By the time he was fired for cause, the University of Michigan’s president, Mark S. Schlissel, appears to have been broadly, even universally, disliked. He seems to have mishandled almost every crisis that came his way, from a series of sexual-misconduct scandals to labor disputes to Covid-19 policy. In September of 2020, faculty passed (albeit narrowly) a no-confidence vote against him. Graduate students went on strike. Survivors of sexual abuse at the hands of Robert Anderson, the now-deceased Michigan athletic doctor, camped outside of his house. Schlissel, with the avoidance and incompetence that marked his whole tenure as president, refused to talk to them.
As a commenter on a blog devoted to University of Michigan news put it, Schlissel “seemed unpopular with basically every constituency.” And he knew it, too, since he’d already announced that he planned to retire in 2023, before his contract was up. There’s no reason to mourn his even earlier departure.
But there are many reasons to take alarm at the way it came about. The Board of Regents’ announcement implies (although does not explicitly state) that Schlissel’s firing is due to the discovery of “an inappropriate relationship with a university employee.” More: “In the interest of full public disclosure, we have released dozens of Dr. Schlissel’s communications that illustrate this inappropriate conduct.”
The letters are the banal and occasionally touching record of the apparently entirely consensual affair between Schlissel and what the regents call a “subordinate.” Although he evinces no particular literary skill as an author of love letters — when the subordinate forwards him Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73" (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”), which one might have expected to resonate with the then 63-year-old president, he fails to respond altogether — his culinary tastes are appealing. “Get psyched,” is his comment on an order of Indian food (rogan josh, chicken korma, vegetable samosa). Elsewhere, he plies his paramour with knishes, which suggests that in at least one area of his life his judgment was good.
What could possibly justify the public release of all of these documents? Why was this relationship anything other than a private matter? As Silke-Maria Weineck, who has been one of Schlissel’s severest critics, told Inside Higher Ed, “he should have been fired for treating faculty, staff, and students with naked contempt, not for an apparently consensual affair. … Posting the correspondence on our main website is a classless and dickish move.”
What if the punitive publication of the emails was less an incidental bit of nastiness than the real point? Normalizing the bureaucratic authorization of sexual and social shaming — a punishment made possible by the panoptic surveillance of university email correspondence — would give boards of regents and other administrators a tremendous cudgel. In the case of Schlissel, there’s some reason to think that the whole moralizing show is largely pretextual, a sensational way of getting rid of a leader whose real faults have nothing to do with his romantic life. So the question becomes: Why the spectacle?
Everyone who works in a university should be concerned about the precedent set by Schlissel’s scarlet letter. What’s in your outbox?
