Book Reviews and the Warm Fuzzies

 

Curmie published his first book review in an academic journal in 1991.  In all, I’ve written about 30 reviews on a wide range of topics for about a dozen different publications.  In some cases, I was only marginally qualified in the subdiscipline in question.  In others, especially more recently, I’ve been a legitimate authority, as well as being a full Professor (or Professor emeritus) rather than a grad student or rather green Assistant Professor.

The process has changed significantly in recent years, the biggest change being the increased level of editorial scrutiny.  A generation or more ago, I’d send in a review and it would be printed as written.  That was back when I was an early-career scholar, even a graduate student, often writing about topics on the periphery of my interests and expertise.  My most recent reviews, when I was a senior scholar writing about subjects in my proverbial wheelhouse, went through three or four drafts before they were deemed publishable.  Note: I didn’t become more ignorant or a worse writer in the interim.

Some of the changes came indirectly, no doubt, from the publishers rather than the editors: I received the same stupid comment—to include the chapter number rather than a descriptor like “longest” or “most interesting”—from book review editors from two different journals published by the same firm.  Actually, one of those “corrections” wasn’t from the book review editor himself, but was a snarky comment from his grad assistant.  You can imagine how much Curmie appreciated being condescended to by a grad student.  Other changes were just kind of dumb: one editor insisted that I change “whereas” to “while” (“whereas” was the better term).

But these are the kind of revisions at which one just shakes one’s head and shrugs.  The ones that actually affect the argument are far more problematic.  One author was writing about the production of a play by a female playwright from the 1950s.  There’s no video footage (of course), and if literally anyone who saw that production is still alive, I think we could forgive them for not remembering many details.  But the author decried the (alleged) sexism of the male newspaper reviewers who weren’t impressed with the production.  Nothing they said, or at least nothing the author quoted, struck me as anything but a negative response to a poor performance. 

Remember, they’re not talking about the play as written, but as performed, so the fact that the text isn’t bad (Curmie has read it) doesn’t render the criticism of the acting and directing invalid.  I said that in what amounted to my first draft, but was told that I needed to say that the allegations of sexism could have been true (well, duh!), but weren’t necessarily.  In my view, declaring suspicions as fact, even if there’s some supporting evidence, might cut it as a blog piece, but it isn’t scholarship.  But whatever…

In another review Curmie suggested that the mere fact that male dramatists wrote plays with specific actresses—their “muses”—in mind for the leading roles doesn’t mean that those women should share authorship credit any more than Richard Burbage should get co-authorship credit for Shakespeare’s plays.  I was ultimately able to make that point, but in a watered-down version. 

More recently, Curmie was asked to “tone down” a comment that several of the authors in what purported to be an interdisciplinary collection of essays were so committed to discipline-specific jargon, incredibly complex sentences, and sesquipedalian articulations (see what I did there?) that readers, even those well-versed in the subject matter—me, for example—would find those chapters unreasonably difficult to read, and might be tempted to conclude that the authors were more interested in strutting their intellectuality than in enlightening the reader. 

I stand by the analysis, but the editor was probably right to ask me to temper the cynicism.  I did so, but I kept the rest in a slightly revised version.  She seemed pleased, and told me she’d sent it off to press.  When it appeared in print, only the comment about jargon remained… and the verb wasn’t changed from plural to singular.  Sigh.

Perhaps the most telling episode was when I said that a book was extremely poorly edited and proofread.  I’ve never written a book, but I have published several chapters in collections of scholarly essays.  The process varies a little from publisher to publisher, but for one recent chapter I sent a draft to the book editor, who made editorial suggestions and proofread, and sent it back to me.  I approved some of the changes he suggested and made my case for not changing other parts of the essay.  After about three drafts, we both pronounced ourselves satisfied, and the essay went off to the series editor, who requested a couple of very minor changes.  And then it went to the publisher.  And then the professional proofreader.  And then back to the publisher.  And then back to me.  At least five different people proofread that chapter, some of us several times.

It’s still almost inevitable that some typo will still sneak by.  Of course, some publishers will cheat and rely on spellcheck, sometimes without even checking the final product.  I once encountered a textbook that intended to reference the 19^th century playwrights Henri Becque and Eugène Brieux, but rendered their surnames as Bisque and Brie—a nice lunch, perhaps, but hardly important dramatists.

But this book, published by a prominent academic press, was ridiculous.  There were four and five typos on a single page, inconsistent formatting so it was impossible to tell when quoted material began and ended, at least two (that I caught) glaring malapropisms, and a number of instances of sentences or paragraphs so convoluted it was literally impossible to tell what was intended.  We’re not talking “teh” for “the” or accidentally omitting the “l” in “public,” here.

I was insistent on making the point that the book was not yet ready to be published.  A lot of the scholarship was really excellent, but the volume read like a first draft, neither edited nor proofread.  Finally, the book review editor had to get permission from the journal’s editor-in-chief (!) for me to go ahead with that commentary.

Certainly Curmie’s more conservative friends and colleagies will nod knowingly at the response to those comments critiquing lazy feminism, and they’d be right to do so.  But I’d suggest that these examples are only the tip of the metaphoric iceberg.  The other two episodes I cited can’t be attributed to concerns about feminism or any of the other -isms or phobias that seem to dominate much of public discourse.

Rather, they strike me as yet another example of the dumbing-down of scholarship, both that which is expected of students and that which is expected of professional academics.  The former is a subject for another day.  The latter, sloppy argumentation or lack of professional oversight by people who are supposed to be good at this stuff, might conceivably be attributed to nothing more than corporate pressure: if a publishing house sends out a (free) review copy of a book, they expect undiluted praise or they won’t send copies to that journal again.  Curmie may be skeptical of all things corporate, but this seems a bit over the top even for him.

