When a Department Self-Destructs

On a recent sunny afternoon in Southern California, Aaron Kunin’s class at Pomona College is tackling The Witlings by Frances Burney, an 18th-century comedy of manners that pokes fun at the literary world inhabited by its playwright. Six students make observations about the characters’ speech and motivations. One of them asks Kunin what the word “railing” means — in Act I, a character observes that another’s “whole happiness” comes from railing.

“Harsh criticism,” Kunin replies. “Criticism verging on insult.”

Kunin would know. He was the object of criticism verging on insult when he chaired Pomona’s English department several years ago. He was branded an “autocratic viper,” an “anti-Black Eurocentric” scholar, and a “little twit.” He was accused of wielding “protocol as domination,” of engaging in “literary blackface,” of causing so much stress that he contributed to a car accident. An outside mediator was brought in. There was a lengthy investigation and an even lengthier court case, during which hundreds of pages of emails and documents became public. Ultimately, a judge examined the investigation and ordered Pomona to throw out its sanctions against Kunin for lack of evidence.

Now all of that ugliness is being aired by Kunin himself. He’s writing a book about what happened and publishing installments — 23 as of this writing — on Substack. The newsletter, named after the Pixies song “Weird at My School,” pokes fun at the literary world inhabited by its author. Except Kunin’s characters aren’t fictional. He describes what his colleagues said and how they acted and quotes from their many emails to depict a department run aground by dysfunction. The story he tells is one of intolerance, vendetta, ego, and timidity. People who work in places like Pomona’s English department “do not say what they think,” Kunin writes. “Inevitably, in this working environment, they forget how to think for themselves.”

Polemics abound about self-censorship in academe. What makes Kunin’s project distinct is his willingness to root around in the dirt of his department, unearthing petty and bizarre disputes and holding them up to the light. He hopes to illustrate a broader phenomenon: that academic freedom is too easily sacrificed at the altar of agreeableness. That allegations of racism can be used to muzzle discourse. That when colleagues avoid conflict at all cost, what’s acceptable to think and say constricts until there’s little space left for anything unorthodox.

Even before he published his newsletter, most of Kunin’s colleagues had stopped speaking to him, at least in the way that colleagues typically do. Laying bare your coworkers’ absurdities risks torpedoing whatever’s left of those relationships. So why do it? What is there to be gained, other than glares in the faculty lounge?

By Kunin’s perhaps singular calculus, it’s worth it. Things went wrong, and when things go wrong, it’s worth considering how. It’s worth exploring why. On the chalkboard behind Kunin that day in class was a quote from The Witlings that could function as his personal credo, written in all caps:

“I LOVE CRITICISM PASSIONATELY.”

On the page, Kunin is bold and confident. Off the page, he’s shy and mild-mannered. “When I talk, I’m stuck with inferior tools,” he once said, “and there isn’t much I can do with them.” In both spaces, Kunin is, as he puts it, a weirdo. He uses the term when introducing readers to his newsletter: “Sometimes you need a weirdo to tell you that things have gotten weird. Your normal friends, neighbors, and coworkers won’t tell you.”

So when I ask Kunin about meeting in person and he mentions a poetry reading that might be “a weird scene,” I trust his subject-matter expertise and book a plane ticket.

We don’t hang around long after the poets are through. We head back to my rental car — Kunin never learned to drive, for fear his general incoordination would lead to accidents — and there are stretches of silence as I focus on navigating 40 miles of California highway in the dark. He’s not one to keep up conversation for the sake of it, or to say something without meaning it. When I half-jokingly asked which poet he liked the least, he looked uncomfortable, so I told him he didn’t have to answer.

During Pomona’s investigation, Kunin’s colleagues and administrators were asked what they thought of him. He’s not a smooth communicator, said the college’s dean at the time. The outside mediator described him as the type of person you either find intellectual and interesting or you find odd. Kunin’s strangeness is an article of interest in his own work. “When my social behavior is correct,” he writes in Love Three, the book that delves into his sexual desires, “it’s because I have successfully disguised myself as a normal person for five minutes.”

You don’t have to be normal to chair an English department. You don’t have to be a leader or be well-liked. You just have to do it, because chairing is something everyone has to do, eventually. At least that’s what Kunin was thinking when, as an associate professor, he reluctantly agreed to the job.

Dettmar’s method worked for a time. Morale improved under his chairship. He had a gift for smoothing things over, the novelist Jonathan Lethem, another professor in the department, would tell the investigator. But while Dettmar put out many fires, according to Lethem, he did not create a standard system for administering department business. So when Dettmar stepped down in 2018, there weren’t many rules in place for whoever took over next. (Lethem declined to comment for this article, as did Dettmar, who writes The Chronicle’s “Ask the Chair” advice column. In a December column about chair succession planning, he expressed regret that he had “shouldered too much of the department’s work and responsibilities, with unforeseen consequences down the road.”)

