Given what’s happened at Columbia University (and what is happening now at other Ivies, and beyond), every university leader in the United States ought to be planning in advance what they will do when similar pressures are brought to bear on them. Academics ought to as well; all the citizens of our republics of learning should care about their institutions and be willing to defend them.
Over a decade ago, here at the University of Virginia, we had a nasty little fight with our Board of Visitors when they tried to fire President Teresa Sullivan with little more logic or rationale than we’re currently seeing come out of Washington. (The American Association of University Professors produced a pretty good report about it, if you want to read something unsettling.)
Our opponents in that little pas de deux had a degree of ignorance that amply matched their arrogance, but we were lucky in discovering allies far beyond Charlottesville in our alumni base and other institutions.
At the time, I recognized that we had learned some smaller, tactical lessons in the whole shindig that might be relatively portable across different universities. I almost published them, but decided that it was better to let my university go forward without adding my two cents.
Now, however, in our moment, these seem relevant again. So, in the wake of Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s assault, I dusted them off and polished them up. They didn’t need much polishing, to be honest. Consider this a small pamphlet for thinking about hosting “a little rebellion now and then” on your campus, when such is needful.
- Don’t start the fight. Have a prompting event—even if you invite it merely by doing your job. We were lucky to have a “day of infamy” jump-start our events in 2012. It was dropped, gift wrapped, into our lap. We were, from the beginning, in the position of the victim—the one who was wronged. Being the aggrieved party from the start helps. A lot.
- Be a big tent, but have one common aim. Because the misdeed was so expansive in its implications, the scope of our “we” was enormously wide. The “we” who was violated included not just the president, but the administration, faculty and staff—and not just them, but the students, and the alumni, and indeed the community of Charlottesville, and possibly all those interested in the future of academia in America and beyond. And anyway, you’re not seeking consensus: You’re seeking alliance. This is hard for us academics, because we are so excellent at invidious distinctions. But remember: World War II was won by an alliance of the British empire, the anticolonialist liberal United States and the definitionally revolutionary U.S.S.R. If those three states could work together, you can say something nice about professors in the business school, or vice versa. The same goes for deans and administrators: They are not the enemy. By coordinating the most expansive community as the community to whom voice could be given, we ensured not just that numbers were on our side, but that the widest set of complaints and grievances were brought to bear on the most precise targets.
- Lean into shared governance. No one ever expected the UVA Faculty Senate to be consequential, least of all the Faculty Senate. It was the place where we sent junior faculty “to learn about the university”; given how much import anyone normally gives to learning about the university, that shows you what we thought of it. But, to borrow from Don Rumsfeld, you go to war with the institutions you have, not the institutions you wish you had, and now everyone knows that the Faculty Senate can matter, and matter decisively. I hope we never forget it. I hope you can learn from our example and not your own.
- Tenure counts. You know that thing we say about tenure mattering for free expression and for ensuring that you can speak your mind on academic matters without getting fired by administrators who don’t like what you have to say? I used to find it annoying and silly— “of course that’s not going to happen, not today,” I thought; “no one will be so dictatorial.” Well, lookie here—I was wrong. The first and consistently most vocal group in the whole UVA fracas was the faculty. The staff members were behind us (especially the women on the university’s staff, who had felt represented by Sullivan in a powerful way), but obviously they were in the most vulnerable position. And the deans and administrators were by and large ready to accept the coup as a fait accompli. (While the deans of the various schools eventually came around, it took them some time; only after they realized that almost every last one of the faculty were extraordinarily pissed, and shopping their CVs around, did they realize that they were hurting themselves more by not saying anything than they would by saying something.)
- “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.” Dwight D. Eisenhower said that, and it’s true here. The prompting event of our crisis was of course the firing of our President Sullivan by our board rector, Helen Dragas, and a few others (let’s be honest about what it was and who did it). But it was clear from the beginning that there were larger issues here—about the disconnect between oversight, management and teachers and researchers, about the creeping “corporatization” of the board (though that does a terrible disservice to wise governance of corporations around the world, which would never be run the way most university boards try to run their institutions), about the failure of faculty to take seriously how the higher levels of the university were operating—matters far larger than simply this act. As the crisis developed, we realized we were reaping the consequences of structural contempt toward the faculty (and the rest of the university, really) by the Board of Visitors and a crisis of apathy about university governance on the part of the faculty. The problem may be larger than you first realize: Get it in focus, first and foremost.
