Anyone who’s ready my work might know that I’m a bit of a fan of Max Weber. Sure, he’s not free of controversies and got several things a tad wrong (who hasn’t?), but he’s provided some unsurpassable zingers (“until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt” being a personal favorite). And from all he wrote, Science as Vocation is a text I return to over, and over, and over again, both as an earnest take on the vicissitudes of a scholarly life and an indexing of imaginaries we’ve collectively shared for over a century on what that life should look like.
For many of us, the images of academia that live in our heads and echoed in the public’s mind and the lived experience of being in the profession are a source of constant dissonance. What our careers “should” be and what they are in practice match only slightly, more a general resemblance than anything close to univocal correspondence. And one of the most salient divergences between what ought to be and what is—and which might have become more relevant in the last few decades—involves the outsized role played by personal branding in structuring career paths that should have very little to do with any kind of marketing strategy.
I tried to think of words other than “branding” (understood as the deployment of a coherent and appealing personal narrative that may or may not be true) to convey what is going on but, at many levels, it’s the best term for stressing how strategies of individual, public, almost viral salesmanship have come to shape the paths of careers and, potentially, the evolution of subfields at large. The insidious fact that scholarly reputation is often tied to specific anchors of status—from institutional pedigree to network associations—implies that the incentives to become a sellable brand—a microcelebrity, of sorts—are real and meaningful. Having a brand is a perfectly reasonable way of making it while faking it, if there is a demand for the product.
This is, what I think, sits at the core of the Jason Arday controversy. I won’t dwell much on this specific case, using it but as a springboard for a larger argument. Of course, I’m not the first to write about this. Will Davies has a terrific write up, for instance, and I’m sure Daniel Engber’s text is okay-ishly passable (I won’t pay for The Atlantic, thank you, or read something that erroneously identifies Arday as “probably the most famous sociologist” in the world). More ink was spent on the issue: for the transcontinental rumor mill that are the Anglo-American social sciences, this was certainly the gossip of the week.
What I think is missing from some of the existing analyses is approaching this case as the symptom of a broader trend in the profession. Davies rightly identifies the rise and fall of Arday as tied to the trust-based reputational economies that are foundational to scholarship. There is no “Truth Police” for adjudication, writes Davies, and with that I agree. Yet what we’ve seen seems to be much more fundamentally about the prominence of an economy of narratives than one just of reputations—something closer to the kind of markets that structure celebrity and fandom, Instagram and TikTok, than markets based on institutionalized status.
You see, however much this case might have been about abusing generalized trust systems and reputation economies in academia, it was also about how much an audience of suckers “we” have collectively become. Arday’s story wasn’t simply incredible. It was by all measures unbelievable. The odds of his accomplishments given the account of his past (not speaking until he was 11; learning to read and write only at 18), made for an incredibly story, but not something likely grounded in reality. His achievements weren’t impossible, but they were certainly improbable. Surely someone at the University of Cambridge must have, at some point, thought “Maybe this isn’t entirely true”. Surely someone, when inviting him to deliver a keynote, someone somewhere at the British Sociological Association must have said “Hmmm, his life almost sounds like the script for a movie”. Surely someone at Simon & Schuster must have commented “This could almost be fiction!”. Surely. But apparently not.
The uses and abuses of the economy of reputation and of the widespread forms of goodwill that are necessary to maintain scholarly production (in mentorship; in peer review; in editorships; in grant evaluation; the list goes on) are certainly structural features that make cases such as Arday’s possible. But they only go so far in explaining how some academics (and quite a few more para-academics) can attain such impressive degree of exposure and recognition. For Arday’s case to have materialized, it required a mature market for narratives, overlaid atop the kind of systems that most of us assume operate in much of academia.
Here’s where Arday becomes a datapoint in a larger structural transformation of the academic sphere: the same forces that propelled Arday to relative stardom in the British context explain the meteoric rise of other academics who, with anything but field-defining contributions to their communities, have an outsized presence within and outside the profession, and who strategically use personal narratives (true or not) to create identifiable brands for an equally identifiable market.
Think, for example, of the recent column by Tyler Austin Harper on his experience as an assistant professor at Bates College and his reasons for leaving academia. Writing in agonizing detail about his experience with the “distressing” racial politics that, in his view, defined his time at Bates, Harper opens the several vignettes with a checklist of signifiers of class identity and meritocratic conviction. His experience serving in college-wide committees, being involved with the selection of new faculty, participating in discussions on curricular reform, and dealing with concerns about students show a coherent yet ultimately uncanny story—somewhat like claiming running 600 miles in 6 days. Surely, things weren’t as homogeneous; surely, there were tensions; surely, he was not in the rooms where other conversations were had; surely, his personal experience is far from a thoughtful ethnographic account (of which there are various) or a generalizable survey about politics and higher education (of which there are various), or even a qualitative study of the experience of minoritized faculty in US higher education (of which, again, there are various). While anecdata is sort of “data”, I’m not entirely sure why The Atlantic would publish this N=1, autoethnographic, gripe-y experience as if it were profound generational wisdom condensed in a few thousand words. Then again, they also publish Emily Oster. So, yeah.
Tyler Austin Harper is, like Arday, just another point through which to draw a line on the scatterplot. The list of academics (and para-academics, like the influencer intellectuals that I study) is long. Would Kathleen Stock, a competent but by no means spectacular philosopher, be as known if it were not for how her story was circulated and sold? Unlikely. But the fact that, like Arday and Harper, Stock gets more traffic and visibility than others in her field owing to how her branded narrative is packaged and distributed, says much about the structure of incentives in the profession and what it may do in the long run. And visibility is, like any other gated resource, exchangeable for other rewards: a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science shows evidence of an association between social media promotion and job market outcomes. Having a brand is, in short, a viable strategy.
It’s not surprising that many of these cases are tied together with the ribbon of “woke”. Some were erroneously hired because of woke. Others found an inhospitable workplace because of woke. Others were “cancelled” ‘because of woke’. It seems, at this point, that woke is the missing ingredient in a Grand Unified Theory of Everything Social, explaining multiple outcomes across numerous domains.
The problem isn’t “wokeness”, alas, as those on the right constantly argue, but rather our collective capture by a market in clickable narratives that has come to embed too many aspects of our lives—incidentally, exploited quite effectively by the same right that is, also, the first to monetize their sad little stories for their sad little audiences (FWIW, Davies makes a similar point). The same monetized metrics that skewed culture industries at large and imprinted a remorseless Instagram aesthetics on more and more sites of cultural life also affect the way academic institutions operate, particularly those where the evaluation of knowledge is much less easy to disentangle from the evaluation of the knowledge-maker (i.e. arts, humanities, and some social sciences). Enter branding. Where there’s an architecture of incentives, however benign and well intentioned, there will be a market that can be gamed. This institutionalized conversion of narratives into a currency isn’t unique to academia, of course (see James’ Democratic Insecurities for an outstanding example related to trauma and suffering), but it certainly matters for making sense of the kinds of the apparent turbulence in our fields.
The kind of science that Weber wrote about is likely not the kind of science that we need or even want. 1917 Germany is decidedly far from us (in most respects; unfortunately, not in all). And contending with historical forms of exclusion remains critical for the survival and health of science and academia more broadly. Recognizing difficulties, breaking barriers, rewarding achievements based on opportunities available, are all things that should go into our toolkits of evaluation. Rewarding brand? Not so much. For that, let them eat their Instagram cake.