I agree with facultyleaks on the fact that not everyone is facing the same situation. I also tried hard to escalate concerns internally, to point out discrimination and wrongdoings sometimes even by the same decison makers. I write about those in a generic manner in linkedin and was threatened by my director to tone down or else. I recently left the college and the field for a part time role. I am still not able to put out all the happenings. Maybe I am a coward? Maybe not, given my family situation. It is difficult to believe anonymous sources like FL but I can totally understand what the reason is. Whats the way we can convince people like Martin? No idea. Hopefully the believers here can think up something!
You made a great point that martins existence is good evidence against his specific point. I do agree with him, too, in encouraging people to come forward in public: i Did just that and in a very big way (https://raddante.substack.com/p/keynote-address-to-florida-techs?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1cugaa) but to my knowledge he hadnt provided any tangible or intangible support to it when it certainly couls use it. That too, undermines his credibility if he is advocating for stripping anonymity but then isnt found to be supporting that when it occurs at national levels.
His era was also substantively different, which ebdercuts the ability for him to compare present day faculty writing under their full name to his era of pen names: that is, coming forward in modern era of social media and internet reach & permancey requires a whole other level.of cahones due to issues of trolls, peanut galleries, virality, etc.
Spending a whole career as an untenured senior lecturer is also hardly encourageabke and argues against his point, too. Its akin to a ship never leaving port, scared of the seas, while writing to critique how other captains choose to navigate the seas. Its a different, paradoxical kind of cowardice, sort ofnthe mirror image of the kind that can sometimes drive staying anonymous in authorship. I can say that, because ive come fully forward, several times, in major ways, paying major costs, and still very in the midst of. But he is not grasping the strategic value is not jumping on every grenade that you come upon, while demanding that people do just that because he saw it in a movie. It falls short, even while raising some good reminders, and in so doing provides a whole other kind of reminder.
Tenure in design fields should be eliminated for longer term yearly contracts. (Design professors need to have solid body of work, be current, flexible, and be able to get quality skilled work from students).
I started a tenure track job at an architecture school with a sad reputation and very large studio sizes. ( i was teaching as an adjunct for about 8 years )Oddly tenured professors (I am white jewish man) were my tormentors ( after a nationwide search ) DEI white women were running the school from the Dean on Down. Two new hires were white women with no portfolio, unlicensed, and terrible teaching skills. Both got tenure. ..... I quit after my first year and went back to practice. I dodged a bullet in 95.
I would make a slightly different point in favor of anonymity. One needs to think things through practically: what is one trying to accomplish, and what is most likely to be effective.
One of the LEAST effective things one can do is be perceived as an automatic contrarian: an anti-institutionalist who takes a vigorous public stand on everything as a point of principle. That automatically gets you marginalized and ignored. This isn't a woke or anti-woke, a right-wing or a left-wing thing: I've seen this happen again and again to people on the left and right alike. This is kind of the same thing as you said "making the conversation about you rather than the issue", but not because one is in constant fights to preserve one's job. There don't have to be any threats to you at all; people just won't pay attention.
The way to get things done is to be an institutionalist. Pick your fights carefully and strategically. Decide what is important and what is inessential. Be perceived as a good player who has reservations about certain things, rather than someone who is trying to tear everything down.
That is what I have done in my career, and I take pride in it. I was chair of my (humanities) department for the whole of 2020-2024, and we kept our integrity. There were no "diversity statements" when we hired people, and we did not "take public stands" in favor of Black Lives Matter or against Donald Trump. We never had a "land acknowledgement", we never took part in any campaigns to cancel people. It wasn't that there was no pressure to do these things - there was, from both inside and outside the department. But I was able to head them off. When we had a search, and there was huge pressure on us from the Deans to hire a minority candidate, I was able to patiently and honestly explain why the white man most of the department preferred was in fact the best candidate, and should be hired. When Donald Trump started to attack universities for their "diversity" activities, and my colleagues in other departments were desperately ordered to scrub all of the "woke" language from their websites, I was able to sit back and comment (a little smugly, I admit) that we had no scrubbing to do, because that language had never gone onto our website in the first place.
