Smooth communicator
Funny story. In November 2019, when the dean of the college told me that his office was going to investigate my conduct, I didn’t understand what he was saying.
Dean: The college is hiring an outside investigator to look into concerns in the English department.
Me: Good.
Watching the dean absorb my response, I could see that something was wrong. He looked as if he had stumbled and was trying to find his footing, although sitting down. He later told the investigator that “he [did] not believe Kunin understood that he would be formally investigated.”
Why did I think he was telling me something good? I thought “looking into concerns in the English department” meant that he was going to have an accountant audit the department’s expenses. I had suggested an audit a few times. I thought my suggestions -- “Has the dean’s office ever audited a department? . . . It might be a good idea to do that for the English department” -- would have a sound of last resort that would be impossible to ignore. Well, I was wrong about that, too.
This story is an example of my cluelessness. It’s also an example of vagueness. What was the scope of the investigation? What was alleged in the complaint? Formless things. “Concerns.” A few weeks later, the HR director used the same word:
Subject: Introduction and need to schedule a meeting
Hi Aaron,
By introduction in this email, I’d like to introduce you to [the investigator] who has been hired to conduct an investigation into concerns that have been raised with both myself and [the dean] here at the College.
[Investigator] will be coming to campus next week, and would like to meet with you one on one in person. Please let [her] know your availability to meet.
Hoping you are well.
Best,
[HR director]
In correspondence with the investigator, I tried to learn more. What kinds of concerns should I be thinking about? “Before being interviewed,” I wrote, “I would like to see the complaint; I might also want to discuss the complaint with a lawyer, and I might want to have a lawyer present at the interview.” The investigator could only tell me that she had nothing to tell me: “There are no formal written complaints that I have to share with you.”
Around the same time, the director of HR inadvertently sowed panic in several professors -- witnesses who did not know they were considered witnesses -- by sending them the same email, verbatim, about “an investigation into concerns that have been raised with both myself and [the dean].” Just like me, the professors noted the vagueness of “concerns” and were alarmed. I quote their messages exactly as they appear in the administrative record:
Before I have a mini heart attack, are these concerns relating to me or to someone in the programs/departments I manage?
I would be enormously grateful if you could you please let me know what this concerns. I suffer from Redacted, for which I take medication, receiving this message has put me on the verge of a Redacted.
There must have been some kind of flaw in the introductory email. Something important was missing. What was it? The director of HR and the investigator put their heads together. The revised email that went out to most of the witnesses, my colleagues in the English department among them, included the following sentence: “Please know that this investigation is not about a complaint or issue with you.”
The director of HR still had to wrangle the nervous professors who received the unrevised version.
Investigator: Do you mind ensuring her everything is ok
Director of HR: I’ve spoken to her. She’s okay now.
Investigator: Great thank you! I would have called her but I am in witness interviews on another matter now.
Director of HR: No worries. It’s a lesson for me to word things a bit more sensitively.
Investigator: Do you mind also reaching out to her?
Director of HR: Already did. She’s good now too.
Investigator: Awesome things.
Here is what the director of HR wrote to reassure a frightened professor:
So sorry for any confusion. This is not a complaint about you or from your students. This is a faculty issue and the investigator received your name as a potential witness to certain events about particular faculty behaviors. [Investigator] can be more specific when you two meet.
Again, I am terribly sorry if this created nervousness for you.
One recipient of the original email noted the vagueness of the communication but was not alarmed. This was the college’s diversity officer. “Oh,” he wondered, “which case is this involving?” It did not occur to him that he might be a respondent rather than a witness of an investigation, so his nerves were unaffected. The investigator informed him: “Complaints or racial and gender discrimination within the English department.”
That information would have been useful to me, too. I would not have misunderstood the message if the dean had started by telling me that I was accused of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.
Note the difference between the use of vague language such as “concerns” by someone like a workplace investigator and someone like a dean. As is well known, Title IX processes are unfair to respondents. In my case, the investigator called her process fair and neutral even as she refused to “share” with me a “formal written complaint.” It’s impossible to defend yourself against amorphous accusations. If you try to prepare a defense against “concerns,” the likely result is that you will confess to the violation of some rule or other, since you will be imagining possible complaints about your behavior rather than responding to a specific complaint.
The dean wasn’t playing a trick to make me confess. His vagueness had a different purpose and was typical of communications among academic administrators. For example, the former diversity officer, the one who served in 2018-2019, once invited me “to explore the extent to which cost sharing can make this [project] work.” “Cost sharing” meant that she was asking for money from English department restricted funds. She wanted an exact number: how much was I willing to commit? I remained clueless until I visited the dean’s office a couple of weeks later and discovered that she was still waiting for my answer.
Me: Sorry! I misunderstood -- when I saw your original email I wrote to [Professor Joy] to explain ways that English department restricted funds could take care of some of her requests.
Diversity officer: Thank you so much, and of course, no need to apologize. I should have been more clear.
She said that she “should have been more clear,” but was she trying to express herself clearly when she proposed to “explore cost sharing”? I don’t think so. “Cost sharing” is a formula to avoid clarity. The failure of the communication was not her vagueness but my cluelessness, which required her to retrace her steps and state clearly what she wanted from me.
When used by administrators, this kind of language expresses weakness. These are people who, for whatever reason, do not want to take responsibility for what they are saying.
