Pomona’s Dirty Laundry

A feud among three professors inspired a debate over woke politics in academe.

Guest: Emma Pettit, senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education

Related Reading:

• When a Department Self-Destructs: Battles over money. Allegations of racism. A chair ousted.
• Weird at My School - Aaron Kunin’s newsletter

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.

Emma Pettit: It’s about respect in the workplace. It’s about who has the credentials to do what. It’s about how much leniency and how much grace you give your colleagues. And it’s about how do we work out conflict when we really disagree with each other?

Jack Stripling A juicy story has been playing out for years at Pomona College, a small liberal arts institution near Los Angeles. It’s a story about a messy feud between three professors in the English department, who clashed over issues related to money, and race, and respect. One of the professors chose to air all this dirty laundry in a public newsletter. The saga, which my colleague Emma Pettit rigorously reported on for a recent article, can sound at times like a satire of uncecked liberalism on college campuses. But it’s also a story about the little indignities that a lot of people suffer through in corporate jobs, from filling out stupid forms to fronting your own money for a company dinner. Today on the show, we’ll talk with Emma about what happened at Pomona and what it may say about the working world. Emma, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Emma Pettit Thanks for having me.

Jack Stripling Well, look, this is a fascinating story that you reported, and I’m not even sure how to approach it because so much happens. But tell me how you got on to it.

Emma Pettit So late last year, a colleague of mine sent me this newsletter that really grabbed my attention. It’s called Weird At My School, and it’s written by an English professor named Aaron Kunin who works at Pomona College. And pretty immediately, I was hooked. I was very interested. He was writing about this investigation that his university had launched against him. And it included all of these really interesting disputes over money and etiquette and curriculum and race and all of these academic culture things that I write about and find very interesting. But he’s doing something different than I think most people would. And that is he’s quoting from emails that are sent by his colleagues. And he’s writing about his colleagues while he still works there. He’s using pseudonyms, so he’s not naming them, but it’s still pretty clear who’s who. He argues that he was working in and I think is still working in an atmosphere of self-censorship where people are afraid to say what they think. And he argues that in that working environment, when people don’t say what they think, they forget how to think for themselves. So that’s how he depicts what it’s like to work in Pomona’s English department.

Jack Stripling So what was he investigated for?

Emma Pettit He was investigated for discriminating, harassing or retaliating against two of his colleagues. And what this professor was doing, Aaron Kunin, was using that investigation, using the emails and the reports and the documents unearthed in that investigation to write about what happened in a way that I’ve never really seen a professor at any other university or college do before. What’s unique about Kunin’s case is that he actually asked his lawyers to file all of the records and the investigation into him publicly so that he could reference it when he was writing about it and so that it would be available for public view. That’s how I was able to see the court records because they’re available publicly online, which is about 2800 pages of emails and statements and the investigative report that was all public for me to read. So I was able to start reading.

Jack Stripling So this happens at a very particular place, Pomona College. Tell me a little bit about Pomona.

Emma Pettit Well, the first thing to say is it’s beautiful. It’s a really beautiful campus. It’s near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Los Angeles. It’s part of the Claremont Colleges. It’s small. It enrolls around 1700 students, and it is an elite private liberal arts college that has the political makeup that you probably would expect. There was a 2018 Gallup poll on the speech attitudes and political identities of the students and faculty there. And only 3% of students and 4% of faculty identify as conservative and 0% of either group identify as very conservative. So it’s quite left leaning. So that gives you a little insight into like what the environment is like.

Jack Stripling So you might call this sort of a stereotypical West Coast liberal college.

Emma Pettit Yeah, I think that’s apt.

Jack Stripling So, Emma, tell me about the central players in this drama.

Emma Pettit So Aaron Kunin is a Renaissance poetry scholar and he is white and Jewish. Kyla Wazana Tompkins is of Moroccan and Arab Jewish descent. She’s a woman of color in the department and is an Americanist. And then Valorie Thomas is African-American and she is an Americanist as well, in the department. And both of them felt for a long time like they’d been at a remove from their colleagues because they thought that they and the department weren’t doing enough to support students of color.

Jack Stripling So somewhere along the line, they get crosswise with Kunin. Tell me how this unfolded.

