars worth of real estate, and pays some of the highest administrative salaries in American academia. That piece also lists some vital work by Dr. Sanjay Reddy (cited here in a New York Times article) cataloguing various, more worker-friendly ways in which the budget problems could have been addressed.
On Dec. 3, Dr. Claire Potter, also of the New School, posted a tweet accusing Jacobin of not fact-checking the article, which is, according to Potter, misleading. In addition, Potter accused the nameless faculty of outsourcing their political opinions to their graduate students who, evidently, have no capability for independent thought, and exist only to act at the will and whim of our professors. Finally, Potter claimed that President McBride has made an explicit commitment to graduate education.
Potter repeatedly accused Jacobin (and also, implicity, her colleagues) of spreading untruths, of not checking the facts. She demands “even the slimmest proof for [the piece’s] assertions and insinuations.” The Dec. 2 piece began with an accurate summary of the New School’s vision (publicly available), followed by a factual description of the cuts that took place, who they affected, and even testimony from people involved. It then rounded out as an opinion piece, written in a tone which pretty clearly frames it as the educated opinion of the authors. To claim that any of this is untrue puts the burden of proof on Potter.
Who are we to assume who is lying here? The laid-off secretary who was interviewed? Fellow professors Potter happens to disagree with politically? The graduate students who have seen all of this unfold around them over the last few months? Having a problem with the tone or framing of the piece is a separate issue from believing it to be untrue. One is an opinion, which is everyone’s right; the other is casting aspersions on the work, research and testimony of colleagues and workers who have been subject to a tremendous amount of recent upset and uncertainty.
To her credit, Potter attempted to refute some of the claims made in the Dec. 2 piece that she perceived to be false, quibbling over the definition of the President’s compensation (as opposed to income), nitpicking typos. She mentioned that the university did attempt cuts from top and asset sales ‘except for real estate,’ assuming we – New Yorkers – don’t grasp how much real estate costs. The idea that the university is moving to a neoliberal, for-profit model is outright false, Potter said, offering zero further explanation. Astoundingly, she claimed there were no plans to cut or merge departments while in the same sentence claiming those plans were cancelled for faculty concerns. Being able to fact-check yourself within the course of a sentence takes a truly ruthless commitment to fact-checking. But all of the above is relatively minor compared to the frankly insulting claims Potter made about graduate students at the school.
I have known the people who wrote the Dec. 2 piece for half a decade now. They are not just colleagues but dear friends. They are people with whom I have worked intimately and closely for several years, both in academia and in various political organizing projects. Most recently, a substantial number of graduate students have formed the Student Action Committee, a collective dedicated to organizing the students in order to resist the cuts being made, reinstate staff and protect our departments. This project started as an email chain and gradually evolved into Zoom rooms, dialogues with administration and an in-person, socially-distanced protest. We have continued to put pressure on the administration throughout this entire post-COVID fallout, and we have no intention of stopping. It is true that Dr. Reddy was gracious enough to carry out independent research when he felt the need to do so, research that (as Dr. Potter correctly points out) he published clearly under his own name. We never asked him to do that though – Dr. Reddy acted out of concern for his institution. Besides, I have never seen a single professor come anywhere near the Student Action Committee.
True to the intentions of the New School’s founders, the students in my department have made countless protest movements and student organizations come and go in recent years. By now, the faculty in my department knows that, at best, they can only hope to ignore it all. In fact, it’s been far more common in my experience to see groups of students holding faculty’s feet to the fire than the other way round. I am sure the faculty who have been on the receiving end of this scrutiny can vouch for that.
It makes me genuinely uncomfortable to think that someone with such a cynical and patronizing view of students is nonetheless allowed to have power over our careers and academic futures. It sickens me to think that an institution founded with the express purpose of having students and faculty work together can morph into one in which our own professors can paint us dim-witted children without the capacity for independent thought.
When pressed, Potter claimed that ‘disagreeing with [the piece] in a public forum is…treating [the authors] as equals.’ But Potter didn’t just disagree with the piece, she lied – knowingly or otherwise – about the authors’ actions being guided by faculty. Dr. Potter – if you are going to use a public medium to insult both the graduate students and faculty you work with, you should be prepared for us to defend ourselves. It’s curious that the fact-checking stops when it comes time to cast aspersions. As we say in Iran, stick yourself with a needle before you throw a spear at others.
Potter asserted that McBride has made “an explicit commitment to graduate education.” Applications to our department – one of the only surviving heterodox economics departments in the U.S. – have consistently grown over the past few years, as a greater concern for the state of the world has driven people to seek alternative solutions to the world’s many problems. Now, the department is being asked to downsize both its staff and to make hefty cuts to the size of its faculty. Potter claimed voluntary separation packages are standard procedure; she fails to mention that some departments are being asked to do away with almost half their faculty, permanently. How exactly does having more graduate students served by less staff and faculty reflect an explicit commitment to graduate education? If McBride has indeed made such a commitment, it is certainly being deployed in an extremely peculiar way. It’s equally peculiar that Potter chooses to believe this platitude and not the writing and research of her colleagues, especially as McBride’s language is scarcely different from that of any other university president.
On being questioned, Potter claims that McBride promised full funding for all students rather than having the majority fund a select few, a policy which, to be fair, has long been unpopular among students, also. However, I have sat in enough faculty meetings to know that it has been a long-standing policy of both the administration of former President (and current paid advisor) David Van Zandt and the current McBride one to pressure departments to slow PhD intakes to an effective trickle – a problem department heads and faculty have to contend with every year. Either have the departments be systematically underfunded and under-resourced, or shrink them to an effective null. Potter’s failure to mention this is, to quote, “misleading.”
The sense of irony in all of this is overpowering. While framing itself as being concerned with The Facts, Potter’s tweet, ironically enough, exemplifies the historical reality that facts are subordinate to power. She casts aspersions upon the credibility, actions and even intelligence of the people she works with, demanding fact-checks while choosing to take bureaucratic propaganda as reality. Winkingly, Potter styles herself as @TenuredRadical on Twitter – apparently implying an ironic self-awareness as to her privilege. But she then uses that handle to call out the University President to cast public aspersions on her colleagues, to support the actions of the new administration in a place where everyone – most importantly McBride – can see it. Actions speak louder than words. Any perception of clever self-awareness is accidental. For all its many faults, perhaps Twitter is useful in just how much it can reveal about a person. We would all do well to use it more cautiously.