Why would they not want to do that? You could ask them for their reasons, but you might not get an intelligible answer. From my vantage point, the fact of the workplace investigation appears to have been a powerful influence. It’s remarkable how staff in the dean’s office who really knew what they were doing left almost no trace of their words and actions in the administrative record of my case. The diversity officer of 2018-2019, a natural politician, is a striking example. She wrote few emails, and she put few words into the emails she wrote. It was frequently difficult to understand her messages, and it was basically impossible to know what she thought. Most of the language in her emails mirrored what her correspondents had said. She communicated warmth rather than clarity.
The other dean, the one who served in the years 2018-2019, went further. Like Donald Rumsfeld, she seemed to view communication as a contest in which the victor would hold all of the information; the loser, none. Some of the disadvantages of this approach may be seen in the investigation report. In her testimony, this dean indicated that she had not been briefed about issues in the English department. Had Professor Herman, Professor Toni, or I ever visited her office to discuss any of these issues? She couldn’t remember any meetings, or so she pretended to the investigator, who did not believe her. The investigator could tell that the dean had given her no information, and she declared the testimony entirely “not credible.”
The investigator did not notice that the diversity officer had likewise given her no information. She appreciated the “demeanor and thoughtful insights” of the diversity officer, who avoided clarity and responsibility just as assiduously but with greater success. Readers may recall that I was similarly affected by my meeting with the diversity officer. I left her office thinking: she understands what’s going on at this school.
What about the dean of 2019-2020? He seemed impatient. Impatient with me, impatient with the English department. He avoided meeting with me -- I saw far less of him than the other administrators who appear in this chronicle. When I managed to get on his schedule, he canceled, and when we met, he didn’t seem to be listening, and hurried me out of his office as soon as he could.
He must have been paying some attention, because he is also the author of the most accurate depiction of me in the investigation report. He told the investigator that I was “socially awkward, stilted and not a smooth communicator.” I accept these words with grateful recognition. My closest friends would not contradict the dean, although they might use more flattering expressions. When my two younger sisters imitate my manner for comic purposes, they emphasize the quality that the dean called stilted.
Each of us criticized the other’s style. I was awkward. He was vague. Maybe we had different goals: I was trying to express myself clearly, and he was trying to express himself smoothly. We had a few things in common, too. We were both trying to speak for the places we occupied in the college, not for our extra-institutional persons. Sometimes I also detected irony in the dean’s vague sentences.
Dear [Herman],
Thank you for your message. I certainly appreciate your sentiment. My comments were strictly intended to provide clarify to your questions around process, but it is very helpful for me to know your views in greater depth.
Best wishes,
[Dean]
Dear Aaron,
Thank you very much for your thoughtful message. I agree that the current round of emails is not as productive as genuine meetings. I know that [the mediator] is working to make these happen, and I do hope that they will.
In the meantime, please do not hesitate to let us know if our office can do anything to support your department.
Best wishes,
[Dean]
Maybe we had irony in common. Or maybe I was hearing an echo of my own voice.
I knew him a little bit. I liked him. He and I started working at the college around the same time. He was there, part of the group, for my first trip to the San Gabriel Valley for lunch at a Chinese restaurant (which later became a regular feature of my life). As I recall, we went to the original Chung King in Monterey Park. I remember asking some ignorant questions about earth science; it was inspiring to hear him talk. A couple of times I observed him leaving a party after one or two drinks so that he could go back to his lab and examine some rock samples. I was surprised when he accepted a position that would inevitably take him away from his research. By the same token, he was the kind of person I thought I wanted to see in the dean’s office: a real scientist, a real teacher.
In retrospect, I see that he wanted me to step down from chairing, and he didn’t want to hear anything else about me or my department. From his perspective, the English department had too much money, too many professors, and not enough majors. Conflicts over other issues were pointless. On top of that, his office was already being billed by a mediator, and was soon to be billed by a workplace investigator because the mediator never did any mediating. English professors were sending notes to his office full of creative accusations -- for example, that my standing for promotion to the rank of full professor was “discriminatory, threatening, and retaliatory” -- and demanding that I be removed from the position of chair. Regardless of what I might have to say, my being chair was obviously not working out. But he wasn’t going to remove me. He wasn’t going to say that he thought I should remove myself, even when I asked, “Do you think I should step down?” He wanted the impulse to come from me.
There was probably more to it. I’ve said the weakness of the dean’s vague communications may have been a tribute to the investigation’s strength. It would be understandable if the looming investigation also gave him some feelings of impatience. He had been dean for two months, and in the second month he found himself unhappily named in a workplace investigation of a place, the English department, where he didn’t work, a place that he didn’t know anything about, didn’t want to know anything about, never said anything about, and was trying not to say anything about. There’s no way he was responsible for any alleged discrimination, harassment, or retaliation. He wasn’t dean at the time in question. It really was unfair.
Later in the conversation, when the dean said there was a complaint, and I was named in the complaint, and he was named, and others were named, I understood better.
I asked, pointlessly, if I was going to want a lawyer. The dean replied (not maliciously), no, he didn’t think that would make sense. I understood this was bad advice, but the dean was in no position to give better advice; I blamed myself for asking.
Because I knew that my conduct was going to be investigated, and I knew the probable identities of the complainants but didn’t know specifically which incidents were under investigation, I printed my entire correspondence with Professor Toni and Professor Herman going back to 2016, and started making a timeline. I thought the evidence was on my side, and looked to the clarity of my writing for protection, just as an administrator might seek protection in vaporous language. “The evidence will exonerate me,” I said.
I really did say those words to the investigator at our first meeting. But I had read articles about Title IX investigations by Laura Kipnis, Jeannie Suk Gersen and Jacob Gersen, and Wesley Yang, and I had read enough of jurisprudence to know that evidence alone never exonerated anyone. I started asking acquaintances if they could recommend a good lawyer.