It’s here: my second sabbatical. In September of 2019 (two years ago for those whose sense of time has been scrambled by COVID), I submitted a proposal for a book project. That proposal took me six months of free minutes to construct, and it took another five months to be approved. I breathed a sigh of relief in June of 2020 that the crazy months of February, March, April, and May–shifting abruptly to online instruction and homeschooling–were over. My husband had had three surgeries during those months. I’d spent hours reading student papers while waiting in hospital parking lots, socially isolated but required to be on site. Summer was approaching, though, and the sky was looking brighter. In just a few weeks, that relief turned to disbelief. My university postponed all 2020-21 sabbaticals and called all tenured and tenure track faculty back to campus to respond to the teaching needs of students now sitting 6 feet apart or in their basements with headphones and screens. Fall of 2020, I taught four distinctly different courses, two of which I’d never taught before. Both of my children were doing school the only way that their district offered: in their bedrooms on their laptops. It was so rough.
But that’s over now.
(Please let it be over now. Please help it be over for all the health care workers and teachers and people in poverty for whom vaccines aren’t yet available. Please don’t let your body be host to the making of the next, worse variant.)
But the sabbatical. As I restarted my project, I began by rereading and writing about J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. I did so before he started making the rounds on talk shows as a Marine Corps public affairs veteran of the war in Iraq because he is running in the Ohio Republican primary for a Senate seat. Here he is, back on the front page with much to say. I’m looking at his memoir to see what I can learn about his experiences in school, and what we can learn from what else he says and how he says it. Did he manage to reconcile the content of school with the culture of home? Did he learn from school how to reason well in the face of conflicts? Did he learn to analyze arguments–his own as well as others’? Did he learn to empathize with multiple stakeholders before designing solutions to problems?
What Vance shows us honestly in Hillbilly Elegy is the violence in Scots-Irish culture, of those he calls his people. “Mama came from a family that would shoot at you rather than argue with you” (25). J.D. is most vulnerable in his book when he confesses his struggle to not act violently, to overcome this intimate history of responding to perceived slights by fighting or fleeing. He doesn’t want to yell at his family or strike his dog. In school, at Yale specifically, he learned to write concise sentences. Did Vance learn to use language non-violently? Did he learn to seek to understand and to find common ground between conflicting viewpoints? Today, looking at his Twitter feed, I don’t see that skill in evidence.
He might not swing his fists anymore, but in his most recent article J. D. Vance attacks the thousands of Americans who work in universities. He wrangles us all into one category and summarily dismisses us. According to his fighting words, the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan is the fault of the “universities that teach our elites to be stupid conformists.”* Hmmm. At my university, we are trying to teach skills for democracy: how to listen with respectful curiosity to others and create common-ground ways to live as one union of states despite our differences. Comprehending others requires hard intellectual work. Democracy requires understanding and recognizing competing interests. The reason that that Taliban is a problem is because they don’t do that. In his memoir, Vance did recognize and wrestle with the complexity of poverty and its solutions. It’s unfortunate to see him return to the verbal combativeness and anti-education posture of toxic masculinity. Once upon a time, he could see what that posturing almost cost him. The women in Afghanistan could remind him.
Lindsay Maddox Ellis 