Curmie was just asked to be an outside examiner for a faculty member at another college who is applying to be promoted to Professor.  One of the things the college asks is a statement about how COVID affected scholarship in my field.  There are a host of indirect influences: closed libraries, the time drain of teaching simultaneously in person and online, etc.  It’s easy to see how these factors might affect the quantity of a scholar’s output, but they don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have any affect on the quality.

Could the need for unmodified positives be grounded in fear of legal proceedings from the publisher or author?  That doesn’t work for me, either.  Or is this phenomenon just academe’s version of “why can’t we all get along?”  Certainly the idea of reasoned debate is fading from our everyday lives.  Those TV shows from a generation ago—The Capital Gang, The McLaughlin Group, Crossfire, etc.—that often offered well-articulated arguments from both the left and the right are gone and pretty much forgotten.  News media in general have devolved into partisan outlets that say little more, as Buffalo Springfield sang over half a century ago, than “hooray for our side.”

The quest for truth, in academia as in journalism (and, it goes without saying, in politics), has been supplanted by a different end goal: it’s not about being right, it’s about being heard, and ultimately about “winning,” however that might be defined.  Ideologues of all descriptions claim that they’re being non-partisan; I smile ruefully and repeat my mantra that “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.”

After my most recent book review, I pretty well promised myself I’d never do another one.  If I change my mind about that, I’ll still write what I think, and I’ll still argue for the right to criticize as well as to praise.  My job is to evaluate the book, to point to both its strengths and its weaknesses so that prospective readers or purchasers can make a more informed decision about whether to read it or buy it.  If that makes me a “cold prickly” (apparently the preferred antonym for “warm fuzzy”), so be it.

This is a slightly edited but not fundamentally changed version of what first appeared as a “Curmie’s Conjectures” post on the Ethics Alarms page.

Eye Black Is Not Blackface. Duh.

If you see blackface here, please leave
this page.  It’s for intelligent people.

A few days ago, I commented on a post on Ethics Alarms regarding the high school principal in Sherman, Texas who declared that the musical Oklahoma! contains “mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content” “would come in third place in a battle of wits with a sack of hair and an anvil.”

Gentle Reader, I hereby retract that characterization.  It appears that Sherman Principal Scott Johnson was merely a good soldier, enforcing the dictates of a superintendent and school board that can’t decide if the Victorian age was a little too permissive.  So… Johnson appears capable of giving that anvil a run for its money. 

The good news is that the international attention this case received resulted first in a decision to re-instate the original student cast but in a shortened “kids” version of the musical that would have cut the solo from Max Hightower, the trans student at the center of the controversy, and finally—when the students and parents refused to accept that utterly stupid “compromise” or the notion that Oklahoma!, of all plays, ought to be bowdlerized—a return to the original version with the students the director cast.

More to the present point, when compared to Jeff Luna, the principal at Muirland Middle School in La Jolla, California, even the folks who did make the idiotic decisions that led to the kerfuffle would appear to embody all the best attributes of Solomon, Socrates, Confucius, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci rolled into one.  We do sorta know what Ado Annie means when she laments her inability to “say no,” after all.

I was about to say that what Luna did surpasses credulity, but, alas, it does not.  There are a lot of adjectives that do apply—“boneheaded,” “irrational,” and “unconstitutional” come to mind—but unfortunately “unbelievable” has no place on the list.

Last month, a Muirland 8^th-grader identified as J.A. attended a high school football game, looking like he does in the photo above.  That is, he wore eye black, just as he’s seen countless football players (and not a few baseball players) do; I won’t bother you with the literally dozens of photos of players of all races doing so.  Now, whether eye black has any direct practicality is a matter for debate.  It started as a means of keeping glare out of the eyes.  I have no idea whether it actually does that, and even if it does, it doesn’t require the amount used by J.A.  But that, of course, is irrelevant. 

There’s little difference between J.A. and those fans who paint their faces red because their favorite team is the Alabama Crimson Tide or who wear “cheeseheads” to support the Green Bay Packers.  Maybe the allure is primal, maybe it’s that face-painting is linked to war paint.  But there’s no “maybe” about the fact that used as J.A. did, it’s completely and utterly harmless… not to mention the fact that, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), “many game attendees wore face or body paint.”

There were, of course, no incidents at the game in question, and literally no one took any offense.  That’s because most people have more than a couple of brain cells.  Not so, apparently, the Idiot Luna.  A week or so after the game, he called J.A. and his parents to a meeting, at which the boy was suspended for two days and barred from attending future athletic contests.  Why?  Because, according to the official paperwork, J.A. “painted his face black at a football game,” which qualifies as an “offensive comment, intent to harm.”  In other words, Luna would need to undergo a couple of millennia of evolution to attain the mental acumen of pond scum. 

You can read an excellent delineation of the facts in the letter from FIRE’s Director of Public Advocacy Aaron Terr.  A brief précis: 1). J.A. “emulated the style of eye black worn by many athletes.”  2). “J.A. wore his eye black throughout the game without incident.”  3). “J.A.’s non-disruptive, objectively inoffensive face paint was constitutionally protected expression.”  4). “The complete lack of disruption is unsurprising, as the sight of fans in face paint is familiar to anyone who has ever attended a football game or other sporting event.”  5). “The claim that J.A.’s face paint constituted blackface is frivolous.”  6). “Muirland Middle School has no authority to discipline J.A. for his non-disruptive, constitutionally protected display of team spirit.”