This did mean compromising on some less essential things. When a colleague wanted to teach a "social-justice"-themed, activist course, I hated the course privately, but I was publicly supportive - I even managed to find him money to bring in some outside speakers. (And this then gave me something to show the Deans when we were asked what we were doing to support the university's "diversity" aims.) I had to write periodically some bullshitting documents to show that we were aligned with the university's newly invented social justice mission. When our PhD students came to me en masse to complain that we weren't doing anything to "decolonize the curriculum", I pushed back sternly (observing that not all of us thought that the curriculum needed "decolonizing" in the first place, and explaining in detail why I personally thought it was a bad idea), but I also at the same time gave them money to organize a small conference on "decolonizing" our curriculum, bringing in various "woke" speakers, so that they could feel that they were making the best case they could for the idea. So people on the left could feel they were being heard, and that the department was in some sense supportive - but on the big things, we kept steady. Our curriculum remains proudly "colonized".
So I feel I have really accomplished things - but I couldn't have done any of it if I had been "going public" and "taking stands" the whole time. So my question for anyone who disagrees with the anonymity of this site would be: what would actually BE ACCOMPLISHED if the author revealed his (or her?) identity? How much have those people who "took a public stand" actually ACCOMPLISHED?
My thoughts exactly. In my college within a large state U, there are a few contrarians. One in particular is a very intelligent woman—I am certain she is a leftist, maybe even a communist—but she manages to annoy almost everyone because she seems to take an adversarial stance against the administration at all levels, almost reflexively. At one point a colleague asked me to please run against her for an at-large faculty senate seat because she had become a perceived liability at the senate, getting up at comment time at every opportunity to object or criticize proposals.
You are correct: people who appear to be reflexively contrarian become marginalized, both politically and in terms of personal relationships. (Funny thing however: I like this woman, even though our politics could not be more opposite. I kind of like it that she stirs shit up, and I too am a natural-born contrarian; I just have better social skills.)
AFAIK, I am the only person on my department's faculty who is not an "NPR lefty". But I avoid politics entirely, because there is absolutely no point in debating these things with people who live within an impenetrable epistemic enclosure. If you believe, as all of them apparently do, that you can understand everything useful about the world by allowing the NYT to curate, frame, and spin the news you consume, then there is not much to talk about.
I guess I am an "institutionalist", in that I take every opportunity to act on principle when what I do or say can make a difference. For example on search committees, I will steer conversations away from the sort of DEI-in-secret considerations that are now commonplace. In the realm of teaching, I may be the only faculty member whose politics are unknown to our students. When a student approaches some design project in my studio that is premised on unfounded or tendentious political assumptions, we talk about questioning premises and the need for due diligence in research.
So yes, I could change course and become noisily contrarian. I am tenured; I'd keep my job. But I would in effect burn many bridges. I do not want to suffer the fate of my lefty colleague.
I felt like I was reading a description of myself here! I was especially amused by your comment about the New York Times, which rings very true. One tiny thing that I do is come to work every day with my copy of the Wall Street Journal under my arm, and from time to time I casually recommend an article in it to someone. Often not a political article - just something connected with that person's interests, or with some conversation we had recently - but I feel it conveys the tacit message that there might be other ways of viewing the world.
My name is on everything I write critical of higher ed. For all we know, you are just someone in the general orbit of higher ed trolling for kicks from a coffee shop. You can claim otherwise all you want, but you're going to have to get in line behind everyone else who's a sage only while opining anonymously. I spent two decades with people like you purport to be watching the wheels fall off. For your sake, I hope you are an imposter.
I've always regarded Internet conversations as based on factual content and ideas, not personality and position. If the factual information carries validity, I care little about its source. The interpretation drawn by the writer from the facts that they wield is where the contest of ideas takes place. But it still doesn't rely on names.
I get that a real-name byline and its associated contact information add credibility. But no one should be put in the position that everything they write is discredited on account of the fact that they won't give their name. For that matter, the fact that someone is using their real name as a byline doesn't mean that their trustworthiness is unassailable.
The ramifications of revealing personal identity go far beyond complications associated with employment at colleges and universities. The weirdness of modern American politics at the dawn of the social media era (which this still is) has led to a social climate where one Wrong Post by a writer might put them at odds with close family members who read it.
