“Everybody knew.”
– Carole Sabiston, Andrea Robin Skinner’s stepmother
“Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.”
– Paul Simon, The Boy in the Bubble
“Our band could be your life.”
– Michael Azerrad
“But at the same time, as every decent person should, he deliberately took the side of the victim and wanted to meet others, his fellow-citizens, on the basis on the only certainties they all have in common, which are love, suffering and exile.”
– Albert Camus, The Plague
The revelations in the Sunday Toronto Star regarding the sexual abuse suffered by Andrea Robin Skinner at the hands of her stepfather, and the monstrous, sociopathic reaction of her mother, Canadian literary icon Alice Munro, were both horrifying and necessary to read. Horrifying for the damage that Munro and her husband inflicted on their children. Necessary because they’re a reminder that the impulse to privilege the perceived genius, the powerful and the famous at the expense of the young and the vulnerable continues to disfigure our society.
Skinner’s courageous account of her story has already sparked many conversations. I’ll leave it to others to work through whether we should separate the artist from the art (though I’d argue that art is never produced in a vacuum, and art’s relationship to the artist is part of the art, though not its entirety). Similarly, English lit professors can re-examine Munro’s work in light of what we now know of her (though my mind immediately went to how Louis CK’s abusive actions cast his standup in a completely different light). Ditto for the continued persistence of taboos against interfering in others’ marriages and in helping victims of sexual abuse (though I note that American comedian Paul Scheer’s recently published insightful, thoughtful (and funny) memoir Joyful Recollections of Trauma mirrors somewhat Skinner’s story of dealing with an abusive (in this case violent) stepfather and the resulting feeling of abandonment when the adults in his life failed to stand up for him (Seriously, it’s a fantastic read. Go buy it.)).
Alice Munro and her husband deserve all the posthumous scorn they’ll cop. As someone who hasn’t read Munro since high school, and whose well-read MA in English Lit partner always considered Munro’s work to be tedious and overrated, I’m not particularly invested in whether or not people stop reading her. What I do care about is how we as a society keep enabling these monsters (and to be clear, I’m talking about Munro as well as her husband) because they’re seen to be geniuses or famous or someone’s meal ticket.
This is the quote from the Star news story that I keep coming back to:
“Over the course of the nearly 50 years this secret has been kept, rumours of it emerged in various circles. ‘Everybody knew,’ recalls [Skinner’s stepmother] Carole [Sabiston]. She recounts being at a dinner party with a journalist who asked her, ‘Is it true?’ Her answer: ‘Yes, it’s true.’”
Not everybody knew, of course. Not my well-read partner. Not most Canadians. But if Sabiston is to be believed (and why wouldn’t you?), the Canadian literary establishment and at least one journalist were aware. And were silent.
We can ask why, but we know why. Genius and power excuse a lot of bad behaviour. The more important the person, the greater their impunity, and the less important the broken people they leave in their destructive wake. It’s sobering to think that, in this at least, there is little difference between convicted felon Donald Trump and Alice Munro: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” For Trump, “they” are the women he was assaulting. In Munro’s case, and the husband she covered for for decades, “they” are the members of the Canadian literary and journalism establishment, who all turned a blind eye to Munro and her husband’s cruel behaviour rather than ask uncomfortable questions of a scion of their establishment. It’s fraternity house rules: Bros before children who’ve been raped.
Power and genius don’t just serve to enable obscenities on the level of Weinsteinesque sexual predation or Munro’s support of a pedophile (a pedophile who admitted to his crimes in writing and was eventually convicted for them). They also serve as a license for tawdry bullying, harassment and cruelty throughout society, all of which remain rampant and protected, taking a toll on their less-powerful targets. The crimes differ in degree, but the impulse they engender in those who choose to do nothing is exactly the same: protect the powerful, neglect the innocent.
Academia and bullying (and worse)
The impulse to protect the powerful, to go along to get along, is certainly rampant in academia, which is one of the reasons “Everybody knew” sticks in my craw. In my own circles, I and my partner, Natasha Tusikov, have attempted to call out blatant bad behaviour, including by at least one senior academic against a very junior colleague. The response was revelatory: emails from junior scholars thanking us for saying something, and public silence from senior scholars who I know didn’t approve of the way their/our colleague had acted. One scholar, unconnected to the incident and who I respect very much, told me that it was great that we’d said something but that they were also surprised that anyone had said anything. Because that’s just not done.
This wasn’t in the 1970s or 1990s or early 2000s. This was within the past six years.
And why the deference to assholery? A conformist desire to not rock the boat, definitely. Power explains a lot of it. In academia as elsewhere, senior people are gatekeepers. They control access to funding and employment. And if you want to get to where they are, you often have to play ball.
