I yearn to return to my beloved topic of truth and fantasy in university budgeting.  But last week it was impossible to avoid the Ronell affair.  There's all sorts of good (and terrible) stuff out there.  The Daily Mail?  Et tu New Zealand? (photo credit).  More links below--though I won't link to the trolling of Ronell's non-condemners, some of which sounds like it was written by a GRU cyberwarfare unit.  

The Ronell case has become for me a case study of the interaction between perm-austerity in the academic humanities and graduate student mental health.  It questions the existence of graduate student academic freedom.  It also shows a systemic failure of faculty governance that, in spite of everybody's pessimism, needs to be fixed.

For anyone just back from deep vacation (or not in the humanities): Avital Ronell is a prominent professor of German and Comparative Literature at NYU.  One of her former graduate students, Nimrod Reitman, filed a complaint with the University charging her with sexual harassment, sexual assault, and other misconduct. An 11-month NYU investigation found Ronell to have committed sexual harassment (but not the other charges); the University has suspended her for a full academic year without pay.  It confirmed that her behavior was "sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms and conditions of Mr. Reitman’s learning environment.”  Case closed?-- investigation conducted, individual offender identified and punished, behavior  sanctioned as violating professional standards.  Message received by that university community and others. In fact not-- the public case was just getting started.

The turning point was a New York Times story on August 13th that refocused the issue around the superficial contradiction between being a harasser and being a lesbian and/or queer woman and/or feminist: "What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist is the Accused?"  The article also focused on a letter of support for Ronell sent privately on May 13th to the NYU administration.  Signed by an all-star roster of senior faculty in or near Ronell's discipline, it has been widely viewed as demanding leniency for Ronell's conduct on grounds of her elite status, and following an old-school patriarchal practice of casting the complainant into disrepute. Although the signers moved too quickly because they were apparently afraid NYU planned to fire Ronell, they seemed to let their own authority outweigh their lack of knowledge about the case.

The literal answer to the NYT title question is straightforward: nothing happens to #MeToo.  Of course women can harass, queer women can harass, and lesbians can harass--although mountains of international data show that they do it much less frequently than do men.  Ronell's harassment of Reitman (a gay man) doesn't say anything literal about the #MeToo movement except what we already knew: gay men can be in it, women can be at odds with it, and no social movement requires uniformity or purity of victimhood. In a lucid piece, Nisha Bolsey concluded, "The approach of feminists should be clear: to believe Reitman. To attempt to discredit him in the name of feminism is not only wrongheaded, it undermines the cause of feminism."

Such statements weren't enough to resolve anything, once the group letter of support for Ronell went viral.  The philosopher Judith Butler's apology for key elements in the original letter wasn't enough.  Complex analyses on the widely-read queer site Bully Bloggers by Ronell non-condemners Lisa Duggan and Jack Halberstam were definitely not enough.  The reason was that the letter disparaged the graduate student while defining Ronell's mentorship of students as"no less than remarkable over many years." If these fifty prominent senior faculty would take no action against one of their own in this kind of case, then by extension graduate students in general could expect faculty toleration for harassment.   

I was struck by the high proportion of academics who seem to agree, as one FB comment put it, that "harassment of students has always been the norm and MANY students are harassed every day by ordinary, non-star faculty."  Many were worried that fixating on Ronell would encourage the profession to "overlook all of the ORDINARY ways in which predominantly straight white men have been sexually intimidating their students, in milder and more violent fashion, ALL of the time, before and after and regardless of theory and its present standing."  Harassment is a kind of general condition of grad life because the faculty who don't do it themselves don't get involved in stopping it.

This crew was self-selecting so I don't know how representative the sample is. But the logic needs to be taken seriously, and it goes like this:

1. Ronell is not the exception but the norm 
2. Ronell is the norm not because most advisors of doctoral students are sexual or nonsexual harassers but because
3. Structural inequalities of power not only condition but control all advising relationships
4. Such that (all) graduate students live in a state of permanent quasi-subjugation or, at the very least
5. A permanent fear of retaliation
6. Which means graduate students have no functional academic freedom
7. Nor do they have creative intellectual latitude of the kind that enables original thought and the value of the humanities
8. And because the faculty are the problem not the solution, this is not going to change.