But Kunin worried it was possible. While Dettmar had handled budget decisions himself, Kunin didn’t think he could do the same. He’s not a numbers guy. He also thought the current system, or the lack thereof, seemed ripe for “misuse and self-dealing,” as he writes in his newsletter. If that happened, he thought the dean’s office might have reason to take the department’s money away and that he, as chair, would be blamed.

So when Kunin stepped into the role, he met with members of the department individually to discuss some reforms, which he and his colleagues voted to accept in September of 2018.

First, the chair could grant funding requests for less than $1,000. Anything at that amount or more required a department vote. Second, the department would use a “loose” version of Robert’s Rules of Order to govern its meetings. Attending meetings virtually would be allowed, but proxy voting and voting via email would not.

Kunin’s enforcement of these changes would ignite considerable conflict between him and two of his colleagues, Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Valorie D. Thomas. They would view Kunin’s sticking to the rules, sometimes stubbornly so, as something far more pernicious. (Tompkins, now a full professor, is on leave from Pomona. She declined to be interviewed. Thomas, now emeritus, did not respond to my interview requests. Their perspectives are taken from the 2,796-page administrative record assembled during Pomona’s investigation into Kunin.)

Back in 2016, Kunin was pitching a senior seminar on Ralph Ellison, the American writer best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man. Though not an Americanist, Kunin had taught essays by Ellison in other courses, had presented papers at conferences on post-1945 American literature, and had commented on articles by Americanists. He looked at the curriculum and saw no overlap. So he submitted his proposal to Dettmar.

According to Kunin’s course description, Ellison believed that “American culture was a single entity whose coherence was not meaningfully challenged by real differences of race, politics, religion, class, or geography.” His seminar would “test the usefulness of Ellison’s concept of culture against his own writing and thought … and against some of the works of his friends and interlocutors,” including Langston Hughes, Shirley Jackson, Hannah Arendt, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

When Tompkins and Thomas learned of the proposal, they objected to it. They thought Kunin lacked the training to teach an advanced course on a 20th-century African-American writer and that, since they were Americanists, he should have asked their permission before putting it forward. (Thomas, who for most of her career held a joint appointment in Africana Studies, specializes in the African diaspora and Black women writers such as Toni Morrison. She’d published an article that discusses Invisible Man. Tompkins focuses on the intersection of 19th-century U.S. literature with race, food, and culture, among other topics.)

They also thought the course’s framing was, as Tompkins would put it to the investigator years later, “factually wrong” and harmful to students. They’d say Kunin wanted to remove race from the discussion of Ellison’s writing. (Kunin says that’s untrue.) Tompkins would also tell the investigator that allowing Kunin to teach such a course in their area sent a message that the women-of-color professors in the department were “less than experts.” (Tompkins is of North African and Arab-Jewish descent. Kunin is white and Jewish.)

Heated emails followed. Tompkins wanted to discuss course-planning protocol, not Kunin’s proposal, and said she felt like she was being “baited” and “fundamentally disrespected.” To Thomas, that Kunin’s course was developed without her knowledge — and without considering how it may affect “colleagues or the Americanists or students of color” — was further evidence of the department’s “indifference to the fields of African-American and minority literatures.” It “represents the gentrification of the subject in a manner that renders the author and critical contexts of Invisible Man invisible,” she wrote.

In the aftermath, Kunin tried repairing his relationship with Thomas. He told her he meant no disrespect by proposing his course, apologized for not knowing about her Ellison article, and asked her to meet. She agreed, and according to Kunin, they patched things up. In the spring, he asked Thomas to meet again because he was planning on teaching a lower-level course on Ellison and blues music. “I would love to hear about your approach to studying and teaching Ellison if you would be willing to share your expertise,” he wrote to her in an email. They grabbed a bite, and afterward, Thomas lent him some books.

Kunin and Tompkins, though, did not mend fences, despite having perhaps more incentive to do so. Before the conflict, they weren’t just colleagues. They were friends. They’d been hired around the same time and for years had enjoyed each other’s company, despite — or, according to Kunin, because of — their contrasting ways of thinking. To the investigator, they’d give different accounts of when their friendship started to wane. But for both of them, this dispute marks its time of death.

In a now-deleted post on her now-inactive Substack newsletter, Tompkins writes about a scenario in which a person of color has a disagreement with a white friend and colleague that “strikes at the heart of your ethical commitments, your belief in the value of certain kinds of knowledge and inquiry, your ideas about why you are here.”

“We misjudged each other,” Kunin writes in his newsletter. “I made the mistake of thinking that she was tolerant, and she made the mistake of thinking that I was cool. We were both wrong.”

