Easily Distracted

One thing that I know annoyed many of the students is that they set out to get action and ended up instead having to tell personal stories in order to educate peers and administrators and professors.

Here’s one more story, if it helps. Where I passed from understanding intellectually and theoretically that small ways of referencing identity could be in aggregate as hurtful as an overt case of active racism, what is now being called “microaggression”, into understanding it emotionally and personally was during two long periods of residence in Zimbabwe.

The thing is, nobody was ever unpleasant to me in racial or national or other categorical ways in Zimbabwe. State officials occasionally were unpleasant in the way they’re unpleasant to everyone: it wasn’t about me. Everybody was in fact quite friendly. I had a nice living situation both times, living in two little furnished flats north of the city center in an area called The Avenues. My colleagues at the University of Zimbabwe were extraordinarily kind and supportive to me as a graduate student and a junior academic. The archivists at the National Archives were friendly and helpful: you could get afternoon tea for a pittance. I had friends from the U.S., I got to go to parties at the U.S. Embassy. I had the family of a former student to look to the second time I went. It was swell both times.

But both times I started to feel an intense sense of anxiety and unease by the time I left, and here’s what it was about, I realized. No matter where I went or what I did, I knew that everybody had an eye on me. Not out of hatred or distrust or dislike. Just because I was instantly identifiably not from around there. I knew I was being written into all sorts of narratives about murungu (white men, foreigners), some of them to my favor, some not, some just kind of neither for nor against me as a person or a category.

If I felt unsafe, it was the ordinary kind of unsafe you feel on occasion in a big city when you know you’re probably identifiable as a person who has some money. Actually in many ways at the time (this was before and then during the beginning of the big economic collapse there) Harare was one of the safer cities I’ve lived in. I went to beerhalls and concerts and soccer matches without any specific anxieties about safety. I walked and rode my horrible old Chinese bike everywhere without specific fears.

But I felt anxious just knowing: whatever I did, it was going to be seen. If I picked my nose, adjusted my crotch, laughed, ate, drank or was drunk, was dirty or clean: seen. And so I found myself more and more just feeling tired. Tired everyday, tired in a way that was existential and pervasive. Anxious not so much for anything anybody did but out of the possibility of being asked, “Why did you do that? Is that normal? Is that common?” Anxious wondering if I had it right when I did this or that, said this or that, not ever sure if I’d offended or amused or pleased.

So on this I get it viscerally, not just intellectually. Nobody has to do anything bad and it can still be bad.

One of the more frustrating struggles threading through the protests has been about who is entitled to be “an ally”. What this often amounts to is well-meaning white kids begging for a gold star, an affirmation of their goodness. Sometimes accompanied by asking for that gold star despite some dissent from some goal or another of the protesters.

The word “ally” has no meaning independent of a strategic objective. It doesn’t mean “friend”: you want to know if someone’s your friend, ask them when you’re sitting down together over a beer. It doesn’t mean “colleague” or “peer”. Someone’s my colleague if they work with me: it’s not a choice that I can withhold, and whatever obligations I have to a colleague or peer are dictated by a professional culture that’s bigger than me.

So if we take the list of objectives that the student activists offered this week, the only time “ally” is a relevant word is whether they need allies to accomplish them. Considering that almost all of them not only involve changes in the structure of the institution but also the working labor of its employees, I would say yes, yes they do need allies, willing allies, unless they’re willing to embrace a highly centralized and corporatized university where the President is a CEO who can hire and fire and discipline and dictate at will. (Which some of the students seem to skirt dangerously close to embracing in fact.) But this is the point: if you’re working towards an objective you can’t accomplish on your own, you don’t get to choose your allies. It’s not your privilege to anoint them. You need whomever you need.

