Anthrorusticaphobia is an extreme, irrational fear of rednecks. Yes, a real word for a real phobia. It’s a fear the United States, particularly its growing urban, coastal, well-heeled populations, needs to confront, a fear that I blame in significant part for what happened yesterday. I’m not a therapist, but I know the first step in confronting a fear is admitting you have one. The second is figuring out where those fears come from and what makes them extreme and irrational. The third is finding a treatment plan that includes “exposure therapy,” or coming to terms with those fears by actually changing your perception of, and interacting with, the cause of them.

I found two easy ways to practice what I preach, to stop functioning from overwork to burnout like that crappy old guitar amp.

Putting together what I know about the social world and being human, when we lose someone, we can make sense of loss simply trying to consciously honor their memory. Not just by thinking about them, but in our actions. I want the lessons I learned from my college mentors (two of whom have now passed away) to be reflected, in a practical sense, in what I do with my life after they’re gone. But it’s relatively easy for me to see how to honor them, especially since I became an academic myself. It’s not that much harder to figure out how to honor the memories of family members who lived to a ripe old age, as well as friends whose lives were cut tragically short, as honoring a person’s memory involves learning from both their triumphs and missteps. When I die, I want people to have learned at least as much from what I did wrong as what I did right so they can get it a little less wrong than I did.

Public trust must be earned and continually renewed for public education to continue to best function as a public good. To me, this means that I must show that I can be trusted not to unduly cross into other domains of social life in doing my job. In the words of literary critic Stanley Fish: do my job, don’t try to do someone else’s job, and don’t let anyone else do my job. In the words of W.E.B. DuBois, this ideal should be upheld to retain public trust in scholarship and to ensure that people in a democracy can best make use of knowledge. In the words of Max Weber, a founding voice in sociology (as is DuBois) and an intellectual hero, the closer to politics our subject matter comes, the more we are obligated to avoid partisanship, to save that for outside the classroom, where criticism is possible and there is not the power imbalance.
More practically (and perhaps cynically) speaking, institutions don’t survive because they are built on some vision of how people ought to be; they must be resilient in the face of how people actually are…