How I was trained
I never received any training in how to chair a department (unless you count the meeting where Professor James told me, “It’s impossible to fuck up the budget”). I never wanted to be trained. The dean encouraged me to attend one of those summer workshops for chairs offered by the Association of Departments of English, where the sessions have titles like, “Responding to the Decline in English Majors and Enrollments,” “Running Effective Meetings,” and “Divas, Malcontents, and Other Troubled and Troubling Department Members.” Although the dean offered to pay my tuition, I was not tempted. I told her that I had read Montaigne’s Essays and therefore did not need any workshop.
I meant that I did not want to become a different person. In 1581-1585, in the middle of writing the Essays, Montaigne served two terms as mayor of Bordeaux, then returned to his library. Montaigne:
I have been able to take part in public office without departing one nail’s breadth from myself, and to give myself to others without taking myself from myself.
(“Of Husbanding Your Will,” translated by Donald Frame)
That sounded all right to me. I wanted to imitate Montaigne rather than the dean, who used to be a professor of eighteenth-century literature, then poured herself into a mold so that she could become the director of a center at a liberal arts college, then a dean at a second college, then (later) the president of a third college. I was unwilling to chair my department if it meant adopting the ways, speech, and ideas of the professional class of academic administrators. My other thoughts about what the dean called professional development I kept to myself.
What did the dean think about it?
This is a tricky question. Clearly the dean did not share my view of the subject. “Professional development,” “leadership training,” etc.: this was a language that she spoke. And the words represented ideas that she probably believed in. Probably she thought the ADE workshop had real practical value. Maybe she thought it represented real knowledge of human nature. At least, she must have thought that the workshop was a valuable credential. She was saying: learn some new words, learn some new skills, become a leader of people, make more money, live a little better. Be like me.
Also, clearly, she used the offer of the summer workshop as a diversion. The year was 2018, and we were negotiating my acceptance of the position of chair of the English department. I wanted a larger stipend, a course release, an unusually long sabbatical at the end of my term, something. Some reward for doing a job that I did not want. That no one wanted. And because of that, because no one wanted the job, I thought my bargaining position was pretty strong.
This woman handed me the ADE brochure, which I took rather ungraciously, with an air of disgust.
She said that she had no more money for my stipend or any of those good things, but she had some money for leadership training.
I don’t think it’s for me, I said. Anyway, I know about leadership. I’ve read Montaigne’s Essays, you know?
She laughed and told me that I was a good man. I recognized this expression as a piece of flattery and wondered if she used it compulsively -- earlier in the same conversation she had referred to Professor James as a good man. Maybe she shared this trait with the department secretary who indiscriminately addressed men as “Dear Heart” and women as “Missy.” (This was the kind, amiable secretary who replaced the competent, witty secretary when the latter retired in 2019.)
I didn’t dislike being called a good man. The dean wasn’t paying a meaningful compliment to my virtue, but maybe this was her way of saying that she could work with me. At the same time, because she used flattery, I felt that she was treating me with contempt. Her regard for the ADE workshop seemed similarly conditional. With one hand, she treated the workshop as an object of genuine value: here was a key to joining her in the ranks of administrators. With her other hand, she treated it with contempt: here was a cheap substitute for the money I asked for. For doing a job that I did not want, the dean offered to compensate me with more of the stuff I did not want!
That was the first time the college proposed that I should undergo leadership training. The second time was in 2020, when the college investigated my conduct as chair and attempted to sanction me.
In the “Determination of Sanctions,” leadership training was proposed as punishment rather than reward. For some reason, although she belonged to a different branch of the college’s administration, the dean of students determined the sanctions. She assigned me two trainings, “an implicit bias training” and “a leadership training.”
In reading the documents, especially the accounts of the various interpersonal interactions, considering the difference between impact and intent, and acknowledging the desire of all the individuals involved to move forward, an implicit bias training will provide Professor Kunin with intentional space to learn, question, and reflect on the role that implicit bias has played in the circumstances that led to the filing of these charges. The specific training will be identified by the College and will include individual or small group training to provide adequate opportunity for Professor Kunin to engage with the material covered in an interactive format.