Checkmate. 

Some examples: Masha Gessen's perceptive overview in The New Yorker highlights what we might call the tyranny of the faculty member's own vulnerability, and ends citing Derrida on the impossibility of justice. Corey Robin, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, concludes, "For all the revelations of sexual harassment within academe that we’ve seen in the past few years, we continue to leave that imbalance of power to graduate students, as individuals, to figure out" -- which of course they can't. Also in the Chronicle, Lee Konstantinou notes the way that the failed humanities job market makes desperate grads ripe for abuse, and concludes that the solution is to put even less stock in your graduate advisor.  Back at Bully Bloggers, Drew Daniel, currently a director of graduate studies, notes that "Fear and anxiety are the grounding affective conditions in academia because academia is a competitive workplace under capitalism."  After quite a bit of good advice about intellectually honest mentoring and better grievance procedures, Daniel still lands here:

Now that the number of jobs has spiraled downwards while casualization of labor has risen, the carrot has withered but the stick remains. This is why professors can now seem both frightening and ridiculous in the eyes of grad students; they are seen as beneficiaries of a lost Golden Age of employment who can’t help you much but can definitely still hurt you. 

The shame-harassment spectrum will endure as long as capitalist austerity does.

On Facebook, my quanty self tried to specify just how many Ronells people think there really are--one per department? 25 percent of each  department? We seemed to converge around two per department, but many made the point that the actual number doesn't matter: it's the possibility, the fear, and the near-certainty that if something does happen, nobody short of a Title IX officer is going to do anything.  And that cure can be worse than the disease (see Laura Kipnis in The Guardian). Back to the 1 through 8 cascade. 

Facebook discussions also turned up a strong sense that public universities are more egalitarian and offer less latitude to despotism.  One person, who went from an elite private doctoral program to tenure at a large public research university, wrote   

Untie funding from individuals— ours teach their way through and advisors have no input on funding. Democratize decision-making about funding for [all departmental programs].  Lastly, on the national front, abolish recommendation letters.

All of which got many cheers.

These would help.  But also: could we not think much more about how faculty can improve graduate mental health and academic freedom by working harder to end austerity in graduate education? 

Drew Daniel and everyone else are right that the root cause is competition under austerity, and yet most tenured humanities are fine with perpetuating it by shrinking their graduate programs.  The humble project of cooperative downsizing has been going on for nearly four decades--and here we are, weaker than ever, and expecting more weakness to come. If you are not entirely sure why austerity always does this, Mark Blyth or Richard Seymour can help.   

The alternative is to increase demand for our students. That will involve increasing undergraduate enrollments, intensifying undergrad education, and enlarging and explaining the humanities research agenda. We need non tenure track positions to be converted into tenure track positions.  Obviously this cuts against current trends, but current trends will bring more of the rot we're here to discuss.

To grow the humanities and Theory, we need to wrestle with the Theory legacy.  First, most of the modern version takes the university for granted.  A great exception was Jacques Derrida.  Another has been Judith Butler: in addition to her institutional work, she has also theorized the university as a condition of critique and as one important source of social justice: this Critical Inquiry essay (2009) offers a good overview.  The university needs its own ethics of care.

Second, we need to be clear that this Ronell case (leaving her scholarship aside) should have zero impact on its future.  Research universities fund disciplines based on the intellectual value of their research topics and programs.  They fund theory across the board, in engineering and economics and art history and philosophy, because theory is about getting at invisible forces that shape or control the empirical world.  Theory is also about refining methods of study so that our study is less rather than more distorting of what we study.  This turns out to be very hard to do--in chemistry as well as philosophy.  Theory is thus the condition of all intellectual progress and also of disciplinarity--not to mention rigor and validity.  So nothing Ronell did can embarrass the intellectual project.  The point is obvious if we glance at another field: no one said the disgrace of astronomer superstar Geoff Marcy might tarnish the search for exoplanets.  The same is true of critical theory in German or in any other language and culture.  Theory's issues are quite unexhausted, even as the material conditions of their study have been slashed.  We need to hold universities accountable to their intellectual mission and not let them use marketing, liability, or financial issues to advance the under-study of core issues.