Two years later, Kunin was chair. Soon enough, questions of money — who gets it, and how — resurfaced old complaints.

In the fall of 2018, the department voted to hire a poet. As part of her start-up package, Kunin had authorized $15,000 of department money for a conference about race and creative writing that she was bringing to Pomona. Before he did so, he asked Dettmar if he had that authority. Yes, Dettmar told him in an email. “You’re simply ‘closing the deal’ for someone we very much want to hire.”

When Tompkins and Thomas learned of the $15,000 departmental commitment, they questioned it in a series of emails to their colleagues. Thomas took it as an insult to her status. When she considered that $15,000 “alongside my own position as a senior faculty member” who “actually has credentials in the field of race, diversity, and inclusion, as does Kyla … I blink,” she wrote. By comparison, Thomas said she funds her programming “on handouts that I have to ask for by going begging across” the Claremont Colleges, a seven-campus consortium that includes Pomona. (After receiving this email, Kunin reached out to Thomas directly to ask if she wanted to meet to discuss these issues. Thomas replied that she was available but had “pretty much said what’s on my mind.”)

Tompkins suggested that Kunin had violated one of the reforms he’d championed — that funding requests from faculty members greater than $1,000 would be voted on by the department. “It’s not good for the chair or the department to be surprised by facts later,” she wrote in another email. Kunin replied that Tompkins did not take part in the poetry-professor search or attend department meetings at which the hiring was discussed. “I’m glad that you are participating in meetings this semester,” he wrote. “…But I reject your suggestion that things you missed last semester are surprising facts.” (When I later ask Kunin about the tone of his emails, he tells me he avoids using “a certain language of professional flattery” in order not to misrepresent his thinking, even though flattery is academe’s coin of the realm.)

Tompkins then wrote to Kunin directly, asking him to “never ever publicly reprove me for my attendance at English department meetings ever again,” which she said was “unprofessional” and “aggressive.” She pointed out that her joint appointment in Gender and Women’s Studies took up a lot of her time, particularly last fall, and that she’d made that state of affairs clear to Kunin early on.

Kunin clarified to his colleagues that it’s not policy to let the entire department weigh in on contract negotiations. Tompkins countered with what she saw as the larger issue looming: “At some point the department is going to have to deal with all of the bad blood about race and inequity. … It’s a mess waiting to explode again and again.”

The email chain went cold. “I’m not sure by what sleight of hand the conversation thread has become yet another indictment of the department’s whiteness: and yet it has,” Dettmar wrote to Kunin privately. At a department meeting the next month, faculty members discussed “the detrimental effects of email on department culture and individual attention,” according to the minutes. Email “has the ability to hurt us.”

Around the same time, Thomas began questioning if she was being disadvantaged by Kunin’s handling of money matters.

At one point, Thomas asked Kunin if she could use the department credit card to take visitors to her AfroFuturisms class to dinner. Kunin told her in an email that he had not ordered a card in his name because he didn’t want the hassle and it seemed “too easy to abuse.” But yes, Thomas should take her visitors to dinner, and the department would reimburse it, Kunin wrote. Thomas bristled. She questioned why Kunin would “automatically assume I have the money to take anybody anywhere? I am not in the same social class as the majority of white people on this campus or in this neighborhood or in this department. So. I encourage you to take a step back on that one real quick, as in everyone is not cookie cutter, even in this department — at least I’m not.”

The next day, she backtracked, telling Kunin that she’s “sorry if I hurt your feelings” and noting that she’s “terrible at email.” When it became clear there was no way to pay in advance, Kunin offered to go to the restaurant during the dinner to pay the check himself.

Another minor conflict of the same flavor would grow into a major one. In February, Thomas had asked Kunin about applying for something called a Wig grant overseen by the dean’s office. She needed $300 to pay for zines for her AfroFuturisms class. Kunin directed her to the form. Days later, she asked Kunin if the department could buy the zines now and be reimbursed by the grant money later. Kunin told Thomas he did not know if that was possible. But if not, he wrote in an email, he expected the department could find the money.

Thomas then asked if she could forgo applying for the grant. Could the department just pay for the zines?

Let’s try the grant first, Kunin replied.

Hours later, Thomas asked Kunin if he understood that “what you just did there is unnecessary and a problem?” She speculated that Kunin was engaging in “punitive nickel and diming.”

Kunin explained his reasoning, including that Wig money is explicitly for things like course materials. He noted that he’d approved most of her previous funding requests without hassle. According to Kunin, when he was chair, Thomas spent more of the department’s restricted funds than anyone else. After Thomas emphasized that the matter was time-sensitive, Kunin offered to pay for the zines with his own “opportunity funds” — around $5,000 that every English professor got to spend how they want — to be reimbursed later with the grant money. Thomas thanked him and told him she’d submit the grant proposal “asap.”