The only part of this missive with which anyone could reasonably demur even slightly is the characterization of the eye black as a display of “team spirit.”  I doubt it was necessarily that, but it was certainly inoffensive, non-disruptive, commonplace, and constitutionally protected.  Terr needs to be more polite than I do, so I’ll allow his characterization of the assertion of blackface as “frivolous,” as opposed to the more accurate “fucking ridiculous.”

But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, “Wait!  There’s more!”  The family appealed the suspension, but the appeal was denied by the San Diego Unified School District, suggesting that they, too, are cognitively impaired.  The correct response, of course, would have been to uphold the appeal and fire Luna.

It’s difficult to tell if Luna is a Social Justice Warrior run amok, or simply a sports-ignorant walking example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, like the buffoons a few years ago who decided that the universally recognized gesture to denote a 3-point shot in basketball was a gang sign.  Ultimately, that distinction doesn’t matter—willful ignorance and blinkered paranoia are all but interchangeable—but it does matter that, alas, the situation is worse than even FIRE suggests.  

Whereas it is obvious that J.A.’s actions are utterly innocuous, and that the punishment is about three steps beyond absurd, that isn’t always the case.  Racial animus does indeed exist, and it is occasionally manifested at sporting events; there was a case less than an hour from Chez Curmie a year or so ago. 

I’m not going to get into whether expression that actually is offensive is constitutionally protected on school property.  Racism and its cousins in prejudice are unethical even if legal.  Luna and the district have demeaned all attempts to protect the Others (whoever that might be in terms of race, religion, gender identity, etc.) from harassment based simply on who they are. 

What is at play here is a variation on the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  When we accumulate enough examples of utterly inane allegations being brought by authority figures, we start to discount all such claims, even those which have merit.  J.A. and his family are bearing the brunt of this outrage, but we all suffer the consequences.

This is a slightly edited version of an essay that first appeared as a Curmie’s Conjectures post on Ethics Alarms.

The Revenge of the Wackadoodles

 

One of my favorite lines from the late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon is “Just when you thought it was safe to be bored / Trouble waiting to happen.” That lyric came to mind when I happened across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Hamline President Goes on the Offensive.”  Well, that lyric and one of my most oft-used phrases, “Oh, bloody hell!”. 

This rather lengthy article—over 3000 words—deserves to be read in its entirety, even though it may involve a (free but annoying) registration process, but I’ll try to hit the highlights here. The author is Mark Berkson, the Chair of the Religion Department at Hamline University. His was for a very long while the only voice, or at least the only audible one, on the Hamline campus to come to the defense of erstwhile adjunct art history professor Erika López Prater as she was being railroaded by the school’s administration on absurd charges of Islamophobia. 

You may recall the incident, Gentle Reader. Dr. López Prater was teaching a course in global art history, in which she showed images of a couple of paintings depicting the prophet Muhammad. Recognizing that there are some strains of Islam in which viewing such images is regarded as idolatrous, she made it clear both in the course syllabus and on the day of the lecture in question that students who chose not to look at those particular photos were free not to do so, without penalty. 

Ah, but that left too little room for victimhood. So student Aram Wedatalla blithely ignored those warnings and (gasp!) saw those images… or at least she says she did, which is not necessarily the same thing. Wounded to the core by her own sloth and/or recklessness, she then howled to the student newspaper and, urged on by Nur Mood, the Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations (also the advisor to the Muslim Student Association, of which Wedatalla was president), to the administration. The banner was then raised high by one David Everett, the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence. (Those folks at Hamline sure do like their pretentious job titles, don’t they?) 

Anyway, Everett proclaimed in an email sent to literally everyone at Hamline that López Prater had been “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” To be fair, he didn’t identify her by name, but there weren’t a lot of folks teaching global art history. Everett was just getting warmed up. He subsequently co-authored, or at least jointly signed, a statement with university president Fayneese Miller that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” Not at any university worthy of the name, it shouldn’t. Anyway, López Prater was de facto fired, because destroying the careers of scholars for even imaginary offenses has become a blood sport for administrators (and, in public colleges, for politicians). 

There followed a not insignificant period in which the university administration was justly savaged for their disregard for facts or for due process, and for the hypocrisy of their actions, which clearly contradicted the university’s pretensions to upholding academic freedom. These denunciations came not only from other art historians, but also from such organizations as the American Association of University Professors, the National Association of Scholars, the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression, the American Freedom Alliance, PEN America, and (oh, yeah…) the Muslim Public Affairs Council. It wasn’t pretty, but it was richly deserved. 

Finally, far too late and far too insincere, there was a sheepish admission that calling López Prater “Islamophobic” was “flawed.” Any with more cranial capacity than a turnip would say “freaking ridiculous,” but hey, it’s a step, right? 

This torrent of negative publicity no doubt also helped to catalyze a number of other faculty to evolve from their invertebrate state and join Professor Berkson in defense of López Prater’s perfectly reasonable pedagogy. The faculty, now with the courage engendered by a very one-sided national response to events at Hamline, ultimately voted overwhelmingly to demand that President Miller resign. Also, of course, López Prater sued the university. As far as I can determine, that case is ongoing. 

Like a lot of other people, I thought, despite some reservations, that it was now “safe to be bored,” to coin a phrase. The matter was now in the hands of the Trustees, and the only hope to salvage any scraps of what legitimacy Hamline may once have enjoyed would be to show Miller the door, taking Everett and Mood with her. They did not do so, of course. Instead, they behaved like Trustees (Regents, Councilors, whatever) have done at every place I ever worked in career that stretched into six decades, from the ‘70s to the ‘20s: they couldn’t admit that they were the folks who hired Miller and that they’d made a mistake. They punted, as such craven and often anti-intellectual bodies are wont to do. 

