The Utility of Uselessness

You know the type.  Drenched in white-collar affectations.  Never skips a social event.  Enamored of minor accomplishments.  Considers fastidiousness a form of rebellion.  Eggheaded, but in an arrogant rather than endearing way.  Talks a lot while saying nothing at all. 

This person is likely a professor at a prestigious university. 

If you were ever a graduate student with an eye toward a career in academe, you’ve wondered dozens of times:  how did that motherfucker get such a good job? 

For you think to yourself:  the motherfucker is useless.  He never says anything incisive.  He’s addicted to jargon.  He’s robotic and boring.  He has a gift for making radical ideas sound painfully conventional. 

If you took the time to think about the curious situation, or saw the curious situation play out often enough, then it finally occurred to you:  that’s exactly why he got the job. 

It’s important to remember that your definition of useless isn’t the same as management’s definition.  Your understanding of usefulness is likely based on some notion of a common good; the common good is exactly what management considers useless.  Maintaining a dullness of spirit and purpose is one of the most esteemed responsibilities on campus.  Traversing commonplaces is an altogether unwelcome form of productivity. 

It’s easy to be confused, given all the high-minded discourse about innovative research and public engagement. 

I’ll try to clear up any confusion.  You’re allowed to do things.  In fact, doing things is probably advisable.  You simply shouldn’t do things that please the downtrodden.  That’s a most unproductive methodology.  Production must lead to reproduction.  The status quo won’t maintain itself. 

Thus the origin story of the useless professor. 

Problematic academics abound, so let’s distinguish uselessness from, say, animus or bootlicking (despite plenty of overlap).  I’m not thinking of the unabashed imperialist or the reactionary provocateur.  Nor do I have in mind the genteel huckster selling American exceptionalism or the wonk who reduces humanity to statistical inventories.  Neither do I speak of the theoretical hotshot or the socialist luminary who recites State Department bullet points. 

I’m talking about that peculiar, near-incomprehensible paragon of studied futility, the person who seems to do a whole lot of nothing, the person who elevates dullness and pretension into a professional identity.  You’ve been stuck with them on conference panels and at cocktail parties.  No matter what you say, you can’t get them to break character.  They’re too attached to the mannerisms of a deep thinker.  They select words according to a never-ending effort to protect (or boost) the value of their status.  Neither profound nor jocular, they exist in a neverland of delicate brainwork, somewhere between hapless and insincere.  They are upwardly mobile for no apparent reason and yet their mobility exemplifies the logic of power in academe. 

These specimens exhibit some combination of the following characteristics:  a propensity for mundane drama; a knack for keeping material politics far away from ideas; a finely-tuned radar for culverts and reservoirs of social capital; an inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish insight from banality.  They treat aloofness and dispassion as a virtue.  They obfuscate everything but liberal orthodoxy.  They have at least one famous faculty sponsor and an unimpeachable pedigree. 

Whenever resistance or even mere dissatisfaction begins to fester, they turn up and offer unsolicited wisdom derived from a million important tête-à-têtes in bars featuring linens and leatherbound menus.  They arrive with an urgent, momentous purpose:  to historicize, to complexify, to nuance (as a verb).  For their main function, witting or not, is to transform revolutionary sensibilities into esoterica.  They are showstoppers with a messianic compulsion to elegant rituals of conformity. 

Maybe they know they comport to managerial proclivities and maybe they’re too dense to figure it out.  Management doesn’t care.  Upper administrators are depraved, but generally they aren’t stupid.  They’re smart enough anyway to identify the actual threats on campus.  The administrators don’t much care which ideological labels the underlings apply to themselves.  Uselessness is the main determinant of utility. 

We’re forced to reconsider our understanding of the term:  uselessness isn’t devoid of value, nor is it anathema to profit.  Uselessness necessarily serves power and is therefore a highly valued form of productivity.  It rarely traduces the bounds of decorum.  It is a thoroughly inoffensive sensibility.  A sincere attempt to be useful is more likely to land you in trouble. 

During my years in academe, I sat on or observed dozens of search committees in which large applicant pools were whittled to four or five finalists.  Those finalists often included an exciting candidate, somebody who seemed genuinely curious and devoted to the well-being of everyone on campus.  And they always included at least one useless motherfucker with a fancy degree and a talent for multisyllabic inanity.  I watched that candidate give a terrible talk:  orthodox, ineloquent, uncharismatic.  I could never locate a smile on the candidate’s lips, only tense simulations of emotion deployed according to the appropriate social convention. 

I compared the useless candidate to the one who promised at least a bit of commotion.  Each time I thought to myself, “They’re gonna choose the useless motherfucker, guaranteed.”  I was never wrong. 

You may be asking why any of this matters.  A lot of professors are useless.  So what?  It’s nothing new. 

I actually think it matters a great deal.  To begin with, tenure-track jobs are increasingly scarce, which incentivizes uselessness as a professional benefit.  Useless professors will train new cohorts into the tradition. 

More important, campuses are filled with adjuncts and grad students (and, yes, some tenured faculty) working hard to unionize, to maintain traditions of critical pedagogy, to resist corporatization and donor influence.  They put in long hours of unremunerated labor.  They exist in various states of financial and occupational precarity.  

And they are regularly punished for their efforts.  So long as workers and students on campus suffer for acting on compassion, then professorial uselessness is worthy of disdain. 

In many cases, the useless job candidate who comes away with an offer is a tribute to deans and donors from provincial bigwigs with managerial aspirations.  Those bigwigs aren’t simply being magnanimous to the deans and donors:  they don’t want anyone threatening their own position in the hierarchy. 

There you have it.  The motherfucker isn’t so useless, after all.