When the Administrative Punishment Machine Came for Me

In my years of teaching in American universities, which began in the late 1960s, I have found my colleagues almost without exception to be liberal-minded and fair on questions of social justice. No one wants to see a student or job applicant devalued because of race, sex, nationality, or other extraneous factors.

It has been strange, then, to watch as a subset of the professoriate ascends into administration and arrogates to itself the duty to engineer the thinking of everybody else. It is annoying to see the introduction of imperious tactics and a bit disgusting to watch people pursue parallel careers as experts in thought-policing.

This became vivid for me in the months after I wrote the following words, in December 2022, to colleagues on a search committee: “[Candidate X] is lively and charming — and yes, Black, which is great — but I can’t say that I found his sophistication and experience up to the level of our top candidates.” Someone on the committee reported that sentence to administrators on my campus of the University of California at Riverside (UCR), and soon a punishment machine clicked into gear. It moved inexorably. Three unanimous votes by faculty committees in the university’s Academic Senate took my side, but administrators countermanded all three and the machine trundled on. After 20 months, the university chancellor placed a “letter of censure” into my file.

The letter declares that I made “unwarranted comments” about race. Those two words — unwarranted comments — deserve careful scrutiny. At bottom, the charge against me was not about my values or beliefs. The charge was that I had misused words. And that, indeed, was true: I had, gently but knowingly, misplayed words in a language game as a protest against the game itself.

Some background: At the University of California, all members of search committees undergo “training” in which they are reminded of a state law that prohibits use of race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and other personal characteristics as selection criteria. At the same time, trainees are strongly urged to pursue the university’s “diversity” goals, which ask that special attention go to those very criteria: race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, etc. While it might be possible, in theory, to accommodate both of these countervailing demands, the practical effect on human beings in the real world is to induce a language game: a person employs diversity criteria while pretending not to.

I am not alone in pointing this out. In June 2023, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, explained to students what he meant by “unstated affirmative action”:

Chemerinsky was warning students not to misplay a language game — it can bring punishment! If you want to support a “diversity candidate,” talk about some other reason for your choice.

In our search at UCR, one member of the committee, observing what we might call the Chemerinsky principle, argued for a special boost for a Black candidate without stating that that was her reason — plain though it was. After a brief discussion, the committee rejected the idea because it was going to lengthen a “short list” that was already too long. It was only after that decision had been made that I wrote the problematic words “yes, Black, which is great … .” I wrote those words in part to concede a point to my activist colleague but also, in part, to express my distaste for the language game we were having to play. I was saying, in essence, “Why can’t we just say what we mean?”

The administration’s response was to charge bluntly that I had “introduced” race. Introduced it? What about all of the administration’s training — both mandatory and tortuous — in how consideration of race can be simultaneously illegal and desirable? Was that not an “introduction” of the issue? My activist colleague had proposed a special boost for a racial-minority candidate; did her care in playing the language game correctly mean that her introduction of the idea was not, in fact, an “introduction”?

To the administrators, my reasons for using the word “Black” in my email did not matter. What mattered was only that I had been the first (in writing, anyway) to use it. The question was merely mechanical. No official showed any desire to understand actual meanings. It’s as if they were thinking: The punishment machine is at the ready; it needs victims in order to do its work; to look at what was actually going on might derail an opportunity.

There was one associate dean with whom I felt I could meet minds, at least somewhat. At a talk in his office, we reviewed how various people had used words and how, on my end, I might have put things differently. But at interview’s end, he defended the administration. “I reject the premise of a language game,” he said. That surprised me. How to put private thoughts into public language without breaking taboos was exactly what we had been discussing for about half an hour! I could not blame him personally, however. He was expressing loyalty to the system. The first rule of the language game is to pretend that there is no language game.

Loyalty to the system required loyalty to other administrators. After Daryle Williams, dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, dismissed me from a search committee and charged me with violation of the university’s Faculty Code of Conduct because of my “unwarranted comments” (neither Williams nor any administrator said what the comments were until seven months later), I replied with my own complaint against Williams for levying punishment without specifying the affront. The Academic Senate committee that hears charges sided with me in both cases. In the end, though, Philip Brisk, vice provost of administrative resolution, reversed both senate decisions on his own authority, thereby both vindicating and protecting Williams. I wrote a letter to the provost and the chair of the Academic Senate, asking for their comment, in principle, on the following proposition:

To me the proposition was a no-brainer, something no thinking person could possibly endorse. And indeed the provost and senate chair did not endorse it. But neither did they disavow it. They could bring themselves only, “respectfully,” to decline comment.

