Thoughts on a Play Curmie Hasn't Seen

Henry Drummond (Billy Eugene Jones) interrogates
Matthew Harrison Brady (Dakin Matthews)
in the Arena Stage production of Inherit the Wind.

The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee classic Inherit the Wind has played an important role in Curmie’s life more than once.  He first encountered the play when he was in high school, at a time when he began having real doubts about organized religion in general and Christianity in particular.  Of course, this was in the early ‘70s, a time of turbulence in American society in general—the Vietnam War, civil rights, what was then called “women’s liberation,” campus protests, drug culture…  Not all of those things had much of a direct effect on Curmie, but what had always been taken for granted was increasingly being questioned.

The play, of course, was based on the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee in 1925.  The irreverence of Henry Drummond, the Clarence Darrow character, shows towards Matthew Harrison Brady (William Jennings Bryan) really caught Curmie’s attention.  He was particularly fond of the bit about where Cain’s wife came from: “Figure somebody pulled off another creation, over in the next county?”  That’s the kind of snark that appealed a lot to an adolescent who wanted desperately to be rebellious but couldn’t quite handle the social discomfort.  Fifty-something years later, Curmie still approves.

Above all, though, Curmie was introduced to the idea that drama can be about something, not just pretty words or an engaging story.  He hadn’t put all the pieces together yet, but this play was indeed destined to play a role in Curmie’s career choices, especially the willingness to explore the more academic side of the business after it became clear that he had more intellect than acting talent.

Speaking of which…  A few years later, in the summer between his freshman and sophomore years of college, Curmie auditioned for a production of Inherit the Wind in the summer season of the local college, whose theatre building was literally across the street from his house.  He was cast, not in the role he wanted, but cast.  His role may be the most difficult he’s ever played: not because it was a lead (Curmie has had a couple, though not many), but precisely because it wasn’t.  Part of the difficulty was, no doubt, due to Curmie’s inexperience; things would certainly have been easier had he had a few more shows behind him before essaying the part. 

But a good deal of the struggle came from the role itself.  Curmie played Harry Y. Esterbrook, the announcer for WGN radio in Chicago.  In the trial scenes, which are at the center of the play, Esterbrook is on stage, facing the audience, every moment.  All those clichés about how “acting is reacting” were certainly true for that part.  Curmie had very few lines to hide behind or build a character around, and it was one of those roles that can’t really help the show, but sure can hurt it.

But what Curmie really got out of that production was something different.  He had no choice but to watch the other actors, and indeed really to pay attention to them.  While Esterbrook was watching Drummond or Brady or Hornbeck (the H. L. Mencken character), Curmie was watching actors more skilled—whether by experience, talent, or both—than himself.  He noticed the difference between standing on the line and before it, the subtle but noticeable turn of the head that set up a moment, the pause that made the audience listen more intently to what followed.  He also listened to the director, who was excellent in some ways but given to rants… and he saw the veteran actors pretty much ignore these outbursts.  If you’re screaming all the time, it doesn’t matter that you’re screaming now.  That applies to life in general, of course, but especially to the stage.

Curmie got better as an actor, in large part because of that show: not good enough to make a living at it, but he did play a few featured roles in student productions as an undergrad and even a couple of leads in amateur productions after graduation.  But without even contemplating the possibility that he might someday be a director, he learned a great deal from the experience of Inherit the Wind about how to do that job, too.

It is ironic, to be sure, that whereas Curmie did indeed end up acting in a couple dozen more plays and directing 60 or so over the course of his career, his job was as a theatre scholar, and it wasn’t until years after being in that production of Inherit the Wind that he realized that the play is about the Scopes trial in very much the same way that The Crucible is about the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century: in other words, as a stand-in for something else.  In both cases, that “something else” was the anti-communist fervor exemplified by investigations by Joseph McCarthy et al. in the Senate and HUAC in the House.  Whereas Arthur Miller concentrated on the false accusations, Lawrence and Lee were more about the suppression of ideas, but the two plays end up in pretty much the same place, and do so in similar fashion, by creating a fictive world that approximates but does not reproduce historical events.