You can make choices about how you treat your allies, about the terms of your alliance, about how long your alliance will continue. You can think about that in terms of instrumentality (as little or as long as necessary, no longer) or in terms of philosophy (as long as possible, in the view that alliances are spiritually and politically a good thing in and of themselves, a sign of the achievement of pluralism and democracy and peace). You can even decide that some alliances are so distasteful that you will defer realizing your goals until you can find some other way to get there.

And you generally need to have a realistic view of your position in the alliance, of your degree of dependency. The students at Swarthmore and elsewhere who hope to forge significantly new institutional processes for dealing with charges of harassment, assault and rape have an external ally with considerable power that they reasonably hope will assist them in reaching their goals.

The students who want a shift in the curriculum and in the content and philosophy of teaching at the college do not. But at some disorienting moments in the process of the last week, trying to talk about those action items directly has been rather like talking with an unsympathetic boss.

“I want those items on my desk by MONDAY!!!” (pounding fist on desk).
“But, boss, you know, there’s a problem with…”
“I don’t want to hear it! MONDAY!”

One of the supreme frustrations of the last week has been hearing some students report that for four years they’ve been “working on faculty diversity, with nothing to show for it”. Have they been working with faculty who are experienced with those issues, who have been working on the same issue, in the committees and structures that engage those issues? Are they aware of what faculty and administrators have been doing, saying, struggling with? Not from what I’ve seen and heard. In some cases, students have said that’s not their brief, not their problem, and that they can’t be expected to do that work or know those things: that they want to tell us what they want and expect us to do it for them.

Sometimes the question is not “Can we be your allies?” but “Can you be ours?” To be our allies in relationship to that strategic goal, you have to be willing to understand the landscape of faculty training, hiring and retention. There are constraints that are bigger than us, problems beyond us, that we can work with and think through but that we don’t control. There are really basic considerations, too, where you can do more harm than good in making demands if you’re not aware of them at the outset. If, for example, you ask that there be more GLBTQ faculty, you have to recognize that there are practical and philosophical problems with designing a position that is about sexuality or identity or gender (etc.) and thinking that this will get you diversity. The ways that faculty find their disciplines and subjects has mapping onto identity and subjectivity but it’s not a one-to-one correspondence. There is a bigger problem with imagining that in the process of a search you can identify and prefer GLBTQ faculty. You’re not allowed to ask someone in interviews nor should you be nor would most GLBTQ faculty want that you should. You sure as hell shouldn’t be sitting around in a meeting trying to make a decision based on your gaydar.

There is no way to get around the fact that students are here (I hope) because they believe that trained and skilled teaching and academic professionals know some things that the students don’t know, have training the students don’t have even by the time they graduate, and that some kinds of authority and hierarchy have to flow out from that disparity. The only reason to stay here if you don’t believe that is out of a cynical desire to collect the credential of the degree as a precondition of middle-class life, a goal that many of the activist students have disparaged. So on at least some of those action items, there is no way out but through: if you want them, you’ll have to listen to and respect what we know about the practical and philosophical limits and difficulties with them as proposals.

In the last week, I’ve heard a lot of staff and faculty talk about how hard it is going to be to teach and advise students in the near-term future, how much they now feel that they have to second-guess everything they might say and how much they feel a risk of whatever they say being misquoted or appropriated and misused.

Teaching and advising and counseling are all intimate practices if they’re done in the way that Swarthmore and other small liberal-arts colleges aspire to do them. Which means they involve vulnerability on all sides. It means that they can, potentially, take up as much emotional and intellectual energy as both teacher and student have to spare and then go well beyond that. One reason that I think committed scholars at large research universities were at least passively acquiescent in the gradual outsourcing of some undergraduate instruction to adjuncts and graduate students starting in the 1980s was simply that they were grateful to be relieved of the heavy emotional and temporal weight that committed face-to-face teaching and counseling places upon professionals.

