Just because someone’s day job is to teach a college course doesn’t mean he isn’t entitled to have a political opinion and express it. Of course he is. This is America, and there is nothing more American than speaking one’s mind.* But what the academic cannot do is conflate their scholarly cred with their politics, and this shameless lie has become a staple of political advocacy.  Stanley Fish calls it out.

PROFESSORS are at it again, demonstrating in public how little they understand the responsibilities and limits of their profession.

On Monday a group calling itself Historians Against Trump published an “Open Letter to the American People.” The purpose of the letter, the historians tell us, is to warn against “Donald J. Trump’s candidacy and the exceptional challenges it poses to civil society.” They suggest that they are uniquely qualified to issue this warning because they “have a professional obligation as historians to share an understanding of the past upon which a better future may be built.”

Whether you love Trump or hate Trump is irrelevant, except to the extent that you willingly turn a blind eye to lies that work in your favor. Are historians singularly knowledgeable by dint of their degrees to raise concerns that non-historians can’t see? is this the moment to throw in George Santayana’s quote?

The claim is not simply that disciplinary expertise confers moral and political superiority, but that historians, because of their training, are uniquely objective observers: “As historians, we consider diverse viewpoints while acknowledging our own limitations and subjectivity.”

But there’s very little acknowledgment of limitations and subjectivity in what follows, only a rehearsal of the now standard criticisms of Mr. Trump, offered not as political opinions, which they surely are, but as indisputable, impartially arrived at truths: “Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a campaign of violence: violence against individuals and groups; against memory and accountability, against historical analysis and fact.” How’s that for cool, temperate and disinterested analysis?

To be fair, while Fish uses historians against Trump as the example, the problem is neither historians nor Trump. The problem is that academics have become shameless and pervasive in their use of academic credentials to push their politics, their advocacy.
While this disciplinary experience qualifies them to ask and answer discipline-specific questions, it does not qualify them to be our leaders and guides as we prepare to exercise our franchise in a general election. Academic expertise is not a qualification for delivering political wisdom.

Nor is it their job, although they seem to think it is: “It is all of our jobs to fill the voids exploited by the Trump campaign.” (I’m not sure that I understand what that grandiose sentence means.) No, it’s their job to teach students how to handle archival materials, how to distinguish between reliable and unreliable evidence, how to build a persuasive account of a disputed event, in short, how to perform as historians, not as seers or political gurus.

To say that academic accomplishment confers neither wisdom nor illumination beyond academic discipline is obvious to anyone who considers what one thing has to do with another. But there’s more! It’s not just that academics sell their scholarly souls in the name of their political causes, but that they lie in the cause of their advocacy. They may not recognize their lies, but that’s only because the shamelessness of substituting emotional belief for reason has become de rigueur in the Academy. All the profs are doing it. Why shouldn’t I? And I’m RIGHT!!!

The Historians Against Trump invest their remarks with the authority of their academic credentials, and by doing so compromise those credentials to the point of no longer having a legitimate title to them, at least when they write and publish their letter.

And what of law profs who deliberately deceive the public as to the state of the law? Historians, at least, work in a discipline with which most of us have a passing familiarity. Law? People have no clue, even though they assume that being on the receiving end entitles them to make up the giving end. If historians have compromised their academic credentials “to the point of no longer having a legitimate title to them,” then some law profs should be disbarred. Well, they would have to be barred in the first place, which some of the worst offenders are not. Of course, they don’t mention that when using their job title to deceive.

But if it was just a bunch of eggheads** opining amongst themselves, no one would care. When is the last time you went to a cocktail party to discuss the deepest political thoughts of historians? Unless, of course, you’re a historian. Or hung out at a lawprof symposium where they all praised each other’s brilliance because no one who disagrees is allowed in the room.

The media, however, adores academics. The reason is straightforward, they can attribute credibility without wasting words. Professor Smith is the Millard Fillmore Professor of Law at Bumfuck University School of Law. Boom. Credible. Nothing more need be said.

What reader won’t immediately recognize Smith’s authority to opine on any legal-ish subject ever? So what if the subject matter has no connection with their scholarship. Do you think a newspaper reader is going to parse their writings on SSRN? Will they be aware that Smith has a sordid history of lying? Of shameless and dishonest advocacy? Of intellectual dishonesty?

Without the media aiding and abetting academia’s shameless efforts to push their emotional advocacy under the guise of scholarly cred, no one would care. Instead, they use the shorthand of attributed credbility to enable the lies that academics are only too happy to tell. And no one in the media will reveal that they sold their scholarly cred cheap. But Stanley Fish just did.

*Terms and conditions may apply.

**This is the sort of epithet that makes pseudo-intellectuals cry about anti-intellectualism. It’s not. Realism demands that we not pretend that everyone with an advanced degree is inherently brilliant, reliable, honest and good looking. Some are, some aren’t. Only fools live in their special paradise.