What did we learn from Williams College?
In 2019, we were all reading news reports about conflicts in the English department at Williams. In the lessons we drew from the reports, we revealed facets of our characters.
Professor Herman wrote about Williams in an email to the dean. She had just discovered that I was going up for promotion to the rank of full professor, and she wanted the dean to put a stop to it:
I write to follow up on the distressing news that the person who directly caused me to go on my current disability leave is being considered for promotion to full. . . . This will have a further chilling effect on the department, on me in particular, and I for one experience this as a further threat to my future success at the college.
If the dean did not halt my promotion, she threatened that what happened at Williams would happen at Pomona:
Last thing, I would direct your attention to the situation at Williams, where students have called for a total boycott of the English department except for classes that take up race. The college really does not want this to go public; it would not be good for any of us, professionally or otherwise, and I’m worried we are getting there.
The first lesson Herman took from Williams was that wild accusations could be used to make the college do all sorts of things. A Williams professor such as Dorothy Wang, who accused her former department chair of committing a violent act, could expect to be rewarded. She could demand money, unplanned leaves, tenure lines in fields that she chose. She could expect to be lauded by her colleagues in open letters, and by students in public protests. At least, she could give vent to a personal grudge and expect no personal inconvenience. No matter how much nonsense she put into her accusations, no one would call it nonsense.
The second lesson was that “the college really does not want this to go public; it would not be good for any of us.” Following Wang’s example, Herman threatened to make her accusations public and enlist students in her cause, but she simultaneously acknowledged that she and the dean had a shared interest in not disclosing the wild contents of her accusations. Perhaps she understood that nonsense would lose some of its power if it moved from the dean’s office into the public world. She also implied that I, too, shared her interest in keeping the secrets that she was threatening to publish. Here she miscalculated. For me, the prospect of exposing her accusations to public view would obviously be preferable to that of having vague, alarming rumors circulate among my students and colleagues at school and in the profession.
Thus the lesson I took from Williams was different. Denise Buell, the dean of the faculty at Williams, supported Katie Kent, the chair of the English department. In public, at least, Buell stood by Kent in spite of all conflicts, public protests, and open letters. She did not appear to hold those circumstances against Kent. She said to reporters: “I want to make it clear that Katie Kent will not be asked to resign as department chair.”
That was the lesson, as far as I was concerned. A lesson in how to be a good dean. Use your judgment. Remember that you have a spine. Don’t give credence to obvious lies. Don’t be afraid of controversy. Don’t make it impossible for department chairs to do their jobs.
I suggested as much to the dean at Pomona when we met in November 2019. I asked if he knew about the students boycotting the English department at Williams.
He said he didn’t. (This was untrue. He had seen Herman’s threatening email within the past two weeks.)
I related a few highlights of the story.
I appealed to him. I said: He could do what Denise Buell did. He could back me up. That was an option.
I left it to the dean to reflect that the cost of supporting me would not be terrible. He might receive some alarming emails from Herman and Professor Toni. Was that too high a cost?
The dean signaled that he wasn’t interested in supporting me. He didn’t seem to feel bad about it. For him, the lesson of Williams was that the English department at Pomona was comparatively healthy. Students didn’t seem to be involved in our conflict.
I basked in the dean’s muted praise. I liked the idea of keeping students out of the conflict. Maybe Herman and I would never again sit down and talk to each other, but I liked to imagine that we might be having a kind of conversation through our students.
I said nothing further, but I had in mind one more lesson from Williams. There was a parallel between me and Kent, and a difference. I noticed it, and I wanted the dean to notice it. The parallel was that Kent and I were accused of yelling at a colleague. The difference was that Kent had done it. She lost her temper. She yelled, really yelled. She raised her voice and used a bad word. She did it when students were present.
I hadn’t done anything like that. Admittedly, I did sometimes lose my temper. I’ll give you an example.
One morning in October 2019, the department secretary asked me to meet her in the main office. This was the second department secretary, the one who called me “Dear Heart.”
She was profoundly apologetic. She had misplaced some receipts for which Herman was expecting reimbursement. She still had the receipts that belonged to most of the other English faculty -- and she apologized for that, too: she had them because she had never processed them. It seemed that she had done almost nothing since she started working for the department in August. Mostly she had been reorganizing the main office, moving old files from one shelf to another. The only receipts she had processed were Toni’s, and she only did that because the mediator stood next to her and watched her do it, foreseeing trouble if Toni’s receipts were not promptly reimbursed.
All right, I said. I proposed that she should set aside some time that day to work through the accumulated receipts. I hoped that Herman’s receipts would turn up, or that Herman would be able to print new copies.
“[Herman] thinks you took them out of the office.”
Oh. Now I understood why the secretary was apologizing to me and not to Herman.