Cates, of course, is found guilty.  His fine has been paid, but he has no future in this small Tennessee town.  Drummond recognizes this, but provides a bit of context: “You don’t suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you?  Tomorrow it’ll be something else—and another fella will have to stand up.  And you’ve helped give him the guts to do it!”  We are left with the confidence that Cates, probably more than the IRL person on whom he is based, will be fine.

While it is a little embarrassing that Curmie took literally years to figure out that a play written in the immediate aftermath of the McCarthy era might be about something more than just a 30-year-old trial in Tennessee, at least he’s perceptive enough to notice that there’s a reason for theatre companies in 2026 to choose this particular chestnut.  Being that “next fella” matters, especially as attempts by the right to suppress any expression they don’t like are springing up faster than zits on prom night.  

Curmie started to list the cases he’s written about just in this academic year, but that list got really long.  A couple of highlights, then: the cancellation of a student-directed play because there are… you know… <whispers> gay people in it; the professor who was fired and the retired cop who was charged with a felony (!) for posting memes insufficiently hagiographic about Charlie Kirk (certainly far less celebratory than Dear Leader’s recent outburst about the passing of Robert Mueller); the Texas A&M philosophy prof who was forbidden to assign a passage from Plato, and his colleague from a different department whose class was cancelled after it had already met because he couldn’t predict which specific days class discussion might veer into territory the censorial regime didn’t like.  And on and on. 

Plus, of course, we should mention the various felonies committed by ICE/DHS/whoever against citizens exercising their 1st Amendment rights, including but by no means limited to the murder of Alex Pretti.  Plus, of course, all of those incidents that Curmie posted about on his Facebook page but never wrote about… and the hundreds (no doubt) that Curmie never even heard about.  Yeah, it’s time for a production of Inherit the Wind, which, of course, also highlights the dangers of cherry-picking which sections of the Bible should form the foundation of a weltanschauung and which can be readily ignored.

So… anyway… there is such a production at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, presented in cooperation with Seattle-based The Feast company (director Ryan Guzzo Purcell is the founder of The Feast).  It is a trimmed-down version: there must have been a couple dozen actors in the production Curmie was in; this one has only ten, with a lot of doubling and only a sprinkling of jurors on stage at any given moment, for example.  As might be expected, this is a show created by Woke Folk: Drummond is black; Hornbeck is female (one presumes that the company got approval from the rights-holders for this change); the cast is listed alphabetically in the program, which also includes a land acknowledgment.  <Sigh.>

Curmie’s dear friend Paul Webb reviewed the production on his blog, which, Gentle Reader, if you’re a theatre-goer in the DC area, you should bookmark.  Paul touches on some curious choices in terms of time period: both in terms of costumes and, for example, the presence of a 50-star American flag, which strikes Curmie as more likely intentional than lazy (but he doesn’t totally reject the latter as a possibility).  A couple of other choices were curious: giving Brady, a Nebraskan, a southern drawl and even putting him in a white suit that make him look like a refugee from a KFC commercial for at least one scene, for instance.  (Bryan was from Illinois,)

Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall declares the production “stupid,” a “travesty,” and “absurd,” among similar endearments.  Is he right?  Up to a point, yes.  Part of the play’s appeal stems from the audience’s recognition of the historical reference: at some level, Bert Cates is John Scopes, Henry Drummond is Clarence Darrow, etc., and there’s no way some of what happens in this production could have occurred in the real world: no rational defendant would hire a black lawyer in Tennessee in 1925, for instance… not to mention the fact that the author of the textbook in question used evolution as a means of supporting eugenics and the alleged superiority of the white race, and it’s rather unlikely that a black man would be much interested in taking up that cause.