Emma Pettit So the seeds of this dispute stretch back to 2016. At the time, Kunin, who specializes in Renaissance poetry, wanted to teach a senior seminar on Ralph Ellison, who’s the African-American writer, perhaps best known for his novel Invisible Man. So Aaron put forward his course proposal. He spoke with another Pomona scholar who wrote about Ellison outside of the department. Got their feedback and then put it forward as something he wanted to teach. Tompkins and Thomas learned about the course, and they objected to it. They thought that as Americanists, Aaron should have asked their permission or, you know, sought their feedback in some way. They also questioned if he had the training to offer an advanced seminar on a 20th century African-American writer when he specializes in Renaissance poetry. And they also would later question the framing of the course. They would say that it inappropriately de-emphasized race in teaching Ellison’s writing. I should say that Aaron says that’s not true, that that is not an accurate representation of his course description or his teaching. But that was the central conflict, and that at the time, Aaron ended up withdrawing the course proposal because he was planning on going on sabbatical. But the dispute spilled over into emails and everyone walked away from that situation I think feeling probably worse about each other than they did going into it.

Jack Stripling Oh wow. So there’s a lot of different threads there that I think run through this dispute. One is just questions about etiquette, right? We’re the Americanists. You should have talked to us before you taught something that felt like it’s squarely in our discipline. There’s another question about qualifications, right? Does this guy even specialize in the area that he’s going to teach? And if not, is that a problem? And then I think that it’s fair to say that we should point out that there’s another dynamic here, which is race. Did that play a role, in your view, in how this Ellison dispute unfolded?

Emma Pettit You know, I should say that Tompkins and Thomas did not speak to me for this story. So their perspectives, as they’re rendered in my reporting, are through that administrative file and through their emails and written statements, but not through an interview. But based on my reporting, yes, I think it did. I think that they questioned whether Aaron, with his specific training, and I also think they questioned his attitudes towards race. Now, Aaron would also say that they really misrepresented his attitudes towards race. But I think they were extremely skeptical that he would teach Ellison in a way that they thought was appropriate. And from Aaron’s perspective, you know, the department has always allowed wiggle room and the ability of professors to pursue their intellectual interests. I think he would say that people teach out of their lanes and have taught out of their lanes if they pursued it through their own inquiry. So as I write in the story, this dispute in many ways kind of replays itself out in the years to come when Kunin is department chair.

Jack Stripling Well, tell me a little bit about that. How does this sort of lay the foundation for what’s to come? What are other episodes in this saga?

Emma Pettit Yeah. So we could spend many, many, many hours dissecting every saga. But essentially, Aaron Kunin becomes chair of his department and it goes really, really poorly. He was chair for three semesters, during which he had lots of disputes with his two colleagues — Tompkins and Thomas. They were disputes over money, over rules, over curriculum, the type of thing that you actually would expect to see fought about in many departments. But the debates, captured in the emails, got heated. The professors accused Kunin of all sorts of things. Thomas called Kunin an “anti-Black Eurocentric Renaissance scholar,” and a “little twit.” She accused him of committing, what she called, “literary blackface.” Tompkins described Kunin as a “horrible racist human being.” At one point, the college brought in an outside mediator. But eventually one of the professors requested a discrimination investigation. So Kunin was investigated.

Jack Stripling: Wow, so there’s lots to unpack here. Let’s start with the disputes about money. What were those about?

Emma Pettit So here’s something that’s important to know about Pomona’s English department: It’s rich, and that is different than English departments at a lot of other colleges, especially at state schools. Finding out exactly how much money they had is a little tricky, but basically the department is supported by endowed funds, and when Kunin became chair, the previous chair told him it is impossible to expletive up the budget, meaning there’s so much money, basically at the department’s disposal. Don’t worry about it. You know, there’s gobs of money for everybody.

Jack Stripling Wow.

Emma Pettit Right, an interesting position and a unique position, I think, for a lot of departments out there. But that’s the situation that Pomona is in. Kunin, however, did think it was possible to expletive up the budget. He also, as chair, is the person responsible for overseeing the department’s funds. And, you know, the college, like any college, has rules against how those things have to be spent. Presumably they don’t want any funny business or misuse of funds happening. And so that was a big part of his motivation to try and get the department to adopt some new rules around funding.

Jack Stripling So the freewheeling days of big dinners at the bar with professors were over under Kunin. No more fun, okay.

