Just over ten years ago, a Canadian social science department set within an industrial city was choosing its next chair. It had never been harmonious, once suffering a decades-long split between mainstream researchers and Marxists/Socialists. That old factional battle had recently calmed, but another was threatening to erupt.  

One side was composed chiefly of aging Canadian public university graduates, people comfortable living in a steel town. They focused on topics like socioeconomic disparities, classical sociological theory, and qualitative studies of everyday life. The other was led by younger graduates of American private universities, people who seemed to resent their unglamorous employment. They studied identities shaped by skin color, sexuality, and gender identity, which they articulated in nouveau discourse peppered with activist jargon.

The department was seeking an external chair who might soothe rising tensions. But both factions had their preferred candidates. The older one chose a left-leaning social scientist, one with a wealth of administrative experience in a state university and considerable familiarity with Canadian scholarship. The younger championed two Gender Studies scholars, one from an elite private college and one from a public “social justice” university, both new to administration and to Canada. The dean was also relatively new yet very ambitious. Once a self-described socialist feminist, she had recently replaced her scholarly attachment to social class for one more attentive to gender, race, and sexuality. She favored the newer faction’s candidates.   

Hiring an external chair is a gate-keeping act par excellence in academe. All parties in this search process had the requisite professional credentials – Ph.D.s, peer reviewed publications, and tenure-stream appointments – and so most expected deliberations would focus on core if dry matters, such as candidates’ track records and experience. And indeed, the old guard’s did. 

But members of the newer faction voiced their preferences in tones that were then peculiar: they emphasized their emotional and personal reactions to the candidates. During formal discussions, quivering voices warned of psychic threats if the wrong candidate was elected. They vehemently opposed the older candidate, variously accusing him of indifference to their own research agendas, gruff interpersonal manners, and lack of requisite social skills needed to “read the room.” In what was supposed to be a high-level academic deliberation, these emotional displays seemed to the older faction surreal, self-indulgent, and overly precious.

The new faction appeared poised to win. But the old guard eked out a surprising victory, perhaps an implicit complaint by some against the new faction’s emotional tactics. The dean, incensed by the outcome, threatened to overturn it, but eventually relented. Leaders of the new faction were distraught, doubling down on their personal pleas.

This vignette illustrates the partial replacement of longstanding standards of professional decorum in universities by newer and more emotion-laden norms. Some hail this emotionalism as an egalitarian impulse that gives voice to various minority identities. But it could be interpreted differently in light of its context. Such outbursts occur mainly on affluent campuses, most of their enactors have upper middle-class origins, and they involve attempts to stigmatize contrary views and circumvent rational deliberations. 

Might such episodes represent novel styles of gatekeeping, with subtle class dynamics? 

When expressed with intensity, emotionalism elevates certain individuals and/or groups to a sacred status, one that is beyond reproach.

Pierre Bourdieu was an internationally acclaimed sociologist of social class. Unlike most social scientists, he defined class in terms of groups’ varying volumes and compositions of different kinds of resources, or “capital.” Bourdieu contended that social classes (and their sub-groupings, or “fractions”) forged lifestyles as they drew on their distinct combinations of economic and cultural resources. “Cultural capital” – Bourdieu’s signature concept – involves practices that attain value in competitive arenas such as universities. 

At the macro-level, genres like classical music, art and literature have long been imbued with prestige, patronized by the upper classes, and consecrated in higher education. According to Bourdieu, this longstanding valuation feeds into the micro level. People steeped in the beaux arts are hailed as sophisticated, refined, knowledgeable and distinguished, and hence their familiarity becomes cultural capital. 

Bourdieu also described other micro-level correlates of class, such as displaying cultivated manners and feelings of “ease” and confidence in stratifying institutions. Many of the same traits have been historically associated with professional norms of face-to-face conduct, such as suppressing impulsive emotions, avoiding ad hominem name-calling, or engaging in preening moralizing, in favor of measured judgement. 

