How I Became A Scholar - Pt. 1

From Harvard Health

Halfway through my sophomore year in college, just after Christmas break, I caught whooping cough. The year was 1995.¹

The diagnosis took several trips to the doctor, because no one was testing for pertussis in those days. Doctors are schooled in a truism: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Immunization had been so successful at eradicating pertussis by the mid 90s that nearly every other respiratory illness seemed more plausible. 

But this was a case where social history could have revealed a great deal. My parents homesteaded in rural Montana in 1977. They belonged to the Jesus People, a sect of Christian hippies who rejected the white picket fence, the retirement account, and obeisance to a traditional 9-5.² 

It was a good life in many respects — still is for my parents. The Bosc pears they grow are better than anything you can buy from Harry & David. But my parents’ alternative worldview meant that they doubted vaccines. As a result, I never received many standard immunizations and skated by on herd immunity until that fateful winter, when an elderly man caught a ride with us to church and passed the virus on to me. 

Jesus People. From Christianity.com.

Pertussis destroys the protective lining at the top of your airway, which makes it nearly impossible to breathe in without coughing out. So you cough, cough, cough, slowly fading, until your body takes over with a long whooping breath. Despite my dire condition, I had to insist that I be tested. By the time the results came back positive, more than two weeks had passed, which meant that the window for treatment had closed. Antibiotics wouldn’t help me or prevent transmission at that point, so I had to let it run its course. 

I have no recollection of how I attended class in that state. But I remember a fogged out stretch of about three weeks when I could barely get any sleep. I spent a lot of time alone, hacking to a point of helplessness. It took six months to recover and a few years to stop wheezing whenever I pushed my heart rate too far. 

I’ll never get those six months back. But public trust in education, science, and government has slipped far enough that a lot of young people are about to lose chunks of their lives to ignorance, too.³

Many are cheering the collapse of legacy media and the ivory tower, ready to tear down any institution left standing after Covid. But I can’t help feeling like I’m being carried involuntarily back into my own past. 

It is as if I and my country have been walking opposite roads for the last thirty years. My path led out of poverty and superstition toward traditional centers of knowledge, toward belief in the institutions now under attack. I was the weird kid who didn’t know who E.T. was, who brought a cup of homemade apple wine to kindergarten as a cough remedy, who financed Bugle Boy shirts by selling wild huckleberries. I fought my way from the fringe to the center.

America wasn’t moving in quite as linear a line, but I see a straight arc from the culture wars of the 90s to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump.⁴ You might say that the fringe has steadily become the center. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the center has not held.  

I keep coming back to that strange juxtaposition of whooping cough and college, when the medieval and the modern collided. It was an embarrassing experience and an instructive one. After paying such a steep price for countercultural thinking, I embraced scholarship with open arms. I didn’t want to keep living in the Middle Ages.

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It was a grief to my parents that my education pulled me so steadily toward the institutions they had rejected. But it was true: I was learning things about close reading, research, and evidence that flew in the face of my raising. 

My scholarly apprenticeship began in a religion class where my professor introduced me to hermeneutics. That’s a fancy word for interpretation: how to interpret the Bible. The two essential tools, he explained, were context and evidence. To draw reliable conclusions from a text, you needed to understand the relation of its parts to the whole. That meant considering the immediate context of a passage, then the broader parameters of, say, the book of Matthew, then the relation of that book to the other Gospels, and so on.

The fact that there were discrepancies among the Gospels mattered. You couldn’t just cherry pick an example from Mark to fit something you already believed. A single example proved nothing. You had to attend to the textual inconsistencies between the four accounts of Christ’s life, educate yourself about what might have been lost in translation, consider the messy process of canonization and all the apocrypha that got left out, acknowledge that each of the Gospels began as oral histories. 

The result? A deep and abiding humility. I could understand why people attended seminary to learn Greek and Hebrew. It was a life’s work. I thought back to all the preachers I’d grown up listening to, how they projected authority through strength of conviction and force of personality. Often they’d spend an hour or more riffing on a single passage, embroidering it with folksy stories that made us laugh and cry and sometimes fall silent with dread. 

