Trauma Performance Culture in Academia
Comments on a Troubling Aspect of Modern Higher Education
A very, very long time ago, I was in a summer program that encouraged under-represented minorities to pursue science careers. I noticed a pattern. Students with the most difficult and painful experiences got the most attention. I don’t begrudge these students. They needed the help.
Still, I took away two sobering lessons. First, the disproportionate attention given to students with deep traumas undermined the goals of the program. By focusing too much on trauma and pain, you won’t spend as much time on the nuts and bolts of science, which is how careers are really made. The second lesson is that many folks in higher education seemed to really enjoy helping people out in the worst situations, but they don’t get as much fulfillment out of helping people master the nitty gritty of science. This is not limited to what I saw over thirty years ago in a summer research experience program. It happens all the time.
I was reminded of this second lesson when I read an article at The Atlantic website by Aya M. Waller-Bey, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Michigan. Here is Waller-Bey:
The year after I graduated from college, I worked as an admissions officer at a highly selective private university, where about 12 percent of students who apply get in. My colleagues and I evaluated and scrutinized thousands of applications. I searched for the highest-achieving students and the most thoughtful stories to satisfy the university’s goal of creating an academically competitive, personally compelling, and racially diverse class.
Before long, I realized that this job had constraints. I got the clear message that I should reward high-achieving students from historically marginalized backgrounds who also described struggle and adversity in their admissions essays. That these students should have to prove their worthiness by putting their trauma on display seemed obviously unfair. A few years later, I pursued a Ph.D. in sociology to study the admissions process. My research showed me that the valorization of trauma narratives is widespread in selective colleges’ admissions departments—and that students from marginalized communities are well aware that their applications have a higher chance of success when they describe the difficulties they’ve faced.
Waller-Bey’s essay’s defends affirmative action as a policy that would downplay the need for minority students to be trauma performers. Here, I’ll focus a little more on higher education’s trauma performance culture.
First, I applaud Waller-Bey for documenting this phenomenon and putting it under the sociological microscope. It’s easy for people to dismiss trauma performance culture as a boogie-man generated by Fox News and Ron DeSantis. You could certainly exaggerate it, but it’s definitely real.
Second, trauma performance culture explains a heck of a lot in higher education these days. For example, there has been a series of incidents where academics have been passing themselves off as ethnic minorities. This would include a Black professor of creative writing passing himself off as Cuban, a White professor of literature passing herself off as Afro-Puerto Rican, a White male professor pretending to be a Black woman on Twitter, and, of course, a White woman in Washington state who managed to get an adjunct gig teaching African American Studies. People ask, why would people do this? The answer is simple - that is what some folks really want to hear and they reward people with these traumatic personal stories.
We can see the effects of trauma performance culture in the everyday life of universities as well. For example, Ivy League schools routinely trumpet the fact that they admitted a student with ties to the criminal justice system, or undocumented students, but they almost never shower the same level of attention on faculty who helped a student of color move from a C+ to a B+ in organic chemistry. Again, we should celebrate triumphs over adversity, but the imbalance is a problem.
I’ve long bristled against trauma performance and I’ve tried to not adopt that pose. In my first book, I explain how rejecting trauma performance led me to my research. From page xiii-xiv of From Black Power to Black Studies:
I remain frustrated by trauma performance and I hope that the academy can develop better ways of promoting inclusion. It’s a real distraction.
Bottom line: Helping people with trauma is good, but push it too far and it becomes a vice.
++++++
My books:
Grad Skool Rulz - cheap advice manual for grad students
Obama and the antiwar movement
My own highly selective liberal arts college inaugurated a First Generation program not long ago, meant to find students and alumni who are the first in their families to attend college, so they can help attract others.
I figured I'd qualify with ease, as the child of parents who had not even graduted from high school. The campus, at best a comfortable, classy retreat for scions of the middle class and up, tries to be more welcoming, but there's a lot of heritage to overcome.
Over the next six months of kickoff meetings, it became clear what the college actually wanted. They were peddling trauma, and impoverished or blue collar background is not good enough. Without saying so, they had already cast the First Gen crowd as people of color.