That weight is harder and heavier to carry depending upon the way that students and colleagues read your identity and personality. A professor or administrator with an open emotional affect may find themselves with more clients than someone with a more forbidding or severe affect, which is no one’s fault: it’s just how we read people and how we present to be read. But that affect may not match up with we can actually provide to students and advisees either intellectually or emotionally: a severe-seeming person may connect in more ways with more people than someone who seems open and inviting.

More pressingly, students often make assumptions or demands for support, empathy and guidance from women, people of color, and GLBTQ faculty and staff that they don’t make from white male professionals. I’m really glad when I can mentor or connect with a student in a way that goes beyond the classroom. I’m also very aware that there are students who wouldn’t think to seek me out for that guidance but would make very strong demands from faculty or staff that they perceive as being closer to their own identities and backgrounds. As one of my colleagues likes to put it, “the students aren’t going to be in your office crying on your desk very often, but they’re there every day doing it to me.”

Even when students are right about their perceptions of a similarity of background, that means the work of teaching and advising is unevenly distributed (which a major reason why it is critical to pursue faculty diversity), and those faculty and staff thus have to do more to protect their time and their energy. And sometimes the students are wrong: some likenesses they imagine and bring into a teaching or counseling experience are not there at all. Which puts that teacher or advisor in a very complicated position, not wanting to spurn or turn away from the responsibilities of the job, needing somehow to get things clear at the start, but also not wanting to have to spend the rest of their professional lives condemned to recount deeply personal histories of their own lives every September to a student who is seeking somebody or something to hold onto. That’s my privilege, to not face that dilemma. It’s also a place where students need somehow to find more places to put their trust, to take more chances, while also to be themselves more heedful and self-aware about what they’re asking of the teachers and advisors they turn to preferentially.

Trust is the big word here. You cannot trust again and again when your trust is always broken, never returned. I know that. But teaching and counseling, if they’re going to be small and focused and human and intimate, can’t happen in the absence of generosity. Generosity that leads to creativity, to taking chances, that produces a diversity of models and practices. This week has reminded me yet again that Swarthmore and places like it have badly oversold themselves as bubble utopias, but even if we finally gave that pretense up, our remaining distinction will rest on practices that require this special kind of generosity, one that is increasingly in short supply in the world around us. If we can’t manage that much, we might as well come out with our hands up and surrender to the MOOC.

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I’ve been married for almost 27 years. When I was dating my wife in college, I was the child of an upper middle-class professional family and she was from a working-class background. I did a lot of what would now be called “microaggression” early in our relationship, around social class. Obviously I was forgiven or tolerated for it, for which I’m very grateful. Life and time and experience and my wife taught me lessons that my undergraduate courses couldn’t. I’m still learning. But we also both know that even after 27 years and knowing each other better than anyone else, we often still don’t know exactly what the other person needs that day, is feeling or thinking. Sometimes we guess wrongly, occasionally profoundly so. I sometimes think, given that families and partners and long-time friends often get that kind of thing wrong, how can I or anyone else hope to get it right with a student that we’ve only known for a few weeks or at best a few years?

Good teaching and advising (and learning and being advised) require the freedom to experiment, to come at matters from several angles, to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. Which means they also require making mistakes and courting misrecognition. There is an irreducible element of risk. No amount of sensitivity training can get away from that risk. The only way to avoid it is to brutally standardize all moments of human interaction, to create a technocratic infrastructure that regulates and records anything that might involve the risk of getting it wrong. The history of the last century shows that in complex modern institutions, if you invite that technocracy in the door, it rarely needs a second invitation, and it never departs until it manages to thoroughly hollow out and distort the host institution.

Doing what we do right–in a human way, without technocracy–does involve taking responsibility for mistakes, both individually and institutionally. Generosity in teaching and advising requires honesty and transparency to work, and a strong measure of humility as well, on all sides. That much needs a good deal of repair and rethinking at Swarthmore and institutions like it, plainly. Nor should anyone call systematic forms of racism or discrimination a “mistake”. The security guards that Seema Jilani describes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner weren’t making a mistake, weren’t engaged in ordinary oversight or misrecognition. Whomever is pissing on the Intercultural Center isn’t just “Whoops, I didn’t get that this bothers you”. Sexual assault isn’t a case of “oh, I didn’t realize that wasn’t consensual”.

