On Shunning in the Academy

On October 17, 1981 my Dad committed suicide by placing a revolver in his mouth, pointing it upward toward his brain, and pulling the trigger. Not surprisingly, this event constituted a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in the lives of his wife and children. I was eighteen years old at the time and in my second year of university (my first year at York University in Toronto). I thought for the longest time that I had also died.

I think it is not possible to trace with any degree of precision the exact causes of complex human choices like the decision to take one’s own life. It is possible, however, to consider the array of conditions that might make such a choice seem necessary. And for my Dad, certainly, one such condition (not the only condition, but one among many) was the state of his relationships with the college in which he had spent the most of his working life as a faculty member, a department chair, a musician, a teacher, and a scholar.

The year was 1981. At that time, the State of Pennsylvania had a mandatory retirement age of sixty-five for all state employees. And so my Dad had received a letter from the State informing him that he would have to retire at the close of the 1981-1982 academic year. To say this letter was brusque would be to understate the matter to the point of absurdity. There was nothing in the letter that would have signified the quality of his contributions to his institution, department, or to his students. There was no gesture of thanks for his years of service nor was there any indication that he had left a legacy of learning that would ever be acknowledged or appreciated by the institution or by his colleagues.

In the two years preceding my Father’s death, his Department was in a state of conflict – a bitter feud the magnitude of which might be unthinkable outside the academy. Inside the academy, I suspect, most of us know what this kind of battle looks like, feels like, and how it insinuates into even the most mundane activities of academic life. Within his department, my Dad was systematically isolated, vilified, and actively shunned. There were rumors after his death that members of his department had actively solicited students to harass my Dad (hot-gluing his office door lock, for example). It is not rumor, but fact that my Dad received anonymous hate mail attacking his teaching, his credentials as a musician, the quality of his performances, and – just to make very sure he understood how deeply he was hated – his ability to make love to his wife. It is not clear who sent those letters. To me the maliciousness of the letters seems self-evident. Whatever my Dad had done as Chair, as a teacher, as a musician nothing, it seems to me, could have merited such treatment.

Often in our University (and at colleges and universities across the country, I am convinced) our battles are waged at a pitch of intensity that the issues hardly seem to merit. And at times, we battle over matters that do seem tremendously important, but our tactics seem to me to be aimed not so much toward facilitating transformation as at destroying one another. When this is the case, I suggest that we are no longer struggling in service of principles and practices, philosophies, or equitable working conditions, but for domination and control. These battles take on a pornographic quality in which explicit submission becomes the object of desire.

My Father’s case is an extreme one – demonstrating the logics of academic conflict extended to their most horrific conclusions. The end is, perhaps, unusual, but the ways of thinking and being, the convictions about the legitimacy of causes, the degrees of certainty not only about the effects of one another’s practices but about the interiority of others – these prevail. These logics I see in operation all around me. And there is a kind of amnesiac quality to the waging of conflict between faculty, between faculty and administration, and between faculty and students. As we fight for that which we believe to be right – whether that is a conviction about who should be department chair, or how a course should be taught and what its content should be, or the core values of a curriculum, or whether the Left or the Right or the Center prevail in the academy – we slide inexorably, it sometimes seems, toward murderous intent. We wish for the absence of the other and frame arguments designed to exterminate the other or at least other-thinking in our midst. And we forget quite quickly once the battle has been won what the issues were.

What we don’t forget is who we hate.

Years after conflicts have concluded, we remember to turn away from one another, to refuse to speak to one another, to dismiss any and all needs or claims of the one who offended or from whom we took offense.

I’m using “we” here not as a rhetorical conceit, but with the recognition that I too begin to hate. I begin to imagine conspiracies designed to humiliate and isolate me. I begin to fear even those whom I most admire and desire to emulate. I forget the days when I might have seen as others see, practiced as others practice, believed as others believe. I skip past the days of learning and the discomfort that attends not knowing and behave as if I have always thought so, done so, been so. And I temporarily or permanently misplace the possibility that I might be wrong or might not have an utterly complete grasp of the truth.

In principle, I love my work. I am sometimes astonished at how much I care for my colleagues, my students, and the web of ideas and knowledge-making practices with which I regularly engage. I feel embarrassed to write that I also have come to love the institution at which I work (loving your school is not terribly cool, I think). The question I am grappling with, though, is how recovery might be possible when those feelings of care and satisfaction with one’s work and respect for one’s colleagues are lost. For colleges and universities to realize to any meaningful extent their potential to critically and productively engage in meaning-making, knowledge production, and the enablement of student learning, we will have to, I think, address this problem. We are limited in our ability to sustain intellectual communities by our inability to understand, value, and nurture the relational.

And the answer is not, I am convinced, that we simply need to be more civil or more collegial. Making nice with one another will never be a substitute for rigorous critical engagement with epistemologies, pedagogies, with knowledge-production and the conditions that attend the production of knowledge. Toni Morrison in her Nobel prize acceptance speech writes, “Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without and alphabet, the choice word or the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge not its destruction.” It is the ineffable, I yearn for, I think -- that there be some recognition among and between us of our interdependence and mutual contingency, not that we must always like one another, but that we need one another and we come to know through one another. I would like some sense of wonderment to infuse our conflicts such that we might recognize the degree to which we are and our students and our institutions are impoverished by the absence, the silencing, and the destruction of the other in our midst.