How I was investigated for saying "please"
This is a story about a lie.
On September 11, 2019, the faculty of the English department were sitting around a seminar table in one of the classrooms. We were discussing Professor James’s request for $20,000 for programming for his new center for research in the humanities.
James had not made up a budget. In fact, he had not come to the meeting intending to request $20,000. It seemed that he had no particular sum in mind. His initial request was completely open: he asked for money for the research center, question mark. When prompted to name a sum, he mentioned $5,000. Another professor arbitrarily suggested $20,000.
(To put these numbers into perspective: in 2019, according to the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the average annual salary of a tenured full professor at Pomona College was $160,000. At the time, my rank was associate professor, and my salary was quite a bit less than that. And, unfortunately, I was chairing the department.)
This request for a large amount of money had grown rapidly out of nothing. The room had a giddy feeling, as though we were bidding at an auction. At the same time, everyone seemed faintly embarrassed.
I felt that someone should ask James to refine his request a little bit. I said: “Can you use twenty thousand dollars?” I wanted to confirm that James wasn’t just accumulating money without a plan, and deciding how to spend it afterwards.
James said yes.
There was a pause. I asked if anyone wanted to take more time to discuss James’s request. At this point I intended to pause again to give people a chance to think.
Professor Herman became impatient. Maybe she felt that I was moving too slowly. Maybe she wanted the meeting to end. Maybe she had to attend another meeting. Maybe she had to pick up her son after his club. Maybe she didn’t see the need for further discussion of this large request. For whatever reason, she cut off the discussion and started taking a vote, as though she were running the meeting.
“All in favor?” she said, rolling her eyes. Most of the members of the department raised their hands.
Herman had done the same thing before. When she thought that discussion was dragging, she would sometimes try to run the meeting herself. Sometimes she would interrupt me or talk over me, sometimes she would make fun of the formalities of Robert’s Rules of Order, and a couple of times she had actually taken a vote.
So far I hadn’t said anything about her behavior. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. But I didn’t like what she was doing. She was being disrespectful, and, in a small way, she was undermining the decision-making process. She was also adding a new knot to her relationship with me, which was already a complicated knot.
“All opposed?”
I decided to say something. I said: “Herman, please.” I chose my words carefully, and I spoke quietly, with a falling intonation. I intended to assert that I was chairing the meeting and that it was my job to administer the vote.
Herman laughed awkwardly and said: “What?” As though she did not know what I was talking about.
If I had answered her question, I might have said: “That’s disrespectful.” But I thought that I had said enough for her to know not to do that again. I didn’t think it would be useful to draw more attention to the problem.
I asked again if anyone had questions about James’s request.
Then I took a vote by show of hands: “In favor? Opposed? Any abstentions?” I always asked if anyone wanted to abstain from voting, although it hardly ever happened. James’s request was approved.
The meeting minutes, which were taken by Professor Edmund, include no record of my exchange with Herman: “Requests for Money: [James] requests $5,000.00 [Herman] suggests that the department has money and the Humanities Studio needs more. She offers 20k. Aaron: 7 in favor. 1 abstention.”
Afterwards, my most notable feeling about the meeting was that James’s request was terrible. I reminded myself that we needed to make a rule that faculty had to submit a budget when they requested money from the department’s restricted funds. Since 2018, I had been bringing to every meeting a copy of the form that I wanted to use for requests. To me it was a kind of talisman.
The foregoing is, to the best of my recollection, a complete account of my interaction with Herman on September 11, 2019. Later, when a workplace investigator interviewed her, one of my colleagues remembered this incident somewhat differently. She remembered my words as: “[Herman], please stop.” That isn’t what I said, but I don’t see that it makes a real difference.
Some of my colleagues also admitted, when questioned, that they did not know whether the word “please” might mean something different when addressed to a black woman. Was the word “please” disrespectful to Herman and Toni “as black women”? What a question! I will write about this question in a separate post.
A different account of this incident may be found in an extraordinary email sent to the entire department by Professor Toni, my most senior colleague:
. . . I want to add that I wish I’d spoken up in the actual meeting about this: how we address colleagues in meetings is a serious issue especially now and to me it was inappropriate of the chair to yell at [Herman] the same downdressing tone way some people reprimand a misbehaving child or subordinate. I think an apology is in order (I apologize to [Herman] for not speaking up about it at the time even if I was shocked) but I hope this makes the situation visible to all of us and promotes dealing with it.
The statement that I yelled at Herman is a lie. Toni wrote an email about something that did not happen, and she sent it to the group of people who witnessed the fact that it did not happen. How did these people respond?
How do organizations deal with lies? In an English department where people are willing to make themselves a little disagreeable, an email full of wild accusations such as Toni’s would elicit a flood of incredulous replies: “That never happened!”, “What are you talking about?”, etc. This kind of response would help the department solidify its sense of reality. The disadvantage of such a response is that it might result in people ganging up on Toni. That would be a problem.
Perhaps a better response would be for one of the department’s full professors to communicate privately with Toni: “What were you referring to in your email yesterday?” This kind of response might gently encourage her to be truthful. Another option would be to ask for the details that Toni’s account conspicuously lacks: “You say that Aaron yelled. What words do you think he yelled? Or do you think he merely yelled, not in words?”
I am fairly certain that no one wrote a note like that. James, a very nice man, wrote to me privately: “I read [Toni’s] email yesterday with real puzzlement: what could she even be referring to? Oh, it was just you trying to run the meeting.” James’s friendly note at least served to reassure me that I had not lost my mind. But it did not address a serious problem: Toni’s email created a new reality, and the rest of us were tacitly accepting it. As far as I know, no colleague of mine ever suggested to Herman or Toni that they misrepresented what happened in the meeting.
