I will never cry / in front of the school
“You’re the only sane person in the English department.”
“Oh,” wagging my finger, “you probably say that to all the professors in the English department.”
I was talking with my friend Professor Emmanuel from Religious Studies. Circumstances had led to her being appointed chair of the English department. It was March 2020, two weeks before spring break.
I liked being told that I was sane. And I didn’t mind the implication that my colleagues were deranged. I wondered if I could ask Emmanuel to repeat that line to the dean. She probably did use the same line, or similar words, to soothe the tempers of other literature professors. As she put it, her policy was to say yes to everybody. She called her policy “strategic hypocrisy.”
On March 6, she texted me about a lecture by the writer Wesley Yang that I was going to host in April. Apparently one of my colleagues had a problem with Yang. Maybe more than one of my colleagues.
Emmanuel: I think [the mediator] is about to call me and tell me why it’s a microaggression for you to invite Yang.
Aaron: Ask her if she is familiar with the term “heckler’s veto.”
Emmanuel: Lol.
Emmanuel: [Herman’s] veto.
Aaron: Also Musil’s phrase “pseudoreality prevails.”
Emmanuel: I will just play confused. What are the objections exactly? That kind of thing.
Emmanuel: But yes, I should reread Musil’s On Stupidity. I know it mostly through Voegelin, who defines ideology as the forbidding of questions. They force themselves to be stupid. I like the idea of using stupidity as a technical term.
Emmanuel: [Herman] is texting up a storm. She thinks inviting him is a deliberate provocation aimed at [Professor Joy].
Aaron: Yang is one of the best writers working today. He is also, I recently discovered, kind of a fuckup. Anyone who is worried about his lecture can take comfort in the fact that he might somehow contrive not to do it. There’s also the possibility that no one will be traveling to California in April due to concerns about the virus.
Aaron: [Herman] should focus on her own work and stop trying to get in the way of my work.
Emmanuel: But Aaron, getting in the way of your work IS her work. Hahahaha.
Emmanuel: I just read Yang’s interview in the Intelligencer. He sounds great.
So Herman thought I was hosting the lecture as “a deliberate provocation aimed at [Professor Joy].” Where did she get that idea? Joy admired Yang’s book The Souls of Yellow Folk. She told me so back in August.
Joy: Wow, I ordered the Wesley Yang book and it just arrived. I’ve read the first chapter already. The first several pages are about my college and Wayne Lo. I was there when that happened. I didn’t know it was written about here. I’m glad I know about this book.
Aaron: Oh! I forgot about that part of the essay and did not connect it to you. Anyway I really liked the book. That first essay is incredible.
Joy: Oh I didn’t think you would connect it, but it was just a surprise. Yes, I’m really enjoying the book. Thanks for the recommendation!
By 2020, she had changed her mind about the book. She also wrote to me on March 6, about an hour after I heard from Emmanuel.
Joy: I think it’s a bad idea to bring Yang. We should discuss. It’s going to further divide our dept in terms of race and gender.
Aaron: Sure I’d be happy to discuss this question with you.
Joy: Are you around in Crookshank today?
Aaron: I could be there this afternoon.
Joy: I’m going to be away from the office this afternoon but I’m going to the event tonight and then to Macbeth.
Joy: I have a meeting off campus at 4:30.
Joy: Maybe we can find time on Monday?
Aaron: Ah okay maybe I’ll see you at Macbeth. I’ll be at the reading on Monday. (Sorry I can’t join you afterwards but I have my seminar.)
Joy: Ok. Yes. I know I was receptive to the book when you first recommended it, but I started to feel haunted by the first essay’s gloss and misuse of Simon’s Rock. I would reread and get uncomfortable. Afterwards, I started talking to some of the survivors at Simon’s Rock about what the essay is getting wrong, tonally, and we all felt mishandled by it. Also Lo and Cho are lumped together in ways that I’m not so sure about.
Joy: It then led me to rethink some of the other essays and where he builds a deliberately abject portrayal of Asian Americans. He’s not good on race.
Joy: And, lastly, he gets slammed by many Asian American scholars, which is what makes me uncomfortable; Tim Yu has lots of criticisms of him. I really worry that this talk may create controversy.
Aaron: I’m not sure what you are saying. Are you asking me to disinvite him?