What about this term that came back from the dead last week: High Theory (HT).  It is associated with French deconstruction and poststructuralism as it crystallized in the 1960s and 1970s and migrated to American humanities departments.  Ronell is a Germanist, so closer to those complex literary and philosophical cultures that were also taken up by the original French poststructuralists.  I got my PhD in a time and place where HT was going from insurgent to hegemonic, though it didn't keep me from turning into someone who studies the university's plumbing. I offer three quick points about it.

The good: as I already noted, theory studies foundational issues and HT got literary criticism past its Cold War positivism into new depths.  HT works on the relations between language, reason, consciousness, affect, the unconscious, objects, other people's subjectivity, and various related factors. It is preoccupied with invisible causes of visible things, and with their intractability.  It attracts the kind of people who, if they were in physics, might study the evidence for the possibility that our curved universe, the brane, sits in a bulk of multiple higher dimensions.   I've had a debate with some university studies scholars about whether intellectual Bildung is really compatible with democracy.  I think it is: difficulty is the lesson of theory for democracy.  Ronell by all accounts has among other things tried to disrupt linear narratives and common sense. Intellectual conventions do need to be tested and violated, or else nothing new ever happens. This not too sympathetic Martin Jay review of Ronell's Fighting Theory is a good reminder of disruption's positive side (h/t Helen).

The bad: in my experience, HT never figured out how to teach the full background you needed to understand the immediate ideas and texts.  Some people didn't really try.  But most did, with mixed success.  If you are in a course on Wordsworth and post-structuralist theory, how do you read enough Derrida to understand the professor and your classmates while also covering the Wordsworth carefully along with canonical Wordsworth criticism?  If you are in a seminar on Derrida and poststructuralism, how do you learn enough linguistics to understand his critique of Saussure, and enough Husserl to understand his critique of phenomenology, or enough Levi-Strauss . . . you get the idea.   Maybe 10-20% of the grad students were solid enough in three background areas to scramble to master the fourth or fifth that you needed to understand one of the major authors in your course.  My cohort did okay because of nearly-ideal funding conditions, but to my knowledge HT overall never solved the basic curriculum problem.  And here's my real point: because HT never faced the curriculum problem, it never faced the resources problem--more time, more collaboration, more archives, better searching, more depth.  The political economy of research has been put of until tomorrow, for decades.

The ugly. The gaps in student attainment were filled by a status Darwinism.  There were the truly smart who could follow the masters and the not smart enough who couldn't.  The New York Times piece reported, "Maybe, Professor Ronell suggested, [Reitman] was frustrated because he just wasn’t smart enough." This essentialism has again become a major grievance, and it has been hurting HT's reputation and dampened interest in learning it for going on 40 years.  

In reality, the source of different levels of performance is different levels of education. Ronell would naturally try to recruit graduate students with B.A.s from Yale rather than Oberlin or Cal State Fullerton--not because  all the smart people are at Yale but because Yale's philosophy, German, French, and other departments offer years of intensive training in seminar conditions in her exact tradition.  HT never denaturalized the foolish discourse of smartness, and in addition to wreaking psychic violence it has kept tenured faculty from pushing relentlessly for the economics that can fund the difficulty. 

Fund the difficulty!  When will humanities faculty address the basic political economy of their fields? TT faculty teach twice as many courses as their counterparts in the sciences, and have grads who do still more teaching while trying to learn research.  Hum faculty mostly mentor grads as an overload.  Extramurally-funded science labs give their doctoral students systematic training and experience in research and not just teaching (though they have problems of their own). The humanities have no equivalent: their grads operate in a semi-DIY environment in which it's easy to think, "my diss project has no structure because I am not smart enough."  I think that more structured and intensive research training would help grad mental health--and help re-professionalize some regressed faculty-student relationships. The economics will take some time to solve, but we'll never get started if we don't want it on academic grounds. 

