It’s Not Brave to Piss People Off

Paul Bloom had a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education at the end of September that asked the question “Why Aren’t Professors Braver?” I was able to access it via archive.is, so if you, like me, like to read CHE once in a while but you don’t want to spend a stupid amount of money for a subscription…. This commentary is closely based on a post on Bloom’s Substack, “Why are so few professors troublemakers?”

Bloom is a psychology professor, formerly at Yale and presently at the University of Toronto, and, among other works, is the author of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion and also The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. I don’t know if his books make him “brave” or a “troublemaker” and everything I know about Bloom comes from this op-ed and whatever I could glean from a quick Google Search, but I get the impression that he is perhaps best known for making controversial and counter-intuitive arguments. And I don’t know a lot about the different schools of thought within the study of psychology, but Bloom is a rational psychologist, which “emphasizes philosophy, logic, and deductive reason as sources of insight into the principles that underlie the mind and that make experience possible.” That might explain why he’s “against” empathy.

It is an odd essay. For starters, there’s his fuzzy description of bravery. Referring to a study of faculty in psychology about taboo subjects and self-censorship, Bloom seems to be saying bravery means being “bold” enough to speak out, to be willing to discuss (in public, in classrooms, in scholarship) some of the “taboo” positions psychology professors avoid– for example, “transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” The other trait of the brave professor is to be a “troublemaker,” and his only example in this essay is Noam Chomsky. That sets the bar mighty high, both in terms of academic achievements and taking bold (and sometimes taboo and occasionally kind of crazy) political stances.

Rather than being brave, Bloom believes faculty are timid and mostly go-along to get-along. Why do faculty do this? According to Chomsky (as quoted by Bloom), it is because we all have been trained into conformity by rigorous educational and professional training which enabled us to get these positions in the first place. “Most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they’ve been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years.”

Bloom disagrees. “The explanation I like better,” he writes, “has to do with the nature of academe and the importance of not pissing people off” because of the potential career costs of offending our colleagues and because none of us wants to be disliked. So instead of “pissing people off,” we do things like sign political petitions we don’t agree with, don’t express an opinion on Israel-Gaza, hide our conservative views or other non-conforming opinions. Basically, keep your head down and do your work.

Of course, neither of them consider the possibility that faculty try not to piss people off because they don’t want to be rude and because at the end of the day, being a professor is a lot more similar to any other white collar job where one of the understood but unspoken qualifications is “plays well with others.” But I digress…

I don’t think Chomsky is exactly right, but there is no question that all faculty, regardless of discipline, spend years jumping through A LOT of hoops to get one of these jobs and then more hoops to get tenure. Plus a lot of faculty (though far from all) were the kind of students who begged for the gold stars and extra homework and who loved schooling so much they never left. That does create a “one of us” cult religion rule follower club feel to the profession, no question.

But Bloom is wrong, I think mainly because pissing people off is counterproductive and not brave. To me, bravery is the willingness to make a personal sacrifice for a greater good. Firefighters, police officers, military personnel are all easy and obvious examples, as are protesters who are at risk of being tear-gassed or arrested or worse. Refusing to sign a political petition I disagree with or being a troublemaker is not even close to being brave, and this is especially true for tenured faculty and even more especially true for tenured faculty at a university with a strong union located in a blueish/purple state.

I have been blogging here for decades, and while I suppose some people think I’m a troublemaking asshole, that’s not why I do it. I write here because I am looking for an audience, and also because every once in a while, a post will lead to something else, like my work a decade ago about MOOCs or some other publication. But none of this takes much bravery, especially at this stage of my career.

The same was true for Chomsky. Bloom implies Chomsky’s past arrests were a result of his outspoken politics, but as far as I can tell, he got arrested a couple of times in the late 60s/early 70s at protests against the Viet Nam war. I suspect a healthy percentage of college faculty around at that time also spent a few hours in jail for protesting the war, not to mention students back then. No, Chomsky spent about 50 years as a tenured professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the world and also as one of the most cited scholars ever. Maybe that counts as “troublemaking,” but being that successful is not brave.

And why should faculty be “brave,” anyway? Bloom wonders the same thing, briefly:

I really don’t know if professors are more timid than real-estate agents, accountants, nurses, and so on. If I’m right, our timidity arises from a fact about our profession — the career cost of offending even a small proportion of the people who are in power. But maybe this is also true for other jobs. If so, it’s a more general problem. Something is lost if real-estate agents, say, feel that they will be punished if they express their views on Israel-Gaza.

I sensed that the politics of the real-estate agent my wife and I hired last year to sell our previous house were generally similar to ours, though of course he never brought up his feelings about the Israel-Gaza war. That would have been quite odd. Similarly, especially when it comes to teaching, I think my students understand I’m a liberal college professor, but my specific beliefs about the taboo topics Bloom brought up earlier, about MAGA, about Palestine, etc., rarely come up. That’s partly because I don’t think it’s good teaching to dwell too much on my own political beliefs, but mostly because of the nature of the classes I teach. It’s a lot harder to avoid politics in fields like women’s studies, African-American studies, political science, a lot of literary fields, and so forth.

Anyway, Bloom argues that professors are different from real-estate agents or whatever because we are in the “truth business” and, with tenure, “we can’t be fired, no matter what we say and who we piss off.” Well, as we’ve seen recently with faculty all over the country being fired for posting something bad about the Charlie Kirk shooting, that’s not necessarily true. In fact, according to The Guardian, somewhere around 40 academics have been dismissed or punished in the U.S. for something they said about Kirk. Most of these punishments happened to faculty in states where they were already going after academic freedom, places like Texas, Florida, Indiana, and South Dakota. The academics who got in trouble– some of them tenured, some not– were trying to piss people off with social media posts claiming Kirk was a Nazi and a racist, that they were glad he was dead, and so forth.

I certainly do not think any of these people should have been disciplined or fired, and I also suspect that once these cases get to the courts, most of those fired will get their jobs back. That said, perhaps this is a case where how and when someone says something matters just as much as what they say. I wrote a post about Kirk and his killer in which I discussed how Kirk reminded me a lot of some of the guys I met in high school and college debate who were into it just for the chance to argue with others about anything, and how his shooter, Tyler Robinson, reminded me of some of the young men I see in college classes who have been radicalized by a weird underground world of internet/game/meme culture that is neither left or right wing in any conventional sense. I began that post with the completely uncontroversial opinion that no one deserves to be gunned down in cold blood on a college campus or anywhere else, including Kirk. I didn’t call Kirk a Nazi or a racist or a sexist; rather, I just shared a video clip of him doing what he did on college campuses and suggested readers make their own conclusions.

Now, that post (like 98% of the things I post here) didn’t find much of an audience– so far, it’s received less than 40 views here and about that many on Substack– but I also quite purposefully wrote that in a way as to not piss people off. Maybe Bloom thought that I should have been a lot more direct in calling out Kirk as an up and coming proto-fascist/Christian Nationalist leader dangerous to the future of American democracy. I didn’t do that because I was trying to make my points while still being professional and civil, and I am very aware how anything anyone posts anywhere online lives on well past the moment. Maybe that doesn’t make me brave, but it isn’t timid. Faculty who are timid don’t say anything.