Bobo got it exactly backwards. It’s the senior administrators who need to pipe down, and the senior faculty who need to speak out. Bobo’s implied threats though, will ensure that all but the very most secure, and I mean way more secure than simply having tenure, will not speak out except in support of buffoons like Bobo.
It's fortunate that Harvard's own council on academic freedom responded with exactly this position: it should be the faculty, not administrators, who are taking positions on controversial issues. I hope that the council's position will win out over Bobo's at my alma mater.
The thing I'm really appreciating from reading other responses than mine own is just how bad Bobo's framing of "outside attention" really is--it's not something that faculty can control for the most part, even IF they've established a public persona. Bobo seems to think it's about whether you speak carefully and whether you leave the hand that feeds you alone on the grounds of loyalty, but even faculty who don't pick fights with their institutions and who are quite careful to avoid strong rhetoric end up targeted not just as individuals but as employees of their institution. The central idea of "academic freedom" is precisely that your institution has to value what you do as a teacher and scholar in a way that isn't stage-managing that content in order to not be provocative. It's the difference between a for-profit TV network that might decide they can't really have a TV weatherman talking too assertively about climate change (as per the NYT profile recently) and an insanely wealthy private university that stands by a climate change researcher regardless precisely because they're not intimidated by negative emails or partisan scrutiny.
That Bobo's op-ed appears on the surface to be a straightforward call on "Raj Chetty ’00, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jill Lepore... [and] Steven A. Pinker" to shut up and soldier makes me think that we do not understand what is going on here. There is no reason for Bobo to act right now to aggressively try muzzle those four. And if I were any of those four, I would be yelling to the provost and president that I simply cannot work with a guy who disses me like that.
Thus I suspect it is no more about those four than Wu Han's 1965 play "Hai Rui Dismissed from Office" was about the Ming Dynasty official Hai Rui and Emperor Jiajing.
But who is it about? There are references to "prominent affiliates, including one former University president" and also to "encourag[ing] civil disobedience... in violation of student conduct rules... after students have received official notification of a potential serious infraction". But no names are named.
I do think that Bobo's op-ed "directly impedes the University’s function" by drawing a line between the university and outsiders that places "alumni, donors" among the "external actors"; university presidents are going to be spending a long time trying to repair the damage by repeating to donors and alumni "no, Bobo was wrong: you are part of **us**, you are not an outside *them**.
I do see one and only one good point in this. But it was put better by Lois McMaster Bujold in one of her novels, where Castellar dy Ferrej admonishes a princess for leading her less protected underlings into trouble:
> His brow twitched, and he gave her a little bow. “Then you might meditate, Royesse, on what honor a captain can claim, who drags his followers into an error when he knows he will himself escape the punishment.” The amber-haired girl’s wide lips twisted at this. After a long glance up under her lashes, she, too, dropped him a fraction of a curtsey...
As a lawyer I make a pretty good retired English professor. But I am one who's served as special assistant to three provosts, one president, and more deans than I care to remember, chaired faculty cmtes, including Cmte A, brought AAUP onto campus to provide guidance to ill-informed leadership, and served as a trustee. Two points. University administrators have little or no experience managing or leading any where at any time. This didn't used to be true, when aspiring faculty usually had extensive work & supervisory experience, often in the military, before they got PhDs. (Good Morning, Vietnam!) It's obviously true now. More schools should send deans, provosts, & presidents to Harvard's bootcamps, & boards should be more involved in training university leadership.
Second, most faculty completely misconstrue academic freedom to mean they can say anything they want anywhere & any time they want. Not true. Academic freedom is a process. Faculty bylaws & guidelines define when & how faculty participate in school governance, when, how, & what faculty can teach, & when & how even faculty with continuous tenure can be dismissed for cause. All that language is defined & can be redefined by the courts. A SCOTUS which can read an absolute clause out of the 2d Amendment can easily take AAUP & AAC language to mean something much different from what, by custom of the past 50 plus years, faculty & universities have decided it means.
So what? So faculty should be more circumspect in what they say outside their disciplines & outside the parameters of shared governance. Not because administrators are right, since they way too often they aren't. But because universities have complicated self-governing processes, and wise faculty value & respect those processes and participate in them, not act outside of them.
Unfortunately the court system currently agrees more with Bobo. Bobo's position just received support from a 6th Circuit panel: https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/GrubervTennTechBdofTrustees.pdf In this case, professors who called another professor a racist can be legally disciplined by their Provost because such language "impairs...harmony among co-workers."
A 4th Circuit court also recently ruled that a professor who criticized a school DEI survey was not engaging in protected speech either because the speech was not via scholarship or teaching in the classroom: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca4/22-1712/22-1712-2023-07-06.html In other words, professors are just regular employees when it comes to workplace-related matters and university governance--and thus don't have special speech rights.
The legacy of the 2006 Garcetti decision and the weakness of Pickering are going to wreak havoc in every direction in academia until the Supreme Court explicitly outlines an academic freedom exception to their current jurisprudence (and even then they might well follow the 4th circuit's lead and not allow an exception for non-scholarship, non-teaching speech).