- “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” The idea that disputes of these sorts are amenable most basically to conversation is mistaken. Statements were continually communicated to our Board of Visitors, but we knew almost at once that argument was not our real weapon. Once you decide to dissent, the time for talk is over, at least with opponents such as these; they will not be amenable to conversation—not without a great deal of pressure from other forces and sources. Your aim is not to convince your opponents; your aim is to beat them. To do that, you must persuade potential allies, not actual enemies. That said, it never hurts to be reasonable and produce strong arguments directed at your opponents, so long as you know those arguments are largely valuable because they are overheard by others.
- At no point should you demonize or vilify your opponents. It weirdly invests them with power you need not bestow. You’re in a fight with someone who’s like a toddler—do not descend to their level. Speak calmly, as to a toddler having a temper tantrum. You won’t convince them, but you will demonstrate you are not afraid. That will upset them more. If they lose, of course they will say you did demonize and belittle them; they’ll call you “so mean,” “ungracious” and “nasty in tone.” Don’t worry; everyone else knows otherwise. Saying that may be their only consolation prize. Let them have it. You’re walking out with the Benjamins. Or, in our case, the Sullivan.
- Time is not your friend, but nonetheless, boil the frog slowly. In a delicious irony, the coup at UVA was reversed “incrementally”—a bad word for Rector Dragas, a good word for President Sullivan. Resistance to the coup began with some immediate disquiet from the faculty and a few students on campus when it was first announced. But the faculty knew from the beginning they wouldn’t be the material cause of any change; they needed more powerful allies. The momentum built slowly, then snowballed at the end. And the momentum built both inside the institution and outside it: inside, mostly by growing outrage at the trickle of information released and the little bit we could discover (or, more properly, the media could discover) over time, and outside, by the gradual but eventually approaching exponential expansion of numbers and kinds of UVA stakeholders who expressed outrage.
The end of the first week saw the Faculty Senate meeting where 800 faculty and others listened as our provost, John Simon, expressed real and powerful concern, and subtle outrage, over what had happened and how it had happened. By the end of the second week, we had politicians, alumni, other university faculties—and a number of major donors—speaking out in outrage. And then, too, we began to see newspaper editorial boards—and Katie Couric—condemn the firing. Had the Board of Visitors waited a bit longer to reverse its action, no doubt the United Nations, the E.U., the Nature Conservancy, the NBA, al Qaeda and Justin Bieber would have issued statements.
The lesson here? Don’t try to get everyone on board all at once. Trust the swarm method, but go through your list of stakeholders methodically—moving from the most swayable to the least so. Rank them in their “get-ability,” and then get them, encouraging the ones you already have on your side to increase pressure on the next-most-gettable ones. On day two of a crisis, you probably won’t get The Washington Post and your institution’s major donors to sign on to calling this an outrage; but by day 10, or 14, with a little help, and momentum from other people, you may. And better still, while this is happening, your opponents probably won’t notice the pressure gradually ratcheting up, as they are simply trying to keep responding to different constituencies. By the time they realize that there are a lot of people angry at them, there’s little they can do to quell the anger, except give in.
- Have a lousy enemy, and let everyone see that. Maleficence is usually associated with incompetence, and in the case of this episode, that was true. We were extraordinarily fortunate in our foe. The Kremlin-like silence of the Board of Visitors as the shock and anger mounted; the Politburo-like prose when the board decided to speak; the slow uncovering of the incredibly flimsy reasoning behind the decision, revealed in emails over the previous months; the remarkable stubbornness, coupled with utterly no sense of the appearance of absurdity regarding the irrationality of the stubbornness—it’s as if we couldn’t have had a better opponent for this fight.
But it is important that what gets publicized is your opponents’ badness, not your contempt for them. Academics are really, really skilled at expressing contempt. Few of us realize it doesn’t make us look good, either in faculty meetings or on social media. You never win an argument by judging your opponents. Instead, let your opponents be seen for who they are.
This is mostly out of your control, but it might be possible to imagine different ways of framing your opponent, so that different profiles of them emerge. In our case it was clear early on that it would be very important not to make this about the entire Board of Visitors but to focus on a small clique inside it so that pressure could be put upon the whole in such a way that some fractures would result; we hoped that such fractures, once they appeared, would quickly cause the whole to shatter. And they did: In the end Sullivan’s reinstatement was a unanimous board decision, the unanimity induced by the fact that the Dragas faction knew they had lost and quickly crumbled.
Anyway, these are some things I think we learned. Best of luck if you get in a position to need them. You’ll need all the luck you can get. We certainly did. But, you know, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. That was on a motivational poster I saw once. Occasionally such things are useful. If you don’t know what I mean, I fear you will soon.
