Is this a racial conflict?
“My workplace blew up with racial conflict,” Professor Herman wrote in 2023. What does that mean?
A) Disagreement about the concept of race?
B) Disagreement on any subject between members of different racial groups?
C) Physical violence inflicted on members of a racial minority group, like a race riot?
“Programs and departments blow up over race and racism all the time in academia,” she confidently asserted. Is that true? Why would anyone work in a profession where these “blow ups” happen “all the time”?
Hello everyone. Welcome to the pogrom -- I mean, program. The beginning of the school year is an exciting time for us, etc.
“We don’t need,” she wrote, explaining that she did not need to explain herself, “to belabour the villainy of how whiteness, antiblackness, and settler colonialism continue to plague the academy, justifying terrible behaviour and resource hoarding all around us.” I do want to belabor this point. Let’s look at an example.
In 2018, before Herman started attending department meetings, she and I disagreed about the interpretation of some of the rules in Robert’s Rules. We had a conflict, in other words. Was that conflict an ordinary, interpersonal one -- a conflict about deliberative process -- or was it an instance of the special kind of conflict that she called racial?
The conflict started when she informed me that she might have to miss another department meeting. The subject heading of her email was: “regarding meetings again, so sorry.”
Herman: Just as an FYI, external reviewers are visiting GWS the 24th and 25th of this month which as you know is a full-time thing with dinners and meetings and class visits and all that. I will try to make the department meeting on the 25th but am still waiting on the GWS itinerary for the reviewers? As I mentioned it’s a busy semester with GWS.
Aaron: Thanks for letting me know.
Herman: Sure.
What followed was a lengthy email in which Herman proposed three new hires in the field of American literature in addition to a replacement hire for the position in Asian American literature recently vacated by Professor Theresa. She wrote: “A larger plan to rebuild the U.S. literature lines is the only curricular commitment to which I would be at all interested in giving any service energy or labor obviously beyond the basic level owed within my contractual obligations.” She asked me to set aside time to read her proposal out loud in the department meeting that she was going to miss: “I’d appreciate it if you could pass this on to the department, *not* as an email but rather in the meeting itself.”
There was a lot that I could have said in response to her email. I noticed that at first she was going to “try to make” the department meeting; then she used the phrase, “if I can’t be there,” which meant that she probably wouldn’t be able to make it after all; then, “Sorry to miss this!”, which meant that she wasn’t going to try. I was impressed by the extravagance of her four proposed hires. Even more breathtaking was her idea that she could use me as a mouthpiece for speaking to the department. Did she really think that she could participate in department business by avoiding conversation with me, staying away from meetings, and enlisting me to read her emails out loud to the assembled English faculty?
She was asking too much of me. I needed to draw a line.
Aaron: Sorry, I can’t undertake to represent your position to the department. You are responsible for making your own arguments.
Herman: Fair enough; I will try to make it if that time isn't taken up by the study. Thanks Aaron!
Herman sent her hiring plan to the entire department in the form of a group email. Then, in a separate email, she sent me the following reply:
Subject: Tone and Future Emails
Aaron, I want you to know that I found your response to me, below, to be needlessly rude and also wrong on a policy level. Be aware that as the Chair of this department you are refusing to represent an opinion and a proxy vote in a meeting for a full department member who cannot attend. Actually you did represent [Professor Philip’s] insights on [confidential document] the other day to the department when he was absent. So this makes me think something else is going on.
Reading out loud the opinion of someone who cannot attend is actually common practice, while proxy voting is accounted for in Robert’s Rules of Order which you adopted “loosely” in the last meeting per the minutes. But also in past meetings [Professor James] has read emails out loud, and I have done it in GWS as well. We have all listened to emails read out loud from colleagues in meeting when people cannot attend. I suggest, as a longtime chair myself, that you be on notice as to how you might produce a hostile workplace by refusing to present the opinions you disagree with, or empowering yourself to inform me, in curt emails, of my “responsibilities” when you are in fact my peer and not my superior. I am going to ask [Toni] to act as my proxy if, as the minutes say, Robert’s Rules of Order are in “loose” adoption and it comes to a vote.