However, what counts as cultural capital can vary over time and across space. Groups compete to impose their own valuations of prestige and status, especially in highly contested fields. This process is partly driven by the evolutions of class cultures over generations, as successive cohorts encounter different historical events and surrounding conditions during their formative years. ^[1]

Bourdieu himself described changing cohorts of French academics, highlighting the events of May 1968 as a particular watershed. Despite sharing similarly advantaged class origins with their older peers, younger cohorts in the early 1970s were entering a French academic system that was undergoing modernization and expansion, and was steeped in New Left politics and 60s’ era cultural mores, unlike conditions faced by cohorts who entered earlier in the postwar era. Likewise, today’s younger academics are entering university systems that are even further expanded, far more transnational in scope, and much more competitive. 

One marked change across academic generations has been the rise of various ‘Critical’ approaches in the humanities, social science, and professional fields. Beginning in the late 1960s and taking root in the 1980s and 1990s, Critical scholars have challenged conventional valuations of academic prestige. They seek to redefine notions of scholarly rigor and depth, often explicitly devaluing traditional conceptions of research and teaching as old-fashioned and stodgy at best, and socially oppressive and inhumane at worst. Once upstarts in academe, Critical scholars have battled mainstreamers in many universities, sometimes encountering stark opposition, but other times becoming dominant. 

Gatekeeping events have provided a key staging ground for these contests. To understand these micro-level events I blend Bourdieu with Randall Collins’ ideas about interaction rituals. For Collins, successful interpersonal gatherings generate solidarity, pumping participants with enthusiasm and social confidence. ^[2] Over time, chains of such rituals encourage participants to feel part of a well-defined group with a collective identity. In contrast, rituals that fail to energize their participants generate apathy and boredom and little solidarity. 

Two species of rituals have different implications for larger patterns of stratification. “Egalitarian” rituals are relatively spontaneous and unscripted, lacking central figures that guide interactions. “Status” rituals, in contrast, forge and reinforce hierarchies among participants, with higher-status actors adopting commanding demeanours, engaging in order-giving, and eliciting deference from lesser-status followers. 

For Collins, face-to-face rituals and broader social structures have mutual impacts. In top-down fashion, participants with greater resources have more opportunities to dominate interactions, perhaps turning some into status rituals. Yet, in bottom-up fashion, interactions can have unpredictable and emergent dynamics that can create, maintain, or undo patterns of group solidarity and/or dominance. For instance, high-stakes gatekeeping, especially in contested fields, often involves unscripted deliberations and open votes. Actors who adhere to older norms and are blessed with conventional resources like solid research track records might prevail in such rituals. 

But as many academic fields have witnessed in recent decades, the value of those norms and resources has been challenged, often in idioms that evoke Social Justice. Importantly, not only have genres of academic work been challenged, but so too has the legitimacy of different styles of debate. Emotionalism challenges longstanding norms of academic professionalism by using a theatrical urgency to implicitly establish a moral hierarchy in which some actors are more deserving of consideration. When expressed with intensity, emotionalism elevates certain individuals and/or groups to a sacred status, one that is beyond reproach. 

This mode of gatekeeping, once deemed unprofessional, is increasingly accepted in universities. And when norms for gatekeeping are unsettled, conflict ensues. Academics raised in a previous generation who expect conventional deliberations are put off-guard when they encounter aroused and visceral emotions. In turn, advocates of Critical Theory/Social Justice, believe that their moral convictions provide a license to dictate the rules and bounds of acceptable debate, and view any challenges to their authority as ill-mannered and insensitive, even immoral. 

Some hail this emotionalism as an egalitarian impulse that gives voice to various minority identities. But it could be interpreted differently in light of its context.

Many see “wokeness” as an evolving manifestation of a particular class culture. ^[3]Surveys suggest that progressive politics are espoused largely by affluent and highly credentialed “symbolic capitalists” from advantaged class origins. But unlike previous generations of upper middle class professionals, they express themselves in rather novel ways.

