There is a video of two police officers who take a protestor to the ground. One of them has his knee on the protestor’s neck. Since this was a protest about how an officer put his knee on the neck of a black man and killed him, that was a significant choice on the officer’s part. After about ten seconds, the other officer makes him move his knee.
This might seem to be a good story, about an officer doing what should have happened with so many other cases—correcting a fellow officer. But, from the second the first officer puts his knee on the neck of the protestor, a bystander starts yelling, “GET YOUR FUCKING KNEE OFF HIS NECK!” The second officer looks over directly into the camera, and then moves the knee.
So, did he make the first officer move his knee because it was the right thing to do, or because they were being filmed?
Unhappily, I think it’s likely it’s the second. He stopped what was excessive and potentially deadly force because of the optics, so to speak, because what that officer was doing was going to get publicized—there would have been bad consequences. Would he have done the same thing had there not been someone with a camera, and no one would know (other than the person with the knee on his neck, but who’s going to believe him?)
Academics are expressing outrage at police officers who don’t report racism or abuse, who don’t pull a knee off a neck unless there is a camera. And my response is, “Are you kidding me? How good are we at standing up to in-group abuse and racism?” Because the answer is: not very. [1]
If you do the kind of work I do, then you can’t much value in-group loyalty, and yet I can look back on decisions I’ve made, and recognize I got suckered by in-group loyalty claims. And, so, at far too many times in my career, I have been aware of abusive behavior on the part of faculty toward various non in-groups (graduate students or staff), and I didn’t do anything but complain to like-minded colleagues who also did nothing. Or I bleated ineffectually at department leadership who didn’t do anything effective, and when they didn’t do anything, I stopped bleating. I’ve seen faculty genuinely try to do something about faculty abuse of students, junior faculty, and/or staff, and to a person, the person complaining was criticized as much as the abuser (and sometimes more). And the accusation? That they were not collegial—in other words, not loyal to in-group.
It’s like a dysfunctional family at Thanksgiving dinner, at which grandpa’s racist comments or abusive treatment of other family members is open and tolerated, but the person who says, “Wow, that’s racist,” or “You shouldn’t do that” is condemned for being the problem, the one who started the conflict.
For instance, at one institution, a faculty member actively “bullied” students to work with her (that was the term that came up a lot), as well as insisted that undergraduates fill out evaluations in her office, with her watching. The chair, when pushed, “talked” to the faculty member. It didn’t work, so he did nothing further. She kept doing it.
A faculty member with a long and admitted history of abusing staff was put in charge of staff, and the chair said that they would talk to this person if he abused staff in this new position. Although he had talked to this person before. And talking to him hadn’t worked. So now it magically would? Narrator: it didn’t.
An openly homophobic faculty member was put on a search committee, and did her best to tank any applicant who seemed queer (let alone did queer theory), and was deliberately hostile to the only one interviewed at MLA. Although the entire faculty saw this, it was only one faculty member—an assistant professor–who tried to do something about it. It didn’t end well for him.
A faculty member wouldn’t let anyone touch his computer, and so couldn’t get it to attach to the printer. In the evening, he would take a floppy drive (this was in those days) to an admin assistant’s computer, print what he needed, and then, because he was so concerned about someone stealing his work, would delete Word from the admin assistant’s computer. Every time. So, every Monday and sometimes other days during the week, the admin assistant would have to reinstall Word (and this was in the days when it took multiple disks and about an hour to do that). The Department Chair (a good man) wouldn’t do anything about it, on the grounds of collegiality and compassion for the faculty member. (I’m not kidding.)
In each of these cases, leadership had so many options. They could have required that the faculty member with a history of abusing dissertation students co-chair, they could have put a password on the admin’s computer, insist that evaluations be filled out in a class with a proctor present, insist that a faculty member put requests to staff in email. More important, all it would have taken would have been colleagues (who were open that they thought the behavior was abusive) to say to the person, “Wow, that is not okay.”
In some cases, the departmental leadership was allowing the abuse because higher administration told them they had to. A friend was at a university that had a faculty member who cornered junior faculty in their offices (and staff and graduate students) and shouted at them (especially women). He claimed that it was the consequence of a medical condition, so the “accommodation” was that no one could complain about it. That’s the most extreme version, but protecting faculty with a long record of abusive behavior can also happen because the administration is lawsuit-phobic. The homophobe was protected by higher administration because she was the sort of person to have a lawyer on speed dial.