This gets us to faculty self-governance.  My sense is that the helplessness of tenured faculty towards academic financing has been leaking for years into their relations to the departmental structures they actually do control.  In the Ronell case, there seems to be general agreement that she long felt entitled to evade professional standards.   Where was the DGS, the department chair, the other faculty?  Apparently not creating a support structure that grads felt could protect them from tyranny and retaliation.  

I don't mean that funding shortages are ever an excuse for tenured faculty inaction, especially at NYU where comparatively speaking there aren't any.  But faculty not confronting political economy is part and parcel of not confronting abuses of power, which are paired traits of neoliberal subjects. Writing in punctum, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei put it this way:

what group analysis . . . teaches us is the crucial importance of what D.W. Winnicott calls the “holding environment,” a space in which emotions can safely be contained. Ideally, the classroom or professor’s office provides such a holding environment. This has nothing to do with “trigger warnings” or “safe space” stickers, but with the proper consideration of a set of external conditions, what S.H. Foulkes called “dynamic administration”: anything from the contract between analyst and analysand, spatial and climatic conditions, scheduling, payment, and so forth. And it is precisely this dynamic administration at which the modern neo-liberal university miserably fails, with as a result the creation of an environment in which toxic relations between teachers and students are able to take root.

I agree: and this "dynamic administration" of the "container" of doctoral programs is entirely in the hands of faculty and students, starting very much with tenured faculty.

I would very much like us--again, especially the tenured--to focus simultaneously and persistently on fixing the psychological and financial conditions of the humanities' theory projects in all their forms. That will mean growth and depth of graduate programs, i.e. anti-austerity.

for them:

The real academic stars are faculty who teach 4/4 course loads or higher at schools no one has heard of to students who don’t plan to go on to academic careers. They show up and do their jobs skillfully and quietly with lousy benefits and low pay.

— John A Casey Jr (@JohnACaseyJr) August 20, 2018

I'm happy to help with the plumbing.

It's a good time to take stock of renewed scandal at USC. One month into the new round, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has announced a "Title IX directed, systemic investigation into the University of Southern California’s (USC) handling of reports of sexual harassment against former employee Dr. George Tyndall."   Opportunistic though it may be (see Catherine Lhamon's comment), the new DOE investigation points again to a structural management problem at the University.

I'm going to bracket the profound gender trouble that propels the kind of abuse at issue and look at the role of an ongoing epistemic crisis in administrative practice.

On May 16th, the Los Angeles Times broke the story of a coverup of an allegedly predatory campus gynecologist, Dr. George Tyndall, with this headline: "A USC doctor was accused of bad behavior with young women for years.  The university continued letting him treat students."   The investigation dug back decades: "the complaints began in the 1990s, when co-workers alleged he was improperly photographing students' genitals." "Some of the most serious allegations against Tyndall involve claims of inappropriate remarks about patients' bodies and his use of fingers at the start of pelvic exams."  The story stayed on The Times front page most days of the month since, as more details emerged, as 20 former students sued USC, as 400 former patients called a complaint hot line, and as the LAPD opened a criminal investigation.  The case has audible echoes of that of convicted Michigan State abuser Dr. Larry Nassar.  (Tyndall denies all charges and defends his practice.)

USC president C.L Max Nikias lasted ten days after the story broke.  He was pushed out in part because his administration, in 2016, had arranged a private payout and retirement for Tyndall instead of a full investigation.  The case was concealed in spite of Nikias having affirmed that

Bringing unacceptable behavior out of the shadows and into the light is the first step in eradicating it.  Change is imperative. And we stand united on this front.

It's a good principle, but it isn't one Nikias actually followed.

