All in the Game

Discipline and Punish

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

Last summer the Board of Trustees of my university amended the university statutes by adding a section titled "Severe Sanctions Other Than Dismissal For Cause." The list of infractions that might provoke an inquiry under this section include "engaging in professional misconduct in the performance of university duties or academic activities"; "neglecting or refusing to perform reasonable assigned academic duties"; "acting ... so as to willfully harm, threaten physical harm to, harass or intimidate a visitor or a member of the academic community"; and "willfully damaging, destroying or misappropriating property owned by the university."

The surprise here is that any such amendment was deemed necessary, for, after all, what these and other provisions of the new section say is that faculty members are expected to do the job they are paid for (while refraining from injuring others or destroying property not theirs), and when they don't they may be subject to discipline. Who would have thought otherwise?

I put that question to older hands, and the answer I got was that up to now the only sanction a faculty member might suffer was dismissal for cause, and no one I talked to could remember an instance in which that "death penalty" procedure had actually led to someone's being dismissed.

This is not surprising since the standard for dismissal is very high: You have to have falsified your credentials or been convicted of, or admitted to, a felony or have disappeared from the scene of teaching entirely or have manufactured and sold a controlled substance or physically assaulted a member of the university community or engaged in sexual misconduct so egregious that you are likely to go to jail anyway. And even if there is evidence that you have done one of these things, you are protected against hasty judgment by procedures so elaborate and time consuming that the appropriate officials in your university will either be reluctant to set them in motion or fail to execute them properly.

Indeed, one senses in reading the documents announcing these policies that this may be the intention -- to make the bar so high and so uncomfortable that rather than start in on something you may never be able to finish you decide instead to let this cup pass and adjourn to the faculty club.

One suspects, that is, that the reluctance to act is a principle, not a principle rooted in the right of everyone to a confront his or her accusers in a public hearing, but a principle rooted in something like class prejudice. The idea is that, generally speaking, people like us -- people who have degrees and publications and who while away the time by reading French or German poetry in the original -- are "naturally" responsible; and even if we occasionally seem to be slighting the job, our reasons, were they plumbed and brought to the surface, would turn out to be good and even noble. We might now and then fail to live up to the letter of our mundane obligations, but even in doing so we would no doubt be hearkening to the higher imperative of the spirit. This is the almost explicit assertion of the following two sentences from the University of Oklahoma faculty handbook:

"The university strives to exercise great care in selecting its faculty appointees and to confer tenure only upon those ... who have demonstrated their merit for tenured appointment. For that reason a dismissal proceeding involving a tenured faculty member or of a faculty member during a tenure-track appointment will be an exceptional event."

"For that reason." That is, given that we have admitted you to our club, taught you the secret handshake, passed on the secret password, vetted you, and determined that you are one of our kind, it is barely conceivable that you could do something that would merit dismissal. Hence the phrase "exceptional event."

One would think that the imposition of sanctions short of dismissal would be an event less exceptional, since the category itself would seem to be a recognition of the fact that professional lapses occur more than occasionally and must be dealt with in an expeditious manner. But these infractions too are presumed to be rare (remember, we are all living the life of the mind) and the imposition of discipline even rarer. "As in the case of dismissal," the Oklahoma policy says, "the imposition of severe sanctions short of dismissal should be viewed as a serious and infrequent step usually undertaken only after administrative remedies and minor sanctions have failed." (What is "minor" and what is an "administrative remedy" -- perhaps a man to man talk -- are never defined.)

Note that the words "severe" and "serious" appear on both sides of what is supposedly the divide separating dismissal and lesser sanctions as responses to differing degrees of bad behavior. In fact there often is no divide, despite the machinery (and the rhetoric) that announces it. Any form of discipline is regarded as serious and severe and therefore to be contemplated only in extreme circumstances.

This absence of a distinction that should be central to the process elaborated in these documents is confirmed by the fact that the list of offenses that might lead to the most serious outcome is often indistinguishable from the list of offenses that are said to trigger milder measures. The result is that over any offense, small or large, hangs the shadow of an action barely thinkable (how could we do that to one of us); the strong reluctance that informs discussions of dismissal spills over into discussions of sanctions of any kind; and even though the enumeration of sanctions may take up several paragraphs the only sanctions really being recommended are the mild reprimands one might give to a colleague in an informal conversation.