But this is a fictionalized version of events, not a literal re-telling with the “names changed to protect the innocent,” à la “Dragnet.”  For example, Bert Cates may be dating the preacher’s daughter, but John Scopes wasn’t; the locals may have been hoping Scopes would be convicted, but they weren’t hostile towards the outsiders (they welcomed the visitors who were spending money in their town); Bryan didn’t die until several days after the trial, in his sleep, not mere moments after the verdict was announced.  

Lawrence and Lee altered the story to make it more theatrical, in the same way that Shakespeare played fast and loose with his history plays.  (Curmie spent a very long time indeed re-learning the actual events of the Plantagenet and Tudor eras after first reading about them in plays like Henry V and Richard III.)  The changes wrought in Inherit the Wind tend mostly to increase the tension, making things more difficult for Cates: he has become more of a pariah in the community, and his personal and professional lives are more in conflict with each other.

What appears to have happened in the Arena production is to exaggerate these departures from history per se and their effects even more.  Without having seen the play in production, Curmie is loath to proclaim these changes successful or otherwise, but he suspects he’d have felt preached at and/or condescended to.  It’s important to note here that changing the time period, or the race and/or sex of a character aren’t inherently problematic: Curmie has indeed done all of the above, usually because there just wasn’t a good enough male actor or white singer or whatever.  Such problems are unlikely to present themselves in a professional production in Washington, DC.

In all probability, the squishiness of the time frame is intended to make the audience think about how this play, written over 70 years ago and referencing events of 30 years before that, is relevant to today’s world.  Curmie doesn’t think that’s necessary; rather, he’s going to trust the audience’s perspicacity (and his own story-telling ability) to make those connections without artificial assistance.  One of the essential elements of theatre is audience superiority: not just “I see what you did there,” but “and I saw it before the people in the row in front of me did.”  Whether a 50-star flag helps or hurts this process probably varies by spectator as well as by production choices.  (It would be interesting to know which came first: the decision to cast a black Drummond, necessitating the time change, or the time change, allowing a black Drummond.)

But all of this dances around the central issue: there’s a professional production of Inherit the Wind out there!  Curmie would definitely go if he was in the area, but there are four screen versions, including three that seem to be available on Tubi: the original 1960 film with a host of recognizable actors led by Spencer Tracy as Drummond and Fredric March as Brady (this is the only one Curmie has seen; it’s really good); a 1988 TV version with Kirk Douglas and Jason Robards; and another TV version, this one from 1999, with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott.  Curmie might just have to check one of these out before long…

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.

Expelled for... um... Greenface?

Back in the halcyon days of the 2010s, the big annual event of this blog was the Curmie Awards, presented to the person or organization who most embarrassed the profession of education.  Curmie would compile a list of nominees from stories he’d covered during the calendar year, and readers would vote on the most (un)deserving recipient.

There won’t be any Curmies awarded this year or in the foreseeable future for three reasons.  First, Curmie has written a lot less of late about educators behaving badly.  That doesn’t mean there haven’t been cases, of course, but, perhaps because he’s no longer in the game, as it were, other stories have done more to pique his interest.  Plus, the unethical or incompetent protagonists in most of the education-related stories Curmie has covered recently have been non-educators: students, politicians, or organizations like the NCAA.

Second, blogspot no longer supports the gadget that allowed polls, so there would have to be a link to an outside site like Survey Monkey or something, and Curmie doesn’t want to deal with all that noise.

Finally, there are a lot fewer of you.  Individual posts are garnering only 20% or so as many hits as in yesteryear.  You, Gentle Reader, are a member of an elite, not to say miniscule, group.  It doesn’t make sense to continue the poll if a half dozen votes would win the election.

All that said, Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms alerted him to a story that, if Curmies were still a thing, would mean that what passes for a brain trust at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, CA, like Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando’s character in “On the Waterfront”), coulda been a contender.

Our story begins in 2017, when three 14-year-old boys took a photo of themselves posing with anti-acne masks covering their faces.  One of the three apparently had rather severe acne, and the other two joined him in what Reason’s Jacob Sullum describes as “an act of playful solidarity.”  The medication started light green in color, but grew darker as it dried.  The lads photographed themselves because they “looked silly.”  Importantly, the boys did not post the photo to social media.

