Social media not ruining academia

It is tempting to postulate technological determinism as the answer to this question: Why are extremism, irrationality, fear and censoriousness especially rampant where they should be next to nonexistent? However, to blame social media for the antisocial behaviors that today characterize academia misses a larger, darker truth.

What is still referred to, reflexively and anachronistically, as higher education is supposedly run by and for persons who are products of, and devoted to, learning. Today, this supposition is false.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, the reading of which is in equal measures fascinating and depressing, recently published Joseph M. Keegin’s bracing essay “The Hysterical Style in the American Humanities: On the ideological posturing and moral nitpicking of the very online.”

Keegin argues that, confronted with “the slow slide of academe into oblivion,” scholars — especially in humanities departments, which are losing undergraduates, prestige, jobs and funding — “desperately grasp for relevance.” They seek it by becoming “professors of ‘academic Twitter.’”

They have, Keegin says, “by and large subordinated their work as professional intellectuals and historians to the news cycle, yoking their reputations to the delirious churn of outrage media.”

Keegin cites the cultural critic Katherine Dee’s hypothesis: “What motivates someone to spend 10 hours a day on Twitter” resembles “what motivated people to camp out in front of theatres to see the next installment of ‘Star Wars,’ or dress up in costume for the release of the latest Harry Potter book.”

Keegin says, “Whatever it is, it certainly isn’t the fruit of serious reflection and study.”

Keegin directs his readers’ attention to something worth watching, Mark Sinnett’s 2022 commencement address at

St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, whose splendidly eccentric curriculum emphasizes the great books, not excluding those by dead Europeans. A mathematician specializing in quantum mechanics and a Presbyterian minister with a theology doctorate from Cambridge, Sinnett spoke without a text, as someone with a wellstocked mind can do. On YouTube, you can see him unpack St. Paul’s statement that we are perplexed but not despairing.

For many Americans today, Sinnett said, perplexity means despair. So various public personalities’ pronouncements consist of supposedly “determinant, unrevisable knowledge.” Sinnett told the diploma recipients that after they’ve forgotten the details of their studies there, “I hope you’ll always remember how terribly difficult knowledge is, and how rare.”

People inundating us with spurious claims of knowledge feel free to condemn to perdition those who doubt their authority. Dogmatism even infects discourse about what is now suddenly termed “the science,” placed beyond debate by the definite article. But everyone, scientists included, is perplexed.

Sinnett’s deeply civilized call to rejoice in life’s rich diversity of perplexities is discordant with the tenor of dogmatism in academe. There, diversity is praised in the abstract but suppressed in fact.

In flight from perplexities of their own, and intolerant of those of others, many academics are not “captured by” Twitter; it is their “safe space.” Academe increasingly is populated by people who, having neither an inclination nor an aptitude for scholarship, have no business being there.