This state of affairs dismays me, but I'm evidently in the minority. I haven't blocked a single person on Substack. But around 220 people have Blocked me. Often as a one-strike policy, blocking the writer for one single reply comment that the Substacker finds disagreeable, or discomfiting.. Also often on a zero-strike policy, apparently- I have no recollection of having a single encounter with most of my Blockers. They just read something I wrote and went to War, sheltering themselves from my disturbing input and satisfying their militant partisan impulses by doing their part to ensure that as few people see my words as possible. More than once I've read writers on Substack boasting of their effectiveness at recruiting others in their political affinity group to participate in Blocking effort, a group boycott directed at some Substack page or its writer. And they think this is Activism. That they're Saving Democracy.
And then there's the fact that the Internet allows everyone to be their own private investigation bureau. And that some folks live in social environments that contain more elements of personal risk than Pocatello, Idaho. And not every college professorship is at the University of Idaho, in the physics department. (I note that you're retired.)
Which is to say that your objections sound to me more like "let's You and Them fight" than a real-world appraisal of what it really means to volunteer for the acrimony and condemnation associated with self-identification nowadays. To the extent where the messenger becomes the story, instead of the mess they're exposing. Because the pettiness and underhandedness and the ease of slander and libel in the Internet era is unprecedented.
Name yourself and show your bona fides and you're entitled to an extra measure of credibility, perhaps. If you deserved it in the first place (but that's a more in-depth inquiry.) What isn't in dispute is that the members of hate mob swarms who feel entitled to treat identified sources as if they have a target on their back are not obliged to supply similar identification themselves.
It's also worth noting that many of the forefathers of the American Revolution initially published their op-eds in pamphlet form, anonymously. They eventually identified themselves. As a matter of their own decision, as part of an assessment of appropriate timing.
Where did you spend two decades as a tenured professor, and not a mere senior lecturer? Because those are notnthe same things, by any stretch, and thus you cant say that you "spent two decades with people like you" if you were on the outside looking in. It is akin to minor league baseball players critiqueing real major league ball players because they both "played baseball professionally". Its like a private pilot critiqueing and astronaut. Its great, admirable, and commenable that you wrote openly, truly. But unless you endeavored to reach the next level then its just complaints and not critiques.
I agree with facultyleaks on the fact that not everyone is facing the same situation. I also tried hard to escalate concerns internally, to point out discrimination and wrongdoings sometimes even by the same decison makers. I write about those in a generic manner in linkedin and was threatened by my director to tone down or else. I recently left the college and the field for a part time role. I am still not able to put out all the happenings. Maybe I am a coward? Maybe not, given my family situation. It is difficult to believe anonymous sources like FL but I can totally understand what the reason is. Whats the way we can convince people like Martin? No idea. Hopefully the believers here can think up something!
You made a great point that martins existence is good evidence against his specific point. I do agree with him, too, in encouraging people to come forward in public: i Did just that and in a very big way (https://raddante.substack.com/p/keynote-address-to-florida-techs?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1cugaa) but to my knowledge he hadnt provided any tangible or intangible support to it when it certainly couls use it. That too, undermines his credibility if he is advocating for stripping anonymity but then isnt found to be supporting that when it occurs at national levels.
His era was also substantively different, which ebdercuts the ability for him to compare present day faculty writing under their full name to his era of pen names: that is, coming forward in modern era of social media and internet reach & permancey requires a whole other level.of cahones due to issues of trolls, peanut galleries, virality, etc.
Spending a whole career as an untenured senior lecturer is also hardly encourageabke and argues against his point, too. Its akin to a ship never leaving port, scared of the seas, while writing to critique how other captains choose to navigate the seas. Its a different, paradoxical kind of cowardice, sort ofnthe mirror image of the kind that can sometimes drive staying anonymous in authorship. I can say that, because ive come fully forward, several times, in major ways, paying major costs, and still very in the midst of. But he is not grasping the strategic value is not jumping on every grenade that you come upon, while demanding that people do just that because he saw it in a movie. It falls short, even while raising some good reminders, and in so doing provides a whole other kind of reminder.
Tenure in design fields should be eliminated for longer term yearly contracts. (Design professors need to have solid body of work, be current, flexible, and be able to get quality skilled work from students).
I started a tenure track job at an architecture school with a sad reputation and very large studio sizes. ( i was teaching as an adjunct for about 8 years )Oddly tenured professors (I am white jewish man) were my tormentors ( after a nationwide search ) DEI white women were running the school from the Dean on Down. Two new hires were white women with no portfolio, unlicensed, and terrible teaching skills. Both got tenure. ..... I quit after my first year and went back to practice. I dodged a bullet in 95.