Recognizing that one develops leadership skills by both learning about various methods or styles of leadership and practical experience, Professor Kunin must complete a leadership training for academics identified by the College that will expose him to leadership models and theories in a one on one or small group setting so that he is able to fully engage in an interactive way.
The other sanctions were: I was not eligible to chair the English department (!) or any other department (?) until 2030, I was not eligible to chair any college committee until I completed the trainings, and my participation in Professor Herman’s upcoming promotion case was prohibited.
Finally, it was suggested that I should apologize to Herman and Toni.
While not a requirement of this sanction process, Professor Kunin is urged to consider the value of an apology to Professor [Toni] and Professor [Herman] as an “olive branch” towards reconciliation of the individuals involved and the department.
When I saw that leadership training was one of the sanctions, my thought was, “Aha, I knew it!” The college actually agreed with me that these training programs were not just a waste of time but degrading. Here was proof.
Toni looked at the sanctions and saw the opposite meaning: the “so-called sanctions” were not even sanctions. “Is it just me,” Toni wrote in an email addressed to Herman and the director of Human Resources, “or is Leadership training at the college’s expense not a reward?” She explained: “Bias and leadership training are going to look great on Kunin’s CV and probably boost his chances of promotion.”
The real meaning of leadership training at the college was probably more complicated than any of us realized. Maybe it was as incoherent as the meaning of race and skin color. (As I discussed in an earlier post, different official statements described the same member of the faculty as a woman of color and not a woman of color.) Was it that different representatives of the college -- its vaunted leaders -- had opposing views of leadership training? One thought it an honor; another, disgrace?
No, not quite that. On a nearer view, the former dean of the college and the current dean of students revealed different ambivalent impulses. The dean wielded the option of leadership training as a benefit, and also as a cheap trick -- a trick to pay a lower price for a department chair. The dean of students wielded the non-negotiable sanction of leadership training as something like the Socratic paradox of punishment in Plato’s Gorgias: punishment is supposed to benefit the wrongdoer; therefore, those who do wrong should want to be punished. One should even prefer suffering unjust punishment to doing wrong without receiving punishment.
The dean of students placed remarkable faith in the effectiveness of training. Human beings could be trained, implicit biases could be disclosed, the effects of implicit bias on behavior could be mitigated, and the college had “identified” training programs that had a mitigating influence. (This view suggests a misunderstanding of the very idea of biases that are implicit rather than explicit.)
With training, she said, I could become “a skilled leader and able member of the governance structure at Pomona College.” All I needed was to be “exposed” to some “models and theories” of leadership. Then I might know how to respond effectively when Herman and Toni sent alarming notes to the dean’s office denouncing my published research and my course proposals. If only I had “practical experience” of the kind provided by training “in a one on one or small group setting,” or, in other words, “an interactive format.” Then I would know how to respond when Toni made up the story that I yelled at Herman, or when Herman made up the story that I was stealing or hoarding her receipts. If that wasn’t enough of a benefit, I would also be granted “intentional space” to “reflect on the role that implicit bias has played in the circumstances that led to the filing of these charges.”
The stress on the requirement of “fully engaging in an interactive way” seems to express the disappointment of the dean of students that some trainings did not have beneficial effects. It was, she wrote, “actually concerning” that I had regularly attended the “compliance training” required of all faculty at the college every two years. Here was a mystery. Somehow, she admitted, “while the trainings were completed they were not fully embodied based on his subsequent behavior.”
So maybe the problem with compliance training was that it was not “interactive” enough, not “fully engaging” enough to be “fully embodied.” Or maybe I was the problem. Maybe I lacked a key quality of “openness to learning new ways of thinking, functioning, and engaging with others.” (In that case, I suppose, the solution would be to assign an openness training.) To illustrate my problem, the dean of students reprimanded me for trying to use the process of the investigation to defend myself rather than admitting my guilt and apologizing to the complainants: “With that in mind, it must be noted that Professor Kunin used much of his mitigation statement to rehash and defend his position as opposed to demonstrating serious reflection.” No training, no matter how effective, would have beneficial effects if I went in with an attitude like that.