Nothing to see here, right?  Well, not to any rational person, no.  But this is a story about high school administrators, remember?  Two of those lads were about to enroll at St. Francis, a high-priced private school.  Again: so far, so good.

Flash forward three years.  It’s now 2020 and the aftermath of the George Floyd incident in Minnesota.  Some recent St. Francis grads had posted an apparently not-PC meme about Floyd’s death, so there was, perhaps, some increased tension.  Unbeknownst to the two boys attending St. Francis, the other lad in the photo had sent a copy to a friend, who “tagged a music playlist on her Spotify account with a copy of the photograph.”  And one of her friends (the administrators undoubtedly know who, but that information seems not to be available to the rest of us) saw it there, recognized the boys, and proclaimed them to be in blackface.  The photo was to be regarded as “another example” of racism at St. Francis.

Well, no self-respecting (i.e., self-important) school administrator wants that kind of publicity, so instead of…you know… listening to the mother of one of the boys, who explained the truth of the matter, they decided that due process was far too much to ask, so they summarily issued an ultimatum that the boys either withdraw or be expelled.

To be fair, those masks are pretty dark (see the photo above), and it’s not too outrageous a leap of faith to see them as blackface, especially if you’ve been prompted to do so.  So some of the furor, though not justified, was at least comprehensible.  But that doesn’t get the school off the hook.  They leapt to a false conclusion when even a cursory glance at the so-called evidence would have revealed that the boys did nothing wrong.  (Curmie isn’t convinced that what 14-year-olds do ought to be held against them years later even if they were in blackface, but that’s at least an arguable position.)

As Curmie has noted several times in the past, it’s important to get names out there if possible.  We may not know the name of the student who posted that photo, but we do know that President Jason Curtis immediately piled on without bothering to check the facts, and that Dean of Students Ray Hisatake called the boys’ parents but obviously didn’t care that they offered a reasonable and indeed true rebuttal to the accusations leveled against their sons.

The money quote, though, is that of Principal Katie Teekell, who said her decision was based not on the boys’ “intent,” but on “optics” and “the harm done to the St. Francis community.”  Of course, there is no indication that the student whose posting of the photo was obviously intended to demean the school has suffered any punishment at all.  Meanwhile the boys who did nothing wrong, and weren’t yet students at the school when the supposedly offending photo was taken, were almost literally run out of town.  The world knows that, now.  So, Ms. Teekell, as Matt Damon might have said in “Good Will Hunting,” “how do you like them optics?” 

This being an education story, and Curmie being a career educator, it seems only appropriate that we attempt to discern the explanation for the administrators’ actions with a multiple-choice quiz.

So…

They acted the way they did because…

a.    They have been so infected with a socio-political agenda that they are incapable of seeing the world except through woke-colored glasses.

b.  They have the ethical sensibility of a hungry cobra and the backbone of overcooked angel’s hair.

c.     They’d come in third place in a battle of wits with a dead battery and a turnip.

Yes, I know, Gentle Reader, “d. all of the above” is likely the best answer, but perhaps your mileage may vary.

This story has received new life of late because the boys sued the school and the jury recently awarded them over a million dollars.  The award is based on a new California law which demands the equivalent of due process from organizations like private schools, unions, hospitals, etc.  This is the first case to invoke the new law in a suit against a private secondary school.

The initial suit sought over twenty million dollars in damages, but the jury rejected claims of breach of contract, defamation, and violation of free speech.  Curmie reminds you, Gentle Reader, that he is not a lawyer, but he confesses astonishment that falsely labeling Bay Area teenagers (OK, they’re into their 20s now) as racists doesn’t qualify as defamation.  Still, each boy will receive over a half million dollars, and the school might have learned its lesson.

Yeah, that’s likely to happen…

 

 

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.

The AP Proves Itself The Silly

Seriously, AP, what the hell?

Oh, bloody hell. 

Curmie had just gotten a little momentum on a piece on the craziness emanating from the apparently not-so-great state of North Dakota (hopefully forthcoming) when he encountered this little gem. This post may be shorter than most, but it takes priority. 

The fun folks at the Associated Press, long-time progenitors of the world’s worst style sheet, have outdone themselves. The AP Stylebook Twitter account posted this yesterday: “We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the college-educated. Instead, use wording such as people with mental illnesses. And use these descriptions only when clearly relevant.” 

It’s worth noting that they appear to have taken the post down after being humiliated by… well… virtually everyone, but there are enough screenshots out there (here, for example), and enough comments by other than the usual suspects to make it pretty clear that the tweet really did exist, and really was that perfect storm of condescension, Woke self-importance, and, let’s face it, bad grammar. 

The reason not to use those phrases, assuming there are such reasons, is that in all cases we’re dealing with nominalized adjectives, which are by their nature a little problematic in formal English. (Is this where Curmie shows off and mentions that such usage is perfectly acceptable in some other languages?) Using articles with adjectives can certainly be regarded as less than ideal grammar, although the AP does manifest all the attributes of the silly. (See what I did there?) 

But it’s also true that many such adjectival noun-wannabees have been accepted into common parlance, although Curmie has never seen “the college-educated” thus employed. “The poor,” “the mentally ill,” and “the French,” however, fail to send shivers up the spine. 

All those expressions probably ought to be in quotation marks (as Curmie has done), too, but one could argue that this would add unnecessary clutter, so we’ll let that one go. 

The problem with the tweet, however, extends past the ironic incompetence demonstrated by whoever posted it. The proposal is stupid on its face, which ought to be (and appears to have been) enough to generate the wrong kind of publicity, but it’s the tired and rather flaccid invocation of “dehumanizing” that really caught the public’s attention. Paul Graham’s tweet that “The AP Stylebook has just checked itself out of the relevance hotel” is more succinct than most, but can be taken as indicative. Curmie kinda likes Ben Collins’s (assuming he got there first) “people experiencing Frenchness,” too. 

Nicholas Fondacaro’s tweet—(“Should we stop referring to ‘the’ AP Stylebook and refer to “a stylebook experiencing stupidity?”)—was also pretty good. Still, the prize for the first round goes to the French Embassy, which now claims the title of the “Embassy of Frenchness in the US.” 

The AP, not content with the initial embarrassment, apparently pulled the tweet with an apology, since “The use of ‘the French’ in this tweet by @AP was inappropriate and has caused unintended offense. An updated tweet is upcoming.” Unintended offense? Uh, no. Here’s Paul Graham again: “You wish it was offense. Actually people were laughing at you.” 

And he’s right, of course (except for omitting that comma). It would be difficult to see the offensiveness of the term “the French” to describe people who called themselves “les Français,” which translates as… [checks notes] “the French.” 

I mean, ouch. The AP would have us believe they’re legitimate protectors of written communication, and they come off looking like utter buffoons. True, they’re not going to show up on our doorsteps with battering rams because we made reference to “the poor.” They (apparently) seek to control not how all of us express ourselves, but only how adherents to their Cult of Enlightened Journalists do so. 

But there was a time, many, many, moons ago, when the AP Stylesheet could at least be taken seriously. Back when Curmie was advising a college newspaper (Curmie shudders to realize that was over four decades ago), it was an indispensable tool, not because it was necessarily “right,” but because it provided a means of achieving consistency. We could, and did, ignore its guidelines, but we did so by establishing our own specific standards, which we attempted to apply across the board. 

But the AP, like so many other once-respected institutions, has lost its damned mind. Basing a stylesheet on the most paranoid delusions of a tiny segment of the population is just nuts. Speaking as a member of “the college educated,” Curmie is unable to suppress a chortle at AP’s ineptitude in… wait for it… the use of language.

Capitalism and Free Expression

Curmie was mostly done with this essay prior to learning of yet another school shooting, this one with a death toll of at least 21, about six and a half hours west of Chez Curmie.  That situation is, of course, most on all our minds at the moment.  Going ahead with this post, Curmie admits, is in part an avoidance mechanism, because he just doesn’t want to deal with the fact that the politicians, especially but not exclusively on the right, have prioritized campaign contributions from the NRA above the lives of schoolchildren (and teachers).  I just don’t want to wrap my head around that right now.

A few glimpses at the uneasy alliance between capitalism and free expression: three stories from this month.

#1.  Lufthansa’s Unconscionable Anti-Semitism.  So, apparently a few orthodox Jews refused to wear face masks for a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Budapest earlier this month.  Many US Jews started their journey in New York and were changing planes in Frankfurt to continue on to a Budapest flight.  Many if not all of these people were on a pilgrimage to the small town of Bodrogkeresztúr as part of an annual commemoration on the anniversary of the death of Grand Rabbi Yesha Steiner, who died in 1925.

(Curmie has some experience with changing planes in a German airport… with a traveling companion from a country from which, at least at the time, Germany required a visa, even if all you were doing was changing planes.  Not the most fun travel experience in my life.  But I stray…)

We can disagree, Gentle Reader, about whether mask-wearing is a medical necessity, an essentially useless exercise in virtue-signaling, or somewhere in-between, but the fact is that both nations and corporations are free to set their own rules.  Don’t wear a mask; don’t get on the plane. Simple as that.  So Lufthansa staff enforced the rules, and did not allow those passengers to board.  So far, so good, right?

Well, they took the policy a little further than that.  Citing the article linked above:

Lufthansa staff allegedly blocked all passengers who were visibly identifiable as Jewish from boarding their connecting flight, German daily Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung reported.  Local German media reported that the staff excluded those passengers who were recognisable as being Jewish because they were wearing skull caps or had sidelocks.

This would be a German corporation, in Germany, deciding that all Jews, not just those refusing to obey the rules, present a problem to public order and must be quarantined, lest they… well, whatever nefarious thing they might do.  Not the best of looks, there, Lufthansa.

Naturally, whether out of honest conviction or risk minimalization, the highers-up at the airline and the local pols scrambled to apologize.  Lufthansa proclaimed “zero tolerance for racism, antisemitism and discrimination of any type,” and the anti-semitism commissioner for the state of Hesse asserted that “this is discriminatory and not a trivial matter, and all the more reason why the company’s top management should also feel personally responsible for apologising for this incident and taking a clear and unequivocal stand.”

Sure.  Unsurprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League is unconvinced of the sincerity of the corporation: “This non-apology fails to admit fault or identify the banned passengers as Jews. It also refers to them as a group, even though many were strangers. They had one commonality—being visibly Jewish.”

Curmie knows little to nothing about German law—whether there were criminal offenses committed or whether Lufthansa can be sued in a civil case.  But he does know this much: Lufthansa had better do a full-scale investigation culminating in firing the offending employees—at the very least the supervisor who was recorded saying “everyone has to pay” for the handful of Jews who violated the mask order, “it’s Jews coming from JFK…. Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems ... just for this flight.”   If not, they will not only lose all credibility as an ethical corporation, but they will also be lucky to escape with only eight figures of lawsuit payouts.

#2.  Netflix and the Warning Shot.  There’s no one to cheer for in this one.  Netflix, which recently underwent the first quarter of declining subscriptions in a decade, is still flexing its corporate muscles, sending what one headline calls a “warning shot at its woke employees” who objected (for example) to the network’s continued affiliation with Dave Chappelle, whose comedy special those employees regarded as transphobic.

Here are selections from the “Artistic Expression” section of the new corporate culture memo:

Not everyone will like — or agree with — everything on our service….  While every title is different, we approach them based on the same set of principles: we support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with; we program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices….

As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.

Things get a little vexed on the free speech arena here.  Some topics are inherently not funny; others bother only those who need more bran in their diets.  Curmie has never found Chappelle even moderately entertaining, so, not having seen the Offending Object, is ill-positioned to comment on the extent (or existence) of its offensiveness.  But, of course, although the brouhaha seems centered on a single offering—Netflix’s original fare is largely progressive in tone.  Those on the right who cry “Woke” may do their cause little good, but they’re not fundamentally wrong.

Netflix is, above all, a business concern.  They want to make money for their investors and employees alike.  They’re going to buy the programs they think will attract viewers and not the ones they think won’t do so.  That’s the way it works.  If enough people want to see a Dave Chappelle special, it’s going on Netflix.  Same goes for projects like “Don’t Look Up,” another show Curmie hasn’t seen, but which his more conservative friends decry as leftist propaganda.  Perhaps it is; Curmie won’t care unless he’s forced to watch it, and for all the attempts from left and right alike, we aren’t there, yet.

It is tempting, of course, to grant at least some sway to the Netflix employees who are legitimately offended by the network’s offerings.  They—at least some of them—do not want to be associated with programming they cannot support.  (Others, let’s be real, live to be offended.)  But we’re not talking about a closed system here.  As Netflix’s recent hemorrhaging of subscribers, largely due to competition from Hulu, Disney+, etc., suggests there are other employers out there.  Capitalism as practiced in the US falls well short of a perfect system, but it’s the one we’ve got, and failing to recognize that reality just isn’t a good place from which to start an argument.

#3.  Not content with being censorious asshats (the usual hat-tip to Ken White for the felicitous phrase) in public schools, a gaggle of right-wing pseudo-Christians with a desperate need for increased fiber intake have shifted their focus to Barnes & Noble.  According to a couple of second-division pols looking to boost their images with the yahoo set, the Virginia Beach Circuit Court found “probable cause that the books Gender Queer and A Court of Mist and Fury are obscene to unrestricted viewing by minors.”

Curmie asks you to note, Gentle Reader, that whereas we all make typographical mistakes from time to time, the quotation above is a grammatical and syntactical nightmare.  It was written and posted on Facebook by a lawyer, Tim Anderson, who apparently passed law school without making a stop at 6th grade English on the way.  (He mentions “parent consent” later in the same post.)  More to the point, it hasn’t been corrected in the ensuing week, suggesting that he believes what he has written makes any damned sense.  The one thing that is clear is the not-so-veiled threat to file (or encourage others to file) nuisance suits like this all over the state: “Suits like this can be filed all over Virginia. There are dozens of books. Hundreds of schools.”  Oh, jolly.

Barnes and Noble is hardly Curmie’s favorite store, but they responded with the only logical statement: that they carry “thousands of books whose subject matter some may find offensive…. We ask that our customers respect our responsibility to offer this breadth of reading materials, and respect also that, while they chose not to purchase many of these themselves, they may be of interest to others.”

An important point is made in an article on the Book Riot site: and not merely that “Neither book fits the definition of obscene and neither book is pornography.”  Rather, they note that “As a private business, they are not only allowed to sell what they wish to sell, but they are under no obligation by anyone to move materials out of their facilities. Further, no private business like the bookseller would simply ‘supply’ books to the school district.”

The books in question, by the way, are (of course) recommended by the American Library Association as being of particular interest to… you guessed it: teens.  And, of course, there’s little that will do more to stimulate the adolescent mind into curiosity than the allure of delicious naughtiness.  As the recent soar in sales for Maus after it was banned by a Tennessee school board demonstrates, the adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity seems at least as true as ever. 

But, easy as it is to make fun of the Bible-thumping hordes who seek to ban books they haven’t even skimmed, it’s also true that there are such things as legitimate concerns… they just don’t seem to be applicable here.  What is available to the general public—books, movies, whatever—ought only to be off limits if there is real consensus, not if just the wackadoodle puritans don’t like it.  Requiring a text for classes is a different standard, but simply having teens (or anyone) have access to material is essential to a society that is actually free.

What we’re seeing isn’t a dystopian novel—not 1984 nor Fahrenheit 451—but it does seem like the first chapter of a prequel to those books, and that is quite scary enough.