In retrospect, these were the good times.

They didn’t last.

In May of 2019, the department held what it hoped would become a regular budget meeting. For maybe the first time ever, members of the department could see, more or less, the large amounts of money that were available to them. At that meeting, professors submitted their big-ticket spending requests. Thomas received $31,500 to support various projects and conference travel, the most of any department member, according to the meeting minutes.

Seeing the department’s riches seems to have changed Thomas’s thinking. From her perspective, there was plenty of money, so applying for outside funding was an unnecessary hurdle. Six days later — three months after Thomas told Kunin that she’d apply for the Wig grant “asap” to pay for the AfroFuturisms zines — Thomas wrote to Kunin requesting that department money cover that $300 cost. After Kunin reiterated their February agreement, she told him to “cut the static” and just reimburse himself.

Kunin didn’t remember Thomas bringing up Innerlight Method training. When Thomas told him the meeting at which it was discussed, Kunin looked at the minutes. Thomas had taken them, and there was no mention of it. (After Kunin noted that to Thomas, she told him she was dealing with a torn ligament in her right hand at the time, so she “should not have been taking minutes at all but did it to support you as chair and to be a ‘team player,’ and may have missed reporting the dismissiveness with which my request for the course support was not addressed.”)

No matter. Kunin agreed with Thomas that the department should cover this expense because it likely would not meet the parameters for Wig money. But he could not authorize any request above $1,000 — that was against the rules. So Thomas’s options were to wait until the next department meeting in September or to draw on her opportunity funds, he told her.

Tompkins, who did attend the emergency meeting, protested that she was not allowed to represent Thomas’s request for her and that Kunin would now not call another emergency meeting to get Thomas the money. “This is just straight-up discrimination,” Tompkins wrote to the department, “albeit through the picayunities of small-p process.” Thomas, too, did not mince words. She likened Kunin’s management of department funds to a “payday loan shark” and said that she would not “continue to be manipulated into this borrower-lender welfare-queen status when the funds are sitting there gathering dust.” She also told her colleagues she wanted to “cancel Robert’s Rules of Order,” which in Kunin’s hands had become a “violent protocol.”

From Kunin’s vantage point, there wasn’t. “Speaking for myself,” he wrote to his colleagues, “I can’t approve requests made using threats and intimidation, which would encourage more threats and intimidation in future.” He thought the department should work out its issues through mediation, which Tompkins had proposed earlier in May. If the department could see that process through, Kunin replied to Lethem, they all “might be in a better place.”

In June of 2019, Kunin told his colleagues that he’d spoken with a mediator: Nyree Gray, then the chief civil-rights officer at Claremont McKenna College. She’d asked him to let the department know that the mediation process was completely voluntary.

Tompkins and Thomas expressed their doubts about whether that was really the case.

The words “completely voluntary” came from Gray, Kunin replied, though “it is of course possible that I have misunderstood the phrase.” Feel free to confirm with the dean’s office and with Gray, he wrote.

“Nobody needs your permission to speak with the dean,” replied Thomas, who then pivoted to scolding: “A reminder: I’m your senior faculty person in this department and you will address me in these public emails as though you have some sense of appropriate professional boundaries.” After that email, according to Kunin, four of his colleagues reached out to him privately to commiserate, including two who suggested reporting the exchange to the college’s human-resources office.

They wanted Kunin gone as chair. In early September, Robert R. Gaines, a geologist who had just stepped into the role of Pomona’s interim dean, let them know he did not think that this “delicate moment,” with Gray beginning her work in the department, was the best time for such a change. (Gaines, who is no longer dean, declined to comment. Gray, who is now Claremont McKenna’s vice president for human relations, did not respond to an interview request.)

As if that wasn’t enough, two words uttered by Kunin at a department meeting that September would cause another spasm of accusations.

Kunin wanted to give people more time to think, but, according to him, Tompkins became impatient and started to take a vote — something that she’d done before in other meetings (Tompkins told the investigator that she is very good at running meetings, whereas Kunin is not.)

Kunin thought Tompkins was being disrespectful. So he said, “Kyla, please.”

“I spoke quietly, with a falling intonation,” Kunin writes in his newsletter. “I intended to assert that I was chairing the meeting and that it was my job to administer the vote.”

That’s not exactly what others saw or heard. One professor who was new to the department thought Kunin’s comment was inappropriate, but no one described voices being raised. Lethem recalled to the investigator that Kunin’s tone was one of “injured dignity.” To Jordan Kirk, a medievalist, Kunin “seemed frustrated that the rules were being rudely and sarcastically thrown aside,” according to the summary of his interview. Gray told the investigator she thought the meeting went fine. Dettmar reached out to Kunin privately to say he read Thomas’s message “with real puzzlement: What could she even be referring to? Oh, it was just you trying to run the meeting.”