Emma Pettit Yeah. Apparently. He also thought that as chair he didn’t want to be the only one making decisions, which is why he talked to faculty about and they voted on a rule where any requests for money $1,000 or more would need to be voted on by the department. He could approve anything that was $999 or less himself. But the big ticket things would need to get buy-in. So early on in Kunin’s chairing of the department, Valorie Thomas starts to question if she’s being uniquely disadvantaged by Kunin’s handling of the rules. And I’ll give just one example: So she asked him at one point if she could use the department’s credit card to take visitors to her Afrofuturisms class to dinner. So he told Thomas he didn’t order a department card in his name because it was a complication he didn’t want, and it seemed too easy to abuse. But he told her, yes, take the visitors to dinner and the department will reimburse you. And so she responded, “okay, fine. You didn’t need the card or want it. However, why would you automatically assume I have the money to take anybody anywhere? I’m 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 everyone is not cookie cutter, even in this department, at least I’m not. I’m real tired of these kinds of assumptions constantly being projected onto me so that I can either front like I’m one of you or feel blamed, suspect, inadequate and othered. But that is the essence of Pomona and academia in general.” She did not respond to my interview requests, but from her perspective, based on what I know, she felt like he was assuming that she could take on this payment burden of fronting dinners for visitors to her class. And then that was an assumption that people too easily made at a very, you know, elite rich place like Pomona. From Aaron’s perspective, he was just explaining a rule to Thomas that Thomas presumably already knew or should know because it had been enforced under the previous chair. And he told her the way that reimbursements work, or the way that paying for things work in the department, is you can either get things paid for in advance or you can submit for reimbursements. And on this particular dispute, when it became clear that there was no way to pay in advance, he actually offered to go to the restaurant to pick up the tab himself if that’s something that she wanted.

Jack Stripling How would you describe Kunin’s management style?

Emma Pettit I would say he’s pretty reliant on the rules that were established at the beginning of his chairing. I think as he writes in the newsletter about the department before he became chair, it comes across as a bit lawless. You know, he describes no one taking minutes at department meetings, so no one really remembering what decisions were made. Votes weren’t taken in any sort of standard way. And the department chair at the time, according to Kunin, decided all the funding decisions himself. All of that looked pretty unappetizing to Kunin. He thought that meetings, in-person meetings were where things should be discussed. And so in terms of like a management style, I think he would always say that meeting face to face is best and he was very willing to do that. I also think that in the view of his colleagues, he relied upon the rules too much. He didn’t know when to modify them to fit the contingency of the moment, and that he tried to make sense of the department through rules rather than relying on some of the, I guess, softer skills of management.

Jack Stripling There’s a few ways of interpreting this. He’s either bringing order to a department that didn’t have much and adding some needed transparency to the way it conducts its business. He’s an inflexible stickler, you know, who’s making life a little more miserable in the department. But, you know, everybody knows what the rules are now. And the most sinister interpretation of this is that he is, in fact, singling out professors he doesn’t like and making them adhere to stringent rules while not applying that same philosophy to other professors. That seems like the different interpretations you can have of this. Is that, is that your thinking?

Emma Pettit Yes. Yes. I think that’s well-said.

Jack Stripling Before they went full bore into a formal investigation, did they do anything else to try to work this out at Pomona?

Emma Pettit Yeah. So a mediator was brought in Nyree Gray, who is at Claremont Mckenna College and was at the time their chief civil rights officer. She was brought in to help the department work through its issues. Her work began, I want to say, around June of 2019. So she was there for just a couple of months before the discrimination investigation was requested. Thomas requested that investigation in October of 2019, which Tompkins later joined, and Pomona tapped an external workplace investigator to really sift through all of these, frankly fiddly and specific and at times bureaucratic and complicated disputes over the winter of 2019 to figure out if Kunin had discriminated or harassed or retaliated against Thomas or Tompkins in his time as department chair.

Jack Stripling Can you talk about the grounds that they said there was discrimination? Did they offer specifics on this?

Emma Pettit Yeah. So the investigator that was hired by Pomona, Angela Reddock-Wright, basically sorted the accusations into three buckets. One bucket was that Kunin as chair had abused the rules to make it more difficult for them to participate in department business and specifically more difficult for Thomas to receive department money. There were a couple of funding disputes over really small amounts of money, $300 for zines for an Afrofuturisms course that Thomas was teaching, and $2,400 for a training that she wanted to attend. They argued that Kunin had abused the rules as chair to make it more difficult for her to access that money or to block her from that money. Another bucket of accusations was that Kunin had devalued their scholarly work. And then the third accusation was that Kunin, “harbors racist ideologies,” which is how Reddock-Wright, the investigator put it in her report, which they say he expressed through his course proposals and his writing.

