A huge part of my job is thinking about expertise. My academic work is, essentially, writing about the concept of the ‘legal expert’ and how it got to be the way that it is. In presenting that research, I rely on my own credentials as an expert and use other methods (citation, journal placement, long words) to strengthen them. And then of course there’s teaching, which is just performing expertise for a room full or more-or-less eager, more-or-less-drunk children. In general, I am paid to be smart and to look smart.
As a result, I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a person look ‘expert’ and how that changes in different settings. One of perks of being an Official Intellectual is that, at least in some contexts, I can help other people see themselves in that category; if I’m doing it, it’s a thing that a person can do and still be smart/serious. For example, Roman legal historians have recently started the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, and they find it fascinating.
smells like expert
This vision of expertise has real consequences, especially for how academic disciplines get to be, act, or look a certain way. One of the reasons why I was drawn to Latin as a teenager is that my Latin teacher was a funny gay guy. Wait, I’m a funny gay guy. Maybe this is a thing funny gay guys are good at?
As it turns out, Mr. Mason was something of an exception. When I got to college and started my Classics major, I encountered self-declared intellectuals who would sometimes tell me that I wasn’t taking my work seriously, because I didn’t act like I was taking it seriously. My performance didn’t really match that of a future expert, and given that none of us were doing anything interesting anyway the performance was all there was to go on. The only reason I ended up in grad school despite that was a particular Latinist at my university—Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer.
Shadi didn’t look or act like any expert I’d ever heard of; she drove fast cars and made jokes and never repeated the same outfit twice. She was fun, and thought Latin literature was fun, and didn’t take herself seriously at all. She is also one of the best Latinists of her generation. Those didn’t actually conflict, since her expertise was based on what she had to say more than on how she acted. I am not like Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, since I am a historian who dresses poorly and can’t drive. But studying with her expanded my notion of how smart people could be in the world, and gave me the sense that I could be myself in the world and still be smart. I’m very grateful for that, and try to pay it forward.
i mean come ON
One of the ways I try to pay it forward is by also being a weird version of an expert. I am very loud for a Classicist, and relatively ethnic; I’m not the only Jew in the discipline, but I’m probably the only one who teaches undergrads that aedile rhymes with bubbele. I get to do that now, and because of my professional position I get to say that anything I do is, by definition, a thing that experts do. That can be a powerful thing for some people to hear.
This account of expertise isn’t new, obviously. Queer theorists have been talking about this expertise problem for basically as long as queer theory has been a thing. But it’s important, and arguably has a lot to do with The Way We Live Now. Our accounts of ‘what experts do’ have widened dramatically in recent years, in ways that make it hard for people to know what an expert is without doing a lot of work. My own version of expertise—how I decide who I trust, on various questions—is credentialist. I trust my doctor on health questions because she went to school and passed a test, I trust the guy who manages my Vanguard account because he works at Vanguard, I trust the things I read in peer-reviewed journals because they’re peer reviewed.
I’ve come up in these systems, and credentialism helps me—as a person with credentials, I would rather live in a world where credentials are valuable. But not everyone is deeply enmeshed in these systems, and people always rely on their scripts for ‘what trustworthy people are like’ in deciding whom to trust. As those scripts expand, the world gets more chaotic. I think you can make a decent case that some of the insane DEI backlash is rooted in a fight over scripts for expertise—I was brought up to think that smart people looked a certain way, and if these people can be smart too how am I supposed to know who to trust? In particular, this fight explains the idea that anyone non-white or non-male must be a ‘fraud.’
Some of those arguments are in bad faith, obviously, but some people really have internalized the idea that experts look and act a certain way and base their evaluation on that look/performance. It’s toxic, but it’s real, and it raises the stakes of Being Smart In Public. I want my students to know that they can be kind of ditzy, and very faggy, and still taken seriously if they produce work that warrants it. That’s real meritocracy, and when I listen to Midnight Sun in my office I am Doing My Part To Democratize The Academy.