Around this time, Kunin discussed with Gaines the possibility of stepping down as chair but decided against it. He did not want the department to look like it could not handle itself. He’d later learn the degree to which Thomas and Tompkins were in communication with administrators about him.

In the end, it was not squabbles over money or words spoken during a department meeting that spelled the end of Kunin’s three unhappy semesters as chair. It was Ralph Ellison.

Considering the previous Ellison debacle, and that things between Kunin and Thomas were now so rocky, it seems predictable that his putting forward even a modified Ellison course would cause more discord. But on this issue, he thought he and Thomas had worked out their differences. (Though he acknowledged to me that that “may have been a silly thing for me to think.”) According to Kunin, he had spoken with Thomas about this Ellison course in the spring of 2017, when they met for a second time to patch things up, and she had voiced no objections. By that point, he says, Thomas was even OK with Kunin teaching a single-author seminar on Ellison. (Thomas would reference her non-opposition in an email but say she’d been “pressured to sacrifice my professional integrity for the sake of preserving superficial civility.”)

Kunin emailed Gray, the mediator, in early October to ask her advice. He wanted to have a good working relationship with Thomas, he wrote, but he also wanted to teach the course that was “most relevant to my current thinking.” Tompkins may also take issue with his course, he wrote, “but it really isn’t any of her business.” Gray thought it was a bad idea: “I can already envision the criticism — now Aaron is on a power trip.”

Kunin decided to ask Thomas if she was interested in teaching a senior seminar. If she was unavailable, he told her in an email, he would “probably have to do it.” His course, he informed her, “would be some version of the seminar we discussed in 2017— American writers who defend literature against sociological analysis,” including Ellison.

Thomas told Kunin she had no plans to teach a senior seminar. In that case, Kunin replied, he would teach it. Unbeknownst to Kunin, that morning, Thomas had met with Gaines and officially requested a discrimination investigation.

Hours later, Thomas emailed the department to say, “Not so fast with the fait accompli.” With this course proposal, Thomas wrote, Kunin was invalidating her and Tompkins’s “Ph.D.s, pedagogy,” and “contributions to the curriculum,” along with “the fields of American literature, Africana studies, African-diaspora literature, African-American literature, ethnic studies, critical race theory, intersectionality theory, and decolonial studies.” She let her colleagues know that she did not support Kunin’s “colonizing” Ellison which she considered “destructive dilettantism” in her field.

Tompkins did not hold back either. “The class is terrible and the proposal totally devoid of scholarly value,” she told her colleagues. If the department put it forward, she wrote, it did not deserve “to survive or thrive.” (At this point, based on the language of their emails, Thomas and Tompkins were under the impression that Kunin was putting forward his 2016 single-author seminar on Ellison. When they learned more about the modified course he was proposing, they vehemently objected to that, too.)

Thomas and Tompkins also appealed to Pomona leaders — including Starr, the president — arguing that Kunin’s course, and his actions as chair thus far, were so offensive that they needed to intervene.

“I have read Aaron’s proposal for this course to people in the field of U.S. literature and African-American literature and afterwards they are all literally agape with shock at how aggressive, disrespectful, and unprofessional it is,” Tompkins wrote. There was no need, she continued, “to threaten Val with his teaching a course she disagrees with, IN HER AREA OF EXPERTISE, THAT EXPLICITLY TROLLS HER METHODS.” She accused Kunin of “bullying” and said that she wanted to “witness his abuse publicly” so that Thomas would not carry it alone.

(Those assertions, according to Kunin, are absurd. He says he would not teach a semester-long course on a topic that he’s been thinking and writing about for years to provoke a colleague. He did not “threaten” Thomas with his course or design it to “troll” her pedagogy.)

The department discussed Kunin’s course at its next meeting, in October, which Thomas and Tompkins did not attend. Tompkins was on leave. Thomas accused Kunin of scheduling the meeting “at the exact hour my guest lecturer is giving a talk.” The department met at the same time on the same day every two weeks. The schedule was sent out in August.

According to the meeting minutes, the consensus among Kunin and the four other professors in attendance was that department courses “have generally not been vetted by other members of the English faculty,” and that if such a procedure were to be adopted, it would have to apply to all listed courses. A few attendees noted that “this seemed more of an issue of scholarly dissidence between individual faculty members than a departmental-procedures issue.” Gray attended the meeting and, in an email, summarized it this way: “There was no clear endorsement for Aaron to move forward nor was there any clear indication to Aaron not to move forward.”

