Privilege and Savagery
A mob forms at the gates of academia
In the last week or so, a photo of a pretty young woman holding her finished PhD thesis has made the rounds on Twitter, accompanied by a cacophony of criticisms. Her thesis, with its wokesque title (about olfactory justice, or some equally forgettable combination of aroma and activism) has been the subject of mockery and ridicule, and I can only imagine how the woman must be feeling right now. She’s become an effigy, and this mobbing changes people in ways that should not be denied. Her cutely self-congratulatory caption (I’m #PhDone!) demonstrates pride in her work and seems aimed at a friendly audience; she probably didn’t expect this to circulate beyond her own friends, family, and colleagues.
But circulate it has, indeed.
The savage hate-addicted sharkfest that is social media has chewed up her smelly tome and spat it back out, with a few morality watchdogs standing up against the swarm, pearls clutched at chest, declaring pity for the girl and doling out shame on the feeding frenzy.
A few things about this are very interesting. One, shaming the shamers, mocking the mockers… moral outrage pouring fourth upon the morally outraged. Eddies in the current, all flowing down the same river. Social media behavior is fascinating. I try to stand on the bank and dip a toe… maybe wade in up to my ankles… but perhaps we all delude ourselves this way: I’m not part of this mob. I think for myself…
But this particular issue is also interesting specifically. Why did the sharks smell (ha!) so much blood in this simple photo with its happy caption?
Because the sham of modern academia has gone too far. A lot of people are #PhDone.
Because this sweet-faced young woman is celebrated with our culture’s most esteemed label, “Doctor,” for undergoing an an unimportant course of study that has culminated in a mini-book no one will ever read on a topic of dubious (at best) interest to anyone who isn’t adrift in some ultranerdverse of disassociated unreality.
Because the status-worshiping masses, so in love with “experts” and their “credentials” will see her PhD and instantly value her over those who don’t carry that status label, regardless of their potentials, efforts, intelligence, skills, contributions, etc.
Because the crippling cudgel of “privilege” has been used mercilessly to beat down the already struggling, who are then trained to sniff it out in others; to salivate with vicious resentment at the mere whiff. And this woman with her expensive degree granted by the institutions that created that very cudgel flaunts a level of a luxury many cannot even imagine: years of young adulthood set aside to contemplate… a theory of smells. The academy that tells you to hate yourself for your whiteness tells you to admire this woman’s great work and look up to her as she takes her place in the leadership class. Don’t ask why, just decolonize something.
Because since Covid and George Floyd and the Epoch of Gender “experts” have been using every ounce of influence they have to convince us that we can’t trust ourselves to understand reality- we should trust them instead. Or else.
And so a great tension has built up between regular folk and the credentialed class. We have started to murmur among ourselves that the emperor is naked, but we haven’t gotten out the pitchforks to storm the castle yet.
In the midst of this, a pretty young woman bids for our admiration with her newly minted doctorate, and the sharks rip toward her, roiling up from the deep.
These are interesting comments. I don't agree that the attacks are purely or even primarily misogyny. And I can understand why one might still aspire to get a PhD. I completed one, in 2021. I was in coursework and then writing my dissertation during the height of Woke Online, in a humanities department. I am not privileged. My parents, before retirement, had lower middle class incomes. I had a teaching assistant stipend, with a tuition waiver and middling health insurance benefits for the first few years. And then I went back to work as a software engineer, worked 40 hrs a week while being a full time student, and paid my tuition in cash for 5 of the 8 years that it took me. I went for the PhD because I wanted to connect with other intellectuals. This had worked for me at an earlier point in my life, when I got a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I still have very good friends from that time. But this time, in the PhD program, I wasn't able to connect with people very well. The politics were very extreme, and I found myself avoiding campus.
There is one detail that I can contribute that others may not have considered: I wasn't given a choice to write a social justice dissertation vs a politically conservative or even moderate dissertation. It was presumed that I would write a social justice dissertation. It was a pretext of my having been admitted to the program. Any point I wanted to make about how social justice narratives didn't match what I was seeing in the archive of literature and film I was writing about I had to justify with all kinds of theoretical and literary citations. I did make some such points. But even then, I was only allowed to write those very subtle critiques of SJ ideology because I had a gay man for an advisor and he was willing to back me up. To be acceptable to my committee, my critiques had to be so subtle that if a casual reader found my dissertation in the library today, they probably wouldn't be able to spot that pushback. Still, they aren't subtle enough that I would have had an easy time publishing what I wrote, or getting hired. So, a) You do not get to choose the politics of your dissertation. You simply won't be allowed to defend until your dissertation agrees with the politics of your committee. b) Until you read the whole dissertation and see how SJ has been framed, you won't know what this woman really thinks. And yes, it is still hard work. It was the second most difficult period in my life, the first being when I was sick with Crohn's disease, in chronic pain that kept me from sleeping, and 40lbs underweight. You are living on almost no money, and at the mercy of (on average) very mercurial people, and constantly having to do mindless and frustrating things to deal with the university bureaucracy. Completing a PhD is not an easy thing to do.
Your writing is brilliant, Leslie.