Academia: What It Feels Like To Be a Liability

In The 21st Century University, You'll Always Walk Alone

The semester is over, so I am in that space where there are many things that need doing but they’ve lost some of their weekly patterning. I attended an interesting virtual seminar about academic freedom yesterday, and accordingly today I feel like writing about Yale University’s AAUP and its new report on the state of academic freedom at Yale and other institutions like it.

Perhaps more accurately, I feel like writing about an issue I brood about a lot that the report made me think about again, namely, what happens when an academic institution starts thinking about faculty, staff, students and their surrounding communities as a source of liability first and foremost. Not as employees and customers, not as stakeholders and clients, not as the agents of its underlying mission and the purpose for its existence.

At many institutions, rich and otherwise, this is the language that the administrative leaders mostly speak. It’s an evolution of the language of compliance and of fiduciary duty. It is driven by the ascension of lawyerly thinking into the central decision-making processes and by the perceived need to protect the endowment or other revenue streams above and before any discussion of what the purpose of the endowment might be.

It’s a way of thinking that not only reclassifies what people are to and in the institution, but also that comprehensively forces its influence on decisions to be unspoken and unspeakable. To say that a change is being made in order to address a potential or perceived liability is to create a liability. So nothing can be said with clarity or honesty about the evidence for a potential risk to anyone who might be a liability or anyone who might make claims in the name of that liability. Therefore that evidence is never tested, examined, or critiqued. It comes from a source that cannot be questioned and resides in a place that it cannot be seen. If such a change is made as a response to an actual incident or pattern of behavior, that is even more unspeakable, as the institution would not be engaged in prevention but in remediation, would not be just confessing potential vulnerability but acknowledging an actual problem or shortcoming. All of what gets done at a university—teaching, mentorship, scholarship, maintenance, allocation, supervision, engagement—is thus beclouded. Did someone make an actual mistake? A preventable mistake? Is that mistake common or exceedingly rare, if it was made? No one can say.

The Yale AAUP Report pulled me into this space via a comment from one of the respondents, on page 12 of the report. This respondent writes about their work teaching about racial inequality in the U.S.., “I’m taking on more risk now as a scholar and teacher, but that this is seen as an individual choice, to be managed by me alone.”

That is a difference from the American academia I started in as a professional in the early 1990s. It’s not that we were infallible in our professional choices within a relatively decentralized working environment. Far from it. But precisely because the academia invested so much effort in producing your professional expertise from your undergraduate work all the way through hiring and tenure, because your work was also vetted by other mechanisms like peer review and teaching evaluations, the institution stood behind you if you were criticized in public for your work. Scholarly networks provided a shared place to stand as well. Your value as an intellectual was seen as deeply intertwined with the value of your university or college, of your discipline, of your profession, of the entirety of academia. If you taught about racial inequality in the US, you generally could feel confident that your president, your dean, your chair, your institutional lawyer, your trustees, would defend not just your right to teach that but say that your teaching of it was the will of the institution, a collective value and a shared commitment, regardless of what they might personally think of you or of the topic you were teaching.

That’s been peeled away in successive stages, but the rawest and most exposed deprivation is the stage we’re in now, perhaps not coincidentally at the point when many of us are facing real threats from national and regional governments as well as highly mobilized political networks. What you teach is now largely understood as a vulnerability to the institution. What you study is a source of risk. You are a liability.

What you do as a staff person can only at best help the institution avoid exposure to liability and legal risk. Anything human beyond that, any consideration for students or devotion to a deeper mission, is an exposure and nothing more.

Social life is now just something universities (barely) tolerate in students. The rhetoric of “co-curricular” is vanishing in many institutions. Student life is not something to support, to cherish, to make bountiful. It’s something to surveil, to control, to limit, to regulate.

Liability reasoning is about commandment, constraint, and silence, and there is no space free from its logic. It doesn’t have to be defended or advocated and it acknowledges no trade-offs. It doesn’t matter if treating people as if they are legal risks actually drives them into legalistic responses. That is not the kind of risk that matters, even if it ends up having a substantial end-cost in both efficiency of operations and in operational financing of arbitration, mediation and litigation processes. It doesn’t matter if reducing all purpose and value to the protection of assets and the reduction of legal exposure actually provides a powerful tool for political enemies to turn against academia. That is not the kind of risk that matters either. It is outside the frame.

This is part of the problem with trying to struggle for academic freedom envisioned as a negative liberty maintained against active attempts by administrators or political outsiders to contravene the rights and prerogatives of faculty. That conception still has value, particularly given how unrestrained and incautious the attempts to destroy that sense of academic freedom have become in Texas, in Florida, in these United States, and in many other nations where universities have been an important space for thinking beyond and outside what the state compels from its citizens.

But it only gets us so far, because it references an older understanding of who people are within the academy and what the mission and purpose of academia really is at its core. The more that we are transmogrified into risks to an asset whose purpose is increasingly nothing more than itself and its own growth, alpha and omega, changed into open-ended sources of potential legal exposure whose agency must be reduced to the most limited dimensionality possible, the less that it is possible to articulate academic freedom through that older language. We are all of us being left to manage as me, alone, with little hope of having anything bigger to stand upon if and when we are called to account against the accounting of assets and balance sheets.