Sun 12 Sep 2004
One of our Williams sources forwarded e-mails (from Morty Schapiro and Dean of the Faculty Bill Lenhart) and suggested “discussion” at EphBlog.
Well, I don’t know if discussion is really what we do best here, but if you’re looking for uninformed speculation and disjointed mutterings, then you have come to the right place!
See below for the complete e-mails. Here is the key section, from Lenhart:
At the end of the spring semester, a meeting took place in which a group of faculty members, one of whom is African-American, was conducting department business. One of those present raised a concern about the status of her own field of professional work relative to the fields of the others. At one point, she made a heated statement to the effect that she did not want her field to be “used as a nigger.”
The matter was promptly brought to my attention by several of those present at the meeting and a formal complaint was made against the faculty member who made the remark. Upon investigating, I concluded that the faculty member’s behavior warranted the serious step of imposing sanctions on her, which I have done. I believe that the statement made at the meeting was a use of racist language that was meant to provoke or hurt the African-American colleague who was present.
Although the Record — and perhaps the Eagle and Transcript — will be diving into this controversy soon enough, I can’t wait to start asking questions:
1) Which department? There are only so many departments at Williams with African-American faculty members. In this case, we also need a female member (the perp) doing work that might be perceived as outside the mainstream. Is there a list of the African-American faculty at Williams? The best that I could come up with is this listing of faculty associated with African American studies. I do not think that every black faculty member is on this list (although, off-hand, I have trouble coming up with a counter example) nor would I guess that every person on this list (Shanti Singham?) is black.
Anyway, my guesses are History or Political Science. I have trouble even coming up with topics in departments like Art, Theatre and even English that would be considered outside the mainstream in a Williams context.
UPDATE: Not Political Science.
2) Who is the perp? My guess would be someone who either has tenure (and therefore feels safe saying whatever the heck she wants to say) or was not born/educated in the US. I find it almost inconceivable that an untenured faculty member who had spent the last 10+ years in the caldron of political correctness that is US higher education would be so stupid as to make such a career-ending remark. Without knowing the department, it is hard to get more detailed. But there is a certain tenured female member of the political science department with a flair for the outrageous remark and some interests that might fairly be considered outside the mainstream.
Again, I have no idea if this total guess is anywhere near the mark, but . . .
UPDATE: Wrong guess. (Apologies if this tongue-in-cheek was too much tongue and too little cheek. If the suggested professor is offended, I will remove this portion of the post.)
2) What were the “sanctions?” Can the College actually keep the punishment secret in this case? What are the sanctions available to Lenhart anyway? No doubt the perp was concerned that Lenhart might have a “frank exchange” with her, but I assume that more was involved in this case. I assume that the BSU will demand to know more.
3) Who were the dime-droppers? Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the department’s next meeting! Lenhart does not make clear (purposely?) if the tattlers came to him as a group or individually. Nor does he tell us if the African-American faculty member complained. This is the sort of inside detail that EphBlog readers need to know!
This is probably enough for now. Readers of EphBlog are encouraged to provide their own answers.
UPDATE: Minor corrections and editing done.
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Below are the actual e-mails. After extensive examination of superscripts, kerning and other technical issues, I have determined that they are authentic, unlike some other newsworthy documents . . .
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This e-mail contains two messages of importance to our community — one
from me and one from the Dean of the Faculty.
September 10, 2004
To the Williams Community,
While there is so much about Williams that we can be proud of, one area in which we clearly need to do better is in becoming fully welcoming and supportive of every member of our increasingly diverse campus community.
Yes, we’ve made progress in recent decades and in recent years. I acknowledge this and am thankful to the many people who have worked hard to realize those gains. But I have to say that there have been too many reminders, including the letter from Dean of the Faculty Bill Lenhart that’s included below, that we haven’t yet reached this important goal.
Today, with the strong support of the Board of Trustees, I call on all of us at Williams to contribute to a special initiative this academic year toward ensuring that our community be one in which all members are accepted and respected.
I am consulting with the Committee on Community and Diversity, the Multicultural Center, the Office of Human Resources, and others on campus on how best to mobilize the community for this effort. To launch it, I will be inviting all students, faculty, and staff to a gathering to be organized with the Chaplain’s Office. I will report back to you on this soon.
As a college, our emphasis should be on education. The light of knowledge and understanding is our most effective tool.
We value the free and vigorous exchange of ideas. At the same time, every member of the campus community should know that we reject personal harm as a part of that exchange. A civil atmosphere of mutual respect is critical to our educational mission. We therefore insist that public discourse not be undermined by personal attacks, especially when they reopen the many wounds of historic discrimination that burden our culture even today. Breaches of those limits will face serious consequences.