In one document this is spelled out with admirable if distressing candor. In a 1994 report, the Senate Subcommittee on Tenure of the University of Michigan Faculty Senate states its belief "that tenure should include certain expectations and responsibilities of the faculty member that rise above the minimal level necessary to avoid dismissal." One might expect that a declaration of responsibilities would be followed by a statement of the consequences that might attend default, but this expectation is explicitly disappointed: "We think faculty should be encouraged to meet these responsibilities, but we are uncertain what punishment, if any, is appropriate."

In what can be read as a reaction to its own timidity and lack of resolve, the subcommittee hastens to assure us (and itself) that it is on the right side of things, even though the support it offers to that side is limited to the rehearsal of pious platitudes: "Nevertheless, it seems important that we acknowledge that, if we are tenured, it is because of an aspiration and belief that we will continue to produce the kind of teaching and scholarship that only academic freedom and tenure can secure." In this extraordinary conclusion to a paragraph that began as a discussion of faculty responsibilities, we are assured that the faculty is naturally responsible and will continue to be so as long as it remains free to do whatever it likes.

Now one can guess at the reasons for the reluctance of academics to think seriously about policing one another. At least two suggest themselves. The first is a history in which a succession of outside constituencies -- church, state, trustees, corporations, donors, parents -- has been all too eager to patrol the academy's borders and make academics toe any number of lines. The second is a disinclination (not shared by everyone) to institute rules and regulations that would turn colleges and departments into the equivalent of union shops. (We're professionals, after all.)

But whatever the reasons, the fact of that reluctance remains, and its consequences are serious. There are two, one external and the other internal. The external consequence was warned against in the American Association of University Professors' 1915 General Report Of The Committee On Academic Freedom And Academic Tenure:

If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and the unworthy, or to prevent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for critical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others.

The message is defensive: If you don't do it, "they" will, and "the power of determining when departures from the requirements of the scientific spirit and method have occurred" will then be "vested in bodies not composed of members of the academic profession." A danger to be sure and one that takes ever new forms.

But the internal danger is more to be feared and is more often realized. It is the danger of dysfunction and its attendant evils -- unhappiness, bitterness, loss of morale, stagnation. When someone is not pulling his or her weight, the burden falls to others who, as responsible persons, will take up the slack but with a (justifiable) sense of unfairness. If this goes on for a long time as it often does, the entire operation of a department will be deformed as everyone gets into the bad habit of working around the colleague no one is willing to discipline. And the longer a "rogue" faculty member "gets away with it," the more difficult it will be to turn around a situation to which all have contributed.

Irresponsible, unprofessional behavior depends for its success on the complicity of those it victimizes or terrorizes. Whether your rogue is the "bully" type who enjoys seeing colleagues walk the other way when he comes down the hall or the passive-aggressive type skillful at presenting himself as a victim or as the one honest person in a world of temporizers or as the chief defender of free expression and academic freedom, he -- and it is usually though not exclusively a "he" -- becomes stronger every time his behavior goes unchallenged.

Since the victims of that behavior have been its enablers, they become invested in the conditions they have helped forge. Consequently, the department head or dean who proposes to break the cycle and call the reprobate to account will be resisted by the very persons who bear the burden of his dereliction, in part because those same persons too easily imagine a role reversal in which the spotlight of discipline is turned on them, in part because they have learned to live with a condition that has at least the advantage of familiarity ("I can deal with this; it's not so bad"), and in part because they will see any action taken as a negative comment on their failure to act before the monster they now harbor was created.

When you've done nothing for so long, you come to believe -- you must believe -- that nothing can be done, and the idea that someone else is going to be able to do something is unbearable. This is where "sanctions short of dismissal" come in. If they are enumerated in an official document, if the behaviors that might activate them are named in plain language, if procedures one can understand and follow are established, and if the message that these procedures will actually be used is sent early and often, there might be a change in climate, and an administrator will have at least a fighting chance of making healthy what has for so long been sick.

It won't be easy and it might not be popular -- remember, academics tend to love their misery especially if they have had a hand in fashioning it -- but it might just work; and it is certainly the case that the alternatives -- sufferance, pandering, collegial remonstrance, appeals to the higher values supposedly residing in the heart of anyone with a Ph.D. -- will never work and will leave you just where you are and where you will deserve to be.