There’s been some social media discussion over the last few days of a tenure denial at Yale (the social psychologist Michael Kraus).
One thread I noticed this morning was discussing how faculty who object to a decision of this kind (or to any policy, really) are sometimes warned by ostensibly friendly colleagues to be careful about voicing their objections because senior faculty or administrative leaders might be angry or upset about the criticism and retaliate in some fashion at a later date.
That’s a real issue to consider for junior faculty, faculty facing promotion, or faculty who have ambitions for institutional leadership. It’s true that there are sometimes senior faculty or faculty serving as administrative leaders who actively maintain grudges in a way that can be consequential for their targets. It’s also true, however, that some of the senior people most prone to holding grudges and nursing enmities are relatively isolated or mistrusted precisely because of that habit and being added to their list doesn’t have any real impact.
What might also be true is that there are no such people to worry about except for the seemingly helpful person delivering the warning. At least some of the time, the person offering their counsel doesn’t know of anyone specifically who is likely to retaliate or be antagonized if you speak up or criticize a decision. In the best case scenario, your helpful guide may simply be guessing or inferring based on nothing in particular. In the worst case, your would-be advisor is the person you’re being warned about: they’re trying to tell you not to oppose or criticize because they will be angry at you or work to hurt you, but they don’t want to actually say so, they want plausible deniability.
In the most malicious case, that person is carrying misattributed messages in both directions—telling you “hey watch out your senior colleagues are vindictive and will really be mad if you speak up in department meetings” and telling your senior colleagues “hey watch out your junior colleague is spitting mad and trying to provoke a lot of faculty and students to hate you”. I don’t think this kind of committed Iago is all that common, and sooner or later most people become aware that this is what’s going on.
What I think is far more common and basically innocent of that kind of conscious manipulative malice is what I call “the flinch”. It develops over time without anyone trying to impose it. If you’re a regular part of some deliberative process at any level (departmental, divisional, in a shared lab or major research collaboration, in faculty meetings or a faculty senate, in standing committees that have important oversight functions) sooner or later you’ll hit upon a couple of people who are predictably tendentious or obstructionist about almost every decision and procedure. That might be for any number of reasons—ideology, temperament, insecurity, bitterness, narcissism. It doesn’t really matter why, it just becomes a patterned expectation. This person’s patterned behavior is going to cost you and everybody else who is involved time and energy and it is likely to make it difficult to have good discussions of interesting ideas and productive approaches.
There may be someone you have to work with regularly who is not so comprehensively frustrating but who is going to predictably foreclose by any means necessary at least one very important potential avenue of deliberative conversation every single time it comes up even when it’s urgently necessary to consider some of the issues involved, who has a canny understanding of how to take an option off the table before it ever gets there. (Occasionally when it comes to a perennially recurrent bad or threatening idea, perhaps from administration, this person is not a problem but a savior.)
Over a period of years, what happens is that this person is training you to anticipate their future possible opposition such that you consciously or even unconsciously represent the inevitability of that stalemate before it ever happens in a deliberative process where that person is absent, in a decision-making situation where in fact that person may never actually be present. In effect, you become their surrogate; you project them as speaking subjects in their absence and even to some extent relieve them of the need to actually voice their repeated obstructions or objections, because nothing ever gets to the point where they need to speak up. Some collegial cuckoo has laid eggs in your own cognitive nest.
That’s the flinch: you now react habitually on behalf of someone who isn’t there and try to avoid decisions that you know will lead to the same stalemated conversation you’ve endured numerous times before.
It’s a fine line, mind you. There are colleagues who have strong principles or values that inform how they think about academic professionalism and faculty governance whom you end up appreciating whether or not you agree with them. It’s actually a relief often to feel that you understand where someone else stands and why and can build a good model of what the parameters or poles in a particular disagreement are likely to be. But there’s a difference and I think most of us have witnessed this between a person who takes principled positions where the underlying principle is both coherent and arguable and a person who is some kind of gatekeeper or obstructionist who will seek to grind down any conversation in order to prevent a particular resolution (or any outcome at all). I never develop a flinch about the person whose principles I understand who is always prepared to talk it through, who accepts the need to subsume or circumscribe their principles if there’s a collective desire to move in another direction, who accepts the responsibilities of some form of democratic process. The flinch comes from the person who is an ordeal to endure, from the negative reinforcement of repeated experiences of tedium and frustration, from just wanting to not have to do that again.
When the flinch settles in to stay, you become that person who carries messages to others who have yet to experience that ordeal. You may not even know that you’ve become someone else’s agent. You think you’re being helpful. You think also that you’re showing your processual wisdom, that you’re trying to save everybody some wasted time and get as quickly as possible to the only resolution or decision that will be possible or allowed. And thus you may end up foreclosing a real possibility that the ordeal could end—that the next turn of the wheel, with a sufficiently unified opposition to the obstruction, will be the time that everybody moves on to something new.
Dealing with a person who is consciously trying to sandbag a decision by passive-aggressively projecting their views onto other people and by creating a sense of fear while keeping their own reputation unblemished is a tricky art (and by no means particular to academia). But the flinch is a more widespread problem, and much more an outcome of working over very long periods of time with the same set of people within complicated structures of administration and deliberation. There are moments where real change is actually within reach if only we can learn to stop letting absent colleagues speak with our voices.
Image credit: "Flinch" by Jeff Boyd is licensed under CC BY 2.0