‘My Fights Are With My Peers’: When a Professor Gets Banned for Bullying

James E. Miller was a newly minted Ph.D. presenting at his first academic conference when another scholar in his field thundered his disapproval, calling him a left-wing “irrationalist,” he recalls, for being sympathetic to Nietzsche.

“He was shouting and gesticulating as if I had just committed a murder in front of everyone,” said Miller, who is now a professor of liberal studies and politics at the New School, in Manhattan. “I was not used to that level of intellectual fisticuffs.”

He said he was “momentarily stunned” by the rebuke from the scholar, Andrew Arato, now a renowned professor of political and social theory at the New School. It wasn’t the first run-in they would have.

More than four decades after that encounter, Miller is among the institution’s scholars whose complaints of “boorish behavior” prompted the college to ban Arato from campus this fall semester, except while teaching and working with graduate students.

The unusual arrangement, which prompted letters of complaint from some of Arato’s colleagues and students, bars him from discussing university matters with colleagues and requires him to participate in an anger-management program. All of his correspondences with students and teaching assistants have to be copied to the dean of faculty affairs. For the remainder of his time at the New School, he won’t be allowed to attend faculty or committee meetings or public events where his colleagues’ work is being presented.

Arato, 74, who continues to deny the accusations, agreed to the partial banishment suggested by the administration in lieu of a formal hearing by a faculty disciplinary panel. He said he suffers from a heart condition and wanted to avoid a drawn-out process that could end with suspension or even dismissal.

“Since they offered a deal that allowed me to continue my full salary and continue to teach, I thought it better not to go through a hearing that I might lose and would hurt my health,” he said in an interview with The Chronicle.

Arato contested Miller’s description of their first meeting, saying he “sincerely doubts” that he shouted and gesticulated. “His memory is awfully good, after 40 years,” Arato wrote in an email. “That he remembers says more about him than me, namely his carrying such a grudge after so long.”

The case that has pitted colleagues against one another at the New School offers a glimpse into a problem campuses deal with frequently; the star faculty member whose explosive interactions with his colleagues ratchet up the tension in faculty meetings and everyday interactions.

“He causes people to leave meetings, causes people to cry, and causes me to cringe,” said one faculty member who asked not to be named because she fears repercussions. “He’s a big guy. He has a loud voice. When he disagrees, he stands up and raises his voice and calls out the person’s name.”

During a faculty seminar, Arato, who stands nearly 6 feet 4 inches tall, angrily confronted a speaker by telling him his presentation was self-serving and superficial, bringing the scholar to tears, the faculty member said.

“I wondered afterward what I should have done. Should I have stood up to him and said, ‘you stop it, you leave’? You can do that with a 3-year-old, but he’s a distinguished professor. We were cowed, and we just desperately didn’t want him to be mad at us.”

Arato denied bringing the scholar to tears, but he acknowledged that he did call him narcissistic and later apologized.

‘Disruptive and Hostile’

In a letter dated August 24, Bryna Sanger, deputy provost, wrote that Arato had been found responsible for “noncollegial, inappropriate and bullying behavior” toward his colleagues. The letter said he had repeatedly been warned about such conduct, which included “disruptive and hostile” behavior during a 2016 tenure meeting and publicly harassing another scholar on the street.

“The charges are too petty for them to outright fire me,” Arato said. “Instead, what they did was create this humiliating package they forced on me hoping I’d leave. But I’m stubborn, and I’m going to continue to teach.”

In a letter to the faculty last month, a dozen of Arato’s colleagues objected to the agreement he signed, which they contend was made under duress. The process, they wrote, was an attack on faculty self-governance.

Nancy Fraser, a prominent professor of political and social science who co-edited an international journal, Constellations, for two decades with Arato, signed the letter.

“I was concerned about the vagueness of these findings, which are alarming in the weight they put on the notoriously hard-to-define term of incollegiality,” she said. “Like many people I’ve always worried that that term gets to be a cover for all kinds of things. It’s almost like an invitation to anyone who has a grudge against someone to take it to the provost,” triggering an investigation.

A separate online letter, signed by more than 100 students and two-dozen faculty members, said the restrictions will make it nearly impossible for students, including almost two-dozen doctoral students Arato supervises, “to have an open ongoing intellectual and academic dialogue” with the professor. When the sanctions become public, the students’ chances of getting grants and jobs will suffer, they added. Arato is “honest, open, and respectful” to students who come from around the world to study with him, they wrote.

“Not one student has complained about me,” Arato said. “So I can’t be a very dangerous person. If I had been a sexual harasser or charged with physical violence, I could understand the penalties. My fights are with my peers — not with people who are in vulnerable positions.”

Emmanuel Guerisoli, a doctoral student and one of Arato advisees, said students were frustrated by the lack of information about the accusations against him. In the current climate, some people assumed he’d been accused of sexual misconduct, which his lawyer, in an email to students, said is not the case. And they criticized students for coming to Arato’s defense while so much is still unclear.

Faculty members, likewise, were frustrated by the lack of information about the charges against him. A philosophy blog published by Brian Leiter at the University of Chicago pointed out that even Arato’s supporters acknowledged, in their letter protesting his punishment, “a serious problem in Andrew’s episodes of behavior.”

By inserting themselves into a personnel situation whose details were murky, the column suggested, the professors were risking the blowback that defenders of Avital Ronell, the New York University professor disciplined for harassing her advisee, experienced.