I'm not so sure training is the answer. Most R1s I know have some sort of mentorship or coaching available to new deans or high-level faculty administrators. That seems slightly more likely to have an impact than a leadership training, even one that was lead by a competent and knowledgably higher ed professional.
The biggest issue as I see it is that the first step for positions like Bobo's and similar rank is usually a term or two as a department chair, or sometimes running a center. These are part-time gigs and have their challenges, but nothing like the whirlwind that greets a new dean or associate provost. The step up is a big and nothing about being a chair renders visible what the person will be like when they are responsible for large budgets and multiple support staff to say nothing of the pressures of a full-time management role.
Their congressional testimony was revealing. These presidents were accustomed to parroting banalities, and their inability to state positions plainly and defend themselves was cringe-worthy. Makes you wonder about these institutions. Remember, the fish rots from the head.
I worked for a Federal agency (NOAA) for 30 years, starting as a GS-12 economist after leaving the academic world. NOAA put in the work when I was promoted to a management position … “The more blunt way to put it is that students, professors, and staff must hope that academia’s middle management cares enough to put in the work and learn on their own. - Drezner” In NOAA we were put through an intensive multi-week training program at the start and had annual weeklong training thereafter. It wasn’t perfect (I wasn’t perfect) but the contrast with the university world seems stark.
One of the things going on in modern academia is an overt attempt to change facts on the ground with regard to power dynamics. Deans (provosts too) have always needed the senior faculty to some degree in no small part because the higher up the ladder a faculty member is, the less power those administrators have over them. A dean can basically tell a lecturer or an adjunct what to do. junior faculty are wise to listen to their deans and take their requests/demands seriously, though even by that point, there might be tenured faculty and especially senior faculty members willing to run interference. By the time someone is tenured, and in particular by the time someone is a full professor, the dean and provost become akin to what some political scientists say about the American president: That their power is basically the power to persuade. A dean can tell a full professor to do something, point blank. But in all but the most narrow cases, the full professor can say "I'm not doing that; good luck." Because the implicit follow-up is "or what?"
But administration across the country is trying to change that. Now, whether they can at a place like Harvard is very much up for debate. If Jill Lepore asks her dean, "or what?" there is likely to be a whole lot of stammering and walking back from that dean. But increasingly at state universities, there can be real consequences for things that used to be up to faculty. I know as well as anyone that many of us can be difficult. But these efforts to ride herd are usually about wanting to apply authoritarian structure in the face of ANY opposition, not just the most (and frankly relatively few) brazen cases that most of us would say "yeah, that's a problem."
Bobo got it exactly backwards. It’s the senior administrators who need to pipe down, and the senior faculty who need to speak out. Bobo’s implied threats though, will ensure that all but the very most secure, and I mean way more secure than simply having tenure, will not speak out except in support of buffoons like Bobo.
It's fortunate that Harvard's own council on academic freedom responded with exactly this position: it should be the faculty, not administrators, who are taking positions on controversial issues. I hope that the council's position will win out over Bobo's at my alma mater.
The thing I'm really appreciating from reading other responses than mine own is just how bad Bobo's framing of "outside attention" really is--it's not something that faculty can control for the most part, even IF they've established a public persona. Bobo seems to think it's about whether you speak carefully and whether you leave the hand that feeds you alone on the grounds of loyalty, but even faculty who don't pick fights with their institutions and who are quite careful to avoid strong rhetoric end up targeted not just as individuals but as employees of their institution. The central idea of "academic freedom" is precisely that your institution has to value what you do as a teacher and scholar in a way that isn't stage-managing that content in order to not be provocative. It's the difference between a for-profit TV network that might decide they can't really have a TV weatherman talking too assertively about climate change (as per the NYT profile recently) and an insanely wealthy private university that stands by a climate change researcher regardless precisely because they're not intimidated by negative emails or partisan scrutiny.
That Bobo's op-ed appears on the surface to be a straightforward call on "Raj Chetty ’00, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jill Lepore... [and] Steven A. Pinker" to shut up and soldier makes me think that we do not understand what is going on here. There is no reason for Bobo to act right now to aggressively try muzzle those four. And if I were any of those four, I would be yelling to the provost and president that I simply cannot work with a guy who disses me like that.
Thus I suspect it is no more about those four than Wu Han's 1965 play "Hai Rui Dismissed from Office" was about the Ming Dynasty official Hai Rui and Emperor Jiajing.
But who is it about? There are references to "prominent affiliates, including one former University president" and also to "encourag[ing] civil disobedience... in violation of student conduct rules... after students have received official notification of a potential serious infraction". But no names are named.
I do think that Bobo's op-ed "directly impedes the University’s function" by drawing a line between the university and outsiders that places "alumni, donors" among the "external actors"; university presidents are going to be spending a long time trying to repair the damage by repeating to donors and alumni "no, Bobo was wrong: you are part of **us**, you are not an outside *them**.