To insist that tenure protects people from the left-wing machine is to participate in the lie. This is hard to do in any manner other than bad faith.
I would make a slightly different point in favor of anonymity. One needs to think things through practically: what is one trying to accomplish, and what is most likely to be effective.
One of the LEAST effective things one can do is be perceived as an automatic contrarian: an anti-institutionalist who takes a vigorous public stand on everything as a point of principle. That automatically gets you marginalized and ignored. This isn't a woke or anti-woke, a right-wing or a left-wing thing: I've seen this happen again and again to people on the left and right alike. This is kind of the same thing as you said "making the conversation about you rather than the issue", but not because one is in constant fights to preserve one's job. There don't have to be any threats to you at all; people just won't pay attention.
The way to get things done is to be an institutionalist. Pick your fights carefully and strategically. Decide what is important and what is inessential. Be perceived as a good player who has reservations about certain things, rather than someone who is trying to tear everything down.
That is what I have done in my career, and I take pride in it. I was chair of my (humanities) department for the whole of 2020-2024, and we kept our integrity. There were no "diversity statements" when we hired people, and we did not "take public stands" in favor of Black Lives Matter or against Donald Trump. We never had a "land acknowledgement", we never took part in any campaigns to cancel people. It wasn't that there was no pressure to do these things - there was, from both inside and outside the department. But I was able to head them off. When we had a search, and there was huge pressure on us from the Deans to hire a minority candidate, I was able to patiently and honestly explain why the white man most of the department preferred was in fact the best candidate, and should be hired. When Donald Trump started to attack universities for their "diversity" activities, and my colleagues in other departments were desperately ordered to scrub all of the "woke" language from their websites, I was able to sit back and comment (a little smugly, I admit) that we had no scrubbing to do, because that language had never gone onto our website in the first place.
This did mean compromising on some less essential things. When a colleague wanted to teach a "social-justice"-themed, activist course, I hated the course privately, but I was publicly supportive - I even managed to find him money to bring in some outside speakers. (And this then gave me something to show the Deans when we were asked what we were doing to support the university's "diversity" aims.) I had to write periodically some bullshitting documents to show that we were aligned with the university's newly invented social justice mission. When our PhD students came to me en masse to complain that we weren't doing anything to "decolonize the curriculum", I pushed back sternly (observing that not all of us thought that the curriculum needed "decolonizing" in the first place, and explaining in detail why I personally thought it was a bad idea), but I also at the same time gave them money to organize a small conference on "decolonizing" our curriculum, bringing in various "woke" speakers, so that they could feel that they were making the best case they could for the idea. So people on the left could feel they were being heard, and that the department was in some sense supportive - but on the big things, we kept steady. Our curriculum remains proudly "colonized".
So I feel I have really accomplished things - but I couldn't have done any of it if I had been "going public" and "taking stands" the whole time. So my question for anyone who disagrees with the anonymity of this site would be: what would actually BE ACCOMPLISHED if the author revealed his (or her?) identity? How much have those people who "took a public stand" actually ACCOMPLISHED?
My thoughts exactly. In my college within a large state U, there are a few contrarians. One in particular is a very intelligent woman—I am certain she is a leftist, maybe even a communist—but she manages to annoy almost everyone because she seems to take an adversarial stance against the administration at all levels, almost reflexively. At one point a colleague asked me to please run against her for an at-large faculty senate seat because she had become a perceived liability at the senate, getting up at comment time at every opportunity to object or criticize proposals.
You are correct: people who appear to be reflexively contrarian become marginalized, both politically and in terms of personal relationships. (Funny thing however: I like this woman, even though our politics could not be more opposite. I kind of like it that she stirs shit up, and I too am a natural-born contrarian; I just have better social skills.)
AFAIK, I am the only person on my department's faculty who is not an "NPR lefty". But I avoid politics entirely, because there is absolutely no point in debating these things with people who live within an impenetrable epistemic enclosure. If you believe, as all of them apparently do, that you can understand everything useful about the world by allowing the NYT to curate, frame, and spin the news you consume, then there is not much to talk about.