I owe my lyrical voice to those performance artists, but I could see in my New Testament class how flimsy their claims to truth were. I wasn’t a scholar yet, but I understood the principle that I’d later teach my own students, which William Cronon captures as well as anyone. Education isn’t a state or pinnacle that we reach. It is, Cronon writes, “a way of living in the face of our own ignorance, a way of groping toward wisdom in full recognition of our own folly, a way of educating ourselves without any illusion that our educations will ever be complete.” 

What was true of hermeneutics was true of every discipline. I couldn’t just make Moby Dick mean whatever I wanted anymore than I could dismiss empirical results in Biology out of hand. There might not be a right answer or a definitive truth, but there were parameters for persuasive discourse. A standard that I had to reach to be taken seriously. Firm opinions were not enough.

After having grown up on the fringe, it was exhilarating to know not only that there was a path to the center but that the method did not discriminate based on wealth, popularity, or any of the other measures by which I often fell short. The only metric that mattered was the truth, which was always elusive to some degree, but never completely out of reach. 

Context and evidence. Hypothesis and experiment. Rigorous peer review. These were the reasons why a test for pertussis and the antibiotics to treat it existed at all. 

I didn’t leave higher education because I had lost my faith in scholarship. I left for many reasons, including family priorities, but part of it was that scholarship and expertise no longer lay at the heart of the enterprise. The metrics had shifted. Enrollments, budgets, and corporate hierarchies occupied the center, not knowledge, beauty, or truth. The way to be taken seriously was by abandoning scholarship altogether, learning the language of branding and assessment, trying to imagine how studying Willa Cather might help a student get a job at Wells Fargo. 

My friend

Sam Kahn

might be right that there has been a lasting epistemological shift in America from the center to the fringe. This is not because the scholarly method has died or empiricism has been exposed as false or the standards for hermeneutics no longer produce persuasive results. It is because enough people have stopped believing that these methods matter (including professors, as

William Deresiewicz

wrote recently in The Chronicle of Education) or that the institutions historically tasked with curating knowledge are trustworthy.⁵ If that ideological shift is as profound as some think it is, we can expect many of the safeguards that scholarly thinking built over generations to disappear. Old plagues will rise again, like zombie viruses rising from the permafrost. Public health will slide back a century or more. Snake oil salesmen will tune their marketing messages to perfect pitch. 

Whooping cough will be the least of our worries then. 

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1. This is the first in a series of essays inspired by exchanges with friends. One asked, when I suggested that conspiracy theories about the government controlling hurricanes posed a public menace, who is the judge of truth these days? Several have expressed a lack of confidence in the only major news outlets left. These conversations have caused me to reflect on my own training, how it was that I came to believe in the scholarly method. Next time, I want to tell you about my mentor, Susan Rosowski, how she earned distinction as the preeminent Willa Cather expert, and what she taught me about the research process.

2. I can understand, looking back, why my parents and many of their generation lost faith in a government that would force them to die for a bogus war — why so many of them chose instead to turn on, tune in, and drop out. You have heard some echoes of my parents’ influence in my own thinking about work and identity and the sacrifices I am unwilling to accept. I don’t mean to suggest that conscientious objection has no place, only that its logic can be carried too far.

3. I remember realizing a few years ago, while reading of a measles outbreak, that I hadn’t been vaccinated for that, either. It was simple enough to schedule those shots, but it was unsettling to know that I’d been exposed for my whole adult life without knowing it. Measles can cause blindess or encephalitis in people over age 30. It’s no joke. I like one of my friend’s analogies: vaccines are as essential as seat belts.

4. My family had already taken several hard right turns by the time I came of age. Half of my great grandparents were college educated and far more worldly than their own children. My maternal grandfather had a cousin named Kitty who married into the Nordstrom family, which owned the Seattle Seahawks for a time. All of my grandparents were evangelical Christians, but they still trusted public schools, government officials, and public health programs. 

5. I don’t have sufficient space to tackle all the ways that our educational and medical institutions have lost the public trust. It’s worth saying that I don’t blame people for questioning the influence of Big Pharma on standard medical care. I’ve written elsewhere about how it’s hard for me to recommend college unequivocally to young people from rural places based on rising costs, debt burden, and other concerns. In all these cases, I believe not that institutions are deserving of unwavering trust, but that there must be an abiding faith in the scholarly methods that built them. Without that, we’re just running on confirmation bias and canards. We need at least a common understanding of what evidence is and what it is not.