Add on top of that the mystique of the genius and its corollary, that great art or brilliant insights should excuse bad behaviour. In Munro’s case, both power and genius served to isolate her and her pedophile husband from criticism, thus further victimizing her daughter who simply wanted her story to be part of the official record of her mother’s life. And while the stakes aren’t nearly (at least usually) as harrowing in academia as they are here, academia suffers from the same dynamic.
If you’ve read this far, you know all this. And you know that this is the part of the opinion piece where the writer calls on senior scholars to do better, to stand up for their junior colleagues, to call out bad behaviour.
It certainly would be nice if they would, and there are definitely decent senior scholars out there (#notallseniorscholars). But do you think, at this late date, that many of them will step up? I’d be happy to be proven wrong, and I’m sure a few more will stand up for their junior colleagues. But let’s be honest: most will probably continue to go along to get along.
Fortunately, the rest of us are far from powerless. In fact, I’d argue that junior and mid-career scholars, and those of us outside of academia’s star-making circle, are more powerful than we believe. It is possible to create something better, although it involves some sacrifice and changing our ideas about what academia is and what academic success looks like.
Step 1: Reject the cult of the genius
The first thing we need to do is to reject the cult of the genius. This is where so much cultural commentary gets tripped up. It’s true that we must grapple with the relationship between the artist and their art once it’s created. However, the much more interesting and relevant issue is around who gets to be an artist, or gets to be recognized as the artist, in the first place.
We tend to think that genius rises to the top, that true genius will be recognized and rewarded. But that’s not quite right. Genius involves talent, but it also involves luck: being born into the right society in the right way at the right time. Making the right connections. Looking the right way. Having the right skin colour. Selling yourself in the right way. Possessing acceptable opinions. Having a culturally acceptable personality. Working at the right university, in the right country, using acceptable theories. Being American, or America-adjacent, tends to help a lot.
What this also means, though, is that people – geniuses, even – who don’t fit the mould and who don’t have the same demographic luck will fall by the wayside. Institutions don’t just select for brilliance, but for acceptable brilliance. Only the right geniuses rise to the top.
That socially recognized genius has an element of chance to it means that while brilliance is individual, geniuses as a category – the people recognized by society as brilliant, with all the resulting accolades and privileges – are eminently replaceable. The recognition of one individual as a genius, as award-worthy, as a literary icon, is demand-driven. It’s not just a function of the supply of geniuses.
As Paul Simon observed in his song The Boy in the Bubble, society has a structural need for heroes. To switch industries for a moment, if Taylor Swift didn’t exist, a Taylor Swift-sized music icon would. They would have unique talents different from Swift’s, which their fans would endlessly scrutinize and celebrate. Someone different in form (different types of songs), but similar in function (a hero for the pop charts).
So too with Munro. Literary prizes would not have gone unawarded if Munro had never been born. If Munro had never written a word, we would be lauding some other genius for their (different) insights into the human condition, marvelling at their wondrous (though different) technique. The Canadian and world literary establishments needs a Munro, but not necessarily this Munro. Even now, there are other Munros out there.
The same goes for academia. There are few ideas so foundational that a single person must be placed at the centre of the conversation. And far too often, even ideas perceived to be revolutionary are themselves adapted, consciously or unconsciously, from younger academics or those from low-prestige universities or countries and then laundered through high-prestige institutions. We’re all working on the same problems based in the same raw material, after all.
(Lest we get too hung up on not working at the core of the empire, working from the margins has its own benefits, including an easier time generating novel perspectives. Like art, there are a million different ways to approach a problem.)
Understanding genius (as opposed to individual brilliance) as a title that is conferred on certain people and denied to others can be liberating. When we look for the brilliant person as opposed to the anointed chosen ones, it frees us to expand our horizons beyond the horrible and the power-hungry who seem to naturally be attracted to the power and prestige that comes from being not just a genius, but also a gatekeeper. When we understand acknowledged geniuses as something produced as much by the system as by their own talent, we no longer are stuck only with the establishment-endorsed figures as our role models. We are freed to create our own institutions, our own networks.
For the academics reading this, consider how many times you’ve come across an Ivy League academic who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I wrote about just this phenomenon in my critique of Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff’s world-conquering (and fatally flawed) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Five years on, academics are increasingly critical of her argument, but when it was published in 2019, criticizing Zuboff was not something academics did publicly (As far as I can tell Evgeny Morozov published the only other early harsh critique of Zuboff). Instead, I, a graduate of a university that isn’t in the storied ranks of the world’s pre-eminent universities but who was nonetheless taught by brilliant academics, received emails from senior scholars and others thanking me for my critique.
Brilliance is not the exclusive purview of the well-connected.