My bleak mood about this case reflected first to how little protection such statements have afforded Tyndall's alleged victims over 27 years.  I grew up with USC--my father had two SC degrees, and many friends and children of friends have attended, including two generations of women who could have been Tyndall's patients.  I was thrilled when USC recommitted to central Los Angeles in the early 1990s and built programs reflecting a commitment to addressing systematically the country's sociocultural condition. Many of the most interesting scholars in the study of culture and society worked there--until they got fed up and left.  I know firsthand that USC overflows with intelligence.  I feel badly for how the scandal and its non-resolution is affecting thousands of dedicated faculty and staff, particularly the whistleblowers and reformers who had been trying to fix things from the inside.

But what needs to be fixed at USC? And who would will be doing the fixing?

The changes so far are preliminaries.  The USC Board of Trustees has

• removed an apparent enabler (Max Nikias).
• changed board leadership (mall magnate Rick Caruso has replaced gas magnate John Mork, who was close to Nikias). 
• hired an elite L.A. law firm to conduct an outside investigation (LA.'s O’Melveny & Myers). 

These things needed to happen, but they aren't reform. They're housekeeping. The University will also need to

• cooperate fully with the LAPD criminal investigation and Department of Education inquiry  (and not try to overshadow them with the O'Melveny inquiry).
• support all of the potential victims who may come forward rather than trying to set a cap or limit on victims or worse, try to discredit them.

These things seem possible and even likely.

Then there's two other things that aren't yet in the wind. USC will need to

• change its administrative culture.
• refocus the elite university mission.

The last pair of changes are nearly impossible for universities like USC.  I'm going to talk about one of these--changing administrative culture.

***

The most interesting commentary has been addressing this issue.  One of the LA Times articles suggested that repeated complaints from clinic nurses were not acted on by supervisors, who nonetheless may have passed them up the chain, only to have them ignored higher up--until the Tyndall story went public, when the higher ups chopped off some heads further down.

In a piece called "Why do colleges keep failing to prevent abuse," the former president of the University of Puget Sound, Susan Resneck Pierce, wrote that presidents must create a wholesale institutional expectation to be informed of inappropriate behavior.

In cases where presidents know about misbehavior but don’t act, she said, fears of bad publicity often drive inaction. But she noted that in many cases, “The cover-up creates more negative publicity than actually acting on an original allegation would have done.”

Pierce thus asks administrators to prefer the truth--no matter how ugly-- to the carefully cultivated image of an enlightened and efficient university that they have devoted their careers to building.  The first feature of a better management culture is to define risk management as cultivating the truth rather than concealing it.

How would that happen?  As USC professor Tania Modeleski asked, "Will there be any meaningful change as long as powerful men overlook the harm done to students and instead privately attempt to shore up the current power structure?"

There is a well-known alternative to management as marketing controlled from the top: open deliberation grounded in shared governance. The prominent USC education professor William Tierney spelled it out (in a piece that should be read in full):

President Nikias relied on a small circle of confidants and, as his troubles rose, the circle grew smaller. The university's Board of Trustees, mostly captains of industry, seemed awed by his fundraising ability. . . .  

The Academic Senate sat passively by as problems unfolded. When The Times uncovered alleged misconduct on the part of medical school dean Dr. Carmen Puliafito, Nikias declined to accept individual responsibility. He ordered an independent investigation, but the report was provided only to executive committee of the Board of Trustees. The Academic Senate registered no public complaint. . . 

A dramatic increase in non-tenured professors at USC has made the faculty hesitant to confront the administration, lest their jobs be put at risk. The result is fewer checks and balances on the office of president. In 2015, the trustees gave Nikias a $1.5-million bonus. The Academic Senate registered no public protest at such an outlandish handout. . . .

This is the tragedy at USC: Instead of cultivating an environment of reflection and reasoned debate, the university sprinted toward growth. Those of us who disagreed with the president were first ignored and then banished. We were viewed as a distraction from the school's goal of ever-greater international prominence. And the trustees and the faculty essentially acquiesced.

