Lessons on Risk (Reading June Jordan for the Present)
Lately I have been thinking about academia and risk. I have been thinking about risk, in part, because over the last few years, I’ve found myself re-reading June Jordan’s body of work, and June Jordan was an intellectual of a certain fearlessness, an intellectual whose life’s work might be translated, if partially, through the language of risk.
Jordan was a Black feminist journalist, poet, essayist, and professor -- one whose choices might appear illegible in the grids of careerist, securitizing strategy that have been naturalized into academic life. Jordan wrote overtly political essays and poetry, and her public political convictions cost her opportunities and friends. She advocated for Palestine. She was not afraid to say how fundamentally disappointing higher education institutions were, nor was she afraid to leave them: she dropped out of school (Barnard), quit academic jobs (Sarah Lawrence). She was an experimental teacher who cared not at all for canonical pedagogical wisdom or convention. Jordan’s poetry and prose are personal, candid, uncompromising. But they are also undefended, even vulnerable.
Jordan’s work and choices might easily be glamorized in the glow of retrospective view, her later recognition, or the hunt for heroes and Black feminist saviors. But Jordan was not interested in claiming heroism. She wanted revolution, but social justice was not anything like her “brand.” Her risks and their consequences were, at the time she lived them, incalculable.
Despite Jordan’s misfit status within the running academic system of values, there’s something familiar to me about her work, her ethos, her classroom accounts. Maybe it is this: I am the recipient of almost a decade of progressive, independent theological education – at a “social justice” institution. It was an education that was by turns electrifying, enabling, frustrating, and deeply humbling. But I can say that, whatever its ordinary flaws, what made it a “social justice institution” was less its own advertised claim to such than the fact that it was an education that demanded I think outside my own safety. That is, it taught me about meaningful risk.
A classroom without real risk is a classroom without learning. And there is no good thinking without honest-to-God, staring-off-the-edge-of-the-cliff risk. But academia is, on every level, a risk averse profession. Consider for instance the kind of professional consequences you might anxiously imagine for “offending” a fellow academic in the position of evaluating you – perhaps you have taken a contradictory position, or you have not cited their work. Academic evaluation relies on a long series of highly individual chains of relation. And everywhere there are reminders that others have been flunked for lesser things.
This is a problem in a profession that directs a lot of its time trying to describe and assess the world. Where is the line between telling what you see as the truth and not inciting backlash from anyone who might have a say in your future? There is no line, that is the trick of self-censorship, of projective anxiety and identification, that rigs the game. You learn to stutter and qualify even before you learn to speak.
It is also a problem for what we call “social justice.” In a profession that punishes risk, causes of collective justice in academia necessarily get lost in the endless clambering for security. Why? Because in that environment “justice” largely survives as rhetoric and as brand, or a project to launder one’s wealth or one’s reputation. It becomes, in other words, an artifact of the white careerist – glossy, high-profile, useful so long as it doesn’t distract one away from the goals of upward mobility or institutional reward. That is, so long as it doesn’t require real risk for others.
I do not exempt myself from the hypocrisies of the careerist. I have also made plenty of choices clambering for security, including taking a tenure-track job over more temporary options because the tenure-track offers the promise of security. And I lost that job, ironizing the choice. In between the getting and the losing of that job, I took – and refused – a lot of risks. I have stated impolitic positions plainly in writing, advocated against my interests, and I have at other times prudently held my cards. While at plenty of moments I said “too much” (in the form of institutional criticisms, or defense of my students, colleagues, and myself), at other moments I felt profoundly that I said far too little. In other words, I have sometimes been a coward. More than once, these were the same situations.
It is painfully unclear which risks led to me losing that job, or if saying less would have allowed me to keep it. But I can tell you that five years on, the only regrets that I have belong to the times and places I could not bring myself to speak out with or on behalf of others. Which is to say that one of the things progressive theological education does at its best is that increases the tension between what we are prone to do by and for ourselves, and what impels us to work with and for others. This is probably what makes theological education so suspicious or opaque to the rest of academia.
Risk is inglorious and uncertain. We cannot know the consequences of our risks. And we are now learning that the political landscape can evolve so quickly as to make nearly any principle outside of slack-spined self-preservation a risk. This is not by accident. The perils are many. The risks are indeed incalculable. But for those of us who find we want more than just a career, who want something other than to claim the last good furniture in a burning house, for whom collective justice still has depth and meaning beyond the brand, now is the time to take risks for each other, despite not knowing how it will end.