I was at a university where a faculty member called out a fellow faculty member for being a Holocaust denier. The Holocaust denier, while using his affiliation with the university as part of his credentials for being a credible expert on the Holocaust (he was, by the way, in the School of Engineering), was simply told he couldn’t deny the Holocaust in class. Nothing said about office hours, conversation, or the conferences he attended, or the writing he did—again, all the while citing his University credentials. But the faculty member who called him out publicly—that person was disciplined. The Holocaust denier had a lawyer.
I once met with an ombudsperson to complain about the fact that the major admins and many faculty participated in a regular mens-only poker game. That person didn’t see the problem. (The University Attorney did, and told them they could still do it, but couldn’t talk.) I met with another ombuds about a situation, and that person told me, “Oh, junior faculty can always speak freely at meetings; they’re just paranoid if they think it will be held against them.” ORLY? The people in positions of power can’t be counted on to support ethical behavior, and that’s one reason that people don’t bother reporting it.
But, in my experience, the problems are at the departmental level. I once found myself involved in a case (not in my department or even college but at my U) of a faculty member who courted students during the coursework period. He was a big name in his field, and had placed students at some impressive jobs, which he emphasized to students in his courses a lot (what the students didn’t notice is that he hadn’t had good placement in fifteen years). But he also had the classic abusive relationship dynamic—during coursework, he praised a student to the heavens, said that they wouldn’t have the problems other recent students had had because they were so good. Once a student was really tied to him (this was a department in which it was hard to change your committee once you’re ABD), he stopped paying attention to them because he was too busy. He wouldn’t let students share their chapters with other committee members until he approved the chapter, and he took three to four months to read a chapter. His students regularly ran out of funding. (There are variations of that story at several places I’ve been.)
I got involved (very peripherally, just supporting someone who had decided to do something about this situation), and discovered that, not only was this pattern well-known, but that it was known to be a pattern he had with women, and that a woman faculty member had complained. She was now marginalized in the department. He did, after all, bring in a lot of grant money.
Academics do not have clean hands (or, perhaps, the right metaphor is that we have well-washed hands) when it comes to being willing to name abusive behavior and do something about it.
So, why do people jump on the faculty member who says, “That’s racist” more than they jump on the actual racist? Because saying something racist is racist, but violating in-group norms about loyalty is equally bad (or worse), because, as captain awkward might say, colleagiaaaaaaality.
A faculty member can be abusive even to another faculty member and in-group loyalty requires that other faculty not notice it, and certainly don’t remark on it. Abusing another faculty member is less of a violation of in-group norms than saying out loud that a faculty member is abusive. Calling out another faculty member as racist makes people feel that, unless they can ignore or dismiss the charge of racism (or abuse), they need to do something. And they don’t want to. Grandpa saying something racist/homophobic/misogynist, even if directed at another family member is not as “disruptive” (in faculty terms, violating norms of “collegial”) because Grandpa doesn’t ask the community to acknowledge the problem. The person saying Grandpa was racist does. That is violating collegiality.
One of many disastrous consequences of valuing in-group loyalty is that loyalty to the in-group is more important than holding in-group members accountable for their abuse of out-group members. That’s the kind of “reasoning” that makes police officers think they’re behaving ethically when they don’t report the abuse of fellow officers. They are behaving ethically, by their understanding of “ethical” behavior, because their understanding of ethical behavior means first and foremost being loyal to their in-group. In addition, they believe that there is no point in complaining about behavior—the higher-ups will do nothing, and they’ll get sidelined.
I initially wrote this post in mid-February, and had gotten about this far. It has now become even more salient. I hear (and see) faculty express shock that police officers stand around while an officer is verbally or physically abusive, says or does racist things—“Why don’t the bystanders do something,” they say.
Well, why don’t we do something?
[1] I have to issue a general caveat—it shouldn’t be inferred that I’m talking about my current department. Also, I’ve picked examples in which I was not the person who spoke up or made changes happen—I’ve been singularly ineffectual in that regard in my career.