So Miller is still in place until she retires “early” in June. Of course, she says, the events of the last year or so had no effect on the decision to retire. Oh, and “No one was let go for showing an image.” Also, that Nigerian prince is absolutely above-board. Just so you know.  (Okay, maybe that last part is made up.)

But there was, to quote Zevon, trouble waiting to happen. A couple of weeks ago, Miller and her minions presented a forum with the heady (but, of course, misleading) title “Academic Freedom and Cultural Perspectives: Challenges for Higher Ed Today and Tomorrow.” An actual discussion offering different perspectives on how to weigh the sometimes competing values of academic freedom and respect for cultural differences would be welcome. But such things almost never happen. There’s virtually always a point of view imposed from above; in my experience, this “correct” position is seldom… well… correct. 

This event, at least according to Professor Berkson, whom I tend to believe, was staged for no reason other than to excuse the inexcusable behavior of the Hamline administration. The first two people to speak: Everett and Miller. The latter declared that this was an “offensive” move. She pronounced it to contrast it with “defensive,” although stressing the second syllable would almost certainly have made her statement more accurate. 

She claimed that the real threat to academic freedom was happening in places like Florida and Texas. Well, she’s right that there are threats in those places: just because some of the allegations are exaggerated doesn’t mean there isn’t legitimate cause for concern… or, indeed, for anger. But the idea that Miller and her ilk are somehow innocent because others are guilty, too? No, that argument has no merit. Dr. Berkson is kinder than I would be when he writes that “Miller fails to see that there are many ways that academic freedom can be threatened.” 

Anyway, the two major culprits in the art history debacle served to introduce the keynote speaker, Michael Eric Dyson. Dyson is an intelligent, well-educated man (PhD from Princeton), and an eloquent speaker. He is best known for his ongoing rhetoric that blacks in this country continue to suffer from centuries of ongoing oppression. (Perhaps that’s why his net worth is estimated at a paltry $5 million?) 

His speech, writes Berkson, made some useful points, but ultimately he contributed to what Berkson calls “essentially a full-throated defense of the administration’s actions against López Prater.” “If I got Muslim students,” Dyson said, “and I know what upsets them, I got the freedom to show what I want to show, but why would you? What’s your point? What’s your intention?” Berkson, himself an authority on Islam, responds:

It is clear that López Prater had no intent to upset anyone. She was teaching an important work of Islamic art, which is part of her job. She showed concern for her Muslim students by giving them multiple warnings, in writing and orally, to avert their eyes when she showed the image if they so wanted. This is nothing like the examples — some given more than once by many speakers at the event — of Holocaust denial, flat earth theory, fomenting an insurrection, and using the N-word in the classroom. None of these absurdly inappropriate disanalogies are remotely similar to the challenge that arose in López Prater’s art history class and that many of us regularly face — responsibly teaching relevant and suitable academic content that might be disturbing to some students.

Note to Dr. Dyson: don’t ask rhetorical questions if there’s somebody ready to answer them.

There followed a panel discussion featuring three bused-in speakers: Stacy Hawkins (her bio on the Rutgers law school website features the word “diversity” a dozen times, if that gives you an idea of her priorities), anti-racist activist Tim Wise, and Robin DiAngelo (whose books include such titles as White Fragility and Nice Racism). The sole representative of Hamline faculty was political scientist David Schultz; given the fact that Miller would rather chew on razor blades that allow Berkson a forum, Schultz is a more than reasonable representative of a professoriate more interested in developing students’ analytical skills than in inculcating them with a particular perspective. 

Berkson has a lot more to say in his article—about power dynamics involving administrators, faculty (with sub-categories of tenured, tenure-track, and adjunct) and students; about the fact that none of the panelists (except Schultz) addressed the López Prater case even obliquely; about the casual assumption on the part of the guest panelists (and the Hamline administration) that faculty don’t actually care about their students’ well-being; about the distinction between freedom of speech and academic freedom; about the fact that the AAUP recognizes the delicate balance between academic freedom and respect for differing perspectives, but nonetheless describes the actions of the Hamline administration as running a “de facto campaign of vilification” against López Prater based on an “inaccurate and harmful understanding of the nature of academic freedom in the classroom.” 

I do urge you to read Berkson’s entire article if this topic interests you at all. But I’ll close with this: university students are old enough to contemplate ideas that may make them uncomfortable. Perhaps these different perspectives are grounded in race, or religion, or gender, or politics—for these purposes, it doesn’t matter. Trying new things is sometimes scary, and the intellectual terrain that must be crossed can be something of a minefield, but negotiating those hazards is imperative for faculty and students alike. 

Figuring out how to make that crossing successfully is not merely an admirable goal; it is a necessary one. Colloquia featuring different approaches are desperately needed. And there are any number of examples of situations in which there’s a legitimate argument for both sides of an argument (e.g., if López Prater hadn’t offered students the ability to opt out). This isn’t it. Stacking the deck with speakers eager to defend an indefensible position isn’t helpful; it’s the equivalent of defending Lauren Boebert or Jamaal Bowman for their recent headline-making misadventures.

Professor Berkson closes by citing Professor Schultz, who said of the conversation: “Our discussion here about diversity and academic freedom ... is probably at the most superficial level that we can have. … At the end of the day, let’s have a real discussion.”  Berkson comments simply, “Amen.”  

“Amen,” indeed.

Note: as has often been the case of late, this post, or one very like it except for a couple of stylistic edits, first appeared on the Ethics Alarms page.