Jack Stripling Yeah. Well, the email you read from a few minutes ago about the company card alludes to the allegation that Kunin might have sort of a blind spot about equity issues. Were there times when either of the professors made the case that some of these seemingly small ball disputes were really about something bigger like race? Did they ever say that to Kunin or other people?

Emma Pettit Yes, there are lots of examples of that. One that comes to mind is in November of 2019, and this is after Thomas requested a discrimination investigation into Kunin. That’s when Thomas and Tompkins learned that Kunin was going up for a promotion to full professor, which they strongly protested. They saw this person being advanced, that they really disagreed with the decisions he’d made to up to that point and had argued that he was making discriminatory decisions. So in an email to some colleagues and some administrators, Thomas accused her colleagues of allowing a, “anti-black Eurocentric Renaissance scholar” to, “steamroll his way through the American literature curriculum.” “Apparently you expected me to grin and ask if I should pick an extra bag of cotton.” She also says that the department is, “now 100% a parody of an English department. Well, yes and no, because it is currently a stellar example of an English department circa 1915. You should rename it The D.W. Griffith’s Department of Anybody Can Walk In Off The Street And Teach About U.S. Coloreds Because Race Is Just An Opinion.” For some context there, Griffith is best known for directing The Birth of a Nation, which is a film that glorifies the Ku Klux Klan.

Jack Stripling Oh wow. So the gloves are really off here. And it’s an interesting moment if we look at this through the framework of workplace again. Kunin at this point is ascendant, right? He is about to get a promotion and this reads to me like seemingly the last best chance to kind of go scorched earth on this guy, perhaps even prevent the promotion. Is that how you interpreted this?

Emma Pettit Well, again, I should say I wish I could have had the opportunity to ask Thomas and Tompkins about why they took it as an affront to them. I would love to know more about what motivated these emails protesting his advancement. But yeah, I think that’s a reasonable interpretation.

Jack Stripling You know, as I hear you talk about this story, there are so many things in this that are very Pomona particular that feel something out of a novel about a, you know, liberal West Coast college. And then there are things that feel very like corporate workplace, like I don’t want to have to front money for a business dinner. Why is he being so stingy with the credit card? I got to fill out these forms to get a grant for zines. You know, just all of the indignities of work life. Did this feel like, in some ways, kind of traditional, normal headaches that a lot of people have?

Emma Pettit Yes and no. I think that’s exactly right. Some of the headaches or some of the complications that Thomas especially was brushing up against are things that, yes, in any workplace are annoyances or bureaucratic problems that you have to deal with. And in some ways, I think that this type of conflict between people and between rules and between structures, yeah, I think it could happen at other places. In another sense, I do think that this is quite a unique story to academia for a couple of reasons. One is that the lines of authority are just a bit starker in other workplaces than they are in a department. You know, you have a department chair, but that person isn’t your boss in the same way that my editor is my boss.

Jack Stripling Sorry for you.

Emma Pettit And I think once these emails and once the criticisms coming from Tompkins and Thomas reach a certain level of harshness or a certain level of degree of criticism, I think in a different workplace, that is probably when a manager or someone else might have stepped in a bit earlier and in perhaps a different way than what happened at Pomona.

Jack Stripling And what was the outcome of this investigation?

Emma Pettit So eventually, Pomona decided that Kunin had retaliated against Thomas in three instances. In two funding disputes and then when he proposed a course related to Ralph Ellison again in the fall of 2019.

Jack Stripling: So all of the things that Kunin was doing that he says were related to process, whether it’s you got to go through a form to get some money, all of these things were chalked up to retaliation, that he was making it more difficult for Thomas on purpose.

Emma Pettit That is what the investigator concluded. And that is what Pomona concluded based on the investigators report. A judge looked at all of that and concluded something quite different.

Jack Stripling Tell me about that.

