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Sunday, July 02, 2006
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Getting Around a Roadblock Well-intentioned, but I think somewhat wrong-headed essay in a recent Inside Higher Ed about the dehumanizing cruelty university presidents and chancellors endure, and the way this must have played into Denice Denton’s leap from San Francisco’s highest apartment building. Because they are symbols of power, mere things, college presidents are not recognized as having feelings or basic human rights. As did Denice Denton, they find themselves dehumanized. Who among us can survive this kind of treatment unscathed? Denice Denton, like many college heads, was on occasion at the receiving end of nasty and juvenile behavior, and I’m sure it scathed her. I’m also pretty sure it didn’t drive her to suicide. She herself, after all, as the IHE writer points out, was capable of cruelty to university presidents: [T]he kind of devaluing language that, for instance, then-Dean Denton directed at [Larry Summers] after he spoke about women and science… must have been a bit galling to Summers, if not actually hurtful. Apparently, like most others, Denton was unable to see that the president has two bodies — his own and his institution’s, and that the former when pricked does bleed. Indeed, scathed though I’m sure he’s been by turmoil far crueler than Denton had to endure, Summers seems to be toddling along just fine. The problem I have with editorials like the one in Inside Higher Ed is that they get very close to saying that women can’t take the heat. I don’t see any male college presidents throwing themselves off buildings, and I only see one female doing it. Yet most of the non-suicides endure pretty steady cruelty and turmoil. Think of what Duke’s president’s been going through for months. It’s characteristic of university leaders that they are seen as symbols of the institution more than human beings with feelings. Everyone knows this, and knows that it goes with the territory. Anger about what’s going on at Duke is going to be directed at its president, even though in fact the particular man running the place only very recently came to Duke. That’s the way it goes. “News of a suicide,” writes one blogger, “is a roadblock in our everyday understanding of life. How to get around it? Everybody’s got a different method. Make a joke. Blame somebody. Try to sound clever. Declare a political position. What is this crazy thing that has happened? How can we categorize and sanitize it?” Better to resist the temptation to categorize Denton's as caused by social cruelty. |