I do see one and only one good point in this. But it was put better by Lois McMaster Bujold in one of her novels, where Castellar dy Ferrej admonishes a princess for leading her less protected underlings into trouble:
> His brow twitched, and he gave her a little bow. “Then you might meditate, Royesse, on what honor a captain can claim, who drags his followers into an error when he knows he will himself escape the punishment.” The amber-haired girl’s wide lips twisted at this. After a long glance up under her lashes, she, too, dropped him a fraction of a curtsey...
As a lawyer I make a pretty good retired English professor. But I am one who's served as special assistant to three provosts, one president, and more deans than I care to remember, chaired faculty cmtes, including Cmte A, brought AAUP onto campus to provide guidance to ill-informed leadership, and served as a trustee. Two points. University administrators have little or no experience managing or leading any where at any time. This didn't used to be true, when aspiring faculty usually had extensive work & supervisory experience, often in the military, before they got PhDs. (Good Morning, Vietnam!) It's obviously true now. More schools should send deans, provosts, & presidents to Harvard's bootcamps, & boards should be more involved in training university leadership.
Second, most faculty completely misconstrue academic freedom to mean they can say anything they want anywhere & any time they want. Not true. Academic freedom is a process. Faculty bylaws & guidelines define when & how faculty participate in school governance, when, how, & what faculty can teach, & when & how even faculty with continuous tenure can be dismissed for cause. All that language is defined & can be redefined by the courts. A SCOTUS which can read an absolute clause out of the 2d Amendment can easily take AAUP & AAC language to mean something much different from what, by custom of the past 50 plus years, faculty & universities have decided it means.
So what? So faculty should be more circumspect in what they say outside their disciplines & outside the parameters of shared governance. Not because administrators are right, since they way too often they aren't. But because universities have complicated self-governing processes, and wise faculty value & respect those processes and participate in them, not act outside of them.
Unfortunately the court system currently agrees more with Bobo. Bobo's position just received support from a 6th Circuit panel: https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/GrubervTennTechBdofTrustees.pdf In this case, professors who called another professor a racist can be legally disciplined by their Provost because such language "impairs...harmony among co-workers."
A 4th Circuit court also recently ruled that a professor who criticized a school DEI survey was not engaging in protected speech either because the speech was not via scholarship or teaching in the classroom: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca4/22-1712/22-1712-2023-07-06.html In other words, professors are just regular employees when it comes to workplace-related matters and university governance--and thus don't have special speech rights.
The legacy of the 2006 Garcetti decision and the weakness of Pickering are going to wreak havoc in every direction in academia until the Supreme Court explicitly outlines an academic freedom exception to their current jurisprudence (and even then they might well follow the 4th circuit's lead and not allow an exception for non-scholarship, non-teaching speech).
I'm not so sure training is the answer. Most R1s I know have some sort of mentorship or coaching available to new deans or high-level faculty administrators. That seems slightly more likely to have an impact than a leadership training, even one that was lead by a competent and knowledgably higher ed professional.
The biggest issue as I see it is that the first step for positions like Bobo's and similar rank is usually a term or two as a department chair, or sometimes running a center. These are part-time gigs and have their challenges, but nothing like the whirlwind that greets a new dean or associate provost. The step up is a big and nothing about being a chair renders visible what the person will be like when they are responsible for large budgets and multiple support staff to say nothing of the pressures of a full-time management role.
Their congressional testimony was revealing. These presidents were accustomed to parroting banalities, and their inability to state positions plainly and defend themselves was cringe-worthy. Makes you wonder about these institutions. Remember, the fish rots from the head.
I worked for a Federal agency (NOAA) for 30 years, starting as a GS-12 economist after leaving the academic world. NOAA put in the work when I was promoted to a management position … “The more blunt way to put it is that students, professors, and staff must hope that academia’s middle management cares enough to put in the work and learn on their own. - Drezner” In NOAA we were put through an intensive multi-week training program at the start and had annual weeklong training thereafter. It wasn’t perfect (I wasn’t perfect) but the contrast with the university world seems stark.
One of the things going on in modern academia is an overt attempt to change facts on the ground with regard to power dynamics. Deans (provosts too) have always needed the senior faculty to some degree in no small part because the higher up the ladder a faculty member is, the less power those administrators have over them. A dean can basically tell a lecturer or an adjunct what to do. junior faculty are wise to listen to their deans and take their requests/demands seriously, though even by that point, there might be tenured faculty and especially senior faculty members willing to run interference. By the time someone is tenured, and in particular by the time someone is a full professor, the dean and provost become akin to what some political scientists say about the American president: That their power is basically the power to persuade. A dean can tell a full professor to do something, point blank. But in all but the most narrow cases, the full professor can say "I'm not doing that; good luck." Because the implicit follow-up is "or what?"
But administration across the country is trying to change that. Now, whether they can at a place like Harvard is very much up for debate. If Jill Lepore asks her dean, "or what?" there is likely to be a whole lot of stammering and walking back from that dean. But increasingly at state universities, there can be real consequences for things that used to be up to faculty. I know as well as anyone that many of us can be difficult. But these efforts to ride herd are usually about wanting to apply authoritarian structure in the face of ANY opposition, not just the most (and frankly relatively few) brazen cases that most of us would say "yeah, that's a problem."
A Fletcher guy: the voice of personal experience.