Thomas and Tompkins urged the curriculum committee to turn down Kunin’s proposal. Thomas told Virginie A. Duzer, the committee chair at the time, that though she had “not seen or heard discussed Aaron’s current course,” she considered Kunin unqualified to offer any advanced course on Ellison, even “camouflaged amid a grouping” of other writers. Tompkins told Duzer that Kunin’s course was “a direct attack on Black thought.” He is a part of a tradition of “literary right-wingers’’ who want “to Make Aesthetics Great Again (MAGA) and who wish to ignore difference (race, etc.) — he tells students this — and thus use the word ‘sociology’ to stand in for everything they cannot intellectually manage, like race.”

Around this time, Gray tried to facilitate a meeting between Kunin, who was willing, and Thomas, who was not. Gray had also advised Kunin to not reply to Thomas’s and Tompkins’s emails.

Having learned the title of the Five American Writers course, Tompkins told her colleagues and Pomona administrators that the proposal was “an isolated incursion into a critical field to which Aaron does not belong.” She argued in another message that, in teaching his “anti-Black classes” that were “arrogantly and unprofessionally staged as an argument with my and Val’s combined decades of teaching,” Kunin was exhibiting “mind-boggling” aggression.

Thomas castigated her white colleagues for their “resolutely dismissive white silence.” Over the years, they’d perceived her as “victim thus reactionary, as inscrutably Black, as suspect, as anti-intellectual, as attacking academic freedom, as not getting it, as affirmative-action hire, as mean (thuggish/ghetto),” among other things. Now, as a “Black spectral outsider in this setting,” Thomas was “fundamentally not believed.” She adopted the third person: “Val says no one spoke to her about the Ellison course or 5 Americans Walk Into a Bar — hmm, is she being fair? Is she being nice? Is she mistaken? Delusional? Or lying?”

Kunin reached out to Gaines to offer his perspective on why he thought Tompkins and Thomas were being unfair and why this was a disagreement worth hashing out. Though Tompkins had said in one of her messages that it was Kunin’s job as chair to “manage and suppress and avoid conflict,” Kunin disagreed. That was Dettmar’s style, he told the dean. “I try to work out conflicts,” he wrote. “If my colleagues have issues with me or (in this case) questions about my research and teaching, I encourage them to come and talk with me.” So far, they have avoided doing so. In this situation, Kunin told the dean, “making the conflict go away would be a disservice to the department.”

Unfortunately for Kunin, making the conflict go away was what everyone else thought was best. Eleven days after Kunin asked Thomas if she wanted to teach a senior seminar and she indicated she did not, she put forward her own proposal for such a class on … Ralph Ellison. (Thomas had done the same thing in 2016, after Kunin submitted his initial Ellison course, but it seems she did not teach it.) Problem solved, from Gray’s point of view as a mediator. Now Kunin did not have to offer his course. Both she and Coffey thought the department should attempt to work out its myriad issues without adding another to the pile. Gray also thought, as she’d later tell the investigator, that Kunin underappreciated the impact of his decisions and was not aware of how his conduct went against “principles of inclusion,” per the interview summary.

That’s not how Kunin saw it. As chair he’d been embroiled in so much pointless conflict, but this one, over a course he wanted to teach, was something he actually cared about. He told Gray he was tired of being bullied and wanted to display intellectual bravery. He thought that was important, particularly at Pomona, where a Gallup poll had found that 63 percent of surveyed professors agreed that the campus climate prevented people from saying things they believed because others might find them offensive. “The result of self-censorship is academic dishonesty,” Kunin would write in a lengthy statement to the dean, “and the only cure for self-censorship is not to do it.”

For Kunin’s colleagues — at least some of them — censorship was not a concern. Morale was. They questioned why Kunin would try to teach his Five American Writers course now when the department was already in turmoil. To the investigator, Dettmar would cosign Thomas and Tompkins’s interpretation that Kunin’s course “attacks” the way the two professors teach their classes, according to the interview summary, which Dettmar said crossed a line. In November, he told Kunin in an email that he thought offering the course would be “very damaging to our attempts to reconcile and work together.” He asked Kunin to withdraw it and volunteered to come up with an alternative.

Kunin told Dettmar that he understood where the former chair was coming from, but, as he saw it, “I should be able to pursue my intellectual interests in this department.” Also, this type of disagreement is happening “in every English department and in every elite school in the U.S.

“We can’t always avoid these conflicts,” he wrote, “or protect ourselves or our students from them.”

For that last accusation, one of Thomas and Tompkins’s pieces of evidence is an essay that Kunin published in 2015 about Vanessa Place, a conceptual poet. Place had posted the novel Gone with the Wind line by line on what was then called Twitter. Many poets denounced Place’s project for being racist, and she suffered professional consequences. In his essay, Kunin called that an “intellectually irresponsible” accusation, in part because Place held seemingly identical opinions about racism as her critics. She’d described her piece as having antiracist aims. Kunin wrote that Place’s work should be viewed as an aesthetic failure, not an ideological one. Further, he argued that it is possible for poetry to be great while also expressing racist attitudes. “Everyone who loves art loves some works of evil opinion,” Kunin wrote in a postscript.

