BY MARK S. JAMES

Last August, my colleague wrote about how our university’s leadership has embraced a top-down corporate model as the way of running the university, and he proceeded to describe various instances when they have ignored shared governance and threatened academic freedom. This trend has continued unabated. The most recent example of this is perhaps the most blatant, and it poses the most serious threat to academic freedom and shared governance yet. The administration is now deploying our office of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to impose a policy that has been rejected by our faculty two times now. But, as Nikole Hannah-Jones recently observed, DEI is now being used against efforts to increase diversity, promote equality, and foster inclusion. 

At 5:20 p.m. on Tuesday, November 21, just as everyone was clearing out for the Thanksgiving holiday, an email arrived informing us that the vice president (VP) of DEI would be presenting a new antibullying policy at the monthly colloquium on the Tuesday following the break. That was the first time most of us had ever heard of this policy, and as I read the description I recognized that it was largely a revision of a civility policy that the administration had proposed a few years earlier, before the position of VP of DEI was even created. 

Just as the antibullying policy had been sent out on the eve of the Thanksgiving break, the civility policy had been sent out on the eve of the Christmas break in 2018. Citing the AAUP’s long history of opposing civility policies on the grounds that they threaten academic freedom, the executive committee of our advocacy chapter objected to the policy. We were joined by faculty council, and the faculty voted it down. We thought that was the end of it.

Policies that are presented at the colloquium, which is an open meeting for all of the constituencies on campus to express any last thoughts, go on to final approval in the meeting of the Priorities and Planning Committee (P&P) that commences immediately after it. By then, policy proposals should have gone through a number of stages to get feedback and buy-in from the administration, staff, students, and faculty. Our executive committee objected to the VP of DEI presenting the policy at the colloquium on the grounds that putting it up for a P&P vote would violate the shared governance process described in the faculty handbook. The VP of DEI backpedaled and insisted that he was just introducing the policy at the colloquium for informational purposes and that it would not go to P&P for a vote. 

He admitted to borrowing some language from the failed civility policy but informed us that he had also borrowed from Harvard’s highly publicized antibullying policy. When asked if Harvard approved of his cherry-picking parts of their policy and revising them to suit our administration’s purposes, he produced an email from Harvard’s legal team saying that since their policy is freely available online he can “use certain language” as long as he “refrain[s] from any use of the Harvard name or reference to Harvard in [our university’s] body of policies.” 

The VP of DEI claimed that the university needs an antibullying policy so that every member of the university community—from faculty members, to students, to administrators, and staff—can report behaviors that they believe are bullying behaviors, even when those behaviors cannot be tied to discrimination. Discriminatory acts are already covered by our antiharassment policy. He pointed out that the State of New York has laws against bullying but did not mention that the laws only apply to the K–12 educational environment. This, to me, implies a desire to punish behavior that is deemed “bad” rather than address institutional oppression. It seems to follow the logic of “color-blindness” by leveling the playing field so that anyone can complain about anyone regardless of identity or status. To put it another way, it seems that those who are advantaged should not be unfairly disadvantaged just because of their advantage. 

This points to an ongoing and fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the antiharassment policy on the part of the administration, and in our culture more broadly. This in turn ensures that we will never address the institutional biases that the policy was intended to address. The primary target of the antiharassment policy is not the bad behavior of individuals or groups per se but rather the forms of institutional oppression that happen to manifest themselves through discriminatory acts. These discriminatory acts are how institutions actively devalue, exclude, and erase the collective experiences and wisdom, the ways of knowing and being, of the majority of our population from the collective consciousness of institutions. This renders democratic institutions unable to fulfill their missions. 

As the saying goes, “To an oppressor, equality feels like oppression.” Contrary to the antiharassment policy, the antibullying policy is strictly about policing conduct between individuals regardless of status. As someone who has thwarted the administration’s efforts to discipline or dismiss some of my colleagues (and myself), the vast majority of whom have been outspoken faculty of color and/or non-native English speakers, for what amounts to not “fitting in,” it is not hard to see how it will be deployed to chill dissent and enforce conformity. I am struck by the irony of the VP of DEI championing a policy that will almost certainly have a profound anti-DEI effect. Considering the ferocity of anti-DEI efforts across the country forcing some to close and others to reshape their missions, it’s possible that this is the intent.

For some unexplained reason, the faculty vote did not go through the Nominations and Elections Committee like it was supposed to. Then days after the voting began, it was discovered that there was a technical error allowing everyone to vote multiple times, so the vote was canceled and all the votes tossed. The policy went up for a second vote beginning at 2:20 p.m. on the following Monday and ending at 11:59 p.m. the next day, giving faculty a mere 33½ hours to participate. (Normally, we get at least one full week.) Two days later, and half an hour before the start of colloquium, we learned that a significant plurality of the full-time faculty voted against the policy, with 50 percent against, 29 percent in favor, and the remaining 21 percent abstaining. Adjuncts had a separate vote, and they were evenly split.

The VP of DEI presented the policy to the colloquium anyway and said that the faculty vote was merely “symbolic.” He claimed that there were not enough faculty votes to form a quorum, conveniently ignoring the fact that nearly half of the full-time faculty voted in less than a day and a half, many of whom were voting for the second time (or more) after their votes had been tossed out the week before. Some of the faculty members in attendance were outraged when he said the vote did not count. Still, the policy went on to the Priorities and Planning Committee after the colloquium, and as of this writing we have not been informed of what happened.

Considering the fact that DEI offices are directly rooted in the social and political struggles coming out of the civil rights movement, I cannot ignore the additional irony of a vice president of DEI participating in the disfranchisement of our faculty.

Throughout this campaign, we used the university’s distribution lists like “Faculty_All” to inform our colleagues of the existential threat the policy poses to academic freedom and right to due process. Suddenly citing security concerns with spam, the administration announced that it has suspended access to the distribution lists for most faculty and groups, including our chapter. (I’m no IT expert, but I fail to see how faculty having access to internal distribution lists exposes our email system to “bad actors” outside of the university.) We have been informed that from now on if our chapter wants to communicate with the faculty at large we will have to go through the faculty president or the provost. 

Contributing editor Mark S. James is associate professor of English at Molloy University, president of Molloy’s AAUP chapter, and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.