The Review

Last week, I wrote about the persecution of the graphic novelist and University of Michigan professor Phoebe Gloeckner, whose students launched a campaign against her for showing what they took to be offensive images in her class on underground comix. Her ordeal, I suggested, might be understood as one instance in a long American panic over comic books, a panic resurgent now on both left and right and with corollary sensitivities in other arenas of word and image. But Gloeckner’s case can’t be comprehended only in terms of renovations of sentiment. The concerted effort by students to amass evidence against her, the failure of the administration to provide moral or even procedural support, the intrusive investigation of the Office for Institutional Equity, the lingering threat of further complaints and further reprisals — the whole episode could only have unfolded as it did because colleges are now replete with mechanisms of investigation and punishment.

The newly punitive university is reflected in what Gloeckner remembers her accusers writing in a private chat, something along the lines of: We failed with the other professor — let’s do this one by the book. It’s a breeding ground for what Laura Kipnis has called “snitches” — vindictive faculty members or students who abuse administrative bureaucracies to wield power and exact revenge. As Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, said in a conversation with me last year, “There is so much emphasis on punishment. That is very disturbing.”

This dynamic is difficult to analyze not least because it can seem to slot so cleanly into the concerns of the culture wars. But the vocabulary deployed by culture warriors on both sides — that new vernacular including “woke,” “toxic,” “cancel culture,” and so on — is more evocative than informative. A shift of lens, or at least some new words, might help to shed light on a social process whose reality at this point seems undeniable, even if its larger meaning is opaque.

What’s needed is a concept that can capture the interaction of student psychology with punitive administrative bureaucracies. In a 2017 paper called “Why Punishment Pleases,” the Warwick sociologists Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlain draw on Émile Durkheim to describe what they call “hostile solidarity.” “For Durkheim,” they write, “the ‘real function’ of punishment was to be found in the maintenance of normative values which formed the collective consciousness lying at the core of social solidarity.” Punishment gives rules emotional force, and thereby binds groups together.

Although Carvalho and Chamberlain are not writing about colleges per se, they do note that their ideas might “assist an analysis of why the deployment of what can be deemed a punitive logic has become particularly appealing in contemporary liberal social settings.” The academic free-speech advocates Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have similarly drawn on Durkheim in their 2018 analysis of scapegoating on college campuses, and their coinage “vindictive protectiveness” is cognate to Carvalho and Chamberlain’s “hostile solidarity.” But the latter idea appeals to me because it communicates the ironically pro-social quality of the impulse toward punishment. As Carvalho and Chamberlain write, “Punishment really is a solidarity-producing process — it aims to produce solidarity where it was lacking.”

The “R. Crumb Hate Corner,” a chat group formed by Gloeckner’s detractors and named for a cartoonist whose work they found offensive, illustrates hostile solidarity neatly. The group’s icon featured the words “Punk bitch” superimposed over Crumb’s face; the implicit reference was of course double, to Crumb and Gloeckner at once. Campaigning against Gloeckner became a group cause, with its own esprit de corps. What happened to her, and what has happened to faculty members in countless analogous cases, cannot be understood without some sense of the bonding function of hostility.

In the uncertain and isolating fall of 2020, such solidarity was never more needful. As Carvalho and Chamberlain explain, “punitive attitudes and support for punitive policies are likely to arise when conditions for solidarity are particularly precarious, such as in periods of social insecurity and anxiety.” From this point of view, the “R. Crumb Hate Corner” and the many other spasms of arbitrary persecution at colleges across the country in the last two disorienting years are attempts, cruel but also poignant, to rescue a sense of community from the wreckage.

What should be done? A modest start might see first-year orientation programming supplemented with material on appropriate classroom expectations and behavior, including the firm insistence that students have no right not to be exposed to material they find offensive. Too, administrators in units like Michigan’s Office of Institutional Equity should be trained about scapegoating dynamics. This wouldn’t just protect faculty members from unwarranted assaults on their decisions in the classroom. It would protect students — who, under the current dispensation, are encouraged to engage in patterns of suspicion and revolt that, after an investigative process, often fail. As Gloeckner writes, “I don’t think the university did the students any favors, either. No one is happy. Neither students nor teachers can thrive in such an atmosphere of fear.” What happened to Gloeckner should have been impossible. Maybe one day it will be.

Read Phoebe Gloeckner’s “My Cartoonish Cancellation” here, Laura Kipnis on snitches here, and Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlain’s “Why Punishment Pleases” here.

Recommended

• “In a frenzy of creation and organization, Deren seemingly ordered the world around her, at least for a crucial moment, to fit into a pattern of her own design.” In The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes about the filmmaker Maya Deren, by way of Mark Alice Durant’s new biography.
• “What does it mean for a show that compels museumgoers to confront racism to invite them to opt out of looking at a historical image?” In Jewish Currents, Zoé Samudzi critiques the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ unsatisfactory Philip Guston retrospective, which “preemptively shapes attendees’ affective responses.”
• “The question that Havel’s purist position raises, ultimately, is whether the intellectual’s role in society is necessarily an adversarial one, whether the intellectual can acquire power and exercise it without betraying his vocation or the truth.” In Liberties, Jared Marcel Pollen on Vaclav Havel’s presidency.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin