September 2001
In the current advanced state
of civilization, we professors are in a bind. For two millennia, Eurocentric
societies have been nourishing values on freedom, individual rights, human
dignity, and tolerance. Laws and policies serving these values have multiplied
over time, as witness the ever more detailed rulebooks that govern life
in universities.
At the same time, we professors
are subject to what Harvey Silverglate has lately (in the Wall Street
Journal, July 11, 2001, commenting on a wrongful conviction for child
sexual abuse) called the “darker forces of the human soul.” In my lectures
on workplace mobbing, I sometimes say there are three basic appetites in
a normal person: for food, for sex, and for humiliating somebody else.
Our civilization affirms
the first two cravings and facilitates their satisfaction. The third craving
is taboo, especially in so highly civilized a workplace as the university.
That is why we professors are in a bind. Like humans everywhere, we are
sometimes gripped by the eliminative impulse, lust to put another down,
but our hands are tied by rules protecting human dignity. Besides, as learned
men and women, we are supposed to be above the darker forces.
The result is camouflage,
subterfuge, self-deception, denial, disguise, circumlocution, labyrinthine
plots- much like the antics of Catholic priests who are overcome by sexual
desire in an organization that forbids them to satisfy it. René
Girard, arguably today’s most perceptive analyst of the eliminative impulse,
calls it the “persecutory unconscious.” Many professors think they are
absolutely free of it. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard
describes “a new level of cunning,” wherein we practice “a hunt for hunters
of scapegoats. Our society’s obligatory compassion authorizes new forms
of cruelty” (2001, p. 158).
Two acclaimed new novels,
both published in 2000, describe the way the elimination process commonly
plays out in academia today. Blue Angel, by Francine Prose, is the
lighter, funnier of the two, a take-off on the 1930s German film about
professor-student romance.
After decades of successfully
resisting coeds’ flirtations, English professor Ted Swenson succumbs to
the wiles of Angela Argo, a not very pretty but precocious member of his
creative writing class. Angela is a number. Her skill at placing the world
at her feet, by painting herself as a victim of its caprice and cruelty,
is consummate. Most professors these days have had Ms. Argo in their classes.
Pity the ones who let themselves call her Angela.
Ted is vain and oafish, but
more tuned in than his counterpart in David Mamet’s play, Oleanna.
As a straight white power-holding male, Ted is a dog who has had his day.
When Angela charges him with sexual harassment, he knows the jig is up,
yet inexplicably refuses to resign. He takes refuge in booze until the
day of his dismissal hearing.
The last fifty pages of the
book describe the tribunal proceeding wherein Swenson is destroyed by the
collective action of his dean, colleagues, and students. None of them imagines
being part of a mob bent on humiliating a fellow human. They are enforcing
policy, upholding human dignity, and protecting the college’s integrity.
“Angela, are you ready?”
asks one tribunal member, the chairperson of the Faculty-Student Women’s
Alliance. “Do you feel strong enough to address the committee? Now, Angela,
perhaps we should start by saying that everybody in this room understands
how difficult it must have been for you to come forward. How brave you
are for helping make sure this kind of thing is stopped.”
Prose serves up a slice of
life and makes the reader laugh. Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain,
is funny, too, but with sobering, spellbinding twists. Roth does not hide
his disgust for the devious methods by which learned doctors carry out
the elimination process.
Prose’s protagonist has committed
at least the Clinton sin of cheating on his wife. Roth’s protagonist, an
ex-dean named Coleman Silk, is as innocent as Roth can make him of the
charges used to string him up. Five weeks into the semester, two students
on his class roster have still not shown up. “Does anyone know these people?”
Silk asks the class. “Do they exist or are they spooks?” Since the absent
students turn out to be black, Silk’s reference to spooks is taken as proof
of racism. A crusade to punish him gets underway. Silk and his wife fight
it. She dies of a stroke. He resigns. His life spirals downward to an inglorious
death.
Unlike Prose, moreover, Roth
spins an explanation for the professor’s fall that goes beyond blind panic
over sex or race. He tells us that Silk, as dean, had come down hard on
the faculty, raised standards of research performance, and launched what
he and the president had called a “revolution of quality.” Silk’s humiliation
is shown to be rooted in revenge. The wrongness of it cries out.
Still, what happens to Silk
is basically the same as what happens to Swenson, and the mob in each case
is composed of the same kind of characters. Roth traces most of Silk’s
troubles to Delphine Roux, his department chair and chief eliminator. Roux
sees herself as blessedly above reproach. Silk to Roux: “A student who
tells me that I speak to her in ‘engendered language’ is beyond being assisted
by me.” Roux to Silk: “Then there’s the problem, isn’t it?”
Both Blue Angel and
The Human Stainare works in the classic tradition of Western literature:
they unmask the persecutory unconscious, strip away the disguises it wears
in a given time and place. In this respect, these novels are similar to
The First Stone (1995), Helen Garner’s nonfiction account of the
ouster of a college master at the University of Melbourne.
(All three of these books
stand in contrast to J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), yet another
tale of an eliminated professor, this one set in South Africa. Breaking
with Western tradition, postmodernist Coetzee has written what Girard calls
a naive persecution text. His novel defends not just the mob that humiliates
the professor but the one that rapes the professor’s daughter. Coetzee
finds redemption in her surrender to the rapists’ power.)
If, as most reviewers agree,
these literary works accurately describe current realities of campus life,
they hold an important lesson for individuals and organizations committed
to the classic values of a university. Threats to these values in our time
are rarely so overt and transparent as Premier David Peterson’s instruction
to the University of Western Ontario in 1989, that it fire Philippe Rushton
for publishing the results of his research.
More often, the threats are
heavily camouflaged by accoutrements of due process and the highest ethical
standards. Attacks are phrased in academic Newspeak, reflecting the “new
level of cunning” Girard writes about. Because academic freedom is an entrenched
value, defended by SAFS and similar bodies, administrators, colleagues,
and students inflamed by eliminationist passion usually frame their campaigns
in altogether different terms. “This has nothing to do with academic freedom,”
they say. They are sure of it. They are sure of themselves.
In none of the books discussed
above is the professor condemned for what he lectured about or wrote in
a scholarly journal. The silencing is for alleged ethical violations, for
transgressions of what has come to be called political correctness.
Constructive action in today’s
academic workplace takes courage, but it also takes a quick and cultivated
wit. Blue Angel and The Human Stain show how cleverly well
educated minds can mask the eliminationist impulse, but they also show
how gracefully a better educated mind can peel off the mask. Thereby these
books give hope that we can understand and control the darker forces within
us all, that we need not behave like savages and eat up our enemies. If
we work at it, we can do without enemies and find ways to get along.
Is it foolish to think so?
Is it Girard who is naive? Are the Swensons and Silks in our universities
just roadkill on the drive away from patriarchy and Western hegemony? Will
there always be someone to cast the first stone? Coetzee, I believe, would
say yes.
Westhues is author of Eliminating Professors: a Guide to the Dismissal Process.
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