I always tried to be patient with Professor Toni. I tried to remember two things. One, she was a legendary, award-winning teacher, loved by generations of students. Two, she taught literature courses in prisons.
That is something I have never done, I used to tell myself. I don’t know if I could do that. I respect that.
Mostly I experienced Toni as the author of inappropriate emails. She wrote emails at all times of day. She sent so many emails that an observer of traffic in my inbox might have surmised: she must be my closest friend at work.
Date: Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Subject: April 9 Guest speakers question
Hi Aaron,
Can I use the department credit card to take my Afrofuturisms visitors to dinner after they present? Is that dept card even happening anymore?Thanks,
[Toni]
The answer to both of Toni’s questions was, “No.” Only the department secretary could make purchases with the department credit card; the card itself never went out of the main office. Toni knew this. At least, she should have known, for the same reason that I knew: James, when he was chair, had written a detailed explanation.
Faculty Colleagues,
I write to remind us all of the college’s regulations involving the use of the department’s purchasing card. [The department secretary] has just been issued a new card after fraudulent activity once again forced the account to be closed -- not fraud that any of us committed, I hasten to add!, but that too-loose security measures seem to have enabled.
Because this kind of fraud isn’t unique to our department, the college has tightened up on the regulations covering the use of these cards -- or really, just tightened up on enforcement of regulations that have long been in place. For our purposes, the most important of those is:
The card is issued in [secretary]’s name, and its use and security are her sole responsibility. She is prohibited by college policy from either loaning the card to any of us or giving anyone the card number.
Though she’s tender hearted, I’ve insisted to [secretary] that any such “sharing” of the card must stop.
Toni received the same explanation that I received. Why was she asking me for the credit card she knew she couldn’t have? I had a few theories about that.
My favorite theory was that Toni’s correspondence with me looked more or less the same as her other correspondence. In her eyes, I bore the same face as all the previous chairs. Maybe she asked to borrow the purchasing card once a year. Maybe she forgot every year. What was the policy again? “Is that dept card even happening anymore?”
Maybe she never understood the policy. Maybe she didn’t read her emails. (In that case, it would have been pointless for me to give even a moment’s consideration to my reply.)
Maybe she thought the policy had changed. Maybe she wanted it to change. Maybe she suspected it was enforced selectively. Did other professors have access to the card? Why not Toni? Maybe the policy was racially discriminatory.
Or maybe she wanted the policy to be enforced selectively. Toni, the senior member of the department, should enjoy the privileges pertaining to her rank and years of service. Because she remembered a time when she had been able to take the card out of the main office, she should be able to keep doing so. A grandfather exception to the policy, in other words.
Another theory I considered was that Toni’s correspondence with me was unique. Because I was a few years younger, and inexperienced, and because she outranked me, maybe she thought she could do things with me that she couldn’t do with other chairs. Maybe she asked questions in order to test me. To see if I knew the policy. To see what she could get away with. Or to put pressure on me to loosen the policy.
Or maybe the policy used to be enforced selectively. When he was interviewed by a workplace investigator, James said that his approach to chairing was to say yes to everybody. That wasn’t true. He was judicious about saying no. He was capable of saying no to me. It seemed possible, but unlikely, that James said yes to senior faculty and no to junior faculty. It was also possible that he made a unique exception for Toni. Maybe he only said yes to her -- maybe that was how he responded to her salami tactics. Or maybe that was how he forestalled her salami tactics.
Readers may have forgotten about salami tactics. In a meeting on September 11, 2018, I explained to the department that salami tactics were not allowed. According to Thomas Schelling, who studied conflict, these tactics exploit the ambiguities in commitments.