The dean of students correctly guessed my thoughts about leadership training. I declined the offer of the ADE summer workshop in 2018 because I suspected it would be a waste of time. It would be pseudo-knowledge, a worthless hodgepodge of Total Quality Management and Diversity Equity Inclusion, inapplicable to the problems of chairing a department. I thought it was beneath me, beneath any professor at a liberal arts college, unworthy of attention, unworthy of contempt.
Reader, maybe you think I was wrong. Maybe I was wrong. I’ll never know for sure whether leadership training contained valuable insights, because I escaped the ADE workshop in 2018 by declining the dean’s offer, and I escaped leadership training in 2020 by retaining legal counsel and petitioning the California Superior Court for a writ of mandate; the court found that the college had no evidence of retaliation, granted my petition, and ordered the college to set aside the findings and sanctions.
I am satisfied with that outcome. Reader, you might not be satisfied. You might have some sympathy for me, but you might also have some questions. Wasn’t I wrong when I suggested to the dean that my training in Renaissance studies was sufficient for the job of chairing an English department? Wasn’t it true that my three semesters as chair left the place in disarray and injured my relationships with most of my colleagues? Granted that I was innocent of the charges of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation; granted that I had to contend with lies, derangement, extravagant spending, and surprising circumstances; granted that there was a certain amount of tosh in implicit bias training and leadership training; granted that I did not deserve to be sanctioned -- wasn’t there some truth in the Socratic paradox, after all -- didn’t I deserve some training? Couldn’t I stand to learn something about leadership? About dealing with human beings?
Maybe it wasn’t enough to have studied Montaigne, you know?
Those are fair questions. To a large extent, I concede the point. It is not the thesis of this newsletter that I was good at chairing the English department. The results speak for themselves: I stepped down from chairing halfway through my term, the department went into receivership, the secretary retired early, and most of my colleagues stopped speaking to me.
Let me just add two comments.
1) Leaders at the college must accept their share of ignorance and failure. In 2018, when I started chairing, both the dean of the college and the president had appointments in the English department. By coincidence, both specialized in the same field, eighteenth-century studies. The associate dean (the one who tutored the mediator, a black woman professional, in the proper style of correspondence when addressing a black woman professional) was also a literary scholar who specialized in nineteenth-century Spanish realism.
And there are others: the geologist who succeeded the scholar of eighteenth-century literature as dean of the college; the diversity officer, a professor of psychology; another diversity officer, a professor of physical education; the mediator, a diversity officer at a different college and former law professor; and the dean of students, a doctor of education.
None of the aforementioned people knew what to do about the English department. If Montaigne was no help to me, no more were the others helped by their knowledge of eighteenth-century literature, nineteenth-century literature, or other fields of study. Nor did their certificates from various workshops in leadership seem to do them any good.
What did these worthy leaders advise? Leadership training. In 2018, they encouraged me to enroll in leadership training; in 2020, they tried to force me to endure leadership training.
And they advised me to apologize (what was the phrase? ah, here it is) “as an ‘olive branch’ toward reconciliation.” Here I observe another funny symmetry. There are two occasions in my life when someone pressured me to apologize for something that I did not do. The first was in 2019, when Toni accused me of yelling at Herman, and declared that “an apology is in order.” The second was in 2020, when the dean of students “urged” me to “consider the value of an apology” to Toni and Herman.
It’s not that I deny the value of an apology. Taking responsibility, sincerely apologizing, offering compensation, can be decent and meaningful. If you survey my correspondence from 2015-2020, you will read pages of apologies, compromises, and attempts at one or the other or both. But I never apologized for something I did not do. Extorting an arbitrary apology is a famous form of degradation. Anyone who tries to extort from you an apology for something you did not do is either a bully or the helpless tool of a bully.
My sense is they were helpless tools. I don’t want to hear lectures from these people on the subject of leadership.
2) Montaigne was a successful magistrate and, later, mayor of a big city. How successful he was, and how committed to these positions, are controversial questions. Some literary historians argue that Montaigne distorts the truth when he depicts the years of his administration as a peaceful oasis in a time of plague and sectarian warfare. Some argue that the self-command Montaigne recommends is a distortion of a career in which he showed passionate commitment to holding power, and ambition for greater places than he ever had opportunities to hold. I don’t have strong opinions on these subjects. I’m more interested in some themes of Montaigne’s political thinking: equanimity in affairs and minimal participation.