Admin Speak

I have a confession to make: I actually like a lot of college administrators. They have helped me and my colleagues in so many ways and have lots of perspective that tenurecrats don't. I have not found them to be greedy philistines whose only job is making up complex ways to justify impossibly escalating tuition and fees. 

That's the prejudice I've heard in office hours and grad lounges. Aside from its being unfair, it stinks of an elitism that truly irrelevant scholars use as self-affirmation.

Nevertheless, there is a way that management speaks and works that makes it the corporate-governance patriarchy of impunity that it is.

What do I mean in specific? A friend recently shared an Inside Higher Ed article about a UCLA history professor with a long string of sexual assault and harassment accusations and the department that wouldn't punish him- a depressingly familiar theme. Plenty of colleagues have very similar stories. If academia is to be defended as a moral life-choice at all, us men in it need to listen to and support women who face this.

I'm not going to talk about the details of the allegations, as banal and awful as there. I was rather drawn to the way administrators talked about why they wouldn't and shouldn't give the professor serious censure.

Here's the money-quote for me, from one Jerry Kang, vice chancellor for diversity:

"What society does with those who have violated institutional norms when they return to the community presents hard questions about retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation and closure. The university is no exception."

Whoa! A question of whether someone in power can get fired for abusing it can't be dealt with until we figure out penal reform? Modern power is so often the power of misdirection.

A scholar complained about a lack of parental leave to her department, and the chair said she should count herself lucky because at Chinese universities, they will fire you if you get pregnant for the mere inconvenience.

Think the Israeli occupation is bad? How bad would it be if the Saudis did it? 

The above is that kind of argument. It does not make an unrelated statement, but enough to shift the terms of discourse away from what's happening here and now.

But the worse part for me is how Kang frames the problem. What does a community do when a member transgresses its norms? He's excluding the possibility that the community gets rid of him! It's faced with a tough, political-sounding problem only when it assumes that "nothing can be done" about the burden of reintegration it must accept.

Well, lemme try something out in the highfalutin language of political thought evoked here. The Athenians had a way of dealing with transgressors through the resecuring of the boundaries of the community. It's connected to all kinds of deep issues with contemporary relevance like sovereignty and the politics of inclusion the admin guy says he's talking about. This was the concept of atimia: dishonorable disenfranchisement; a loss of citizen-standing. And we'll say for poetic purposes that they thought it was worse than death. If we were to think of an instructive modern counterpart to securing the community through membership-policing it might be... getting the sack.