Salami tactics, we can be sure, were invented by a child; whoever first expounded the adult version had already understood the principle when he was small. Tell a child not to go in the water and he’ll sit on the bank and submerge his bare feet; he is not yet “in” the water. Acquiesce, and he’ll stand up; no more of him is in the water than before. Think it over, and he’ll start wading, not going any deeper; take a moment to decide whether this is different and he’ll go a little deeper, arguing that since he goes back and forth it all averages out. Pretty soon we are calling to him not to swim out of sight, wondering whatever happened to all our discipline.
In Schelling’s sense, many of Toni’s emails were examples of salami tactics. Every time she requested $999 from restricted funds, she determined her request simply by naming the greatest amount she could receive without presenting her request to the department. Similarly, she called some of her requests “time-sensitive,” which was true, in a sense, but only due to her own inaction. If she waited until after a deadline had passed before sending me an email, her request became time-sensitive.
“Is that dept card even happening anymore?” Toni was pressing on a limit. All I had to say was, “No.”
Hello [Toni]
I chose not to order a card in my name because it was a complication I didn’t want and it seemed too easy to abuse.
Of course you should take the Afrofuturisms visitors to dinner and the department will reimburse.
Best wishes
Aaron
What caused me to share irrelevant information about my choices? Just a private vainglory. When I was chair, I kept a strict economy in my own spending: unlike previous chairs, I didn’t have a purchasing card, and I didn’t request money from restricted funds; I used my own research budget for all of my teaching and research expenses. It must have bothered me that my colleagues didn’t know about my little economies. It shouldn’t have bothered me: they didn’t know because I hadn’t told them. (Even the department secretary, who did know, only made fun of me: she pointed out that the money in my research budget came out of the very same restricted department funds. There really was no meaningful difference, she said.)
Predictably, Toni’s response to this revelation was that she wanted me to know more about the circumstances of her life.
Um, ok fine you didn’t need the card or want it. However, why would you automatically assume I have the money to take anybody anywhere? I am not in the same social class as the majority of white people on this campus or in this neighborhood or in this department. So. I encourage you to take a step back on that one real quick, as in everyone is not cookie cutter, even in this department -- at least I’m not. I’m real tired of these kinds of assumptions constantly being projected onto me so that I can either front like I’m one of you, or feel blamed, suspect, inadequate and othered. But that is the essence of Pomona and academia in general.
(Remember that Toni was a full professor, and the average annual salary of a full professor at Pomona in 2018 was $160,000.)
Now I wrote the reply that I should have written in the first place: explain the rules, outline the options, present them to Toni as a choice.
Your response makes a lot of assumptions about my class background.
In any case, please note that I said: “The department will reimburse.” In other words, whoever pays for dinner, the department will reimburse that person.
This has been department policy since [James] was chair. To quote from [James’s] original email:
“This means that if you wish to make an expenditure for which you have either departmental or college funds, you have two options:
You can make the purchase yourself (cash, check or personal credit card) and process the paperwork (including appropriate receipts) through [department secretary] for reimbursement. My sense is that requests for reimbursement are typically fulfilled within about 10 business days.
You can provide an invoice for [secretary] to pay with her card, or send her a link to complete an online purchase (or come to her office and navigate to the relevant site on her computer) so that she can come in behind you and fill in the credit card information.”
Best wishes
Aaron
It was strictly true that Toni “made a lot of assumptions about my class background,” but it was also true that her assumptions were correct: I was brought up in an upper middle class household, among people who sometimes picked up the check after dinner at a restaurant. My email implied that her assumptions were incorrect; that implication was false.
My first motive was that I wanted to end an inappropriate conversation, and I had no scruples about obfuscating the story of my life in order to do so. My second motive was that I was curious to see how she would respond.
Toni sent four different replies, which was not unusual in her correspondence. First she replied in the heat of the moment.
OK. They might eat or they might not. It’s trivial.