The Problem With ‘Collegiality’

Neal Hutchens, a professor of higher education at the University of Mississippi, said applying a “fuzzy” term like collegiality to disciplinary matters is more difficult than, say, dealing with a complaint that involves sexual harassment, where there are legal standards that can be referred to.

“You take a term like ‘collegiality’ and what does that mean?” he said. “It’s kind of loosey-goosey in a way similar to ‘bullying.’ A lot of people have stories about problematic faculty members who might not be involved in outright threats or intimidation, but they do impair the professional lives of a lot of their colleagues and can hurt their departments,” he said.

The American Association of University Professors has cautioned against using collegiality as a separate criterion for hiring and promotion, saying doing so could threaten a faculty member’s “right to dissent from the judgments of colleagues and administrators.” That doesn’t give faculty members license to interfere with their colleagues’ ability to work or engage in personal attacks, the AAUP notes.

“It’s not unheard of for an administration unilaterally to segregate a faculty member from other faculty members because of alleged bullying, harassing, and uncollegial behavior,” said Gregory F. Scholtz, director of academic freedom, tenure and governance for the AAUP. “What is unusual in this case is that the professor agreed to his banishment.”

The only incident Arato regrets, he said, is calling a colleague he saw on the street a hypocrite after their disagreement over a faculty sensitivity-training program. He objected to having it imposed by the administration — he felt it would cast “a deep sexual chill” over the college, as he said in an email. She favored the requirement. She said he was stalking her and aggressively waving his book at her as he yelled at her. He said he ran into her and did no such thing. Still, it was wrong to confront her like that, he said. “If you live long enough, you do lots of stupid stuff,” Arato said.

The administration started out with a list of about 20 complaints about his behavior and, after a four-month investigation, whittled the list down to four it deemed most credible, Arato said he was told. One involved objections the professor raised while serving on a tenure committee that was considering a scholar with expertise in animal studies. Arato said he didn’t think the scholar was suited for the open position, which he said focused on international affairs, and he criticized his colleagues for not mentoring the scholar properly and steering him in a different direction.

“The dean called me afterward and said I was too harsh and I agreed to resign from the tenure committee,” Arato said. He apologized to the committee.

Then there was his intervention in a Title IX case brought against a colleague. Arato, who was serving as his faculty advocate, said an administrator accused him of using an “inappropriate tone” when complaining about the way the scholar, who is African-American, was being treated.

A ‘Playground Term’

His critics have accused him of calling some of his colleagues’ work stupid. “I’m pretty harsh when I think something is wrong with a piece of work,” he said. “I analyze it, showing the internal contradictions.”

Arato also objected to the use of the word bullying to describe his behavior. An immigrant from Hungary who grew up in Queens in the 1950s, Arato said he was regularly bullied by kids who threatened to beat him up. “If you’re going to use that playground term, it should involve some kind of threat of violence or physical harm or at least severe emotional stress,” he said.

In a statement released this month, The New School said it is “proud to be a place of impassioned debate, sophisticated academic inquiry and diverse, sometimes difficult discussions.” It added that while administrators can’t comment on confidential personnel matters, it doesn’t tolerate “unprofessional conduct, including demeaning, intimidating or disrespectful behavior that unreasonably interferes with the ability of a member of the university community to participate in educational or employment activities.”

Miller said he remembered Arato’s attacking a job candidate, “going after her like she was a complete moron.” He said Arato sent out a blanket email attacking another candidate by name and calling him a fraud.

Arato replied, in an email, that the female scholar’s work wasn’t serious and that he had corrected the male job candidate, but didn’t call him a fraud. The scholar was hired and they’re now friends, he said.

“He’s incredibly erudite, learned, and a very smart and incisive thinker, and someone I have the utmost respect for as a colleague and fellow scholar,” said Miller, who is a special adviser to the provost.

The problem, he said, is that Arato is extremely volatile and prone to attacking his colleagues, who often react with a “fight or flight response.” When he yelled, “almost all of us retreated and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened.”

Fraser, Arato’s former co-editor, said he is “brilliant” and “very articulate” but added that she “wouldn’t defend all of his behavior.” She and a colleague sent a letter to the New School faculty objecting to a punishment they called “highly disproportionate, if not cruel and unusual” adding that, while they had their disagreements with Arato, they worked them out with him informally “as we feel colleagues should do.”

“I’ve had my history with Arato, but never in a million years would it have occurred to me to go through an administrative procedure like this,” Fraser said. She feels the administration has usurped the faculty’s authority to handle such complaints. “I’m furious that these people are going to tell me I can no longer debate Arato over the many things we have to argue about,” she said. “Will his students only hear him, unchallenged by other people?”

Arato, she said, “tends to think every philosophical disagreement is a fight to the death.” But “if anyone was bullied or targeted, it would have been me, and I find that ridiculous. Maybe twice a year he explodes at a meeting. Everybody knows it’s Andrew — he goes off and everybody’s eyes roll, and they continue the discussion like nothing happened.”

Carlos A. Forment, an associate professor of sociology, also signed the letter objecting to the sanctions. He said in an interview that he’s not defending Arato’s behavior, which he said can be “off-putting,” but that he feels the matter should have been handled by the faculty, not the administration.

“It seems to me there has to be some sort of proportionality here,” Forment said. He said he’s had a couple of public “spats” with Arato in the presence of colleagues. “It’s unpleasant and it bruises,” he said, “but it seems to me that at some point, one has to make a distinction between being bruised badly and being crushed or assaulted or traumatized.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.