This is a national (even an international) issue but we take no comfort in that. At Williams we set for ourselves the highest possible standards including, critically, in the promotion of civility, tolerance, and community.
We can do better. We will do better. It will take the efforts of all ofus.
Sincerely,
M. Schapiro
President
—————————————————————————-
September 10, 2004
To the Williams Community,
I am writing to inform you about an occurrence that resulted in sanctions against a faculty member.
At the end of the spring semester, a meeting took place in which a group of faculty members, one of whom is African-American, was conducting department business. One of those present raised a concern about the status of her own field of professional work relative to the fields of the others. At one point, she made a heated statement to the effect that she did not want her field to be “used as a nigger.”
The matter was promptly brought to my attention by several of those present at the meeting and a formal complaint was made against the faculty member who made the remark. Upon investigating, I concluded that the faculty member’s behavior warranted the serious step of imposing sanctions on her, which I have done. I believe that the statement made at the meeting was a use of racist language that was meant to provoke or hurt the African-American colleague who was present.
Over the summer, I and other administrators have been working with the department to determine how best to move forward toward the goal of ensuring an environment that is respectful of all the department’s members.
In recent years there have been a number of discussions concerning the extent to which various members of our campus community feel it to be one that is sufficiently welcoming and supportive of all. President Schapiro’s letter addresses these broader issues.
I am confident that a community as strong as ours can seize this challenge to make Williams a better place for all its members.
Sincerely,
William J. Lenhart
Acting Dean of the Faculty &
A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Computer Science
8 Responses to “ Used as a . . . ”
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March 9th, 2008 at 2:56 pm[...] For my attorney on this matter, I would like to enlist the help of Kevin Koernig ‘05. See his comments. If it is alright for Schapiro to impugn the entire community, why is it not alright for me to [...]
September 12th, 2004 at 12:21 pm
While I think this is a great topic for posting on Ephblog (even though it might scare off potential applicants), I am concerned that “readers of EphBlog are encouraged to provide their own answers.” Do we really need to engage in baseless speculation as to which faculty member used a racial slur at a meeting? [Note: the context from the email is vague, but it is hard to see a context in which the phrase would be within the bounds of polite conversation]
Your own musings strike me as unfair. What does an amusing/poignant quip about the nature of higher education have to do with racial attitudes? Why is an essay on tourism indicative of racial bigotry? Indeed, the essay speaks of sensitivity to different cultures on the part of the author. [Note: I don't see why the article is out of the mainstream either. Professor Shanks argues that tourism is not the economic panacea that some governments make it out to be. She doesn't say that tourism is bad or wrong; merely that there are trade offs.]
You are right to call attention to the incident. And I agree with your question about the nature of the “sanctions.” Both are worthy subjects of discussion.
But why should Ephblog stoop to impugning the character of Williams faculty based on no evidence? It would be more efficient to start a thread entitled: The Ten Professors Most Likely to be Closet Racists. If and when the identity of the department or professor comes to light, then perhaps Ephblog should weigh in. In the meantime, I object to innuendo and gossip. Ephblog should hold itself to higher standards (especially if it continually questions the truth value of posts on other blogs run by members of the Williams community).
September 12th, 2004 at 4:59 pm
Why was Sam Crane’s comment removed?
September 12th, 2004 at 6:22 pm
I was just wondering the same thing. I never saw the comment - only the link in the sidebar.
September 12th, 2004 at 7:29 pm
Only because you asked . . .
Sam Crane and I have been having an e-mail exchange on this topic. A great advantage of blogging is that it allows one to correct false information in a timely manner. Sam posted his comment before he saw my update above. He thought that his comment was made somewhat off-point by my update. He suggested that I edit it (his comment) accordingly. I wasn’t sure how best to do that (while preserving his other valid points), so I temporarily removed the comment.
Sam (who has many better things to do!) has kindly offered to trust my editorial judgement, so I will reprint his original comment here.
I’ll comment on the substance of this point later.
A disadvantage of blogging is that the editing options create trade-offs between getting the most correct information near the top of the post (as I have done with the UPDATE) and preserving the post as it originally appeared so that the following comments and discussion make sense.
But I only went into all of this because you asked . . .
