Victims of Williams College
Cast your mind back to 2019. Is it possible that you signed an open letter with the intention of forcing Professor Katie Kent, the chair of the English Department at Williams College, to resign her post?
That year, the forgotten year of 2019, there really was a boycott of the English department at Williams. A group of students demanded Kent’s resignation. They pledged to boycott courses. They staged a protest with the polysemous title “Love and Accountability.” Love was the name of a literature professor -- her full name was Kimberly S. Love -- who took an unplanned leave because of what she called the “violent practices” of the college. Another professor, Dorothy Wang, resigned from an affiliated position in the English department (retaining her appointment in American Studies), because, she said, the department had not responded sufficiently to Love’s allegations. Like the students, Wang said that Kent should be forced to resign.
Everything happened in public. The story was reported exhaustively in the Williams Record as well as in tabloids such as Inside Higher Ed and other national publications. Williams alums passed around open letters on social media accounts. Hundreds of writers and literature professors at other schools added their respectable names to the letters. The letters and signatures can still be viewed online.
Does anyone remember signing those letters? Stephen Elliott has observed that people usually don’t remember participating in mob actions:
A friend who went through a vicious cancellation campaign in 2018 told me that multiple people reached out to him within 6 months asking for his help with something (he was known as a helpful person), forgetting altogether their participation in the mob that cost him his life’s work. When he reminded them they were surprised. They literally didn’t remember.
Let me remind you of what was said at the time.
There were two incidents offered as examples of the violence practiced at Williams. The incident that provoked Professor Love to take an unplanned leave was a dispute with a car repair shop. Professor Love and Professor Kai Green claimed they had made an arrangement for the shop to tow their car and give them a ride home. The man who worked at the shop denied that he had ever agreed to be their driver. In the end, he gave them a ride home, refused to accept payment in the form of a check, and kept their car.
This is how they reconstructed their conversation with the worker at the shop. (Below I am reproducing the dialogue without their commentary.)
“Where are you from? I know you’re not from around here.”
“We actually both reside in Williamstown.”
“Are you students?”
“We are both professors.”
“Williams, that’s a nice place to work?”
“Yes, it is.”
“You all need to call a car to pick you up. I’m not a taxi cab service! I can take your car somewhere else or tow it to your house. I’m not taking a check from you. I don’t trust you. I don’t like you.”
“But you and your manager said you take checks. I don’t have cash.”
“Well then, I’m taking your car back.”
Some parts of this account seem questionable to me. The worker might have given a different account of the facts. (The reporter for the Williams Record did not ask him for a comment, but confidently called him a racist.) At worst, assuming all the facts are correct, the worker broke a contract to provide a service for the two professors, took their car, left them stranded at home in the winter, and used language that made them feel unsafe.
We are not safe.
What we have been doing to fit our bodies in these institutions is killing us and we WANT TO LIVE!
Is that violence? I think it would be more accurate to say the professors had a conflict with the worker, and, fortunately, the conflict did not escalate to violence.
There’s one other thing I don’t understand. Is this anecdote about a car repair shop supposed to represent violence at Williams College?
I don’t see the connection. I don’t think Love and Green saw it either. They must not have thought seriously about what they were saying.
The second incident, the one that inspired a boycott, at least had the virtue of taking place within the structure of the college. It happened like this. Some months later, on campus, in the building that housed the English department, Professor Kent was getting ready to chair a department meeting when she was accosted by Professor Wang and two students. Wang asked if the meeting was going to include discussion of the open letter from Love and Green about the department’s “violent practices.”
Kent replied that the department had already discussed the letter. Unable to resist quibbling with Wang’s interpretation of what Love had written, Kent added: “She was talking about the college, Dorothy. She wasn’t talking about the department; she was talking about the college.”
Wang told her students: “This is why I disaffiliated from English.”
At this point, Kent lost her temper: “Are you talking shit about me to your students?”