Curmie Doesn’t Like Being Lied To

 

It would seem that prevarication has supplanted baseball as the national pastime.  Name a politician you’d trust to tell you the truth if a lie would be more convenient.  Curmie can’t, and if there’s one out there, it sure as hell isn’t one of the frontrunners in the next Presidential election.

Curmie has experienced two separate incidents over the past couple of weeks.  What they share is not simply that someone failed to provide a service they were obligated to provide, but that they lied about it and showed literally no remorse for having done so.

Incident #1: Although Curmie has retired from teaching, his university has a provision that emeritus faculty are entitled to an office if one is available, and one is.  Because I’m still doing some academic writing, I’m grateful for the workspace, the use of a computer, access to a printer and scanner, etc.  We’re now back in the building we occupied from the time I came here until the summer of 2020, when we were displaced to across campus while renovations and expansions were happening to our “home.”  (We were told we had to move out by the end of May 2020 or we couldn’t move back in the fall of 2021; we couldn’t move in at all until August of this year, and the building won’t really be ready for at least another few months.  But that’s a rant for another day.)

The problems are two-fold.  First, the new office is less than half as big as the one Curmie moved out of three years ago.  Second, it was designed by an idiot, or, more likely, a committee of idiots.  The desk, made of cheap but heavy material, is far too big for an office of that size.  There are permanently mounted cabinets above the desk, but no place for files.  Curmie could go on.  And on.  And on. The biggest annoyance is that the offices on my side of the hallway (the smaller ones, with windows offering a view of the convenience store across the street) got only a single bookcase.  Curmie seriously doubts that whoever decided that has ever as much as met a faculty member in the humanities, let alone listened to one.

Curmie was able to get a second bookcase, but they’re absurdly deep, so you can’t put a third one against the remaining space on the only available wall or you could never get past it to sit at that enormous L-shaped desk.  Despite donating over 1000 books to the new department library and taking a dozen boxes home since moving out of my former office, I still have far too many books to fit on the available shelves.  I’ll no doubt need to do another purge when I retire retire, but most of what remains are things I anticipate using in upcoming research projects, and many of these volumes aren’t in the university library.

The solution, obviously, was to buy another bookcase (the university sure as hell wouldn’t provide one) that will fit the available space.  So I did.  I found something on Amazon that met my purposes.  It would have been perfect instead of merely good if those stupid cabinets didn’t extend an inch or so past the desk, and I can’t move the desk (even if I had the strength) and still be able to open the door.  The new bookcase won’t solve the problem, but it will help.

It was to be delivered Friday the 1st.  At 10:37 that morning I got a message from Amazon that the USPS had tried unsuccessfully to deliver it.  This, of course, was a lie; they never bothered.  I was less than pleased.  Anyway, I found the tracking number and did a little investigating.  According to that information, the package was loaded onto a truck and was “out for delivery” at 6:20 a.m., but it wasn’t delivered because—get this—my mailbox was full!  This was both a lie and, of course, irrelevant even it were true.  Bookcases, even those requiring assembly, tend not to fit into mailboxes.

So Curmie called the USPS 800 number, and had a charming conversation with the robot voice.  Now, it became clear that the reason for non-delivery could have been that the package was “large.” Well, duh.  I was told I could pick up the package from the post office starting Saturday, or arrange to have it delivered that day.  I chose the latter, but, needless to say, the package didn’t show up on Saturday.

I’ll grant them Sunday and Monday (Labor Day).  Nothing Tuesday, either, of course, and the tracking now said the bookcase was being held at the post office.  (All the previous stuff about being loaded for delivery had conveniently vanished.)  In other words, it had been sitting in the back room there since Friday, and if they’d told me the truth I could have picked it up then and had the weekend to assemble it without disturbing my colleagues.  But apparently honesty is in short supply at the USPS.

So I went to the post office on Tuesday.  I asked why the tracking said it had been “out for delivery” early Friday morning but wasn’t delivered.  I was told that “No one was here that early.”  Then something about the timestamp being linked to when it got scanned in.  I decided not to bother to ask the obvious question of who scanned it in if there was no one there. 

Anyway, the woman who waited on me went into the back room and then re-appeared carrying the package.  It had “heavy” stickers on it in three or four places, but she managed it just fine.  In its unassembled state, the bookcase is about the size of a carry-on bag and weighs maybe 45 or 50 pounds.  I had no trouble getting it to my car or loading it into my trunk.  (I confess that I asked our tech director to borrow a hand truck to get it to my office since I couldn’t park anywhere near the elevator; he chose to carry it, instead.  This involved a trek of 50 yards or so and a set of stairs.)

OK, it’s hardly news that the USPS will avoid work whenever possible, and certainly the utterly false statements about “out for delivery” and the reason for non-delivery are all too typical.  But, Gentle Reader, as they say on the late-night infomercials, wait! There’s more!  Presumably they knew when they got the package from Amazon that they weren’t actually going to deliver it… or maybe it’s just the locals who decided that.  Either way, the USPS got paid to deliver the bookcase to me and failed to do so.

The only question is whether Amazon is responsible at all.  Other couriers are perfectly willing to deliver “heavy” packages (see below).  Why would Amazon choose the USPS?  Surely they’ve been around the block enough times to know that the postal service isn’t necessarily going to treat their (Amazon’s) customers right. 

Still, it’s easier to forgive a less than inspired business decision than outright prevarication.  But, alas, there’s not a lot an online customer can do to avoid the mendacious organization.  And it doesn’t help that it’s a government agency.

It’s not just those with ties to the government, though.  Private companies feel the need to get in on the act, too.  So let’s move on to Incident #2.