To repair the storm damage at USC, we need a Board of Trustees that provides consistent oversight and does not see itself as the handmaiden to the president. We need an Academic Senate that ensures that the faculty is an equal partner in decision-making. We need a president who can set a world record in running a marathon without forgetting what winning the race truly means. And we need the entire academic community to recognize how important a climate of thoughtful, reasoned dialogue is for our university. 

Of course I agree completely. Universities are by definition the natural homes of an "environment of reflection and reasoned debate."  And yet, in practice, they mostly aren't.  Senior managers have the power to ignore faculty input, and when it offers ideas they don't like, they often do.  This is particularly uncomfortable when the faculty member is right--as Tierney, a nationally renowned expert on higher ed, most likely was.

More generally, USC leaders seem in practice not to respect the insight and knowledge of frontline workers.  They no doubt do in the abstract, but not when someone higher up has other concerns.

This disregard included the clinic employees who over decades complained about Tyndall's behavior time and again.  I've heard many tenured USC faculty members say the same thing--expertise and experience don't count when they contradict the official ethos.  Management there seems to have operated through an epistemic authority that they deny to the rest of the university.

Decades ago, feminist epistemologists analyzed the way that prevailing professional practices systematically ignored knowledge specific to womens' standpoint and experience, and/or kept women from having critical mass in discussions, and/or rejected their cognitive capabilities or practices as not worth taking as seriously as their own. (A good online introduction is here; and see Epistemic Injustice.)  On its face, a textbook example would be the repeated sidelining of the USC clinic's nurses' concerns about Tyndall's gynecological practice.  Critical ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and other disciplines have made similar arguments: epistemic privilege generates epistemic injustice, which manifests itself as, among other things, epistemic disrespect toward positions that aren't part of the official program.  This occurs even where the authority in question expresses personal regard for the individuals who are being ignored.

Epistemic disrespect nearly cost Nikias his job before, in 2017, in the wake of an investigation captured in The Times July headline, "An overdose, a young companion, drug-fueled parties: The secret life of a USC med school dean."  In that case, Nikias moved the dean in question, Carmen Puliafito, out of his executive position while hanging on to his services and also not exposing his apparently criminal conduct to donors. "After he stepped down as dean, USC kept Puliafito on the medical school faculty, and he continues [as of July 2017] to accept new patients at campus eye clinics."  The Times discovered that Puliafito's colleagues had complained about drunkenness and verbal abuse, but had never gotten any relief.

In that case, Nikias was found to be engaged in active avoidance of the facts. He was aware that the Times was investigating Puliafito by March 2016, because the paper repeatedly contacted him about it.

It remains unclear when top USC officials first learned about the allegations involving Puliafito. But The Times made repeated inquiries over the last 15 months about Puliafito, in some cases describing information reporters had gathered about the dean. USC's leaders never responded to the inquiries. Numerous phone calls were not returned, emails went unanswered and a letter seeking an interview with USC President C.L. Max Nikias to discuss Puliafito was returned to The Times by courier, unopened. 

The USC president had to be hunted down by the press--several times--before he admitted serious wrongdoing (see a "timeline of his troubled tenure").

Puliafito has been back in the news recently, trying to hang on to his medical license by blaming his former prostitute-girlfriend for seducing and addicting him.  In the process, a former vice dean of the medical school testified that he'd informed USC Provost Michael Quick about rumors that "Puliafito was partying in hotels with people of 'questionable reputation'" in early 2016.

It appears that Nikias displayed willful blindness towards Puliafito's conduct and at least condoned a coverup, even as the story was being rooted out with enormous time and effort by reporters. It may emerge that he did the same with Tyndall.