Kent swiftly composed herself. She greeted the students, apologized for her unprofessional language, and invited them to her office for further discussion. The students rejected her invitation. Kent later wrote personal letters of apology to Wang and the students, and made a public apology in a statement to the Williams Record:
During an encounter with Professor Wang and two of her students in Hollander Hall on Wednesday, April 17, I raised my voice and spoke to her using inappropriate language. I should not have yelled or sworn -- I shouldn’t have accused her of “talking shit about me” to her students. Professor Wang’s questions about what I take to be confidential Departmental and College matters caught me off-guard and made me both upset and defensive. Nonetheless, I regret speaking to her in that way. I also regret putting her students in that uncomfortable position. It wasn’t my best moment. I lost my cool, and I apologize. All of us have moments where we wish we had done better -- this was one of mine.
Kent apologized for her word choice but did not retract what she had said. “Professor Wang’s questions,” Kent wrote, “about what I take to be confidential Departmental and College matters caught me off-guard and made me both upset and defensive.” In other words, Kent had good reasons for being upset. Wang had been talking shit about her to her students. Kent’s tone and language may have been unprofessional, but Wang’s questions and comments were also unprofessional.
Wang and the students did not accept the apology. It was “not adequate at all,” according to the students. They didn’t like how Kent represented her behavior as a lapse in judgment -- she lost her cool, raised her voice, chose her words poorly -- rather than an act of violence. Perhaps they also resented the implication that Wang, too, had misbehaved. Wang said, “I don’t think she [Kent] understands the structural racism and sexism and the violence that the English department has perpetrated on people.” The students agreed: “We want her to unlearn some of these terrible things she’s enacting.”
Wang called the incident an example of violence. The student witnesses said they were unsafe. One student told the Williams Record that “Kent’s tone and posture made her fear for the safety of Wang and [the other student].” In their open letter, the Williams alums called the incident “Professor Kent’s harassment of Professor Wang,” a violation of college policy for which a tenured professor could potentially be fired. The open letter signed by writers and professors at other schools called it “verbal assault,” in other words, a kind of speech unprotected by the first amendment. Or, simply, a crime.
I don’t understand the motives of the people who signed these letters. I can understand why someone might choose to say nothing. “This controversy,” someone might say, “looks like an unholy mess. The English department at Williams College is probably one of the least violent institutions in human history. These complaints of violence, racism, and sexism seem weak, and Wang acted inappropriately. On the other hand, Kent’s word choice was inappropriate, and where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right? But I don’t know any of these people or what they’re capable of, so I won’t get involved.” Fair enough. But the signers of the letters were motivated to get involved. One should have a good reason for making a public statement in support of the claim that this incident was violent. The only good reason for making such a statement would be evidence of violence.
And there is none. In all of these open letters, there is no evidence that Kent has ever committed a violent act. At worst, assuming the facts are correct, Kent used language that made Wang and her students uncomfortable. It’s natural that Wang would feel uncomfortable, because she was being confronted with her own bad behavior. It’s natural that the students would feel uncomfortable, because they were witnessing a confrontation, and because Kent’s words were harsh and angry. The outlandish accusations spawned by this incident I can only understand as a creative mob activity in which Wang, the students, and the authors and signers of the open letters competed with one another to invent the worst possible term for Kent’s conduct.
This is how Wang defended the claim that the incident was violent:
It [the incident] confirms Kimberly Love’s assertion about violence of the institution. People think she was just being hyperbolic, or they don’t understand. They’re always like, ‘Oh, what do you mean? Did somebody punch her in the face?’ That’s been the response, right? But [there are] all of these forms of violence: psychic, verbal, denigrating what we do.
No, I don’t understand. How is the incident in which Kent yelled at Wang an example of the “violence of the institution,” “the structural racism and sexism and the violence that the English department has perpetrated on people,” “a departmental culture of intimidation, fear, racism and disrespect toward FoC [faculty of color],” “the structures and practices that have allowed inequity to take hold and persist,” etc.?
In short, how does the act of an individual become structural?
