I still feel an attraction to calling a university a “community”. I like what the word is meant to suggest, that a university isn’t just a workplace, it isn’t just a business offering a service, it isn’t just a knowledge factory. That a university is a physical site of literal residence and of long-term stewardship that generates and rests upon relationships of mutuality, engagement and simultaneous presence. Like a neighborhood, not all those relationships are approved from some central deliberative body: students enter through one decision-making structure, faculty through another, staff through yet another. People have assigned roles and duties but they’re also often called to responsibility for the intangible whole of the thing.
But it’s a misleading word much of the time, sometimes purposefully so. At the least, some uses of it don’t seem prepared to live up to what the word proposes about a university.
If you lived in a community where all the neighbors voted for a home owner’s association board that could propose regulations and guidelines that had to be debated in open session and ratified by a vote of 75% of the community members in attendance, you’d likely agree that it’s important for those discussions to be civil and orderly. You’d also likely agree that what is known to one needs to be known to all: if the HOA board proposed a three-percent increase in community fees on vague or general grounds without disclosing that this was on the advice of counsel to cover liability exposure for a previous bad decision? That’s still a community, but it’s not a good one, and the HOA board would (or at least should) lose the right to demand transparency from everyone else.
But if you lived in a community where all of that was effectively moot because there was a mansion on the hill above the community that had full legal authority to modify, cancel or ignore all the decisions and deliberations of the HOA board and the membership of the neighborhood, a mansion whose doors were mostly closed and whose inhabitants only spoke in public when they were so inclined, you’d start to wonder whether it was a community at all. At the least, you’d have to question whether there was any point at all to maintaining standards for deliberations or dialogues within the community.
As I read the initial reports of the University of North Carolina’s Board of Trustees voting at last to authorize the offer of tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, I was struck, not for the first nor likely last time by the rote invocation of the need for open debate and avoiding “cancel culture” following a decision. The vice-chairman of the board, R. Gene Davis, complained that his fellow trustees had been called “most unpleasant names” and had to endure “false claims”. He asked that people at UNC avoid cancel culture and choose instead open debate “grounded in the virtue of listening to each another”.
But the trustees who held up what had been a normal, default decision, to offer tenure to people appointed to the kind of position that Hannah-Jones would have held, can’t be listened to because they haven’t spoken. Davis said he wished he could set the record straight, but “legal considerations” prevent him from doing so. UNC’s Chancellor has similarly spoken vaguely: everybody is doing as they ought, everybody is acting with integrity, nobody’s made a mistake, but also nobody who actually makes the decision has said much of anything about what it is that they were deliberating about in the first place.
That’s the private mansion on the hill overriding what the community wants and decides. You want an example of cancellation, that’s it. You have to lay it out there if you want to hold something up. You have to come down out of the mansion and have it out with your neighbors. You have to be of the community and in the community before you have a right to ask people to talk or debate in a particular manner. It’s fine to have a different view, but you have to show your homework.
Transparency is an oft-invoked concept and I often have ambivalent feelings about it. The demand for transparency can be a gesture of domination or privilege. But higher education, like many contemporary institutions, vastly overuses an overlapping series of shields of confidentiality in deliberative processes, including stifling invocations of legal obligations. Most formal discussions leading to decisions and even many informal ones can and should be in circulation within the entirety of an institution—especially if we really want to imagine that it is a community. We ask (or expect) too many people as leaders and participants to withhold their opinions and assessments. Most universities and colleges lack anything like an actual public sphere where different constituencies and individuals can routinely speak their mind or articulate their interest in a decision, leaving that kind of discussion to happen in small social networks that often just reinforce the existing preconceptions of the people within them.
If R. Gene Davis is frustrated with the intensity of the vitriol thrown at him and his colleagues, he and many of his spiritual brothers across higher education need to understand that this is a consequence of how much of decision-making is protected by silence or is represented in vague and anodyne terms that bear little resemblance to what was actually said and thought within the rooms where it happens.
I am something of a broken record on this general point in my lifetime as an academic blogger, but that’s partly because I think this is an avoidable mistake. Many decisions are made for pragmatic, unspectacular reasons that are perfectly shareable with everyone. The privilege of some people to express views that have undue weight on decisions where those views are extreme, uninformed, naive or motivated by an agenda that has little to do with higher education and its mission is not a privilege that they should have. When we defend the privacy of deliberative spaces, we often say that it is so that participants will feel it is safe to be honest. In practice, this allows people who already have little fear of the consequences to speak even more irresponsibly, and often more dishonestly. People who do not feel safe, whether they are well-founded in those feelings or not, generally are no more inclined to speak their minds no matter how much they are assured of privacy or confidentiality. What makes people feel safe is not confidentiality but a long and visible record of protecting people for speaking their truth and weighing that truth in the making of decisions. Which, by the way, is not a record that should be extended to cover untruth or hostility to the community. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick notes in her book Generous Thinking, generosity towards others doesn’t require enforced blindness to malice and the misuse of authority.
This is not just a message for administrative leaders and boards. Sometimes faculty take up a room in that mansion on the hill. Occasionally even students, activists or otherwise, find a dorm room in it. To really have community, everybody’s got to come to the meetings and speak their mind with no fear that everything that’s been said and decided will then be overriden by three or four men—or perhaps by a gaggle of state legislators—whose stupid or malicious views will never be held to account.
Photo by Thibault Penin on Unsplash