When Accusations of Incivility Spell Doom for Faculty Members

When Emily P. Lawsin’s department chair admonished her to be more “collegial and constructive” in her tone, the complaint sounded familiar. The chair had accused Lawsin’s husband, Scott Kurashige, of being uncooperative and disruptive after he, too, had raised complaints about the treatment of minority scholars at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Lawsin and Kurashige, who together helped build Michigan’s program in Asian/Pacific Islander American studies, are activist scholars who for years were thorns in the sides of university administrators.

Kurashige left for the University of Washington at Bothell four years ago, after he was effectively pushed out, he says. Lawsin was just handed a terminal contract. Both claim, in a lawsuit against the university, that Michigan administrators punished them for their frequent complaints that the university had done too little to attract and retain students and faculty members of color.

One of the ways it did so, they contend, is by portraying them as troublemakers who were themselves contributing to a hostile work climate.

Accusations of incivility can spell doom for a professor, and to this faculty couple, the charges smacked of retaliation.

In 2016 they filed a lawsuit against the university, which their lawyer says is scheduled for trial in November.

The case illustrates the tensions that can arise when professors who butt heads with their bosses are punished for being “uncivil” or “uncollegial.” And it reflects the challenges that colleges face in trying to protect scholars’ freedom to complain without giving them license to create an atmosphere that’s toxic for everyone.

Pleas for civility have, in recent years, prompted angry responses on several campuses, where critics have interpreted them as efforts to silence controversial viewpoints.

This debate famously flared up in 2014, when the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign cited incivility in its last-minute decision to revoke a job offer to Steven G. Salaita based on his incendiary tweets criticizing Israel. Some saw it as an affront to academic freedom; others, a reasoned response to strident and vulgar speech.

In the Michigan case, according to the lawsuit, administrators found fault with the tone of the couple’s remarks to administrators, including June Howard, who was then chair of the American-culture department.

Lawsin calls that “tone policing” — a term invoked by activists who feel that their message is devalued when the recipient focuses on how it was delivered.

Conflicting Accusations

Like a growing number of universities, Michigan takes on the issue of civility in its professional standards for faculty members.

The standards emphasize the importance of vigorous debate, even when it makes some people uncomfortable. However, they add, “The university also expects its members to engage each other in a professional manner, with civility and respect.”

Faculty members can be penalized for actions that create “an intimidating, hostile, offensive or abusive climate” for work or study.

In 2013, Kurashige, who was then a tenured professor in the department of American culture at Michigan, was removed as director of the Asian/Pacific Islander American-studies program.

The following year, after he criticized the lack of diversity at the university in The Chronicle and other news media, administrators made it clear that his alleged lack of collegiality would bar him from further leadership roles, the lawsuit says.

When Howard accused Kurashige of bullying her and posing a potential threat to student safety, she cited the faculty-standards code, which call for penalties or even dismissal for those who violate it.

Viewing this as an attempt to silence him, Kurashige accepted a tenured position at Bothell.

It’s hard to judge whether the complaints of uncollegiality against Kurashige and Lawsin are overblown because the correspondence in question is locked up in litigation. Michigan administrators, including Howard, say they cannot comment about the case or the broader issues it raises.

In an amended complaint filed last month, the couple accused administrators of defaming them in a 2016 department review. Among other things, the review said Kurashige had gone on “tirades” against administrators he didn’t like during department meetings. It also said that faculty members reported that the climate improved in Asian-American studies when Kurashige left Michigan, but that when Lawsin returned from medical leave, she “picked up where he left off.”

The report also said that Kurashige bullied some faculty members, particularly women. In an interview on Thursday, Yeidy M. Rivero said she left the American-culture department in 2013 because of Kurashige’s confrontational and aggressive behavior.

“He was constantly fighting – mostly with the chair – and very aggressive,” said Rivero, who is now chair of the department of screen arts and cultures at Michigan. “Who wants to be in a department where there is constant fighting?” Kurashige said he was reacting to procedural violations in dealing with his complaints and that he tried unsuccessfully to get administrators to enter mediation with him.

Kurashige is still respected enough by his colleagues nationally to have been elected president of the American Studies Association this month. Lawsin, a senior lecturer whose two-year terminal contract at Michigan began this month, says her classes are often oversubscribed.

An online petition by students and alumni of Michigan’s Asian-American program calls on the university to reinstate Kurashige to his position overseeing the program, and to “end the harassment” of Lawsin and grant her a five-year extension of her contract. The program, it said, is “a shadow of its former self” without two of the scholars who helped establish it.

Kurashige says he is one of 20 minority faculty members who left the American-culture department from 1997 to 2016, in part, he says, because they felt marginalized or disrespected. Among them was Sarita E. See, now a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside.

In an email, she said any unpleasantness or frustration she experienced working with Kurashige “was nothing out of the ordinary and that it utterly paled in comparison with the totally untenable work conditions that led to my (and many other’s) departure — even after having gained tenure — from UM.”