Kunin’s essay was controversial. The size and significance of that controversy depends on who’s describing it. To Kunin, it was minimal and manageable. He remembers six or so “obnoxious” comments on social media. Critics responded to his essay “respectfully, and for the most part positively,” he writes in his newsletter. He knows of only one writer who turned down an invitation to speak at Pomona because of it. Also, Kunin believes that controversy is not something to fear in intellectual work. It “marks a place where study is warranted,” he told me.

The college rejected some of Reddock-Wright’s findings because they lacked sufficient evidence. Anything to do with Tompkins was tossed out because Reddock-Wright had not demonstrated that the professor “suffered an adverse employment action based on race, gender, or retaliation for protesting Kunin’s actions,” according to the college’s statement of policy violations.

Ultimately, Pomona decided that Kunin had retaliated against Thomas in three instances: the $300-zines issue, the $2,400-Innerlight-Method-training issue, and with his Five American Writers course. When it came to the funding issues, the statement says, “Kunin’s implementation of the rules was inconsistent and unnecessarily burdensome” in a way that singled out Thomas and his actions “were in retaliation for Thomas’s protected assertions of racial discrimination.”

In his mitigation statement, Kunin pointed out the ways he thought Reddock-Wright had erred in her assessment. That she’d read the reams of harsh complaints voiced by Thomas and Tompkins about his Five American Writers course yet “concluded that the hostility in the English Department came from me” was “remarkable,” he wrote.

By then, Kunin had lawyers. They immediately challenged Pomona’s conclusions in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County. A judge would now have to sift through fiddly academic disputes over the provenance of $300 for zines and who’s allowed to teach Ralph Ellison to decipher whether a Renaissance-poetry scholar was being appropriately punished.

Two years later, in the fall of 2022, Judge Mitchell L. Beckloff ruled that Pomona did not have substantial evidence for its findings, and he chucked out the sanctions.

In his ruling, Beckloff found Reddock-Wright’s conclusions unpersuasive. For example, she wrote that Kunin had approved a white faculty member’s request for a $1,000 honorarium, even though, according to the rules, such a request must be voted on by the department. It’s one of the pieces of evidence that Reddock-Wright relies on to determine that Kunin was “inconsistent” in how he treated Thomas’s funding requests compared to those made by her non-Black colleagues. In fact, the department had voted on the white professor’s request — it approved $2,000. That professor later asked Kunin in an email if half of that already-greenlit chunk of money was an appropriate amount for an honorarium, and Kunin said yes. Reddock-Wright had “erred,” Beckloff wrote.

Ultimately, while Kunin was “rigid” and Thomas was “lax” when it came to her funding requests, and there was conflict between them, that’s not proof, direct or circumstantial, of retaliation, Beckloff wrote. As for the Five American Writers course, “in fact, it was Thomas who acted to derail [Kunin’s] efforts to teach a course involving Ellison.”

After all that, Kunin was found to have violated nothing.

During his court case, Kunin decided he had something to say about what happened. Maybe even a book’s worth. He asked his lawyers to file the administrative record of the investigation publicly, so that he could reference it. Hundreds of pages of quarreling and opinions on that quarreling that people presumably thought would never see the light of day was now available for anyone to read.

It’s a move not many would make — exposing your workplace while you still work there. But it seemed like a good idea to Kunin. He saw a gap in the existing literature about the dysfunctions of academe. The comparisons that writers typically reach for, like the Salem witch trials or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, were misleadingly outsized, Kunin told me. “It’s bad enough, in its own way.” He wanted to see if he could do a better job. He also no longer thought it was possible to have an honest conversation within his department about what took place. For that he’d have to go elsewhere.

In his introductory post, Kunin describes his project in simple terms. He wants to give “an accurate depiction of the working environment at my school, and to find the humor in it.” What’s that environment like? “Imagine a workplace where some of the workers are afraid that their colleagues might be white supremacists, and some of the workers are afraid that their colleagues might be on the verge of calling them white supremacists. (There is usually some overlap between the two groups, and, in most workplaces of this sort, no white supremacists at all.)”

Kunin’s humor is dry and sometimes biting: Of Tompkins taking a leave after the “Kyla, please” incident, he writes: “If my colleague has a medical condition that causes her to experience a breakdown when she hears the word ‘please,’ her condition deserves compassion, and it should be reasonably accommodated in the workplace. …. On the other hand, if my colleague develops an unhealthy obsession that causes her to make up stories about me, that’s a different kind of problem, one that probably doesn’t have a medical solution.”