Apparently seeing that I would not go quietly, the administration twice offered a settlement. If I would retire on July 1, 2024 (as I was planning in any case), I could do so “without blemish” on my record. But I declined. Instead I postponed my retirement until November 1 to make it clear that I was rejecting the proposals. I did not feel comfortable acknowledging, even indirectly, that there was any truth whatsoever in the charge that my words had been racist. Beyond that, I felt a certain curiosity to see what happens, start to finish, when a university professor stands up to an administration.

My field is Chinese literature. I have written much in recent decades on the travails of Chinese dissidents. I have served on the boards of several human-rights organizations and since 1996 have also “served” (if that’s the word) on a visa blacklist of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which strongly opposes what I do. In early 2024, UCR Magazine published an article commending my work. The roots of my activist tendencies run much deeper than that. I grew up in the household of left-wing intellectuals and was protesting in the streets as early as the 1960s, in support of Black people in the American South who were seeking the right to vote.

As the story of what happened to me at UCR spread, I received more than a thousand supportive tweets and emails. About a third were from Chinese people, many of whom drew parallels between how UCR had treated me and how the CCP treats its critics. During Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, one had to be careful in talking about one’s cat (māo, high flat tone) because the word could be heard as máo (rising tone), the name of the Great Leader. What you meant did not matter as much as what someone else could accuse you of meaning. A language game ran wild. The charges against you were cloaked in moral righteousness; your assigned role was only to look inside yourself to uncover your unnoticed iniquity and then to confess; resistance from you would only lead to heavier punishment. The punishments directed at me at UCR weighed a garlic skin compared to what victims of the Cultural Revolution suffered, but the resemblance in techniques that my Chinese friends had noticed was, indeed, remarkable.

Many expressed a fear that American democracy, for years a “lighthouse” for Chinese dissidents, was sliding into a CCP pattern. A certain weakness in human nature seemed at work in both cases: Excessive confidence in good intentions leads to hubris, careerism, and abuse. In its early years (the 1930s and 1940s), the CCP attracted idealistic young people who were willing to risk their lives in order to do good. After 1949, CCP membership became the first step on a career ladder that led to personal benefits. Both before and after the shift, the principle that “Because I am on the right side, my tactics do not matter” was constant. The result, for China, was horrid suffering among the very people who in theory were being “liberated.” Broadly speaking, a similar pattern was emerging in the DEI project on American campuses: grounding in moral righteousness; transition to pursuit of career; indifference about tactics.

A career path in DEI administration clearly has opened at UCR (and elsewhere, I have no doubt). One colleague in my department has taken that route. Promoted from associate professor to associate vice chancellor and then vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclusion, her mission has become to ferret out unconscious bias, microaggressions, white privilege, and other flaws in academic culture — all across campus. She has become very adept at this, but her skills are in a different field from where she started.

Many have observed that a new managerial class has ballooned within higher education. Administration has become a specialty, and credentials within the specialty have become fungible: A good-looking record at one college or university can lead to higher position at another. Such incentives clearly undermine the growth of healthy campus cultures. The goal of actually helping people subtly shifts, moreover, toward one of accumulating a record by which one can show certain credentials.

The new administrative class is more starkly authoritarian than what preceded it. Much more than before, policy is formulated at an administrative pinnacle and sent downward, often embodied in rigid and arbitrary rules executed by computer programs. The role of faculty, staff, and students becomes “compliance.” Noncompliers are subject to “discipline.” All of this happens whether or not the compliant ones, in their particular contexts, might know better ways of serving the university’s ideals.

The implied claim of administrators that the faculty need their instruction in how to be fair is arrogant and sometimes almost clownish. But it does keep the accused on the defensive. In the prosecution of my case, it was my unvarying role to explain why I was not a racist. This was difficult. To deny that one is racist is, after all, just one more thing that racists do. I endured the assumption while feeling, inside, that if anyone was prejudging Black people it was my accusers, not me. They were the ones assuming (although they were careful not to say it) that Black applicants could not make it without quotas and boosts. They were the ones eyeing careers (with higher rank and salary attached) in the DEI bureaucracy — for which, in a sense, they had underrepresented minorities to thank.

For decades I have supported the values that lie behind DEI: that every human being deserves equal respect and opportunity, and that every effort, including the righting of past wrongs, should be made to pursue fairness. So now I face questions: If the top-down punishment machines of the new administrative class are not the right answer, then what is? Should we abandon the cause just because someone has corrupted it? Would, perhaps, lectures or seminars by thoughtful philosophers, historians, or sociologists (who are available on most campuses) be able to focus us more on what unites us as human beings than on what divides us? I am not sure. These are open questions.

In any case, we must be leery of authoritarianism. Here it is easy to see a threat from the right. We have a president who is unembarrassed to express admiration for Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un and other dictators — in their persons as well (how much?) as in their methods. Beware. But I am quite certain that my Chinese friends are right to point out a creeping authoritarianism from the left as well. Beware again.