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Wednesday, May 04, 2005
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UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS UD’s a great admirer of the website Inside Higher Ed, but one of their recent news items - about an unnamed professor who, on being told he’d been denied tenure, went berserk in the hallways of his university and ripped all of his clothes off - has her wondering whether commentators who worry about the ethics of blogging don’t have a point. The item is filed under “NEWS,” but it’s rumor. There’s not a hard fact in it. “The scholar was well liked and well published, according to the e-mail that arrived last week, but he was denied tenure in April. And then he lost it. One day on campus, he started shouting expletives about the university administration (some versions of the story have this taking place in a class; others do not). He then moved into a hallway, continuing to shout and removing his clothes, taking leaflets off the walls. At some point, he was subdued by campus security officers.” No names, no dates, no locations. No sourced details, no interviews, no nothing. From the university’s public relations office the authors are able only to get a statement that an “incident” with a professor recently occurred. “We’re not naming the university or department here because to do so would lead to identifying the professor, who is getting help, and who doesn’t need (or presumably want) to be known nationally.” Um, since when is everyone so sensitive? If you have a story, and if you have positive i.d., go with it all the way. If you have vague conflicting accounts [“Many people at the university involved know about the incident (or versions of it they have heard, with the ‘facts’ changing a bit), but there’s been no public discussion.”], don’t go with it until you have a real story. Or, if you want to be sensitive (not to mention that, even with a name, a professor who goes nuts in this way ain’t much of a story), don’t go with the story. In any case, now that a high-profile education blog has broken out with the story, the university - and probably the nervous breakdowner - will be revealed one way or another. But this shallow approach to the incident generates nothing of value, as the comments posted to the piece attest. Predictably, there are commenters who rush into this inchoate semi-story with therapeutic solicitude for the poor soul, and anger at the cruel tenure system and the cruel bureaucracy of the university. Just as predictably, there are those who say it makes sense a nut was denied tenure, and I wouldn’t want a nutcase teaching my kids... Since both species of observations are built upon nothingness - or upon the thinnest of air - they’re equally worthless. Which is why it’s just as absurd when the editors quote various academics on their responses to whatever the hell happened here: ‘ “I’m surprised this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often,” said Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a frequent writer about the way academe treats junior faculty members and graduate students. “So much of the system makes people feel utterly powerless,” he said. ' See how the oxygen keeps seeping out of things? First you report a rumor about some guy who around the same time he was denied tenure screamed shit and fuck and took his clothes off in public. Something like that. Based on this wisp of a story, you solicit comments from people like Nelson, famous for years of furious condemnation of “the system.” Nelson isn’t “surprised” things like this (whatever this was) don’t happen more often; he’s clearly disappointed, since it would bolster his argument about the fundamental inhumanity of current academic practices if everyone denied tenure stripped and shouted fuck until subdued by campus police. This response, though, is rare, which suggests to UD that it doesn’t tell us very much about “the system.” When mailmen go nuts in public, which they do far more frequently than professors, do we begin talking about the fundamental inhumanity of the postal service, which makes people feel so powerless that they go berserk? Nelson goes on to add his own rumor to the mix: ‘ Nelson said that he knew of one professor …who suffered a breakdown after he was denied tenure, and responded in part by stripping naked and climbing into a college building by hauling himself up a wall, holding onto ivy, and climbing in. The professor was eventually able to reverse the decision and to win tenure. ’ UD loves the detail about the ivy. It’s just the kind of credibility-enhancing detail English professors are always telling their students to provide in their essays. But when you look at Nelson’s gossip more closely, it gets a bit weird. How long after the tenure-denial did the guy (it’s always guys!) start in on the ivy? Was the ivy the only mode of ingress into the building? Could he have used the front door, or had he been locked out (a security risk?) of campus buildings? And note how Nelson says this was only “part” of this professor’s response to the denial of tenure! What the hell did he do for a second act, and why won’t Nelson tell us? Possibly because, as with the ivy, it’s more rhetorically effective to do an I could a tale unfold number than actually to report an actual story…. |