Room
for a View
Conflicting Cultures
A Speech by Roger Bowen . Edited by Lorna Tychostup
Photo by Lorna Tychostup The speech “Conflicting Cultures” (which
is excerpted below), was given by then-SUNY New Paltz president Roger
Bowen, to the United University Professors assembly of delegates in
Albany, on May 11 of this year.
Roger Bowen, the unanimous first choice of the SUNY search committee,
was appointed president of SUNY New Paltz in July 1996. At his confirmation
hearings, a lone trustee, Candace de Russy, voted against Bowen’s
presidency. From the beginning of his tenure as president, Bowen was
made a target by de Russy and other conservative critics who repeatedly
called for his dismissal. Planting themselves at ordinary campus functions
such as the 1997 Women’s Studies conference “Revolting Behavior:
The Challenges of Women’s Sexual Freedom” and the 1999 staging
of Eve Ensler’s play “The Vagina Monologues,” these “watchdogs”
were able to create controversy where there was none. Bowen’s own
dogged commitment to the First Amendment and academic freedom brought
him under increasing fire from critics, despite the fact that in 1998,
he was awarded the Alexander Meiklejohn Award by the American Association
of University Professors for his defense of academic freedom. Bowen
resigned as president of SUNY New Paltz in late August, accepting the
post of president at the Milwaukee Public Museum. In a final interview,
Bowen told Chronogram, “I feel a sense of grief because I love
the area and I love the people so much. I am not leaving for lack of
community, faculty and student support.”
The present conflict in the academic world has sprung, I believe, from
the corporatization of higher education, which is still a work in progress.
Presidents have been recast into CEOs, Provosts into Chief Operating
Officers and Vice Presidents for Administration into Chief Financial
Officers. Deans have become “middle management,” while faculty
are seen as “labor” and students have been transmogrified
into “clients” or “consumers”. Such language creates
new realities for the academy, ones impossible to ignore. Academic institutions
ape the corporate world and devise strategic plans, turn admissions
into enrollment management, conjure entrepreneurial ventures that reap
rewards. More and more, search committees seek presidents who are non-traditional.
In all this change, there lurks an underlying suspicion toward the old
academy, its arcane traditions, its inefficient labor-intensive ways
of educating students, its lifetime employment practice called tenure,
its shared governance procedures, and its high costs relative to “manufacturing”
graduates who can demonstrate an immediate return on society’s
investment in their education. In brief, the corporate model, and the
mentality it spawns, sees the academy as a social throwback sorely in
need of massive remodeling.
That task is assigned to boards of trustees, often composed of people
from the corporate world, some of whom may take office exhibiting a
missionary impulse to remake the academy in the image of corporations,
or to reflect the political base of the elected officials who named
them to the board. In either case, the idea of “governing in the
public trust”—in which board members work at arm’s length
from full-time government and full-time educators both—may be abandoned.
The politicization of SUNY became apparent several years ago when the
provost’s “Report on General Education” referenced only
three books, all written by conservative cultural warriors of the 1980s:
Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Lynn Cheney’s
Fifty Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Students and E.D. Hirsch’s
Cultural Literacy. Not a tip of the hat was made to “the other
side” to indicate a balanced approach.
Opening the door to political-cum-corporate control has profound consequences.
The citizen trustee is replaced by the corporate trustee; and the corporate
trustee gets the post because his/her values resonate with those who
have the power of appointment and who were themselves elected because
of campaign contributions from corporate America. Not always, but often,
these people are unfriendly towards such traditionally embraced notions
in the academy as affirmative action, multiculturalism, qualitative
assessment, tenure, academic freedom, tolerance of unconventionality
and quirkiness, inefficiency, and intellectual-risk taking and experimentation.
In New York the trustees are appointed by the governor and confirmed
by the Senate, which for the past six years has been controlled by the
same party as the governor’s. They are appointed to lengthy terms
of service and are accountable to no one save the governor. Trusting
the trustees—holding them accountable—is a responsibility
accorded only to the governor.
In recent years the appointment of new trustees has advanced not only
the corporate model, but also a political model for SUNY. It appears
that every new member of the SUNY Board of Trustees appointed over the
past six or seven years has passed a political litmus test: they have
had to demonstrate their bona fides as Republican Party members or as
“Pataki Democrats.” Not only must members of the academy yield
to the hierarchical corporate governing structure, but must also now
take special care to avoid upsetting the political hierarchy as well.
One does this by obediently following orders, not questioning authority,
professing loyalty to the powers-that-be, and altering behavior in order
to accommodate political expectations.
Within our system, not one of the senior officers of SUNY has ever served
as a university president at a four-year university—that probably
makes SUNY unique in the national sphere of public higher education
systems—and therefore they have no direct knowledge of the complexities
of running a university.
But politicized leaders in higher education—hereafter I will refer
to them as “edu-politicos”—evince little or no appreciation
for the academic temperament, especially among presidents who dare to
retain the mantle of academic respectability. We are not supposed to
question them. Politicized leaders demand loyalty and are offended by
critical thinking. I will never forget the words of one senior SUNY
official who told me that one of my character flaws is that I am, in
his words, “an independent thinker.”