(Kunin uses pseudonyms, but it’s clear who’s who. Each professor’s moniker aligns with someone they study. Tompkins is Professor Herman [Melville]. Thomas is Professor Toni [Morrison]. Full disclosure: Professor Marianne [Moore], who so far appears just once in the newsletter, is my colleague Evan Kindley, now an associate editor at The Chronicle Review and then a visiting assistant professor at Pomona.)

Kunin did consider what effect publishing these stories would have on his department’s reputation and his own. To future hires, he was broadcasting — or at the very least confirming — the department’s bad vibes. To his colleagues, he was arguably committing an act of betrayal. Who wants to see emails they dashed off years prior about sensitive topics appear on the internet? Who wants to have their private conversations revealed and dissected? “By writing this newsletter,” Kunin asks in one post, “do I risk destroying my future working relationship with them?”

He follows that sentence with another question: “What relationship?”

I wish I could tell you what Kunin’s colleagues think about all of this. But I can’t. I reached out to all current members of the department and a couple of former members. Some of them did not respond. No one agreed to speak on the record. Before publication, I told everyone who is named in this story that their emails and interviews with the investigator would be quoted, in case they wanted to comment. They didn’t.

(I also asked Starr for an interview about Kunin’s central argument: that Pomona’s English department is riven with self-censorship and has no appetite for disagreement. I received a short statement from a Pomona spokesperson. “Regarding the allusion to allegations of self-censorship: We continue to uphold the principles and practices of academic freedom and open discourse across our entire campus community,” it read. Kunin’s “blog,” the statement noted, “includes content from a case settled some years ago.”)

As to how Kunin’s colleagues feel, I can offer some informed guesses, based on what was said to the investigator back in 2019. By that fall, at least a couple of members of the English department who’d privately sympathized with him began to see him in a different light. Lethem and Dettmar questioned if he was deliberately provoking Thomas and Tompkins by proposing his Five American Writers course. Dettmar told the investigator he thought Kunin was principled to a fault. Here’s a snippet from Reddock-Wright’s summary of their interview: Dettmar “stated that Kunin’s position is ‘I have academic freedom, and no one can stop me,’ but Dettmar stated he should stop himself.”

If one views Kunin as an instigator, as someone who insists upon his right to say and write what he wants — irrespective of its effect on others, or because he wishes to goad his colleagues into a response — then airing the department’s dirty laundry only enhances that impression. If he’s a troll, then the newsletter is a protracted shitpost best ignored, the thinking goes.

The only member of the department who has responded publicly to Kunin’s newsletter is Tompkins. She’s previously written about this ordeal, in much vaguer terms than Kunin. In January of 2023, she wrote on her now-inactive Substack newsletter that her workplace once “blew up with racial conflict.”

At the time, Tompkins considered going into more detail. “Should I be specific? Do I name names? What kinds of evidence will I use? Or nothing at all? I don’t know,” she wrote in another now-deleted post. A year later, shortly after Kunin’s newsletter appeared, Tompkins wrote that in her newsletter she would “never ever divulge specific details related to this new job or my old job or any job.” To do so “would be a severe breach of confidence and highly unprofessional, especially because I am a department chair.” (On leave from Pomona, Tompkins now chairs the University at Buffalo’s department of global gender and sexuality studies.)

When I visited in March, I floated various criticisms of Kunin’s project that I’d heard. That it’s mean-spirited. That he was dredging up these episodes at a moment when others were ready to move on. Thomas had retired. Tompkins was, at least temporarily, at a different college. What good did it do to write about this now, I asked, when his two main antagonists were gone?

He also thinks that other people “have a very different sense of their participation in these stories.”

When I asked him to say more, he scoffed. “My main antagonists? In a healthy, functioning institution,” he said, “that kind of antagonism would not be a problem.” What he says he needed — what he says he did not receive — was support from his peers and from Pomona’s leaders. “My way of looking at it,” Kunin told me, “would have been for my colleagues and for the administration to respond to delusions and vindictiveness by encouraging people to talk to me.” Instead, they decided that Kunin was the problem, at least partly. “People didn’t like to see the emails that Val was addressing to me or that Kyla was addressing to me, but sending to the entire department, because those emails made everyone feel bad,” he said. “They blamed me for those emails.”

Toward the end of my visit, I asked Kunin if it’s possible that he’s wrong about anything.

“There’s all kinds of evidence that I’m wrong,” he told me. “Other people think things that are different from what I think. The decisions that I’ve made have brought me to this kind of uncomfortable place.” Regardless, he still sees the newsletter as worth writing, especially because, in his view, Pomona’s English department has not been and still is not functioning the way a department should.

Now, they do.