This week’s Point was written by Jeff Melnick, former VP and Communications Director of the FSU. As always, The Point represents the views of the author and is not the official position of the FSU.
In this next-to-last Point of the semester, I want to ask a simple question that has tentacles that extend all over the place: what on earth has happened to upper-level administrators at colleges and universities around the country? On some level the obvious answer is: nothing. For much of the post-World War II era our chancellors and presidents, our provosts and deans, have understood their prime directive to be satisfying the explicit and implicit desires of the military-industrial complex, the corporate hegemon, the donor class.
Many of you reading an email missive from your union likely already have a fairly robust sense that faculty and staff on the one hand, and administrators on the other, are at best uneasy partners in the work of higher education: you probably only have to take part in one bargaining session (and you should! it’s fascinating!) to be reminded that we sit, you know, on opposite sides of the table. But even if you have a grimly realistic view of the evolution of this relationship—remember “shared governance”? those were the days!—maybe you agree that in the past few years there has been a marked tonal shift, especially with regard to how upper administrators publicly talk about faculty and students on their campuses. I am sure my vision is clouded by the hazy curtain of nostalgia, but when I arrived at UMB in 2010 I came to experience Keith Motley—a leader I had many differences with in terms of policy and strategy—as a chancellor who sincerely wanted to support faculty and students and who showed sincere delight at our accomplishments. He was not in the business of attacking (or dismissing) accomplished, committed faculty members.
What is perhaps most striking of all to me in this regard is how regularly administrators deploy the MAGA-brand insistence that we do not understand what we have just witnessed with our own eyes and ears. The Trumpy weaponization of “fake news” as a way to promote an alternate narrative of life that is simply not supported by any…. evidence has been enthusiastically adopted by college administrators to silence, discipline, and marginalize faculty and students. This is certainly a development that should ring your “academic freedom” bells—but that is only a part of what is happening: in a very novel and terrifying way, I think that what administrators are participating in is a wide-scale reimagining of the university as a place where faculty and students are at best a nuisance to be ignored and at worst as threatening populations that need to be neutralized and, in many cases, erased from campus life.
I want to use the rest of this Point to talk about two emblematic cases from last week—one a rhetorical attack on a faculty member, one an actual attack on a group of students—by upper administrators at University of Michigan and Cornell University. It will come as no surprise to you that in both instances the dangerous crossroads of conflict was defined by Israel’s war on Gaza and campus protests targeting what every major human rights group of note has termed a genocide. This has been, for at least the last few years, the grounds upon which university administrators have flexed their muscles and tested their power.
First, there is the matter of Professor Derek Peterson’s commencement speech at University of Michigan. You can watch it here and decide for yourself whether you think this chair of the faculty senate (and MacArthur Genius grant recipient) was “hurtful and insensitive” in his remarks—I’m not here to litigate that question. But I do want you to notice how quickly the President of the university, Domenico Grasso, turned on him, and with language that should be chilling to all FSU members: in his statement, Grasso expresses outrage that the “Faculty Senate Chair deviated from the remarks he had shared before the ceremony”—a charge Peterson disputes. Not only that, the “Chair’s comments were inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position.”
Here is where the battle is joined—the notion that any of us, speaking in public, must represent our institution’s official position—is a toxic and dangerous one. To his credit, Professor Peterson has loudly rejected Grasso’s absurd claim that graduation speeches should be simply “congratulatory, not a platform for personal or political expression”: “The idea that graduations should be apolitical is ridiculous. Michigan is not a finishing school for polite young men and women. Our students are not wilting flowers.…They need encouragement to face a flawed and unjust world head on, using the tools we’ve given them: critical reasoning, careful research, sympathy for the oppressed.” (Numerous observers have reminded us that LBJ announced the goals of his very political Great Society platform during a graduation speech in Ann Arbor.) See here for much more from Peterson on the matter.
In the second case, the President of Cornell University, Michael Kotlikoff, walked away from a university-hosted debate on Israel-Palestine and literally drove his car into a student who was part of a group that was trying to question him—especially about his draconian punishment of campus protesters—as he left. Again, I am less interested in relitigating the who-did-what-to-whom aspect of this chaotic moment than I am in parsing the administrator’s words after the fact: the anger and disdain is palpable, the claims of “harassment and intimidation” so wildly overblown as to discredit everything else he says (did anyone really bang on his car window? Not really seeing that!).
But what most wrenches my heart is how clear it is that Kotlikoff hates these students. Nowhere does he express concern for their well-being; this is only about demonization and discipline. And as with the Michigan case, Kotlikoff makes it perfectly plain that he no longer believes in the campus as a space for critical engagement on the most important issues of our time.
We have not had to face anything so dramatic as these two examples here at UMB, but we do have reason to worry about how truthful and transparent our administrators will be when we do encounter a stressful moment. I remember in December of 2023 when the provost announced that some terribly antisemitic graffiti had been discovered on campus. Many of us had students send us pictures of graffiti they saw on campus that day that was expressly anti-Zionist but not antisemitic. For a while the provost tried to pacify concerned faculty by saying that what he saw was truly abhorrent, but that he could not give details because of an ongoing criminal investigation. A small group of faculty met with him over the next few months to try to explore together what kind of community response was called for. But the provost stalled and obfuscated and two and a half years later we still don’t really know what happened.
To get a better sense of how widespread the attack on our campuses is we call your attention to a very useful website created by the Middle Eastern Studies Association which offers up a map of all the ways that academic freedom has come under attack in the past few years. Of course it is not possible for the website to remain up to date: as I finish writing this Point news has been breaking of a planned graduation speech by Rami Elghandour cancelled at Rutgers University because the speaker dared to write messages supporting Palestinian liberation on social media and this allegedly upset some students on that campus.
I am a Jewish American and a scholar who has studied antisemitism—my second book was about the case of Leo Frank, one of the very few Jews in American history to be lynched: I take threats to us very seriously. But Israel’s war on Gaza and the purposeful conflation of Zionism and Jewishness by highly-motivated observers has seemingly turned many US higher education administrators into untrustworthy reporters and agents of carceral repression. Our job as faculty and librarians is to continue to research and facilitate research, teach and speak in all the ways we find relevant, evidence-based, and for the common good.
The committee for this year’s The Point currently includes Jessica Holden, Healey Library; Nick Juravich, History; Jeff Melnick, American Studies; and Steve Striffler, Labor Studies. If you want to write an edition of The Point, or if you just have an idea, please write us at fsu@umb.edu.