Look beyond the establishment. Look for the smart people who aren’t jerks. Work with them. Cite them.
Step 2: Create your own networks
And create things with them.
Of course, the biggest problem, in literary circles as in academia, is that all-too-often assholes and their enablers are themselves gatekeepers. This can be tough for prospective PhD students who are just entering the profession. But even here students have agency. Reinforcement of these cycles of assholery begins with the PhD student who acts transactionally to leverage the prestige of an asshole professor rather than work with someone else. (The situation is different, of course, when the student only discovers later that they’re working with a terrible person. Here, it’s incumbent on the department to step in and protect the student, including facilitating a transfer to another supervisor.)
The cycle is perpetuated when we, as scholars, continue to work with such people, for any number of reasons (they’re doing interesting work, they have money, we need them for the prestige they’ll bring to our own projects). Often, deciding not to work with a toxic, senior colleague can come at a cost of foregone projects or revenue. It can mean that you’re not invited to the cool kids’ lunch table.
But here’s the thing about academia, at least in the social sciences, and at least in Canada (and here I’m talking about tenured and tenure-track professors). Even as many university systems around the world become more metric-driven, the reality remains that professors have more leeway to define the parameters of their job than in just about any other profession on the planet. A professorship, within some very general limits, can be almost anything you want it to be. Are you interested in theory? Community engagement? Public policy? Seemingly esoteric questions? Do you want to work with people in another discipline, at another university? Do you want to write books? Journal articles? Opeds? Organize conferences? Focus on teaching and mentoring students? We have so much freedom to define what it means to be an academic.
Recognizing that the cult of the genius is kind of a fraud offers its own kind of freedom. Another form of freedom comes from realizing that the belief that we have to work with senior assholes to advance our work and career is a choice, not an imperative. For this lesson, look to the DIY movement in punk rock in the 1980s and 1990s. Shut out from mainstream success, bands invented alternative ways to create networks and a culture. They worked together to create the culture they wanted to see in the world. There’s no reason why academics can’t do the same.
Start by finding your own people, especially among those who are coming up with you. Build your networks horizontally, not vertically. Help others achieve their dreams as you pursue yours. When it comes to mid-career and senior scholars, work with the ones you like, and who like you. I’ve dumped on senior scholar a lot in this piece, but there are plenty of great ones out there. I’ve worked with plenty. Find yours. The key is not to suffer the jerks just because you think they can help you get ahead, or because it’s expected.
Define your career objectives in terms of what you can accomplish working with people you want to work with. If a senior asshole stands in your way, go somewhere else. The loss is theirs. Don’t be afraid to build something where you are. It might be something smaller and initially less prestigious than what a senior academic could offer you, but great things grow from small projects.
(The dynamics are different and much harder within departments, of course. These suggestions refer mostly to discipline-level relationships. In departments, it’s all the more important not to hire jerks, no matter how brilliant they may seem, because they’ll be with you for the rest of your working life. There’s enough brilliance out there that it’s not worth the grief.)
One benefit of doing it yourself (or, rather, choosing to work with decent people rather than with jerks that you hope can advance your career) is that it reduces the chances that your professional fate will become tied to a bully. It may limit you in the short run, but if you also work to build a network of like-minded non-jerky people, the long run can end up being pretty sweet, without incurring the cost of enabling others’ bad behaviour. And remember: nobody, not even assholes, lives forever.
Make things better
In The Plague, Albert Camus proposes a basic standard of human decency. Describing the motivations of his main character, Dr. Bernard Rieux, in fighting the titular plague: “as every decent person should, he deliberately took the side of the victim and wanted to meet others, his fellow-citizens, on the basis of the only certainties they all have in common, which are love, suffering and exile.”
Camus, I think, is imploring us to aspire to help the victim and not to spread the plague, whether it is an actual biological disease, or “violence and injustice.” We must, he says, fight “against this terror and its indefatigable weapon … while not being saints but refusing to give way to the pestilence, do [our] best to be doctors.”
Everyone around Andrea Robinson Skinner failed her, first her parents, then the wider community. They failed to keep the pestilence at bay. This type of failure is all too easy to identify in our own lives. How many times have we failed to stand up for the vulnerable among us, personally or professionally? How many times have we enabled, through inaction, the actions of tyrants big and small? These failures should not be rationalized away as the price of art or money or fame or scholarship. They are beyond justification.
Skinner’s story is awful. That she has made a good life for herself and reconciled with her siblings speaks to an ineffable strength that too many people must tragically call upon because of the malice of some and the failure of others. Upon hearing her story, we can rejoice in her resilience. But we should also take her story as a challenge, not just to call out such harms when we see them, but to act in such a way that we don’t empower monsters in the first place. Our medicine must be not only curative, but preventative.
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