But if there isn’t other space left in most of what we do as teachers, advisors and community members to make mistakes, space left to misunderstand, space left to not give in all cases what someone needs or wants, space left to talk past or not hear, space left to try things, space left to give what we individually know how to give and refuse what we individually aren’t able to provide, we’re pretty well done. All the creative, generative possibilities for the future of a liberal arts education depend upon that.

I didn’t support the campaign to have fraternities restricted or banned at Swarthmore, largely for reasons I articulated earlier this academic year.

I do support the students who’ve filed a Clery Act and Title IX complaint against Swarthmore, and similar groups of students at other campuses.

I might disappoint those students by qualifying that support in the following manner: that I don’t think they yet have a completely clear view of the alternative processes or outcomes that they’d prefer. Once you start a conversation about the difficulties involved in building a better system, you might have some appreciation for why most administrations in higher education have settled for so long for the complex, contradictory and unsatisfying systems of reporting, counseling, and judiciary review that have been built up over the last three decades.

Let’s start with the support first, though. The first and foremost reason that I think this development is a very good thing for Swarthmore and institutions like it is that the filing plus an independent review by consultants will at last create a documented, independent body of testimony and evidence about student experiences and administrative procedures that everyone can use as the standard reference point for going forward.

Ever since I’ve arrived at the college in the mid-1990s, I’ve known students that have alleged that the college handled reports of abuse, assault, harassment or rape inadequately. I’ve had a pretty wide range of committee assignments since I’ve been at Swarthmore but one area that I’ve had no involvement with is judiciary procedures. The one time I served on the Dean’s Advisory Committee almost two decades ago, we mostly discussed alcohol policy, though with little address to the role of alcohol in assault or rape allegations. Without personal experience, I’ve had nothing else to use to evaluate those student allegations except trust in the students I know and trust in my colleagues in the administration, which have pulled in opposite directions. I do know from experience that students sometimes are profoundly wrong or exaggerated in what they say about other aspects of internal process or decision-making at the college. At the same time, I’ve known that sometimes faculty and administration don’t accurately hear or mentally transcribe what they say to students. So without anything direct to go on, it’s been hard to know what to say. Was this a common problem? A sporadic one? What kind of problem was it: a problem with specific procedures, with particular staff members, with a generalized culture, with a specific kind of incident, with the entire society around us? Most of the students I’ve heard from are students I trust very deeply, but they’ve almost always been telling me about what friends or friends of friends have said, not speaking about their own direct experiences. The constant thrumming of discontent has always worried me.

One reason that those stories were vague or indirect was the completely legitimate reason that victims often don’t want to go public, don’t want to have to endure skepticism and hostility, don’t want to have to repeatedly tell a story of trauma, don’t want to be responsible for educating everyone else about victimization.

Another and more important reason, it turns out, is that we have told students that our judiciary procedures require absolute confidentiality from everyone involved in a hearing, so that the students who took the step to most clearly document cases of harassment, assault or rape believed they were required to keep that documentation secret, whether or not they were satisfied with the outcomes of the process. (The student publication the Daily Gazette has published a very good series of investigative reports on this issue that helped to bring this point forward.) So our procedures, intentionally or not, have helped to maintain an environment where it is impossible for the community to have documented knowledge or awareness of the incidence, character or resolution of assault and rape and yet equally where survivors and victims can do little but informally or privately testify about their experiences. Small wonder then that there has been a recurrent, corrosive murmur about the untrustworthiness of institutional process: there has been no way for that murmur to be anything more.

Which is why clear, documented, transparent scrutiny from several different bodies is a good and necessary outcome. It’s the only way to move forward.