I don’t know about your class background (bc the dept studiously avoids any meaningful direct conversation about such uncomfortable subjects attaching to how we, as beings, are situated?) but I do know what you wrote and the positionality of that voice belongs to a set of institutional assumptions about how we are all situated. That’s all. Been hearing and experiencing it since 1998. Reimbursement is a burden imposed by the institution, whose class background I know well; some people are ok with that burden and some cannot take it on. I always have to consider what price I’m willing to pay in erasure and stress, in order to behave in compliance with the institution’s script.
Bests,
[Toni]
Then she wrote a conciliating reply.
Hi Aaron,
I’m terrible at email. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.
[Toni]
Thanks [Toni], I appreciate that. My feelings are not that important. The important things are to support your projects and maintain consistency in our department policies.
Best wishes
Aaron
She even tried to speak with me in person, maybe because she recalled that I preferred meetings to emails. In this case, her attempt resulted in another email.
Hi Aaron,
Sorry I was unable to speak with you in the hallway this afternoon. Too much going on. I stopped by somewhat later but you were in conference with [thesis student].
[Toni]
When Toni sent a fourth reply, I made an extraordinary offer: I said that I would find her party in the restaurant, pay the bill myself, and submit the receipt for reimbursement. I agreed that guests of the English department should be fed by the department. And I agreed that it was a problem if the state of her finances was so dire that she could not wait to be reimbursed. So I offered to pay.
Hi Aaron,
Can you have [secretary] phone in authorization on her dept credit card so I can take them to dinner at Walter’s? I don’t have the funds available to take multiple people to dinner but after performing for 3 hrs including lecture, film and performance, it seems like they should eat.
Thanks,
[Toni]
[The secretary] says there isn’t a way to pay in advance.
What time will the dinner take place? It might be possible for me to come in and pay -- I'll be in the village for the dinner following [poetry] reading. Maybe you could send me a text? The other possibility would be to have everyone pay for their own dinner, then submit receipts for reimbursement.
Aaron
OK don’t worry about it. My funds are low or I’d pay. I’ll have them submit receipts.
Thanks
[Toni]
Thanks [Toni]. Let’s keep thinking about this for future events. There may be a better solution to the problem.
Aaron
[Thumbs up emoji.] It has been a problem for 20 years.
In the same year, only seven months later, Toni asked yet again for the credit card she knew she could not have. On this occasion, she copied the dean.
Date: Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Hi Aaron,
I also need to use the English Dept. credit card tomorrow night if possible (I don’t know the current department or business office policy on faculty in English using the dept. card) to pay for taking the speaker and guests to dinner after the [photography] lecture. Scripps Humanities Institute is contributing $600 toward the dinner cost but there are some type of complications with them paying the bill directly at the restaurant; they have requested that I pay it and get reimbursed after they transfer funds to English. I prefer not to pay out of pocket and wait for reimbursement.
Bests,[Toni]
Hello [Toni]
As you know, the English department’s policy is that the purchasing card does not leave the main office. This has been the case for several years. Below I am pasting [James]’s original email explaining the policy.
The phrase “as you know” is the harshest language I ever used in correspondence with Toni. (I believe she intended her closing, “Bests,” to sound similarly harsh.) The meaning of “as you know” is that Toni knew the answer to her question and knew that she should not ask the question. I was directly contradicting her. She had written, “I don’t know the current department or business office policy on faculty in English using the dept. card.” So I was accusing her of disingenuousness.
In the end, the dean paid for the dinner. Which makes me think Toni understood the rules better than I did. She understood that if she put enough pressure on any rule, it would break. As Schelling puts it, “Most commitments are ultimately ambiguous in detail,” and thus, “there is some threshold below which the commitment is just not operative, and even that threshold itself is usually unclear.” She kept asking me about the credit card until I felt impelled to pay the bill for her; then she asked the dean, and he experienced the same generous impulse.
According to the investigation report,
When Kunin denied the request, [the dean] offered [Toni] the use of his purchasing card. He stated he would do this for any of his colleagues.
I wonder. Would the dean have done that for any of his colleagues?
Anyone at the college?