Controlling Faculty Expression
Defeating Tenure
With Ceremonies of Public Disgrace and Embarrassment
Boston University has
a long and inglorious history, beginning in the 1970s and extending into the
present, of finding ways to control its faculty members’ expressions and of
defeating and legally getting around the supposed protections of the tenure
system in particular. I have received a surprising number of inquiries from faculty
members and administrators at other universities who read the blog regularly
and want to know more about the treatment I have received in response to the
reports of ethical misconduct and professional misbehavior I have filed and the
attempts of Boston University administrators to ostracize, marginalize, and
remove me from the decision-making process in the university. This is the
second part of a seven-part posting touching on some of the ways I have, as I
note in a previous posting, been “bullied, beat-up, and bludgeoned administratively,”
“turned into a persona non grata,” and “effectively
expunged, banned, and prevented from doing anything but teaching my courses” in
my College. Due to lack of space and the number of years these events have
taken place, the individual postings will be of a summary nature. Details are
provided on earlier blog pages. —Ray Carney
Part 2—Being Upbraided and Berated
In Hallways, Stairwells, and
In Front of Students
On more than one occasion, the
shouting, name-calling, abuse, and threats described on the preceding page
has moved out of offices and meeting rooms and into public spaces.
As the mood struck them, both the
College of
Communication Dean and the Chairman of the Department of Film and
Television and Film Studies Director have felt free to berate me, shout at me, or make smart sacastic remarks about me in a loud voice when I was standing in a public hallway,
stairwell, or outside a classroom—yelling at me at the top of their voices,
criticizing my morals, character, and performance of my duties in front of
undergraduate and graduate students, unconnected faculty members, staff members sitting in their offices,
visiting parents, and complete strangers. (I document two examples on another
page of the site. See “Public Shaming as an Administrative Technique.”)
For
the record, I am not the only faculty member in my building who has been
publicly abused this way. When I described my experiences, two other College of
Communication faculty members told me they had been accorded similar public
administrative upbraidings that went on for a briefer periods of time. Needless to say, these events are not inadvertent. They are deliberate. An administrator does not start yelling at a faculty member in a public place accidentally. He does it for a reason. He does what he does in front of outsiders and students to humiliate the faculty
member and destroy his or her relationship with his or her students.
There
have also been quieter, more insidious forms of intimidation and bullying in
public places. Colleagues and administrators swear at me as they
pass me in the hall or on the stairs. Others do an about-face when they see me
approaching them and pointedly turn and walk in the other direction. Still
others refuse to reply to questions I ask when we meet, or walk past me
silently, refusing to meet my eyes or respond to a friendly greeting.
*
* *
Just as I have protested other
acts of brutalization and bullying, I have protested these events to the
perpetrators and the administrators over them—not only because they affect me
but because in being conducted in front of students they erode the necessary
trust and respect that must exist between a teacher and his or her students. The students suffer in this situation as much as the teacher being savaged in front of them, because they are being misled. They assume their teacher must deserve such treatment, that their teacher must be incompetent and irresponsible to be bringing such criticism down on his head. They can't imagine that it it all being done as theater by the administrator, deliberately to undermine the relationship of the teacher being reviled with his or her students—or to destroy it altogether. Beyond
that, the nastiness and ad hominem nature
of these attacks is deeply destructive of the premise that an educational
institution is organized in terms of civility, tolerance, and reason. This is not the way civilized, educated people interact with their bosses—by standing in a public place being yelled at and having their alleged deficiencies shouted to the rooftops (or up to the top of a stairwell from the ground floor in one case). Only at Boston University is this the way administrators treat faculty members.
Exactly as was the case when I
protested the acts of brutalization and bullying that took place behind closed
doors in meetings, the response of the administrators I sent the memos to has
been either not to respond or to deny that anything at all ever took place.
(Denial is only to be expected, I guess. The administrators who acted this way
would presumably be fired or seriously reprimanded, if they admitted what they
had done.)
*
* *
The effect of these public events
on me has been as predicable as the effect of the screaming and name-calling
sessions conducted behind closed doors. As much as possible I now enter and
leave my office through a side entrance off at one end of the building to avoid
having to pass through trafficked hallways, and have almost completely
succeeded in re-routing my journeys to and from other offices or to and from my
classroom to avoid having to pass by the offices of the Dean, the department
Chairman, and the Film Studies Director—since all three locations have been the
sites of their office holders’ darting out if they saw me walking past to begin
shouting at and berating me in public. When I do have to walk the main halls,
as is of course sometimes the case, I have learned to keep on the lookout for a
side office to dart into, somewhere I can hide from public scrutiny, in order
to be out of the sight and hearing of passing students if I am suddenly
“cornered” by an administrator who wants to tell me what he thinks of me in
front of students and strangers.
[Continued on the next page]
