Appreciating Rotten and Good

I’ve been using Notes as a commonplace book, a place to mark writing on Substack that strikes me as worth remembering and sharing. Lately, as I cast about looking for the good stuff, I’ve been finding writers writing on topics I think are important only to wonder how much of their production is influenced by the use of transformer-based language machines. I feel as much curiosity as outrage. “You’re stealing readers from the real writers,” I yell to the clouds. But I also wonder what it feels like to run a hot-take manufacturing operation. Is it rewarding? Are the few beers or coffees each month worth the grind?

It is possible, even likely, that many of the writers I find myself wondering about are not using LLMs to manufacture content, but unconsciously conforming to the smoothly machined style that the essay read online now seems to demand, one that increasingly dominates what I see in Notes. I have always attended to voice and style as I decide where to put my attention, but now I look for writing that is clearly crafted out of materials far removed from the outputs of transformer-based language machines.

Rather than wring my hands about LLMs and cultural change, I thought I’d offer up a brief essay recommending my all time favorite discovery on Substack.

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Looking around, it is hard not to feel that people in our society, even in so-called serious fields like government, academia and journalism, are being rewarded for style over substance, and that this has been true now for a very long time. This occurs, obviously, on both sides — we the woke by and large want for ourselves and other people to sound woke, not to be woke, since being woke sucks as an experience.

—Rafe Meager, Caveat Vendor

Is there anyone better at using the essay form to understand the experience of living and working within the institutional constraints of the modern research university than Rafe Meager writing at The Universal and the Vacuous Events?

Their latest essay joins three others in my personal collection of the best writing on higher education this decade. Snippets don’t do them justice. I urge you to read Caveat Vendor from beginning to end and return for a few thoughts.

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Time for change

I think the word “timeless” does not quite fit here. Probability is a theme that runs through Meager’s writing. The unfolding nature of time as I experience it, along with my faith in contingency, has me believing that education is ever changing. It is the primary means humans have to adapt to their environment, which like human culture is always in flux. Teaching and learning at universities feel timeless because the process has been going on in institutions with that name for centuries, and some of the forms persist, even though they are transformed by their context.

From the inside, change feels so damn slow as to not exist. Yet, seen across the centuries, especially the last two, the institutional arrangements that structure educational labor are wrapped up in the chaotic historical processes we give names like industrialization, globalization, and capitalism. As global knowledge factories, universities are where these processes happen and where they are understood, or at least contemplated.¹

Attention to how teachers and learners, each with their own streams of experience, are entangled in complex social processes is one of Meager’s great strengths as a writer. Without getting lost in abstractions, Meager is clear about what makes the current arrangements so infuriating: they could be so much better! “But it is not inevitable that academia ended up this way, nor is it inevitable that we continue to bend the knee to the logic of money and power.”

Academic work is rewarding in so many ways and the rewards are so sadly compelling. It makes even moderately successful academics reluctant to use what influence they have to resist the application of managerial efficiency to educational processes which, because they involve shaping humans in all their precious diversity, cannot be easily scaled or optimized. It is not that university professors are powerless or blind to this problem; rather it is that they choose to preserve their rewards and precious autonomy instead of working to improve the lot of those subject to unthinking bureaucratization: the students, the staff, and untenured colleagues. The most outrageous problem, one Meager treats incisively in this essay, is when autonomy lets the powerful get away with abuse. Academic success creates monsters such that “a persistent minority of very bad people make this house a horror show for everyone, and I grow increasingly repelled by the silent majority that stands by and watches and enables it.”

Yes, and the confusions of the past few years as social movements we give names like "Me Too" and “Black Lives Matter” seemed to rise (finally!) to the occasion only to appear beaten back has left me feeling hopeless. And yet, I “keep ushering new people into an increasingly broken-down house, unsure whether you can, in good conscience, sell it to them.”

And I don’t know what to do about this. Leaving my full-time job as a university bureaucrat to teach a few classes on an adjunct salary and write—ah! my precious autonomy—felt like giving up the fight. In my worst moments, I see the defunding and chaos of the Trump regime as an echo of my own despair—a welcome wrecking ball. With cleared ground, maybe we can start anew. But this is nihilism. I’m not so radical as to give up on the one institution in civil society that seems, on balance, to do good in the world.²

“It is hard to design ways to overcome thorny, uncertain, high-risk collective action problems,” Meager writes. They share, with Dan Davies, an insider view of the economics profession that, along with its many failures, offers models and ways of thinking that make these problems appear tractable. But models don’t use themselves, and the confusions of the past few years make it feel near impossible to even suggest new approaches to improving our increasingly unaccountable institutions of higher learning. I don’t just mean economists fall short; I mean all those who practice the human sciences, my own tribe of historians included, seem incapable of making repairs to the houses where we live and work.

The great power of Meager’s essays is the elevation of the affective dimensions of academic life, and the feelings about these failures in particular. They treat feeling as a necessary complement to thinking, a way to identify truth, feeling truth as a way to make change. Similarly, their writing braves the division between quantitative and qualitative that structures so much academic feeling and thinking. Meager treats these distinctions as relations, not divisions.

That’s enough gloss. My purpose here is to encourage you to make time for a writer who does Substack right. Instead of churning out three essays a week and putting at least one behind the paywall, Meager publishes one every few months. Each is an occasion for me, as I hope they will become for you.

Here are my three favorite Rafe Meager essays on higher education.

Taking Our Chances

Tormented by an Urn

Finish Your Projects

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1. I am convinced by two recent books by Adam R. Nelson (no relation) that the industrialization of knowledge happened much earlier than the standard histories would have us believe.

2. Okay, hospitals are another.