How I Learned To Stop Criticizing Everything
There are two directions higher education can take. Here’s why I chose pluralism.
This article is part of an ongoing Persuasion series on the future of universities.
Universities are in crisis—losing public support, shaken by internal divisions, facing angry donors and alumni, and increasingly straying from their core mission of intellectual curiosity and open inquiry. Our series, which is made possible by the generous support of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, will consist of a collection of longform essays and podcast interviews aimed at helping higher education tackle this crisis.
In today’s installment, Eboo Patel discusses turning his energy for radical critique into constructive action. To read the other installments in the series, from Rachel Kleinfeld’s prescription for fixing DEI to William Deresiewicz’s exploration of off-campus learning, click here!
– Yascha and the Persuasion team.
I grew up among the professional middle classes in the western suburbs of Chicago during the 1980s. My mother stayed home with me and my brother when we were young, then went to night school to get her CPA before landing a job at a big accounting firm. She disliked it intensely, and finally found the perfect fit as a professor at a community college, where she taught for 35 years.
My dad worked in corporate advertising and also hated it. He once told me that if you win the rat race you are still a rat. He got out, bought a couple of small businesses, and happily sold sandwiches to satisfied customers for the next decade and a half.
I went to the University of Illinois, the quintessential professional middle class school. It’s where the children of architects and engineers go to become… architects and engineers. God did not give me that gene. It takes me several minutes to calculate a 20% tip at a restaurant. But I’m adventurous and ambitious and what I lack in math skills I make up for in imagination and determination. I excelled in school and won a fancy scholarship to study in England.
People do not go to Oxford University to become architects and engineers. Oxford is where the children of the masters of the galaxy go to become masters of the universe. I was the Earth-bound state school kid surrounded by the celestial beings of the Ivy League. I was Cameron in a sea of Ferris Buellers. To make it worse, I was brown, and originally from India. I had “striver” written all over me.
I felt so out of place. Who were these Americans who were already chummy with so many people at Oxford? How did they know what drink to order with their salmon?
Somehow, my anxieties got all wrapped up with The New Yorker magazine. I’d never seen one in my life until I got to Oxford. But everywhere you turned on High Street or Broad Street, every sophisticated person seemed to carry one in their back pocket, reading it casually while riding the bus or sitting in a café. I felt like such an imposter approaching a news stand and buying a copy for myself, as if I was one of those sophisticates. Then I went back to my room—what was probably the smallest room ever built in the 1000 year history of Oxford University, and which I’m sure they gave deliberately to me—sat on my bed, and stared at the cover. It was indecipherable. I could not make heads or tails of it. How would I ever fit in in this place, with these people?
The New Yorker became a symbol of my separateness. Ordering the right drink with salmon, a symbol of my separateness. Having no friends at Oxford, a symbol of my separateness.
I could have done the simple thing and reached out to someone. But instead I inhaled an ocean of theory that offered academic justification for my disease. The language made me feel smart and justified and superior: “subaltern,” “discourse,” “power-knowledge,” “colonialism,” “white supremacy.”
That winter break, I met my dad for a holiday in India. “How’s Oxford?” he asked as we were heading to a restaurant. I unleashed my vocabulary. I was the subaltern in the midst of colonial empire, seeking to speak but always being suffocated by the dominant discourse. I was one of the wretched of the earth, one of the oppressed.
My dad humored me for a few minutes, but finally could not restrain himself from stating the obvious. “If you’re oppressed, what word do you have to describe that boy?”
We were in a chauffeur-driven car in the Colaba neighborhood in south Mumbai, and the kid that my dad was referring to was right outside the window holding two fingers out to me in a gesture of pleading. The other three digits on that hand were stumps where fingers might once have been. And the other hand didn’t exist at all. Another stump.
I considered the word “oppressed” for a moment and realized that I could not think of a more intense term in the English language to describe the human condition. I found myself conducting a thought experiment. What if I was in a conversation with this child? Would I say, “You and me, we’re the same, both victims of an oppressive system”? What if he responded, “Sir, you appear to be very different than me, but I’m happy to play along. Perhaps you could spend a day with me, and me a day with you, and we could test your theory that way. Or maybe since we’re the same we could just switch places.”
What he would notice if he came back to campus with me would be the comforts—the people who cook the food and clip the hedges and clean the floors. But maybe the thing that would strike him the most is that here, on a campus, there is a relationship between your talents, your efforts and your advancement. Maybe he would turn to me and say, “There is literally nothing I can do to alter my position in this world. But you—you determine your own fate.”