I guess I am an "institutionalist", in that I take every opportunity to act on principle when what I do or say can make a difference. For example on search committees, I will steer conversations away from the sort of DEI-in-secret considerations that are now commonplace. In the realm of teaching, I may be the only faculty member whose politics are unknown to our students. When a student approaches some design project in my studio that is premised on unfounded or tendentious political assumptions, we talk about questioning premises and the need for due diligence in research.
So yes, I could change course and become noisily contrarian. I am tenured; I'd keep my job. But I would in effect burn many bridges. I do not want to suffer the fate of my lefty colleague.
I felt like I was reading a description of myself here! I was especially amused by your comment about the New York Times, which rings very true. One tiny thing that I do is come to work every day with my copy of the Wall Street Journal under my arm, and from time to time I casually recommend an article in it to someone. Often not a political article - just something connected with that person's interests, or with some conversation we had recently - but I feel it conveys the tacit message that there might be other ways of viewing the world.
Most profs (and admins) who submit content to me request anonymity. Most of the faculty have tenure. It's viewed as irrelevant.
My name is on everything I write critical of higher ed. For all we know, you are just someone in the general orbit of higher ed trolling for kicks from a coffee shop. You can claim otherwise all you want, but you're going to have to get in line behind everyone else who's a sage only while opining anonymously. I spent two decades with people like you purport to be watching the wheels fall off. For your sake, I hope you are an imposter.
I've always regarded Internet conversations as based on factual content and ideas, not personality and position. If the factual information carries validity, I care little about its source. The interpretation drawn by the writer from the facts that they wield is where the contest of ideas takes place. But it still doesn't rely on names.
I get that a real-name byline and its associated contact information add credibility. But no one should be put in the position that everything they write is discredited on account of the fact that they won't give their name. For that matter, the fact that someone is using their real name as a byline doesn't mean that their trustworthiness is unassailable.
The ramifications of revealing personal identity go far beyond complications associated with employment at colleges and universities. The weirdness of modern American politics at the dawn of the social media era (which this still is) has led to a social climate where one Wrong Post by a writer might put them at odds with close family members who read it.
This state of affairs dismays me, but I'm evidently in the minority. I haven't blocked a single person on Substack. But around 220 people have Blocked me. Often as a one-strike policy, blocking the writer for one single reply comment that the Substacker finds disagreeable, or discomfiting.. Also often on a zero-strike policy, apparently- I have no recollection of having a single encounter with most of my Blockers. They just read something I wrote and went to War, sheltering themselves from my disturbing input and satisfying their militant partisan impulses by doing their part to ensure that as few people see my words as possible. More than once I've read writers on Substack boasting of their effectiveness at recruiting others in their political affinity group to participate in Blocking effort, a group boycott directed at some Substack page or its writer. And they think this is Activism. That they're Saving Democracy.
And then there's the fact that the Internet allows everyone to be their own private investigation bureau. And that some folks live in social environments that contain more elements of personal risk than Pocatello, Idaho. And not every college professorship is at the University of Idaho, in the physics department. (I note that you're retired.)
Which is to say that your objections sound to me more like "let's You and Them fight" than a real-world appraisal of what it really means to volunteer for the acrimony and condemnation associated with self-identification nowadays. To the extent where the messenger becomes the story, instead of the mess they're exposing. Because the pettiness and underhandedness and the ease of slander and libel in the Internet era is unprecedented.
Name yourself and show your bona fides and you're entitled to an extra measure of credibility, perhaps. If you deserved it in the first place (but that's a more in-depth inquiry.) What isn't in dispute is that the members of hate mob swarms who feel entitled to treat identified sources as if they have a target on their back are not obliged to supply similar identification themselves.
It's also worth noting that many of the forefathers of the American Revolution initially published their op-eds in pamphlet form, anonymously. They eventually identified themselves. As a matter of their own decision, as part of an assessment of appropriate timing.
Where did you spend two decades as a tenured professor, and not a mere senior lecturer? Because those are notnthe same things, by any stretch, and thus you cant say that you "spent two decades with people like you" if you were on the outside looking in. It is akin to minor league baseball players critiqueing real major league ball players because they both "played baseball professionally". Its like a private pilot critiqueing and astronaut. Its great, admirable, and commenable that you wrote openly, truly. But unless you endeavored to reach the next level then its just complaints and not critiques.
It doesn't help that the posts are so clearly written with AI.