Wang, Love, and Green don’t have answers to this question. Love and Green base their claim that the college is a violent institution on an anecdote about a worker in a car repair shop. Their anecdote is lame in that it lacks evidence of violence. But the lameness hardly matters, because their anecdote does not implicate the college. They do not explain how, in their view, the worker in the shop participates in the structure of the college.
Wang attributes the claim of institutional violence to her colleague, Love, but she also seems embarrassed by Love. What makes her seem embarrassed? She doesn’t mention the car repair shop. She suppresses the lame anecdote about the car repair shop, and substitutes the anecdote about her conflict with Kent, which at least took place at the college. In other respects, the second anecdote is just as lame as the first, because it also lacks evidence of violence. Apparently Wang wants to establish the violence of the college by means of two lame anecdotes in which individual actors are blamed for violence, but nobody commits any violence.
Perhaps sensing the weakness of her case, Wang also told the Williams Record that Love’s unplanned leave and her own disaffiliation from English were “evidence of [the department’s] harmful culture.” According to Wang, “If you look at just the women who were hired to teach either minority American or postcolonial literature . . . three out of those four are either leaving, taking medical leave, or disaffiliating. This is all under the tenure of Katie Kent.” Here the structure that Wang sees is a circle: she stages a protest against alleged violence, then offers her own protest as evidence in support of her allegation.
Wang seems strangely confused as to whether her accusation is individual or structural. Should Kent be punished as an out-of-control agent of violence? Or is Kent a blameless intermediary who accidentally reveals the violence of the underlying structure? Or should Kent be punished for not understanding the concept of institutional violence? “I don’t think she understands the structural racism and sexism and the violence that the English department has perpetrated on people. She’s a defender of that department.” Maybe that’s what violence really means -- defending the English department from accusations of violence? Maybe Wang wants Kent to be punished for “having the audacity to argue with another professor” (as the reporter Robby Soave commented)?
Wang is also concerned to weaken the concept of violence. “Oh, what do you mean? Did somebody punch her in the face?” Right. A punch in the face is a good example of what violence would ordinarily mean. Impact, projectiles, edge weapons, something like that. Use of force to inflict physical harm on a victim. When Wang puts violence in the same category as psychic/verbal/denigrating harms, it looks as though she is trying to activate the stigma of violence without providing evidence of any harmful conduct or intent.
The word “structural” (and other related words: institutional, cultural, systematic) shouldn’t be a license to beg the question of how structures are related to individuals. It shouldn’t weaken the concept of violence. It shouldn’t give meaning to lame examples; a structural account of violence shouldn’t be less well documented than a chronicle of an individual act of violence.
What should a structural account of violence look like? Think of the blood feuds depicted in the fascinating sagas of the medieval Icelanders. Chieftains, farmers, traders, slaves, and marauders used violence to defend their honor, and in this way they organized a society without having a government. According to William Ian Miller,
Status had to be carefully maintained or aggressively acquired: one’s status depended on the condition of one’s honor, for it was in the game of honor that rank and reputation was attained and retained. Honor was at stake in virtually every social interaction.
(Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland)
If you were a medieval Icelander, you might use the confrontational question, “Are you talking shit about me?”, as a formula to provoke violence. Your enemy would know other traditional formulas to utter in response: “I don’t know what you mean, but I heard someone say that you enjoy eating the flesh of a horse’s anus.” “That’s a lie.” “Are you calling me a liar?” And you could either start fighting right away, or name the time and place for your trial by combat. Or, if you wanted to avoid violence, you could repair your honor by accepting compensation or starting a lawsuit. Or, if you wanted to strengthen your intention to commit violence, you could use your lawsuit to have your opponent declared an outlaw. (Miller says that legal settlements always “hovered on the edge of bloodshed.”) The concept of honor, the verbal formulas, and the law provided structures for a violent way of life.
A structural account of the conflicts in the English department at Williams might start with the hypothesis that institutional incentives encourage literature professors to accuse their department chairs of violence. The outlandish accusations invented by the authors of the open letters might prove to be an interesting case study.
What do you think the incentives are?