Nikias's conduct is not categorically different from Tyndall's, who--best case scenario--offended even if he did not actually abuse many of his thousands of patients, and who never thought "oh, this isn't going over well" and stopped with the sexualized remarks or sexual-seeming manipulations--or was made to stop.  The alleged offenses consist of abusing usually very young women in their most vulnerable moment under cover of professional authority and in the name of individual care.  This involves a deep negation of consent that, in tandem with the sexualization of medical treatment, compromises the personhood of the victim and of her agency. It  is the opposite of what universities stand for. And yet in spite of the longstanding seriousness of staff concerns, senior managers, in The Times' account, acted only when one of the clinic's nurses, who had become impatient with the clinic management's inaction, reported Tyndall to the campus rape crisis center.

These appear to be examples of epistemic privilege enabling wrongdoing and a subsequent coverup.

***

We should also recognize that epistemic privilege puts self-governance at risk. Higher education has largely governed itself for a century and a half, partly on the theoretical grounds that professional  skills can be developed and monitored only by other professionals.  Higher ed has fought off direct federal control of colleges and universities of the type now wreaking havoc in Great Britain, using a self-regulation system of accreditation and related mechanisms.  As Heather Steffen reminded our research group this week, the tradition of self-regulation enabled universities to fend off the effort to apply No Child Left Behind-type learning assessment to colleges in the wake of the Spellings Report.

Nearly all of us support the general principle, but the self-regulation has actually to take place.  At USC it did not. Nikias and Quick had a medical school dean with substance-abuse problems who neither took corrective action himself nor received correction from other administrators.  They did not remove (or help) him until exposure forced their hand.  The same thing allegedly occurred with Tyndall.  In failing to fix their own problems, Nikias et al. not only eroded USC's reputation--they also eroded the justification for academic freedom for all universities, which is the integrity of the self-governance procedures of learned societies.

Finally, what about the reform potential of Rick Caruso and the USC Board of Trustees?

We have some evidence that the Board still lacks interest in shared governance or in Tierney's "environment of reflection." On May 18th, the Times reported that USC had acknowledged receiving 200 complaints about Tyndall going back to the early 2000s.   On May 21st, 6 former USC students sued the University, alleging that Tyndall had "sexually victimized them under the pretext of medical care and that USC failed to address complaints from clinic staff about the doctor's behavior."  On May 22nd, the Board of Trustees received a letter from 200 faculty calling on Nikias to resign. USC faculty also launched a change.org petition entitled, "Remove President Nikias: Protect USC Student Safety."  That day, the response of the then-Chair of the USC Board of Trustees was to express "full confidence in President Nikias’ leadership, ethics, and values." 

The next day, on May 23rd,  the L.A. Times reported that 300 women had called a USC hotline with a complaint about their treatment by Dr. Tyndall.  The Times also ran the story they had seen formal complaints about Tyndall dating from 1991 and 1995 (he started work at USC in 1989).  On May 25th, as Tyndall defended his practice in a letter to The Times, the paper reported that the number of legal filings against USC  had risen to 21. At a press conference about one of them, attorney Gloria Allred remarked, "this is only the beginning."  Nikias's announcement that he would resign came that same day.

In short, the USC Board backed Nikias against the faculty but dumped him 3 days later when they saw potential liability on the scale of Penn State via Sandusky or Michigan State via Nassar.

This isn't a shocking thing.  The actions of Boards of Trustees express truth as grounded in legal authority rather than educational expertise.  In this sense, Boards are by definition embodiments of epistemic privilege.  USC's Board has fired Nikias, but that may only maintain the epistemological inequality that caused the problem in the first place. If it's all Nikias's fault, then USC leadership can sustain their implicit model of management in which self-governance remains the property of senior officials.

Unfortunately, the Puliafito and Tyndall cases show that self-governance and top-down governance are at odds  Self-governance depends on the intelligence of the entire community, starting with people working with students and patients in the trenches. The kind of decisional oligarchy favored by most universities today guarantees epistemic privilege, and epistemic disrespect, and the inevitable blindness and error.

William Tierney is right to call for real shared governance in a "climate of thoughtful, reasoned dialogue." But that's not going to happen without a sustained battle for the kind of epistemic justice that universities are better at imagining for others than for themselves.