Academic Arrogance: Dismantling a Culture of Harm

Last Updated on: 2nd February 2024, 05:28 am

Academics are like polar bears. We live alone; we hibernate. If you walk down the halls of academic offices, you’ll find that almost all of the doors are shut. We live a solitary existence, occasionally coming out only to do collaborative research or eat an undergraduate. 

But some of us are also vicious towards one another and our students. More like polar bears with rabies. We can cut other people down, assuming they’re stupid, when they were simply expressing an idea we disagree with or trying to learn something we’ve already mastered. And according to Darla Twale and Barbara DeLuca (as well as my own personal experience), this is a common phenomenon.

If you click on Quora’s article titled “What Is Academic Arrogance,” you’ll also find this list of commonly asked questions. 

• Are people in academia arrogant? What is the role of arrogance in academia?
• Why are professors at universities so arrogant?
• Which academic fields have the most and least arrogant people?
• Are some people with a PhD arrogant?
• Why are most intellectual people arrogant?
• What is it like to have an arrogant professor?

Huh. Sounds like there might be a problem here.

In fact, one of the most popular answers on Quora was an (intentionally ironic) example of academic arrogance.

What Is Academic Arrogance?

As the author of this answer demonstrated so adeptly, academic arrogance is a belief that because you have spent time mastering a specific subject, you are superior to others. 

Academic arrogance can be extraordinarily harmful–not only on a personal level, but to the scientific discipline as a whole. It discourages new lines of thinking or questioning established belief and it forces the subservience of those new to the discipline. It can also take the form of bullying and go so far as to be traumatic under some circumstances.

The Roots of Academic Arrogance

Academics tend to live in isolated worlds and tend to create hierarchies. They are vestiges of past hierarchies (based in patriarchy, I will add). These hierarchies start at the bottom with graduate students, up to Instructors, then Assistant Professors, then Associate Professors, then finally Professors (it’s a misnomer that someone is a “full professor”–the title is simply “Professor”).

Interestingly enough all those professors do the same job. They all do teaching, research, and service in varying percentages depending on the school that they’re employed by.

The major difference between an Assistant Professor and a Professor is that the Assistant Professor does not have tenure. Tenure doesn’t mean lifetime employment (there are ways around that) but it does mean that as long as you are productive and the school doesn’t have a financial emergency, you should have a job. This makes Assistant Professors feel somewhat subservient to professors because the Professors vote on whether they get tenure.

Students and junior faculty tend to defer to Professors. Over time, if people keep deferring to you, you can start to feel like you’re pretty special. If I’m running a lab as a professor and everyone is subservient to me, or I’m living in one little world where I’m the expert, it’s easy for me to become arrogant.

Academic Arrogance in Your Field

If you go to some academic conferences, you can see all of the alpha males butting heads. Unfortunately, part of what happens in any academic field is posturing–showing how many graduate students you have, where you’ve been published, or telling people in so many words “you aren’t doing good work because you haven’t cited my work.” Or simply freezing out a younger colleague because they cited somebody you don’t get along with.

Because it’s an insular world, these things can grow and fester so that factions develop. The best piece of advice I got in graduate school was, “Don’t become close friends with anybody on the faculty of a new job for at least a year. Wait until you know who doesn’t like whom.”  But though the advice is useful, it also reinforces the idea that professors are loners who don’t collaborate.

You’ll get a taste of this dynamic as you choose your committee for your dissertation.  You’ll want to be sure that your committee members actually get along, and that your dissertation doesn’t become a battlefield for other grievances–a proxy war of sorts. I’ve seen students get caught in the middle of battles over methodological preferences quite often, for example, even when they believed the professors agreed on the basic tenants of the subject matter.

Academic Arrogance and Bullying

Thesis Whisperer has one of the best articles on Academic Arrogance around. In it, the author features a comment she received on her Facebook page, which she describes as “A scene I have witnessed over and over again.” After giving her presentation, she says, she was floored by the aggressive and threatening tone of a senior academic’s comment.

“… this senior academic went on to berate me (in front of around 20 colleagues) for about 10 minutes on these ideas which I had explicitly stated were preliminary … this was extremely confronting, and, even worse, completely off topic and unconstructive. I wasn’t the only one who felt it was out of hand. Afterwards, a few academics (including my supervisor) and fellow students commented privately that how this person had spoken to me was completely appalling. Some audience members even said that just having witnessed it left them deflated and feeling anxious for the rest of the day.”

Unfortunately, this is indeed common–and incredibly damaging. Not only is it extraordinarily harmful to the student’s mental health and their passion to pursue the discipline, it’s harmful to the discipline itself. 

Combatting Academic Arrogance

There are several steps we can take to combat academic arrogance. 

Report Unacceptable Behavior

The Black Lives Matter movement and the Me Too movement have something to teach us about how to insist on being treated better: tell people. Though this alone is rarely enough, it is an essential first step. 

We’re taught to suffer in silence, and in any authoritarian culture, that message is reinforced as a prerequisite for academic success. Shaming messages like, “You have to learn to take it like the big boys,” or “Put your big girl panties on” are derogatory, not helpful, and they’re phrases used by bullies.

Most universities have grievances processes that are laid out in their handbooks (often available on the student website). If you feel you’ve been treated unfairly, report what happened and allow the investigators to do their job. If they don’t conclude what you think they should have, use the appeals process. 

While the “tattletale” label may seem to apply, it’s becoming clear that only when authority figures are held accountable for their inappropriate behaviors will that behavior cease. If you hesitate to report because you think you might be perceived as “wimpy,” consider how you’d feel if a younger sibling were exposed to this same behavior a few years down the road. Might you then consider your attempts to curb the behavior brave?

Change Mindset

We can also stop buying into the idea that just because someone has an attitude of arrogance, they actually are better than we are. This change in perspective can be difficult because we’ve been encouraged to respect and follow authority figures.

Respect is appropriate. Following wise leaders is a wise course of action. But blindly accepting professed truths because someone arrogant espouses them is giving up our own authority. We do it all the time, and we need to become aware of it.

Model a Different Way

Recognize that you are an agent of change; academic culture is much more successful when conflict management happens through open communication, civility, and respectful honesty (Creamer, 2004). How can you begin to embody these qualities as you interact with other graduate students, professors, and especially with undergraduates who are learning the nuances of university culture from you?

DeLuca and Twale advocate change through research. Their book, Faculty Incivility: The Rise of the Academic Bully Culture and What to Do About it, describes systemic methods of cultural transformation through data-gathering of all kinds, from gathering historical dropout rates to interviewing professors and students. They also remind us that school governance offers an avenue for change, drawing on the energy of outrage to raise awareness and create a movement.

You Are Not Crazy, the Culture Is Crazy

Whatever you choose to do, remember that getting discouraged by academic arrogance and the bullying culture is rational and normal. Try not to let that discouragement lead to depression and inertia. 

You may need to create a support system to get you through the tough times along the road — therapists are good resources, as are other graduate students (even from other programs), and people who love you enough to want you to live your dream.  

Read The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell and reframe the bullying as “trials” sent to make you stronger (though certainly don’t keep yourself in truly abusive situations, or imagine for a second that you deserve it). Keep believing in yourself as you move through this arduous process. And don’t let the bullies get you down.