As for Herman, she had a special responsibility to say to Toni that I never yelled at her. She did not do this. Instead she replied to the entire department with a message of thanks to Toni for saying that I yelled at her: “Thanks [Toni]: love you.” She forwarded Toni’s note to the dean’s office and the director of HR with the equivocal comment: “Following the department meeting, [Toni] sent this.” She wasn’t confirming or denying Toni’s story; she merely confirmed that this was the story Toni had told. In other communications about this incident, Herman wrote that I “snapped” at her, which, I guess, is a way of acknowledging that I did not yell at her. It’s also an attempt to do the same thing that Toni was doing, which was to make my timid assertion of the role of the chair (“[Herman], please”) appear sinister.
Another way for a department to respond to lies is by ignoring them. That is what most of my colleagues did. I have sometimes done the same thing. The alternative, accusing someone of lying, is socially perilous. In societies that value honor, people fight duels over such accusations. Professors at liberal arts colleges do not worry about protecting their honor, and they are not at risk of being killed when they point out lies, but they might be even more afraid of disagreeableness. They don’t want to hurt people. They don’t want anyone to feel hurt. They want to be liked!
Sometimes, faced with a lie, you ought to ignore it. You don’t want to seek occasions for new conflicts. You’re not a Viking, you’re not an officer in the Austro-Hungarian imperial cavalry, you’re not a member of a street gang. You’re a literature professor, which means that you probably don’t have much experience with violent conflict. That’s a good thing. Avoiding conflict is better than having to fight a lot of duels.
But the commendable wish to avoid conflict can lead to shameful calculations. For instance, you might be tempted to write the apology that Toni demands. There is a false convenience that says: “The easiest thing would be to apologize. Let her have what she wants. Then maybe she would stop lying.” No. By apologizing, you would encourage more lying. The apology itself would be a lie.
There is also a false compassion that says: “What you are hearing is a lie, and the source of the lie is pain. The pain is not a lie. You can support her by affirming her lie and thereby recognizing her pain.” That might sound like compassion, but really it’s a way of treating Toni like something other than a human being. What I mean is that human beings are responsible for their own actions, and thus are affected by their actions. Toni degrades herself by lying. There’s no compassion in encouraging her to lie, only further degradation.
After waiting overnight to see if someone else was going to respond, I sent the following email to the department:
Hello everyone
Once again different members of the English department have different accounts of matters of fact.
I think [Toni] is remembering the moment from our last meeting when [Herman] started taking a vote, which is part of the job of chairing a meeting. The formula in Robert’s Rules for a moment like that would be something like, “Professor [Herman] is out of order.” That sounds a bit harsh to me, and we use first names in this department, so instead my words were: “[Herman], please.” Everyone was there and may refer to their own memories of the meeting.
If it is inappropriate for us to reprimand our colleagues, then my colleagues have sent me some inappropriate emails during my time as chair. However, I am not looking for anyone to apologize to me. As I have said before, I do not think that we will communicate better by policing our colleagues’ communications. Instead I would suggest that we have different styles of communication, and we should aim to tolerate the differences in style.
If anyone has other thoughts on this issue, or other issues, let’s discuss them with [a professional mediator].
With respect to all
Aaron
Herman was impressed enough by my reply to adopt the phrase “Professor [Herman] Is Out of Order” as the motto on her Twitter page for the next three years, and as the title of her Substack newsletter, where it remains to this day, proclaiming her intention to talk over me in meetings. She was affected in other ways as well. It seems that her reaction to what I said in the meeting was so intense that she had to take a medical leave that lasted two semesters. I know this because she arranged to have an announcement to this effect sent to all of us in the department. She wanted everyone to know that she was away on medical leave, and she wanted everyone to think that I was the cause of her medical leave. Everyone understood the message well enough.
I am not questioning the advisability of Herman’s medical leave. If my colleague has a medical condition that causes her to experience a breakdown when she hears the word “please,” her condition deserves compassion, and it should be reasonably accommodated in the workplace. If I were informed of the existence of such a condition, I would never say “please” again in her presence. On the other hand, if my colleague develops an unhealthy obsession that causes her to make up stories about me, that’s a different kind of problem, one that probably doesn’t have a medical solution.
When people make up stories about you, it’s natural to assume that they must be either delusional or dishonest. People who tell lies either don’t know they are lying, or they do know. The New York Review of Books has a tradition of publishing correspondence from disgruntled authors scratching their heads as they assess the depravity of reviewers: “This summary of my argument is so bizarre, so different from anything that I actually wrote, I can only conclude that the reviewer must be either delusional or dishonest.”
It seems to me these are not the right choices. Delusional and dishonest are not easily separable in speech, because people use what they say to figure out what they think. When they tell lies, the words press against their thoughts. They can relieve the pressure by adjusting what they think to match what they say.
Here, then, are the real choices:
A) People who lie can enjoy the relief of changing their thinking to match what they say.
Or
B) They can suffer the confusion of not knowing the difference between what they think and what they don’t think.
You will notice that the conflict in this episode was apparently not a disagreement about ideas of race, gender, etc. Ideas may have been involved, but not in an explicit way. Nor did this conflict explicitly have to do with second-order questions of freedom of expression or thought. Nor, seemingly, did it have much to do with teaching literature. The role of money in this conflict is more remarkable. My next post will discuss English department finances.