I repeated that I hoped the missing receipts would turn up.
The secretary appeared to have given up on finding the receipts. She regretted that she had been so unfortunate as to lose Herman’s receipts rather than those of some other literature professor, creating an opportunity for Herman to accuse me of stealing or hoarding her receipts. “I’m so sorry, she fixated on you. She just immediately went in that direction.”
Later that same day, Herman wrote to me. She copied the college’s diversity officer and another associate dean on her message.
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Subject: Expense reports
Hi Aaron,
It seems that my expense report has gone missing from the department office, the only missing report of all of the faculty reports in the department.
Do you have it by any chance? You are the only person in the building besides [the department secretary] who could claim an administrative relationship to my expense reports. She stayed at work until 7 pm last night looking for them and I’d like to relieve her worries.
She is so overloaded that they are a month overdue to be processed, poor woman.
[Herman]
I supposed Herman knew very well that the paper receipts mislaid by the secretary never appeared on my desk in the ordinary course of business. If I wanted to examine her receipts, I could click on a field in the accounting program Workday and view a pdf. There was no reason, no legitimate reason, for me to touch any paper receipt, form, or file related to her expenses. I might “claim an administrative relationship to [her] expense reports,” but the claim would be spurious.
This accusation rattled me. As though infected by Herman’s view of me -- she apparently believed me capable of any underhanded, low, sordid, petty act -- I briefly entertained some fantastic notions. What if Herman broke into my office and planted her receipts among my papers? What if she tried to engineer a situation where I picked up her receipts without perceiving them, like Niall Macginnis passing the rune to Dana Andrews in Curse of the Demon?
I actually stood up from my desk and cased my own office. Maybe Herman inserted her receipts in these teaching notes, or in this stack of student papers? Maybe the receipts were mixed with some papers the secretary had given me? (Had the secretary ever given me anything made of paper?)
With my hand on a stack of papers, I caught a glimpse of my derangement, and snapped out of it. To an extent, you can will yourself back to your senses. The very idea of self-control, the mental image of a tool that you aim at yourself to fix a mental problem, can be useful if it takes you outside of yourself and your problem. (There have been times in my life when that trick did not work for me; one of those times will be the subject of a different post.)
Montaigne:
This fierceness and violence of desire hinders more than it serves the performance of what we undertake, fills us with impatience toward things that come out contrary or late, and with bitterness and suspicion toward the people we deal with. We never conduct well the thing that possesses and conducts us. “Passion handles all things ill.” (STATIUS.) He who employs in it only his judgment and skill proceeds more gaily.
When I was chair, people sometimes asked me how I liked it. I used to say that it sucked, I hated it, and I was learning a lot about human nature. My colleagues kept showing me sides of themselves that I had never seen before.
I tried to do what Montaigne advised. That is, I tried to do my job according to my standards, and keep my feelings out of it. The English department was an entertainment in which everyone performed flawlessly. Here was the new secretary, who wasn’t good at processing reimbursements, but she was perfect at being incompetent. Here was Herman, my former friend, who was always completely herself. Everything that happened to her, she reworked into an outlandish story about me. Her powers of invention were remarkable. Here was I, tearing apart my own office in a fit of paranoia, and on the verge of telling Herman my real opinion of her conduct.
I knew that I needed to write a timely reply to her email, but I forced myself to wait one hour, calm down, and prepare my class. Then I forced myself to delete half the words of my reply before sending. These are the words I sent:
Hello [Herman]
[The secretary] alerted me this morning that your expense report was missing. I wish I could help. Unfortunately I don’t know anything about the physical location of expense reports. My only contact with expense reports is on workday.
Best wishes
Aaron
Ok, thanks for writing back.
[H]
Several months ago, I wrote that luck protected me from being fired in 2020. My point about luck may have been unclear. It was lucky, for example, that I never had an outburst like Katie Kent’s where she yelled and swore at Dorothy Wang. Most people would have a moment like that. In a difficult situation, for a moment, you would lose control, and lash out. It’s a human thing to do. If I had done that, I believe I would have been fired.
Kent was protected by an administrator who backed her up. I was protected by luck. On the occasions when, inevitably, I lost my temper, nothing happened. I didn’t yell, I didn’t write anything down, I didn’t send anything, nobody saw anything. That was lucky.
Some of my readers tell themselves: “Kunin had some trouble at work, but he was a weirdo. Such things could never happen to me, because I have a pleasant personality and conventional opinions.” To them I say: it’s mostly luck. I think that I’m quite a decent guy, and I’ve never slept with a student, sold drugs to a student, embezzled money, or plagiarized someone else’s research, but I don’t think my decency is enough to protect me. I’ve been lucky. In 2020, people wanted to fire me, they looked for reasons to fire me, and, luckily, they couldn't find one.