Joy: I’m expressing my concerns about the event. I’m worried that he’s controversial.
Aaron: Ah okay. We should talk about this.
Joy came to my office later to ask me to cancel the lecture. I said that I liked Yang’s book and wanted to hear him speak. Disinviting a speaker in order to avoid possible controversy would be bad policy.
Joy got out her smartphone, opened Twitter, and tried to show me a joke that Yang had reposted from someone else’s Twitter account. I said that I didn’t want to look at it. I wasn’t going to change my opinion based on a joke taken out of context. Maybe Yang thought the joke was interesting or meaningful. Maybe he was criticizing it. Maybe he thought the joke was funny. Maybe I would find it funny too. Outrageous jokes can be very funny.
Nor was my opinion swayed by reports of Tim Yu’s criticisms. Yu, I thought, was a smart guy, I always enjoyed talking with him, and I always learned something from him. But I wasn’t going to substitute his judgment for my own. I recalled his articles in The New Republic: he was wrong about Calvin Trillin, I thought, he was wrong about Sherman Alexie, he was wrong about H.L. Hix -- in fact, he seemed to think the same thing as Hix -- and, I thought, Hix was also wrong. Did I agree with Yu about anything?
There was no lecture in April 2020. The college kicked the students out of the dorms, switched to remote instruction, and canceled all public lectures by visiting speakers. I wrote to Yang to postpone, then cancel, then reschedule for October in videoconference format. “One way or another,” I told him, “I still want to make this lecture happen.” He may have wondered why I sounded so determined.
I put off telling him that forces other than the pandemic were trying to stop the lecture from taking place. At last, in August, I sent him a note:
The chair, to her credit, said that the lecture was on the calendar and that we would not cancel it. She asked me to make one concession, and I agreed: do you remember I originally invited you to give the 2020 Holmes memorial lecture? We’re taking the Holmes family name off of the event. The name seems to be meaningful to my colleague, and it really doesn’t matter to me. I hope that sounds all right to you.
The controversy had been resolved, I assured him. My colleagues had issues with me, not with his work, I assured him. Anyway, I assured him, his lecture would not be affected since he was going to speak from a remote location.
The lecture, “Notes Toward a Definition of the Successor Ideology,” was scheduled for October 6. On the morning of September 23, I received a text from Emmanuel.
[The mediator] has just called me and put on the pressure to send out the email that you are about to receive.
This was the email:
Hi All,
Since a number of you have written about the Yang talk next week, [the mediator] and I have decided to open discussion of the surrounding issues at the meeting today. Possibly we can also cover the curriculum reform. I’ll send a revised version of the reform proposal out shortly.
See you at 4.
[Emmanuel]
I replied in a text message: “Trouble every day! Well maybe it will be useful to have this discussion in a meeting.”
Professor Toni wrote to the department:
Respectfully, Given the nature of this event it is not possible to engage any productive curriculum discussion today and I already suggested to [Emmanuel] and [the mediator] a postponement of curriculum discussion as the senior faculty member of the department. I suggest a postponement of curriculum talks until the impact and accountability for the impact of the Yang talk can be productively processed and reckoned by the department. Any curricular decisions are already derailed and coming out of this climate will be spurious. I remain fully committed to policy, curricular, mediation, and diversity, equity and inclusion discussions in this Department. If you choose to have the curricular discussion go forward please know that it will happen at the cost of explicitly choosing to exclude me as I cannot enter into a hostile and unmediated departmental climate with any expectation of fairness or safety. Controversy is great; it has impact and that requires being accountable. [Toni]
We met on Zoom. Emmanuel called the meeting to order and turned it over to the mediator.
Professor Geoffrey said there was a war in the English department.
Toni said the context of the lecture, with the department in receivership, showed my aggression. The timing of the lecture, following the killing of George Floyd, showed that ideas like Yang’s had a lethal impact.
Professor Philip read some posts from Yang’s Twitter feed. He was so dismayed by what he read that he started to cry. He asked me: why this speaker now? He asked me to think about these people. (Gesturing at the other professors. His words punctuated by sobs. His voice distorted.)
Philip’s tears seemed to be contagious. Professor Jane and Professor Herman were also visibly crying at different times in the meeting.
Geoffrey said that he had done an internet search. It seemed like Yang wrote polemics against Critical Race Theory. And Toni and Herman taught Critical Race Theory.