Whatever the investigations find, however, there are some persistent contradictions in the advocacy of the students filing the complaints that will prove hard to resolve.

Some changes will be easy to make, and may already have been made. Particularly on reading the investigations in the Daily Gazette, I don’t have any hesitation about saying the following:

1) That a student reporting harassment, assault or rape should never, ever be asked if he or she was drunk or in any way culpable. I don’t even think it’s relevant to ask whether the complainant clearly said no or made an objection to harassing behavior. As many critics have pointed out for decades, that puts the impetus on the person being approached to say or do something, as if the person making an approach can safely assume until something is said that it’s ok to make sexual advances or remarks. If someone’s reporting, the baseline assumption should be that there’s something to report and that the person reporting is a victim of another person’s actions.

2) That sympathy for and counseling to victims be absolutely hard-wired into the reporting process. It’s my impression that the college has moved pretty forcefully in this direction already.

3) That once a report is made, there’s a public record of the report, without names, creating a verified, public database about the incidence of such reports and their resolution. I think from 2011 onward, Swarthmore and most other colleges have fixed that part of the process, in response to federal requirements.

4) That some accommodations of victims should be made much more expeditiously than we have done. For example, moving accuser or accused to other dorms should happen without a lot of hassle or delay. To be honest, I think that should even happen more quickly in cases where there are strong personality conflicts–most residential colleges have tended to treat most friction in living spaces as a “learning experience” that relates back to diversity.

5) That we can do way better than force victims to sit down with the accused in a small room and have to testify to peers, faculty and administrators who may or may not have training or experience relevant to rape and assault cases, in an environment that is at best indifferent to the mental well-being of the victim.

6) That we shouldn’t ever restrain victims from speaking about their experiences. Confidentiality is a powerful but exceedingly dangerous sociopolitical technology that should be used only in very specific and limited contexts. Academic institutions are prone to the massive overuse of confidentiality across a very broad range of practices and procedures, and this is one of them.

However, rethinking judiciary procedures in specific is likely to be a bigger problem.

Here’s the chief contradiction I see among the advocate groups who have been pushing for changes at Swarthmore and other campuses. Some of the students involved, including some at Swarthmore, argue that they would like to see much more expeditious actions taken against reported rapists or assailants, most typically quick movement on expelling offenders and creating some form of permanent record or notation of the reasons for their expulsion. (See for example Tucker Reed’s account of her experiences at USC.)

At the same time, some advocates respond that they would prefer for action to be taken by administrative processes within their institutions rather than by the external legal system, for a number of reasons. First that the legal system is by any standard even slower at producing results; second that it is often far more violating or traumatic for victims than the worst collegiate procedure; and most interestingly third that many of the victims report some degree of compassion or concern for the future of their attackers, preferring that they simply be removed from the community rather than suffer criminal penalties. (At the same time, most victims quite legitimately reject outright that they themselves be compelled via a judiciary process to participate in the rehabilitation or education of their attackers.)

All of these points make sense but they pull in opposite directions. For one, the idea that we should be sufficiently sympathetic to rapists or assailants within a community to not seek criminal penalties, just removal, is in tension with the frequently-repeated dictum that rape is rape, that we shouldn’t see rape that involves two drunken acquaintances who’ve had consenting encounters in the past as any different or lesser than “stranger rape” that leaves the victim severely injured. Nor is it fair to leave the determination of whether to treat rape as a criminal violation reported to the police as a burden on the victim. But requiring or mandating a criminal report in all instances creates problems: by their own account, many victims might be less likely to make a report if they knew that was the outcome, both out of anxiety about the process (knowing, among other things, what an adversarial system will do to distort or manipulate the victim’s experiences) and even out of reluctance to visit criminal penalties on their attackers.

If that leaves colleges like Swarthmore with a need to have a better or different judicial process, what should that look like? I’ve always been a bit unhappy with the pseudo-judicial systems that many universities maintain: they’re demonstrably prone to manipulation in other ways and on other issues besides rape and assault.

