Last spring, my son graduated from Oberlin College, and in only a few more months, I’ll have paid off my own enormous student loans. That is, I believe deeply in the intellectual benefits of higher education and have willingly indentured myself to attain them. On the other hand, I loathe the academy’s blind spots.
A few years ago, Stephen Greenblatt—the Stephen Greenblatt—said in an interview, “I’ve been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I’ve been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.”((Stephen Greenblatt, “Meet the Writers: StephenGreenblatt.” Interview at Barnes and Noble, 2004.))
On the one hand, there’s a lovely quiet confidence in the long view Greenblatt takes, a modest surety of purpose, but it’s also a position freighted with an absence of urgency. That unacknowledged absence is a luxury, a privilege, that too many academics ignore, not at their own peril, but at the peril of others, others like the women who would have been very grateful to learn about that provision in the Violence Against Women Act about employers’ responsibilities to protect them. “The audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written,” Greenblatt writes. Eventually. There’s no rush. And the burden of finding knowledge, you’ll note, is on the audience. Seeking the audience out is not configured as the thinker’s job. Eventually, if I am superb enough, the chosen few will manage to discover my work.
Sitting on my sofa on a Saturday morning, writing, it still surprises and honors me that an editor has asked me to write for a prestigious college’s online journal. I was raised to be seen and not heard. Now someone wants my voice?
That’s the key, I think: to remain surprised, to remain honored. Our public voices are an extraordinary privilege. We can make the choice to carry with us and be shaped by the voices we’ve heard—the strippers and dropouts and battered mothers—and we can act so that what we do will matter to them. We can continue to choose—no matter what islands of remove our positions may afford us—to keep inviting those voices, to teach free classes to the poor, for example, and to listen to what the poor tell us when they read our cherished texts. We can teach texts written by poor women in our classrooms. We can remember that torture and abuse traumatize humans into silence, and that humiliation and subordination train people into reticence, but that their voices, those valuable voices, can be fished to the surface again, if we are patient, if we are kind. If we care.