Kurashige contends that the university’s deans and department chairs “weaponized the discourses of civility and collegiality” to retaliate against him and other minority scholars for complaining about discrimination.

“When you have this revolving door, the primary criteria for retention is how deferential you are to your superiors,” he says. “If you speak out about Trayvon Martin or Donald Trump, that’s OK, but you can’t bring that same level of analysis to issues of institutional racism that students on your own campus are raising.”

Impassioned Beliefs

The controversy at Michigan demonstrates how challenging it can be to police civility and collegiality, particularly when scholars are voicing impassioned beliefs about hot-button issues like racism, says Gregory F. Scholtz, director of the department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance of the American Association of University Professors.

“Sometimes faculty members aren’t the most pleasant people to work with, and sometimes they can become angry or upset or express themselves in a heated manner,” he says. “But doing so shouldn’t necessarily result in a sanction.”

That doesn’t mean faculty members have the right to harass or persecute their colleagues, Scholtz says. Respectful behavior is important, he acknowledges, but punishing bad behavior can be problematic, especially since it’s so subjective.

The AAUP, in arguing against the idea of adding collegiality to teaching, scholarship, and service as a distinct category for evaluating faculty, warns of the danger of chilling debate and discussion. “Criticism and opposition do not necessarily conflict with collegiality,” its statement reads. “Gadflies, critics of institutional practices or collegial norms, even the occasional malcontent, have all been known to play an invaluable and constructive role in the life of academic departments and institutions.”

That’s not the way everyone sees it. While the Salaita case was making national headlines and bitterly dividing Illinois’s Urbana-Champaign campus, Kurashige and Lawsin’s case was unfolding more quietly during an emotionally stressful time for the couple.

In 2014 Lawsin gave birth to a baby with Down syndrome who needed open-heart surgery. During one of her medical leaves, she filed a complaint about institutional discrimination. According to the lawsuit, Howard said she was troubled by Lawsin’s tone and asked her to communicate in a more collegial and constructive manner.

“I was stunned,” says Lawsin, who is Filipino and teaches in American studies and women’s studies. “Those of us who teach ethnic and gender studies know that that’s coded language, akin to calling someone a troublemaker.” The image it conveys, she says, “falls into the ‘angry woman of color’ stereotype.”

When Lawsin tried to return, in 2015, she says, she was laid off from all teaching duties until the union intervened. Since then she’s fought for the right to return to the classroom against “trumped-up allegations” that she was psychologically unfit to do so, the lawsuit states. The university, she contends, has also devalued her experience, describing her as a spousal hire.

Every semester, Lawsin says, she teaches about stereotypes, including “how Asian women are seen as docile and not necessarily outspoken.” Of those in her program who have tried to debunk that idea, “I am one of the few left.”

Uncertain Expectations

Tensions can surface when expectations for behavior aren’t clearly spelled out, says Ann E. Blankenship Knox, an assistant professor of leadership and higher education at the University of Redlands, who studies collegiality in the professoriate.

One professor might consider a professional disagreement over policies or student issues part of the academic process, while others might view the same interaction as hostile or insubordinate, she says.

“Without clearly articulated expectations of professional conduct — whether we call it civility, collegiality, or something else — how these standards are applied is then left up to those faculty members in charge of evaluation,” Knox says. Even if it isn’t treated as a separate category, civility is nearly always measured in faculty evaluations, usually in the context of service, teaching, or research, she says.

Michigan’s faculty code of conduct does a relatively good job promoting a balance between academic freedom and the need to treat each other with respect, Knox says. It is more specific than many policies in both expected behavior and the process for alleged violations, she says.

Fostering a climate of civility has been a mission for nearly two decades for Robert E. Cipriano, a professor emeritus at Southern Connecticut State University. He wrote a book on the subject, Facilitating a Collegial Department in Higher Education: Strategies for Success (Wiley, 2011), and has consulted with dozens of colleges that are trying to create more-civil environments without setting off freedom-of-speech alarms.

Cipriano has been surveying academic chairs since 2007 about their attitudes on collegiality. Last year about 80 percent favored adding collegiality to the list of criteria on which faculty members should be evaluated. About one in five of the approximately 80,000 academic chairs leave before their terms are up, he says. The No. 1 reason? Having to deal with a difficult faculty member.

A toxic, uncivil faculty member can destroy a department, he says. Morale slumps, stress rises, and productivity dips when dissent becomes personal.

He’s developed an assessment matrix that could be used to poll a department when an administrator accuses someone of incivility. If the person’s colleagues disagree, “it could show the administrator was being vindictive.”

Lawsin, who believes that’s true in her case, says she’s often asked why she doesn’t leave Michigan. “This is my career. I helped rebuild Asian-American studies from the ground up on this campus,” she says. To effect change, “you have to stand on principle, no matter how difficult.”

Updates (3/29/2018, 12:27 p.m.) This article has been updated to reflect an additional perspective, from Yeidy Rivero, on the behavior of one of the complainants, and (3/29/18, 5:01 p.m.) Kurashige’s response.

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.