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This guest author post is by Mel Stanfill, author of Professor Superstar: Fandom and Anti-Fandom of Academia. The book is now available in hardcover, paperback, and open access.

If the common stereotype is that academics are up in their ivory towers writing useless things that are of no interest to anyone, it seems like the obvious response would be to ignore or mock them. Instead the past two decades have seen a frenzy of activity around faculty—social media virality, mainstream news coverage, and many legislative actions. In chapter 5 of my book, Professor Superstar: Fandom and Anti-Fandom of Academia, entitled “Red, White, and Anti-School: The University as Conservative Anti-Fan Object,” I examine this proliferating public attention to academics to try to understand why this group of people who is so frequently dismissed as culturally irrelevant should generate such intense attention. After all, professors do not have the political or cultural power of a celebrity, lawmaker, or other figure that would make their actions important enough in any traditional sense to warrant such reaction. Using fan studies as a lens on this phenomenon adds attention to how these reactions to academics and academia are structured like a fandom: characterized by public, collective affect, or feels; public, collective interpretation of shared text(s); and identity and community formation structured by those affective ties and texts. Specifically, I found that it is an anti-fandom with affects and interpretations in opposition to the object.

First, looking at academics and academia through the lens of fandom shows how they function as cultural texts about which people have (occasionally intense) feelings. Sometimes, as in the traditional view of fandom as pleasure and love, the feelings are positive. There is often joy and gloating from anti-fans when they have successfully harmed the out-group, such as the tweets after Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard in early 2024, ostensibly because of her allegedly insufficient response to antisemitism on campus and her alleged plagiarism. Gay’s opponents took great pleasure in her resignation. Conservative pundit Liz Wheeler announced on Twitter “Claudine Gay RESIGNS from Harvard in a crushing loss to DEI, wokeism, antisemitism & university elitism. The way to defeat wokeism is to be SAVAGE and relentless. If we are, morality will triumph over Marxism. A fabulous start to 2024.” Notably, many things in the tweet have nothing to do with the criticism of Gay’s handling of her job but have a lot to do with why Wheeler (and many other people) had negative feels about her.

Moreover, while feels are typically understood as love or affection, hatred or anger can equally be shared and fuel the creation of new texts. The New York Times reported that “Sarah E. Bond, professor of classics at the University of Iowa, wrote an academic piece challenging white supremacists’ use of marble antiquities, which had originally been painted colors, to suggest a classical ideal” of whiteness, a practice used by the white nationalist group Identity Evropa among others; “after critical columns in Campus Reform and National Review, she was barraged with threats and calls for her dismissal.” Notably, most scholarly work is rarely read. While reading itself is hard to quantify, according to one study, only around 20 percent of humanities articles are cited within five years of their publication—and they’re certainly not often read by nonacademics. Bond’s piece would likely never have been widely known had these people not gotten so fired up about it. The intensity of the feelings tells us there is more here than meets the eye, and the fannish framework of feels suggests one way to understand it.

Second, fan studies helps us see that exactly the same techniques used for making sense of other cultural forms come into play with academia as it becomes the object of interpretation and collective creation of new texts in (anti-) fannish ways. The ways academia is treated as a mediated text are clear from the fact that lots of people have feelings about it without any direct contact. Indeed, feels about academia are in some ways more important when they are not rooted in direct interactions with universities and the reality check they would provide. That academia often functions as a text is perhaps clearest when academics are attacked by people who have not even taken their courses, purely on the basis of interpretations of paratexts such as title, description, or reading list. A student who was not enrolled in Lee Bebout’s 2015 course at Arizona State University, called “U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness,” “criticized it in a post for Campus Reform in late January of that year, and by the next day, the student was on ‘Fox & Friends’ critiquing the course and its reading list, books that, based on their titles alone, the student claimed were casting ‘all white people as the root cause of social injustices for this country.’” The New York Times Magazine article added that “Threats and hate mail followed.” Without knowing what the readings said, how they were used in class, or anything about how the material was taught, people constructed an entire anti-fan interpretation. In the book, I extend the fandom concept of fanon, or fan created canon—meaning the set of characteristics of the object of fannish attachment that are collectively agreed on in a fan community, but don’t actually appear in the source text—to think about widespread negative views as anti-fanon, a set of false beliefs about higher education that their adherents don’t realize they invented. Anti-fanon falls into relatively predictable patterns, invoking buzzwords that generate feels about bogeymen: CRT, Black Lives Matter, DEI, Marxism/communism, Antifa, and woke. Whether these bogeymen are present—and even what these terms mean—is irrelevant; they have been established as the collective negative interpretation, and therefore shape how people respond to academia.

Third, fandoms are characterized by community and group identity—those feels and texts are public and collective and build ties among those with shared interests as well as a sense of self, and can do so whether the object is the target of positive or negative feels. People coming together to share their favorite memes about being a professor with likeminded communities or defining themselves in opposition to alleged wokeness in higher education both engage in such forms of identity and community. In particular, anti-higher education sentiment is integral to conservative identity and community. This identity and community formation is substantially a consequence of conservatives seeing themselves as unwelcome in academia. One survey reported that 9 percent of Republicans believed “conservatives can speak their minds” on campus, but 58 percent of Republicans believed liberals can speak freely; Republicans “were also slightly less likely than Americans overall to see campuses as respectful and inclusive places for conservatives.” These opinions don’t tend to be questioned or even operationalized in such polls—many business schools and economics departments are quite hospitable to conservative views like tax cuts for the wealthy, the superiority of capitalism, and minimal economic intervention and regulation, after all. Fundamentally, this is not policy disagreement so much as it is emotional alienation. As part and parcel of this alienation and feeling like their in-group isn’t welcome, conservatives see professors as the out-group. With that “us vs. them” dichotomy between teams comes a desire to punish or defeat them. This drives attacks on academic freedom and tenure, as skepticism of the ways (increasingly small proportions of) faculty are protected from firing without just cause is deeply tied to feels about how academics aren’t nice enough to their group.

Ultimately, Professor Superstar argues it’s important to recognize that external political attacks on academics and academia are anti-fannish—they are about how feels and identity drive interpretation of texts. We can’t reason our way out of them, and failure to recognize how this formation functions has seriously hindered our ability to respond effectively.