I had told my doctoral advisor I wanted to write a paper on how The New Yorker exemplified a discourse that maintained the colonial power structure and marginalized third world state school students like me. He offered a suggestion: “Instead of making The New Yorker a symbol of separateness, why don’t you read the articles and try discussing the content with your classmates. That’s how you make friends.”
Wise and pragmatic counsel. My advisor had noticed something: with all the fire I spit, all the critical theory I read, all the words I weaponized, I was mostly succeeding in making my own life miserable. I was lonely, and angry, and falling behind. The things I did excel at were of dubious value. I was good at finding everything that was standing in my way. And I could detail the things that everyone else was doing wrong.
But as you grow up, you learn that this path hits a brick wall very quickly.
For example: I stood up after an especially boring session at an interfaith conference and chided the participants for lacking vision and edge and energy. Where are the young people? Where is the heat, the action? My callout achieved the desired result: a string of oohs and aaahhs and mouths agape. But then, something out of the ordinary happened. A woman approached me and said, “You should build that.”
I felt myself get hot with fear. My experience had been that if you say things with vehement self-righteousness, people don’t challenge you. Maybe they assume that your passion comes from being the world expert on the issue that you are shouting about. But I wasn’t an expert. My self-righteousness was a bluff, and here was this woman calling it. “Your vision for a different kind of diversity organization—one with edge and energy—is compelling. Why are you telling other people what to do? You should build it yourself.”
It took me a long time to shift my paradigm and develop the skill set to turn that idea into reality. I’m glad I did.
I’m not sad that I read those critical theorists. I think it’s a useful perspective to have. My problem is that I deformed the world to fit a narrow worldview, and I let it direct my life.
The bigger problem is that this paradigm has become a regime in certain quarters of higher education. You are coerced into holding that worldview and punished if you utter ideas outside of its scope. Critical theory is like a sharp kitchen knife: very useful for some things, like cutting meat, but if you eat your cereal with it, you’ll hurt yourself. And if you point it at someone else, then it’s a weapon.
In some circles, on some campuses, every other utensil has been removed from the intellectual cutlery drawer, replaced with sharp kitchen knives.
There’s a better way. Pluralism means that you cooperate with people of diverse identities, that you learn from the divergent ideologies, that you expand the number of explanatory frameworks you have to make sense of the world. You should not exit college narrower than you entered. And you should not graduate believing that you are less capable than when you began.
I actually think the most important thing we can tell new college students is that they are privileged. In fact, they are amongst the most privileged people in human history. That’s not an insult, or a scolding, it’s just a fact. If you have potential, and are in an environment that provides you with opportunities to realize your potential, you are amongst the most fortunate human beings to walk this planet. Your life is not characterized by oppression; it’s characterized by agency.
The question before every college student, really, is simple: What will you do with your agency?
Turns out those architects and engineers I went to the University of Illinois with were onto something. They used their agency to build things. And that’s what our universities need to challenge a new generation of students to do. I look forward to the day college presidents welcome their incoming class with the lines, “You are amongst the most fortunate individuals who have ever lived, in one of the most remarkable and resource-rich environments human beings have ever created. Here, you can imagine new worlds. Here, you can invent your destiny. Here, you can learn to defeat the things you do not love by building the things you do.”
Eboo Patel is the founder of Interfaith America and the author of We Need to Build: Field Notes For Diverse Democracy. He served as an advisor on faith to President Barack Obama.
A version of this essay was delivered as a talk at The Nantucket Project 2024 gathering.
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A wonderful and inspiring essay. Thank you. I applaud your ability to take thought and make such a fundamental change. But I'm puzzled by one remark: I’m not sad that I read those critical theorists. I think it’s a useful perspective to have.
I understand being glad you read them. I'm glad that I've read quite a few of them. But (and this is a genuine question, not a comment) do you actually mean "useful to have," as in you might actually use it as it's meant to be used in some circumstances. Or do you mean, you are glad to have that understanding of what we are up against, so you can better help to defeat it?
But I wonder whether you have overcome your instinct to criticize. Yes, you seem to have turned one critical thought into a useful career--for others as well as yourself. But do you still feel--or even express--criticisms as a matter of habit? The art of turning criticism of others into understanding of others is different from that. And much harder. But IMO very a very valuable skill.