Joint appointments are complicated and difficult and I am doing my best in a busy semester of hiring and external review, plus other responsibilities, as perhaps you are doing your best in your first semester of chairing. If you have now decided that you will not represent or offer some of the opinions of people who cannot attend meetings even and because of joint appointments or other obligations I would like to ask that you make this an open department conversation about doing so, as well as proxy voting, not an ad hoc private decision issued in impolite terms. That is what I tried to do with policy issues in GWS.
I want to point out that I was quite polite in asking you to do this and equally polite in absorbing your refusal and even more polite in writing and explaining to the department. In the future I would like to ask that we attend to common courtesies in our communications. I have no interest in conflict or interpersonal negotiations with you, but rather am committed to certain pedagogical and curricular priorities for the department, for my other appointment, and for the college. That is my only interest in my place of employment. I am continuing to consider when and if it is in those interests to have the private conversation you wanted to have but have not decided. I will let you know but in the meantime I expect good manners and equal treatment and offer you the same.
During my time as chair, I never learned Robert’s Rules by heart. By September 2018, I had studied them enough to know that most of what Herman said was false. For example, Robert’s “account” of proxy voting is that it should not be allowed. Clearly Herman had not looked at the text of Robert’s Rules, but asserted that Robert said what she wanted him to say, and dared me to call her bluff. She must have thought that I, too, was bluffing, that I had neither looked at the text nor discussed it with the department in the meetings she missed. In fact, she seemed to think that I was doing the very thing she was doing -- using Robert as a pretext for “an ad hoc private decision issued in impolite terms.”
I took the time to transcribe the relevant passages from my copy of Robert’s Rules, compiled them into an email, and sent them back to Herman:
If you consult Robert on the topic of proxy voting, he has this to say: “Ordinarily it [proxy voting] should neither be allowed nor required, because proxy voting is incompatible with the essential characteristics of a deliberative assembly in which membership is individual, personal, and nontransferable.”
On the subject of absentee voting: “It is a fundamental principle of parliamentary law that the right to vote is limited to the members of an organization who are actually present at the time the vote is taken in a regular or properly called meeting . . .”
On the subject of deliberation by email: “Any such effort may achieve a consultative character, but it is foreign to the deliberative process as understood under parliamentary law.”
The whole point of Robert’s model of parliamentary decision making is that the meeting is the place where we make decisions. There are many useful features of Robert’s model, one of which is that the members at the meeting might listen to one another and change their minds.
Robert also recommends loosening the rules somewhat for “small boards” (with membership of twelve or fewer) such as the English department. In the department meeting on September 11, we discussed some basic conventions for making decisions. In a unanimous vote, we determined that we would follow the example of the FPC, which allows virtual communication in the form of teleconference and skype, but does not allow proxy voting, absentee voting, or deliberation by email. (This is the meaning of [James’s] phrase “à la FPC” in the minutes.)
I agree that [Philip’s] participation in the meeting on September 6 was irregular and that our department has a history of similar irregularities. I am trying to change that. I discussed the procedures that I wanted to introduce with every member of the department in individual meetings held over the summer -- except you, since you canceled the meeting we had scheduled on September 4.
Finally, I deny that the tone of my messages to you has ever been hostile. I encourage you to attend department meetings to represent your views to the department, and I encourage you to talk to me to avoid further misunderstandings.
With respect
Aaron
I could have said more about Professor Philip. I didn’t think the comparison was fair. I was tempted to magnify the differences: Philip did not write a text for me to read out loud to the other faculty; he came to see me in my office to give me information that I needed to include in a confidential document that was due in the dean’s office on September 14; this information was discussed in a committee meeting, not a department meeting; and the discussion occurred before the department adopted Robert’s Rules. Nonetheless, I didn’t like the process, which was truly an ad hoc process, so I conceded the point.