September 12th, 2004 at 8:18 pm
To (d)avid:
You object to “baseless speculation as to which faculty member used a racial slur at a meeting”. Since the College has decided the withhold the information, I am afraid that speculation is all we have. If you think my speculations are “baseless” — i.e., that there is good reason to believe that the Math or Physics department is actually the home to the perp — please provide your reasoning.
Given the information that we have, I think that my speculations, at least at the department level, are quite baseful. In fact, I am doing a good job of clearing the reputation of the departments that (assuming the information we have is correct) are innocent.
Dean Lenhart’s e-mail says, in essence, that one of the hundred odd female faculty at Williams is a racist (defined in this context as someone willing to use a racist term for evil purpose). If you refuse to speculate as to the guilty party, then you have no choice but to conclude that there is a 1% chance that Dean Edwards and Katie Kent and is a racist. I would rather that my probabilties were more accurate than that. I am glad to know that Professor Shanks is not the guilty party.
My *guess* that the guilty party was either tenured or foreign born/educated is merely speculation. Whatever else maybe said about graduate school in the US over the last 20 years, it has done a good job (I think) at teaching Ph.D candidates that there is no better way of *destroying* your career than to use the N word.
You suggest that I am “impugning the character of Williams faculty based on no evidence.” I did not say that Professor Shanks did anything wrong. I *guessed* that she *might* be the perp based on speculation (she’s tenured) and evidence (perp must come from a department with an African-American member). That speculation turns out to have been wrong.
[Side note: I make no judgments about the intrinsic worth of Professor Shanks scholarly work. But, we are looking (according to Lenhart's e-mail) for a perp whose work might *appear* to someone else in the field --- perhaps someone of ill-will --- as being out of the mainstream. I know political scientists who would assert that work on tourism is not within the mainstream of that field. (Personally, I'd rather read Professor Shank's work on this than much of the drivel that appears in the "mainstream" journals, but the issue is not what my particular preferences are.]
Is it your position, then, that no one (including the authors of EphBlog) should (publically?) speculate as to the identity of the perp?
The sooner the perp is revealed — I would bet that the smart folks at the Record already know the department and are hard at work on the individual — the sooner the speculation can stop.
September 12th, 2004 at 8:47 pm
To Professor Crane:
You suggest that by *guessing* — with reasonable although not deteriminate evidence — that Political Science *might* be the department I have “sull[ied] the reputation of faculty in that department.” I do not think that this is fair.
There is a sullied department here. The College just refuses to tell people — or at least students and alumni — which one it is. If I had no information, I would assume that each of the 20 odd departments has a 5% chance of being the guilty one. But, I do have information. I know — or at least I have been told — that the sullied department must have both a female member and an African American member. This suggests to me that departments such as Math, Physics, Computer Science and others are unsullied. (Actually, I don’t have complete information on the racial composition of departments at Williams — where is Nancy McIntire when I need her? — so I could be wrong about these. Corrections are sought.)
Am I a bad person to try to use the evidence that I have to update my probablities — like any good Bayesian — as to which department deserves some sullification? Am I a bad person to make that speculation public?
Again, if I said that the Political Science department was *guilty*, you would have a point. But I did not assert that.
Given this new information, my posterior probabilities are:
40% History
20% English
10% Economics
30% Other (including Art, Theatre and Music).
I am ready to consider the argument that it is best for the College that secrecy be maintained about both the guilty party and the sullied department, but my bias is always in favor of sunlight being the best disinfectant.
September 14th, 2004 at 1:18 pm
I just wanted to point out that it is somewhat foolish to be too concerned with sullying the reputation of one department or another through speculation about this issue. President Schapiro already went several steps further by sullying the reputation of the entire college community with the letter he sent along with Dean Lenhart’s. Perhaps there is some big factor to the original issue that has not been reported, because otherwise I cannot fathom why a stupid and highly distasteful comment by one faculty member indicates that the entire Williams community needs to “do better is in becoming fully welcoming and supportive of every member of our increasingly diverse campus community.” According to this formulation of the issue, I’m just as guilty of racial insensitivity and being unwelcoming to the entire diverse campus community (whatever that means) even though I made no comments myself nor took any other action similar to that of this faculty member and in fact do not even know the identity of the perpetrator or many of the details of the incident. And the same goes for every other student, professor, and college employee. This is guilt by association to a radical extreme, and I find it very insulting. If a faculty member had been caught stealing from the college, I doubt President Schapiro would take the time to lecture the entire college community on how we are a bunch of thieves who need to do better to respect other people’s property. Yet in this case the actions of one individual are being used to indict an entire community of over 2,000. It seems that President Schapiro is taking the famous speech from Animal House far too seriously.