The mediator referred to me as an individual who had a history of provocation.
Professor Edmund said she did not understand what we were doing. If people had an issue with Yang’s lecture, they could go to the lecture and ask a question, or they could write a response, or they could choose not to attend.
Herman said that she was not interested in Yang. She was not interested in the melodrama of Yang. She had read his work. It was antiblack. He doxed her friend on Reddit.
Professor James said there were limits to academic freedom. We wouldn’t recruit a lunatic from the street to give a lecture in this department.
The mediator asked if anyone wanted to move toward a vote, specifically about this event, or about accountability for department events in general?
Toni said that she wasn’t asking to cancel the event. She announced that she was going to make a public response to the lecture.
Everyone agreed that it would be a mistake to cancel the lecture. It would provide Yang with exactly the kind of scene he wanted.
Professor Jane said that we needed more self-censorship.
Geoffrey said the department was a family. Department events were like Thanksgiving dinner where you didn’t want to fight with your relatives.
Edmund said the department was not a family. She already had a family. She didn’t want to have that kind of relationship with her colleagues.
We talked for two hours. Cowardice, hysteria, tears. Three people cried -- because Wesley Yang was going to give a lecture.
There is something eerie about seeing college professors cry in a professional setting for a professional reason.
You can’t help thinking about your education. All those years in school. Backpacks, erasers, blue exam books. Homework. Wanting knowledge, wanting attention, wanting praise, wanting favor. Wanting to absorb it all. The whole mental landscape. All the obscure facts in my teacher’s head. And fear of exposing my ignorance. The poem I wrote, “I will never cry / in front of the school.” The time I cried in front of the Allen building after failing an exam.
Yes, they cried. But that’s not the point. The strange spectacle of crying professors is not what made the meeting bad. They were crying because it was a bad meeting. And it was bad because they had not bothered to read Yang’s book. (Joy, who read Yang’s book and had personal reasons for disliking it, was not present.) In this meeting, a group of literature professors were engaged in smearing the reputation of a writer based on vague rumors and hasty internet searches. That was badly done. Literature professors should try to make true statements about pieces of writing.
A lot of things were said that I don’t remember. I tried to respond to everyone, but I probably misunderstood some people, and some of my responses went awry. I said that I was not trying to start a war. That heckler’s veto was a bad policy. That I was not going to disinvite Yang. That he was a serious, accomplished writer. That he did not write polemics. That he wasn’t seeking to offend or provoke. That he wasn’t an edge case for academic freedom. That the department had hosted some provocative talks in the past: William E. Jones, Lee Edelman, Jess Row, etc. That Yang wasn’t that kind of speaker. That he gave a wonderful talk at Scripps in 2018. That he understood my colleagues better than they understood him.
I used the word “inquisition.” I used the word “evil.” I used the word “bullying.” (At the time, if you asked me what was going on in the English department, I probably would have said, “Bullying.” I now think this term is overused.)
When Jane asked for an example of successor ideology, I said, “This. This meeting.”
I said: I would never do to any of you what you just did to me.
Emmanuel did not say a word. I later discovered that she had been sending texts. This was her running commentary:
I think if you want to get your message said with a less provocative speaker you could try Camille Paglia.
Hahahahaha
Wow.
Nice.
[Toni] is smart enough to hear that.
On September 29, in response to an email announcing the upcoming lecture, Toni sent the following reply to the entire faculty of the college:
*For the record, I am in no way, in anyone’s wildest dreams or hallucinations, affiliated with this event.
The lecture took place as scheduled on October 6. There were no other protests or controversies. The only remarkable interruptions were caused by my technical mistakes with Zoom.
The world went mad in 2020. But the madness of 2020 was, in some parts of the world, a familiar kind of madness. For a literature professor, for a musician, for a journalist, for a museum worker, it may already have been the case, long before 2020, that all communications were freighted with destructive possibilities. An incautious reply to a seemingly innocuous query might result in loss of friendships, reputation, livelihood.
The combination of internal and external pressures had curious effects. There were times in 2020 when the madness outside of the college overtook the madness within. Then the college adjusted and found its natural level of surpassing madness. And, a few times, the English department asserted its claim for first prize.
The department’s response to Yang’s lecture was one of those times.