Bourdieu’s classic depiction of “bourgeois” culture a half century ago highlighted its understated refinement and cultivation, which he contrasted to working class crudity and coarseness. He also examined the avant garde fraction of the middle class, that which possessed middling levels of economic capital but large volumes of cultural capital. That fraction further boosted its cultural capital by engaging in valuation struggles that aimed to downgrade traditional bourgeois status markers, characterizing them as stodgy, old-fashioned and even oppressive, and by promoting their own as edgy, novel and liberating. Fifty years later, that fraction’s cultural valuations dominate institutions such as universities.

While this fraction continues to express refined cultivation (e.g., in the area of food) and understatement (e.g., in the area of clothing), other elements of its culture are more emotional, particularly in political and moral arenas. Woke or “social justice” culture in elite universities, for instance, is marked by its politics, intense “in-your-face” moralizing, and therapeutic ethos.

Class politics have re-aligned over several decades. New symbolic capitalists, unlike previous generations of professionals, have adopted left-wing identity politics. Today, professionals, not workers, adopt the most stridently progressive views. Their staging grounds are elite universities and coastal urban media, not factories or union halls. They loudly voice their politics in unsubtle tones, often with a moral grandiosity in which they declare themselves as being on the Right Side of History, saviors of democracy, and guardians of universal emotions like joy, caring, and empathy. They police their politics and morals with ever-evolving terms that mark group membership. And most curiously, this culture encourages its members to portray themselves not as victorious or aggressive, but as vulnerable and besieged, even amid its professional affluence.

These tactics, according to Collins, can generate emotional dominance in immediate situations. Emotional virtuosos can deplete opponents of social confidence, compelling opponents to self-consciously “walk on eggshells,” wary of giving offence. Guilt-tripping can intimidate its targets, putting them on the defensive, and stigmatizing alternate views, even squelching debate. 

Dominating others’ emotions in gatekeeping rituals requires confidence. The upbringings of symbolic capitalists can make such confidence feel natural. Annette Lareau, applying Bourdieu, described upper-middle class parenting as “concerted cultivation,” a set of practices that nurture children’s feelings of entitlement and abilities to absorb evolving mores and vocabularies (which in academe today are often supplied by political activists). ^[4]  Both facilitate the ability of symbolic capitalists to signal their status over the masses, whether by fueling their feelings of assurance in interpersonal situations, and/or their authority to engage in language policing. Both are akin to class etiquette, like raising one’s pinkie while sipping tea. 

Increasingly, the implicit “Cultural Other” in the symbolic capitalist imagination is not an all-powerful bourgeoise, but a large fraction of the working class – white, rural, and socially conservative. Arguably, symbolic capitalists are now re-expressing age-old put-downs of working people as crude, vulgar and uncouth using moral-political idioms, laundering their class prejudices in the process.

Increasingly, the implicit “Cultural Other” in the symbolic capitalist imagination is not an all-powerful bourgeoise, but a large fraction of the working class – white, rural, and socially conservative.

These class dynamics can be decisive in academic gatekeeping. At the macro level, symbolic capitalists have successfully imposed new norms for gatekeeping in many university fields, sometimes imposing formal job ads that require candidates to adopt various ‘Critical’ or ‘Social Justice’ approaches. They have consecrated certain terms, phrases and underlying assumptions, stigmatizing skeptics as beyond the pale, equating disagreement with sacrilege. These surrounding conditions tend to restrict expressions of viewpoint diversity at the micro-level. The acceptance of emotionalism by gatekeepers, such as allowing orators to present their case while morally grandstanding or demanding purity oaths from otherwise heterodox candidates, can create a double standard for the latter, putting them on the defensive, encouraging them to self-censor. Uttering the wrong word can make or break their chances.

Understanding that heterodoxy suffers in one-sided “status rituals” that demand deference can help us avoid situations where participants who have much to contribute end up self-censoring. Attending to the micro level with a robust theoretical framework could allow heterodoxy to thrive as we work to favor egalitarian rituals that follow norms of healthy exchange among moral equals, rituals in which no one usurps the authority to dictate terms of acceptable debate.