If the desired outcome is that an attacker be expelled quickly, and that there be a record of the reason for the expulsion, that’s going to create some serious burdens on the institution. First because that’s a fairly serious penalty that requires something like if not identical to the presumption of the American judicial system: a presumption of innocence until due process is observed. Let’s say you expel a student after three years and put on their transcript, “Expelled for sexual assault”. The expelled student can rightfully say that you have deprived them of the benefits of three years of tuition and the expected lifetime benefits of completing a Swarthmore education. Considering that in recent years, students have sued universities even over what seem like open-and-shut issues like low grades in a course, it’s not unreasonable to expect that more frequent expulsions with clear transcription of the cause will lead to litigation, with potentially large damages being sought.

Meaning that the standards for a finding of assault in an internal procedure would have to be high enough to withstand scrutiny in a civil proceeding and also that they probably ought to be in that being expelled and having a transcript with a note as to cause is a serious penalty if not as serious as a criminal finding of rape or assault might be. If so, that’s likely to run counter to what the critics of current policies are seeking, in several respects. The counseling of victims would have to be utterly firewalled away from a judicial procedure (the degree to which that’s presently the case is the source of a lot of frustration, in that we’ve formerly had deans serving both as the advisors for a judicial procedure and as counselors to victims) and the judicial procedure would have to operate with something like the presumption of innocence for the accused if not with an openly adversarial approach to evidence and questioning, which walks us right back into the problem of seeming unsympathetic or skeptical towards victims. In a small school, it’s going to be very difficult to have one institutional structure that puts no burden on victims, openly acts as their advocates and counselors, promises them justice, redress and healing and then have another institutional structure that can’t promise anything of the sort and then have those two structures interact to produce a coherent and decisive outcome very quickly. It’s going to be equally hard not to have that kind of two-sided approach, however. The students seeking change shouldn’t expect that it’s going to be easy or even possible to create an internal procedure that does all or even much of what they advocate.

They should also consider that building such a system might have many unexpected or unanticipated consequences. For example, if the process has to withstand legal scrutiny, it might be hard to keep other kinds of criminal actions (involvement in drugs, underage drinking, non-sexual violence, even intellectual property violations) wholly out of the loop of that system, to make other kinds of infractions subject to more informal, confidential mediation. We might almost have to have three (or more) separate systems or to define sexual assault, rape and harassment as offenses which are so completely different in impact and gravity that nothing else requires the same kind of process or procedure. In the case of the latter approach, it probably won’t be long before someone argues that some other class of offense or harm is equally serious and requires the same kind of handling.

I suppose as something of an afterword, I’d also suggest that the students bringing the complaint should not be quite so cynical about the possible outcome of an independent review. I support the filing of the Clery Act complaint because I think the more investigative processes the better and because it’s the only way to create more trust in the long-term in the community. But it’s important not to treat investigations of this kind as a zero-sum contest that can either be won or lost, and to therefore “work the ref” by creating a pre-emptive narrative about the intentional insincerity of your opponent and therefore the pervasive untrustworthiness of everything “they” are doing. I think a probing investigation–whether by consultants or the federal government–is likely to find that the mistakes and problems of institutional process over the last twenty years are a product of messy histories (ranging from the crazy-quilt contradictions of in loco parentis at colleges to an ever-shifting legal environment). If so, there is no “they” who has acted with devious intention, nor any “they” who are out to hurt the institution. When I look at this filing, I don’t see sides, I see a lot of people who want the best for Swarthmore and higher education and who are doing the right thing as much as they can in the way they see best, and in the case of the students, doing it with great courage and determination. This isn’t zero-sum: it’s the rare kind of dispute where there are ways for everyone to come out a winner, if only everyone will leave enough space for that to happen and have enough generosity to agree that once we get past the obvious changes, there will be difficult puzzles that can’t be so easily solved.