We’ve been in our current house a little over 22 years.  The garage door opener wasn’t new when we moved in.  A few days ago, the chain snapped.  So I went to the local Lowe’s, checked out the possibilities, came home and discussed the options with Beloved Spouse, and ordered a new opener online.  So far, so good. 

FedEx delivered it when they said they would, last Thursday.  (By the way, the box is essentially the same size and weight as that unassembled bookcase I mentioned last time, and FedEx delivered it, no problem.)  But whereas 20 years ago I would probably have done the installation myself, for a variety of reasons I decided to just have Lowe’s arrange for a professional installation.  That’s where the fun begins.

Lowe’s farms out this kind of job through Handy or their subsidiary Angi.  We’d had pretty good luck with Handy in the past; our experience with Angi was, shall we say, less pleasurable.  So we were apprehensive when it was Angi, not the parent company, that contacted me.

But I filled out the requested information, including that with a little notice I could be available at any time.  I was given three choices of when the work could be done, and chose late afternoon on Sunday.  The text messages urging me to be “excited” that the installation was soon to happen began on Friday.  Sorry, I come by my nom de plume honestly, and few curmudgeons get excited over garage door installations.  Relieved, perhaps.  Grateful, even.  Excited?  Nope.

So then came the message at 6:30 Sunday morning that “due to a last-minute issue with [my] pro,” they were going to re-schedule until Tuesday.  This led to more texts to get excited, and then another re-scheduling until Thursday.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Well, not quite.  The 3:00 a.m. text that woke me up on Thursday declared that the installation was “cancelled unexpectedly.” 

“Cancelled,” as in “we’re washing our hands of this whole business”?  Really?  “Unexpectedly”?  So I called the local Lowe’s that morning.  Naturally, I got a robo-voice, but was able to get transferred to a different robo-voice, and then to someone in the installations department (I’m guessing she’s not located in my small town in East Texas, but I suppose she could be).

According to what she was seeing on her screen, the installation was still scheduled for 11 a.m. that day.  It was, in fact, never scheduled for 11 a.m.; the cancelled appointment was for 3 p.m.  I immediately had a flashback to the Firesign Theatre’s most famous line, “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.”  Somebody—Angi? Lowe’s?—was screwing up.  Big time.

Anyway, the Lowe’s rep “reached out” to Handy, and ultimately put someone from there on the phone with me.  This woman’s accent was often incomprehensible, but I did get that the cancellation was because this was the third delay of the same project, and that’s what they always do.  She acted totally befuddled that I didn’t accept company policy as a divinely inspired reason for jerking a customer around.  And she did confirm my initial suspicions that there never was anyone assigned to do the job, so all that crap about “last-minute issues with [my] pro” was simply a lie.  Like the woman at the post office described in my last post, she at least purported not to understand why I objected to being lied to.

This is when the woman from Lowe’s went into high dudgeon: “We pay you to provide this service to our customers.  Are you telling me you’re unable to do that?”  Well, yes.  But the Lowe’s rep pulled back a little when it became clear that my refund was already underway.  That still left me with a garage door opener still sitting in its box, where it is somewhat less useful than when professionally installed.  The Lowe’s woman asked me if I wanted to speak to an Angi manager.  Yes.  Yes, I did. 

A manager called me back a couple of hours later.  She mouthed all the right platitudes about how sorry they were for the inconvenience, but (predictably) showed no remorse for having lied to a customer.  “My pro” never existed.  There are only two possible choices: either Angi knew there weren’t enough contractors in this area to meet the demand or they didn’t.

If the former, then not only were their excuses to me a lie, but they had also, in effect, lied to Lowe’s, and made that company guilty of false advertising.  If the latter, then Hanlon’s Razor kicks in, and they’re just morons.  I’d told them I could be available as needed.  The logical thing to do is to put a call out to their workers in this area and say that they had a customer who could be available at any time but would like the job completed as quickly as possible, then let the people actually doing the job pick a date and time.  Nope.  They decided on an arbitrary time and expected both me and prospective installers to accommodate.

That is, there was no one available Sunday at 4:00, Tuesday at 4:00, or Thursday at 3:00… but there very well might have been on Friday or Saturday or Monday or Wednesday, or at a different time on Sunday, Tuesday, or Thursday.  I claim no expertise on running a business, but I do have list of a few things not to do.  This kind of scheduling incompetence is Exhibit A.  No… wait… it’s Exhibit B.  Lying to customers is exhibit A.

The good news is that I was able to follow a different course, and the guy showed up at my door less than 24 hours after initial contact.  The better news is that Angi got nary a nickel from this transaction.

As has sometimes been the case in the past, this post began as a guest post—well, actually as two guest posts—on Ethics Alarms.  You can find them here and here.  There has been a little more editing than normal, but, Gentle Reader, you will certainly recognize the content.  Curmie apologizes for taking so long to get this version posted.

 

 

Confucius and the Fourth Circuit

Twentysomething years ago, a few months after completing my PhD, I got a phone call from my mentor in Asian theatre, who, upon learning my job search wasn’t going as well as I might have hoped, asked if I wanted to teach a couple sections of the university’s Eastern Civilizations course. I asked if I was really qualified to teach such a course. His response: “You know something, and you can read.”

 

Based largely on his recommendation, I got an interview for the position. I made no attempt to conceal my ignorance of a lot of what I’d be teaching. But the department had struggled with grad students who had lost control of their classrooms, and I’d taught full-time for ten years before entering the doctoral program; I got the job. The head of the Eastern Civ program closed the interview with “There are some books in my office you’ll want to read before you start.” I knew something, and I could read. 