Let me give another example: earlier this year the chancellor sat at
my dinner table on our campus and engaged one of my most distinguished
faculty members in a lively conversation about whether it was appropriate
for this faculty member—an expert in American Indian history—
to testify on behalf of various tribes who were asserting land claims
against the State of New York. The chancellor, a lawyer, argued forcefully
that my faculty member might be breaking the law because he received
compensation for his trial testimony; I interrupted with the obvious
point—obvious, that is, for an academic—that academic freedom
superseded any legal argument, that faculty had the right and the obligation
to profess as experts in any forum, whether they were paid or not. The
chancellor did not respond.
Instead, when the chancellor returned to Albany he apparently instructed
SUNY’s chief legal counsel to research the law and write a warning
letter to my faculty member, instructing him that testifying was possibly
illegal. But a close reading of the law revealed it was not illegal.
And so it happened that SUNY counsel wrote my faculty person advising
him that if he testified again about Indian land claims, he should first
check with the State Ethics Commission because the law might be changed
to make such professing into a crime.
Why would the chancellor do this? I can only surmise that since he lost
the argument on legal grounds he exercised his political power as chancellor
to chide my faculty member as a forceful reminder of just who is in
charge. The Chronicle of Higher Education later wrote that “Many
faculty ... see the SUNY Chancellor and a number of trustees as hostile
to the idea of academic freedom and, as unqualified political appointees,
more adept at pushing partisan agendas than supporting academe.”
Another illustration occurred earlier this year when the chief operating
officer of SUNY met with campus finance officers and told them to take
a message back to the campus presidents: that any event on any campus
that causes embarrassment to the chancellor will be met with immediate,
public rebuke.
That politicians would like their state-funded universities to avoid
embarrassments and controversy is understandable, but that they expect
to avoid controversy is, at best, naive. I vividly recall a discussion
with a senior SUNY administrator who claimed he supported New Paltz’s
Theater Arts department in staging “The Vagina Monologues”
because he supports academic freedom, but then said he disapproved of
one monologue about the rape of a young girl by an older woman. That
monologue, of course, is based on factual reality, but no matter.
Edu-politicos cannot adequately safeguard academic freedom because they
are more concerned with public image, with the re-election of themselves
or their political allies, and with their own reputation for cleaning
up academic “Dodge City.”
We are dealing here with conflicting cultures, one is the free-thinking
academy where intellectual risk-taking, critical thinking, debate, and
challenging both authority and convention are commonplace. The other
culture, the political, is Clausewitzian, i.e., war by other means.
Politics mean battle, competition, confrontation, disagreement, discord,
factionalism, and contests for power and control. It seeks certainty,
order, norm-formation, Where the academic culture thrives on ambiguity,
the political depends on eliminating it. The two are so unlike that
they should be kept apart. The academic will always lose to the political
if a contest for dominance occurs. If you doubt this, then only recall
the trial of Socrates.
Neither the corporate penchant for efficiency nor the political preference
for order can be healthily reconciled with the freedom that lies at
the core of academe, yet of the two, the political is the more pernicious.
So long as tenure and academic freedom are respected, administrators
held to corporate standards can get by, even thrive on those occasions
when the bosses actually adhere to the measurable standards they set.
Student retention, graduation rates, dollars raised, and the like are
all measurable and therefore can serve as the basis for evaluation of
performance.
But, when the political model trumps the corporate, not to mention the
purely academic, problems will occur. I use my own situation as an example.
A few months ago I was told by a SUNY official that I would be happier
working at a private university where “independent thinking”
was “valued”. His advice came not long after a terribly distorted
editorial in the New York Post, an ideologically rightist paper, lampooned
a New Paltz women students’ symposium on female sexuality. I was
told that some in power saw this as an “in your face” event
that I had orchestrated. I explained that the event was entirely funded
by student fees, that I had no knowledge of it—any more than I
know in advance who the Philosophy Club invites to campus to speak.
No matter again. The charge was that I had not “controlled”
my students any better than I had “controlled” the performance
of “The Vagina Monologues.”
What struck me in several subsequent conversations with one SUNY official
was the absence of any reference to my performance as academic leader,
fund-raiser, community leader, writer, teacher, and financial administrator.
I was being judged by an ideological measuring stick.
I am not saying that those now in control of public education in New
York State are malevolent, nor am I saying that they do not have good
intentions. But we in the academy know that respect is given only to
those who earn it, not simply by having good intentions but by doing
good work. We are accustomed to assigning values to real work, but also
accustomed to determining for ourselves the criteria for rewards. That
is one element of academic freedom. Another element of our culture is
to eschew political bias in assigning values. We should not favor those
who favor us. And we should always support the right, and obligation,
of members of the academy to speak truthfully in every imaginable arena.
My message this evening has been intentionally provocative. I would
provoke you to consider seriously the unhealthy encroachment of the
political realm into the academic. I would ask you to rethink of the
academy as a sort of secular church, no less aspirationally moral and
in search of freedom of thought and expression than the temples and
churches whom our foreparents had the good sense to protect from the
state. The political players in this struggle do not appear to share
these goals.
I close with these questions: Is it not time to profess that our age-old
and well-tested search for truth must be left alone by politicians?
Is it not time to declare that the academy refuses to be compromised
by political meddling?
—Lorna Tychostup
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