Herman thanked me for my explanation of parliamentary decision making, and that was the end of the conflict for the time being.
In 2022, after she had a few years to think about it, Herman wrote down some of her objections to Robert’s Rules:
Having come out of an extended six-year period of departmental strife centered on questions of race, racism, and retaliation, which was problematically managed and resolved at many turns, even when occasionally superbly handled by my own administration, I have lately not had much reason to believe in the possibility that faculty can work together. But what I have learned is that what fails faculty more than anything, what serves their disempowerment, is bad leadership, in particular leadership that relies on a lack of measured, collectively agreed-upon infrastructure, that ultimately unequally disburses privileges, access to funds, and chances to professionally thrive.
. . .
And when I mean infrastructure and process I definitely don’t mean dumb antiquated individuated stuff like Robert’s Confederate Rules of Order, whose civility-oriented rigidity serves nobody except the individual who decides s/he/they is its best interpreter. What I mean is legally vetted, thought-through, reasoned infrastructure that takes ideology and personality out of the equation and makes equity, transparent process, and fierce standards of academic freedom based on rigorous review, the name of the game.
It appears that Herman understood our disagreement over Robert’s Rules to be a racial conflict, that is, an episode of “strife centered on questions of race, racism, and retaliation.” Her claims are typically equivocal, and perhaps self-fulfilling. If Herman says, “Robert’s Rules are racist,” and I say, “No, that is nonsense,” it may be true, after a fashion, that our disagreement is a conflict “centered on questions of racism.” It was likewise true that Herman had accused me of retaliation, and a legal process followed that could be called a conflict, at the end of which the California court found that there was no evidence of retaliation. Is that a “question of retaliation”? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to use a different term -- a false accusation, a pointless conflict?
How did race get into the conflict? Herman suggested that the rules themselves, and their author Henry Martyn Robert, were inherently flawed by racism. The rules were, she wrote, “dumb antiquated individuated,” “civility-oriented,” and “Confederate.”
That sounds pretty bad. If the rules adopted by the English department in 2018 turned out to be a product of the Confederate States of America, one might expect the rules to be racially prejudiced in their principles, discriminatory in their design. Even if the rules contained no objectionable language, or even if recent editions of the rules took out any objectionable language printed in earlier editions, the English department might want to consider handbooks of deliberative process by different authors. We don’t usually look to the slaveocracy for models of good organization.
But what Herman wrote is false. It’s historical libel to associate Robert with the Confederacy. Robert served as part of the engineering corps in the U.S. Army that defeated the Confederacy. (Incidentally, his father was a significant figure in the history of college administration: Joseph Thomas Robert, first president of Morehouse College.) According to his official biography, Robert’s first attempt to preside over a deliberative assembly was a town meeting in New Bedford in 1863, where he had been asked to lead the citizens in a discussion of plans for defense against a possible invasion by the Confederate Navy. This is Robert’s account of how he came to know parliamentary processes:
My embarrassment was supreme. I plunged in, trusting to Providence that the assembly would behave itself. But with the plunge went the determination that I would never attend another meeting until I knew something of . . . parliamentary law.
I’m just copying information from the introduction to Robert’s Rules. What’s surprising is that Herman didn’t do even that much research. I don’t think she read any more of the text of Robert’s Rules in 2022 than she had read in 2018. She knew only that Robert participated in the Civil War, and that fact was sufficient for her to smear him as a Confederate operative. She had no further interest in the content or history of Robert’s Rules. She was merely expressing a personal grudge, maligning Robert in order to malign me.
As far as I can see, the racial element in the conflict was limited to this fabrication.
[Edited to clarify that Herman sent the email with the subject heading “Tone and Future Emails” only to me, not to the entire department. I also corrected a typo. --AK, 3/19/2024.]