That’s relevant to my consideration of the recent ruling of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University, in which a tenured faculty member claimed to have been punished for arguing against certain initiatives undertaken by his department. I’m no lawyer, so there’s some legalese I’m not so sure about, and I have no interest in chasing down all the precedents cited by either the majority or the dissent to see if they really say what these judges say they say. But I know something and I can read. 

More to the point, one of the texts I taught in that Eastern Civ course was Confucius’s Analects, which I had to get to know a lot better than I did previously in order to teach it to someone else. One of the central tenets of Confucian thought was his argument against having too many laws, as no one could possibly predict all the various special circumstances surrounding every dispute. Context matters; timing matters; motives matter. Confucius’s solution was to turn everything over to a wise counselor (like him) who would weigh all the relevant elements on a case by case basis. That’s not the way our justice system works, nor would it be practical, but it’s easy to see its appeal… in theory, at least. 

Significantly, Confucius’s reservations about laws’ inability to anticipate all the possible combinations of circumstances are the first cousin if not the sibling of what Jack Marshall of Ethics Alarms calls the “ethics incompleteness principle,” which asserts that there “are always anomalies on the periphery of every normative system, no matter how sound or well articulated.” 

An extension of this is that what is lawful and what is just are related but inevitably not identical concepts. The problem is magnified when it’s not just the law, but previous court decisions, that are ambiguous. Where, for example, does the First Amendment’s guarantee of free expression leave off and an employer’s desire for a congenial and (generally speaking) united workplace begin? Does it matter if the employer is a government agency? If it’s a university? If the alleged miscreant has tenure? If the place is just a little awkward as opposed to a war zone? Is academic freedom a relevant concern? The answer to the first question appears to be “well, it depends”; all of the seemingly disjunctive questions would appear to be best answered by “sort of.” 

The basic facts are these: Stephen Porter teaches statistics in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Adult & Higher Education at North Carolina State University. He claims to have been punished—not fired, exactly, but ostracized and placed in a situation which could likely result in his position being retrenched—for being outspoken about what he perceived to be an abandonment of “rigorous methodological analysis in favor of results-driven work aimed at furthering a highly dogmatic view of ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘inclusion.’” 

Porter says that three moments between 2016 and 2018 are at the center of his claim. The first came in the spring of 2016, when he objected to the addition of a question about diversity on student evaluation forms because he believed the question to be insufficiently researched. 

The second occasion was two years later, when he sent an email to departmental colleagues linking to an article in Inside Higher Ed which criticized a departmental search led by Alyssa Rockenbach. Porter appended the comment, “Did you all see this? … This kind of publicity will make sure we rocket to number 1 in the rankings. Keep up the good work, Alyssa!” 

In a subsequent meeting with Penny Pasque, then the department chair, Porter argued that Rockenbach had “cut corners” in vetting a candidate “out of a desire to hire a Black scholar whose work focused on racial issues.” (That candidate, by the way, had been fired from his previous position for financial misconduct.) 

That fall, Porter published a brief blog piece entitled “ASHE Has Become a Woke Joke.” His commentary concluded, “I prefer conferences where 1) the attendees and presenters are smarter than me and 2) I constantly learn new things. That’s why I stopped attending ASHE several years ago and switched to AEFP.” [ASHE is the Association for the Study of Higher Education; AEFP is the Association for Education Finance and Policy.] 

Finally, that fall, the department considered hiring a new faculty member. Pasque changed what was originally scheduled as a meeting of the HEPA (the Higher Education Program Area) faculty to discuss the candidate, and, with only a small number of faculty present in a virtual meeting, proposed that Porter leave HEPA. 

Feeling ambushed, Porter responded, “Give me a fucking break, folks. I was the one who said [the potential hire] should come. And now I’m the bad guy because I don’t want to leave Higher Ed for a non-existent program area.” This, of course, led to further tensions, including a reprimand for his language. Things escalated from there, and Porter was involuntarily removed from HEPA and de facto prevented from having advisees because of “lack of collegiality” and complaints from graduate students (that would be a grand total of two of the sixty grad students, by the way). 

Porter claimed his comments were protected speech, and that the university violated his First Amendment rights; he sued the university and several individuals. The university saw things otherwise. The Fourth Circuit, by a vote of 2-1, agreed with the university. Unsurprisingly, for different and predictable reasons, both FIRE (who had filed an amicus brief on Porter’s behalf) and Jonathan Turley disagreed. 

Here’s where my “knowing something” becomes relevant. Curmie has no opinion about whether the relevant precedent is Pickering v. Board of Education or Garcetti v. Ceballos, but he does know how universities operate. Let’s start with a couple of points that clearly work against Porter. 

First, the chances that he’s an asshole as opposed to merely someone whose political stances the administration doesn’t like is quite high. He says his response to that student evaluation question was “was amicable in tone, although perhaps embarrassing” to the person presenting the proposal. That’s clearly a subjective, self-serving, and retrospective view (not discounting the possibility that it’s also accurate). 

And sending a taunting email to a colleague who has been embarrassed in a national publication, especially when the anonymous source for the article is quite likely to be Porter himself, is more than a little unprofessional. Copying the rest of the department only aggravates the situation. 

Secondly, Porter’s blog post did indeed damage the reputation of the university, even if he has a point, since it led to a rebuttal from the president of an important professional organization in the field in her keynote address. The old adage of “don’t shit where you eat” is advice Porter does not seem to have taken to heart. 

And it’s pretty clear that Porter did little to mend the fences with his departmental colleagues when warned that failure to do so would have repercussions. 

But there are considerations in the other direction, too. (If there are lawyers reading this and Curmie is screwing up the legal arguments, please correct him.) First off, being a curmudgeon is (I trust, given my sobriquet) not illegal, and comments remain protected speech except in specific instances—sedition, incitement, slander, etc. (There’s another exception we’ll come to in a moment.) 

The fact that Porter is a tenured faculty member at a state university carries three (count ‘em, three!) protections. 1). Whereas most businesses have the authority to sanction employee speech (“you can say what you want, you just can’t do so and work for us”), there’s a specific exemption for university faculty, at least in certain circumstances. 2). Private enterprises, including universities, have at least some authority to maintain their own rules, provided they are clearly stated and equitably enforced, but state universities do not have this freedom. 3). Tenure brings with it the full degree of academic freedom, which has come to include the ability to criticize the decisions of their administration. 

The majority decision rests, apparently, on two foundations. One is that the presumed lack of chronological propinquity between the blog post and the department chair’s response, and between Porter’s outburst in the meeting and his removal from HEPA indicates that the latter is not a direct result of the former. Here’s where quoting Dr. Porter directly (from a different context) seems the appropriate rejoinder: “Give me a fucking break, folks!” Of course it was retaliation. The court’s argument that the time lapse means anything suggests an ignorance of both the way universities operate and, indeed, of human nature. (It also doesn’t speak well for Porter’s legal team.) 

The other argument is that Porter was speaking as an employee, and is therefore not entitled to the First Amendment protections he would have as a private citizen. (This is why Elon Musk had the legal right to fire that engineer who told him the truth instead of what he wanted to hear.) Indeed, Porter supposedly said he was “just doing [his] job” in questioning the student evaluation proposal. If nothing else, this comment elicited one of my all-time favorite lines in judicial decisions: in his dissent, Judge Julius N. Richardson writes, “Superman deflects praise by saying that he’s ‘just doing his job,’ even though the citizens of Metropolis never cut him a paycheck.” 

In fact, that episode could be interpreted either way. Yes, Porter was acting as an employee in one sense, but as a statistician with a particular interest in this kind of survey, he was employing his particular skills. Does this qualify as his “research,” which would make his speech protected? I’m gonna call this one a wash. 

The blog post would seem to meet the requirements of protected speech: it’s written as a private citizen, expressing an opinion on an area of public interest. (I’m interested, and I have no connections, positive or negative, to the organization in question.) Still, the blog does identify Porter as a faculty member at North Carolina State… or at least it does now; I presume it did when the essay was posted. Does that mean he was functioning as an employee? I don’t think so, but one could make the case. 

Finally, there’s the business about the new hire and the ensuing brouhaha. Here, there’s no question that Porter was uncivil, but he was certainly provoked. Curmie is pretty certain he never told colleagues to “give me a fucking break,” but substituting “damned” for “fucking” would increase the likelihood he’s uttered that sentence fairly significantly. 

Yes, Porter was “uncollegial” at that moment, but Curmie offers the following in response. We’re talking about a one instance (or perhaps two or three, if we include the other incidents) over the period of several years. This does not a pattern make. (Yes, there may have been other incidents that didn’t make it to the court case.) 

Collegiality is, of course, a good thing in general terms, and it is essential to some degree in some disciplines: in my field, theatre, for instance, if the director and designers can’t get along, it will indeed affect the work product of the institution. But even here, there’s no need to like each other, just to work collaboratively. I don’t know enough about what people in a Leadership, Policy and Adult & Higher Education department do, but from an outsider’s perspective, it doesn’t seem like any high degree of collegiality would be a sine qua non. Moreover, whereas collegiality is sometimes, probably too often, a consideration as to whether someone gets a promotion, Curmie has never seen it used in what amounts to a demotion. 

Finally, and most importantly, there’s an increasingly ominous trend to use “uncollegial” to mean “insufficiently obeisant.” Disagreements are at the center of the academic project. Similarly, the most valuable comments on, for example, Ethics Alarms, aren’t the ones that say “You’re absolutely right, Jack”; they’re the variations on “yeah, but…” or even “I disagree because…” There are some issues on which we’ll never agree, but hearing an articulate rationale for an opinion with which we disagree is how we learn, and that, Gentle Reader, is a good thing. 

When Curmie started his career, the concept of “shared governance” was alive and well. It’s now on life support, in danger of flat-lining in the very near future. Administrators are increasingly overpaid relative to faculty, increasingly autocratic, increasingly dismissive of anyone who questions their latest harebrained scheme. And Trustees/Regents/whatever at state universities listen only to the governor who appointed them or, occasionally, to high-ranking administrators; students, faculty, staff, and alumni are ignored… unless, of course, they happen to be rich. 

So, where does this leave us in this case? It ought to be self-evident that legal decisions ought to be based on the law, but here the law doesn’t really clarify things very much, as so much depends on definitions that are neither clear nor fixed. But now is when we listen to Confucius and search out the most just solution. 

It’s possible that stronger legal case is that of the university.  But it’s clear to me, at least, that Dr. Porter is the more aggrieved party. I wouldn’t necessarily relish having him as a colleague, but from my perspective the Fourth Circuit got this one wrong. Of course, Curmie was an opinionated professor who occasionally had the audacity to say out loud that not all decisions emanating from administrators’ offices were divinely inspired, so perhaps he’s not the most unbiased source.

This piece was written as the third installment of “Curmie’s Conjectures” on the Ethics Alarms blog.  I have made a couple of minor stylistic changes and corrected a typo or two here, but the argument remains the same.  As with earlier such posts, there is much more likely to be discussion there than here; you are welcome to head there... or not.