Emma Pettit So Kunin challenged Pomona’s findings in court. A judge looked at the claims on either side and the evidence. And basically, he decided that while Kunin was, quote, rigid and Thomas was, quote, lax when it came to her funding requests and there was a conflict between them. That’s not proof, direct or circumstantial of retaliation. As for the Ralph Ellison related course, in fact, the judge writes, it was Thomas who acted to derail Kunin’s effort to teach a course involving Ellison. So in Judge speak, that’s essentially saying, workplace investigator, you missed the mark, you didn’t have enough evidence for the conclusions that you reached. Kunin had been sanctioned by Pomona and he tossed those sanctions out.

Jack Stripling In the course of your reporting or in the investigation, did any faculty member other than these two professors complain in this way about Kunin?

Emma Pettit No. No, they didn’t. Other members of his department were asked what they thought of his actions as chair, if they thought he was motivated by racial bias. They said from what they could tell, he was rigid. I think they thought he could be more flexible, loosen up a bit. But they did not lodge similar complaints about his actions as chair.

Jack Stripling: So you mentioned earlier that Kunin sees what happened in his case as an example of self-censorship within the academy. How so?

Emma Pettit: Yeah. So when Kunin is writing about this and when he is doing sort of an autopsy of what happened to him, he sees all these examples of his colleagues saying things to him and then either not confronting Thomas or Tompkins about what they’re saying in emails, or just staying quiet about matters in which you would think that in a healthier workplace environment, someone would speak up and someone would say, Hey, I disagree. Hey, I don’t think that’s appropriate. That’s Kunin’s argument. And we’ve seen that a lot in higher education. We’ve seen a lot of people say, especially when it comes to matters regarding race and racism, that sometimes those claims can be used as sort of a muzzle for discussing real issues where people can reasonably disagree. And we’ve written about that a lot at the Chronicle. I’ve heard about it a lot in my inbox, but it is a real concern that Kunin is raising and that I think really resonates with this broader cultural trend I guess that we’re seeing in higher education, that a lot of people think departments have become places where, in some pockets of academe, you can’t say what you think or you can’t. You can’t disagree with your colleagues in a manner that is really necessary for the preservation of departments and for academia in general.

Jack Stripling: Okay, so how has this investigation and the entire ordeal affected Kunin’s life?

Emma Pettit Soon after, the investigation was asked for by Thomas, he stepped down as chair. You know, by that point it’s pretty clear it wasn’t working out the way that he had hoped. I think he found the investigation stressful, as I think most people would find a workplace investigation stressful. I think during the period of chairing, he was under stress. He told me that he developed shingles at one point in time, he thinks due to the stress. And the investigation itself and afterwards, this is Kunin’s perspective, but I think he thinks that it really affected his relationships with his colleagues, that they distanced themselves from him during the investigation, that they started to hold him at arm’s length and have continued to hold him at arm’s length. And so now, aside from essentially one person in the department who’s his friend, he doesn’t have much of a relationship at all with his colleagues anymore.

Jack Stripling What does Pomona College have to say about all this?

Emma Pettit Very little, unfortunately. I asked their president for an interview about Kunin’s central argument in his newsletter, which is that the English department there is riven with self-censorship and has no appetite for disagreement. She was not available or she was not made available. I just got a short statement back from a Pomona spokesperson that said, “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 also said that Kunin’s newsletter quote “includes content from a case settled some years ago.”

Jack Stripling So long story short, nothing to see here, Emma.

Emma Pettit Right, Exactly.

Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back after a break.

[BREAK]

Jack Stripling Emma, I want to talk about how your story might fit into a larger national conversation. We’ve been hearing complaints for years, particularly among conservatives, that college campuses, to use a phrase, are woke, that everyone has to be on guard and self-censor to avoid offending people. Does the Pomona story lend any credence to that criticism?

Emma Pettit Yeah, it does. On the one hand, you don’t want to conclude too much from a particular situation with a particular set of people. I think what happened at Pomona is a bit stranger than what might happen at other college campuses. I also think there’s a risk of painting with a really broad brush when we talk about self-censorship and when we talk about ideological conformity, I tend to think in my reporting things are never as bad or good as any one side says. But yeah. Kunin makes the case in his newsletter that what happened within his department is not unique. It might be unique in that particulars, but that there is this general problem of professors not feeling free to say what they think or to have the type of collegial disagreements that you need to have for a department to survive and for a department to move forward. And, you know, just in my experience reporting on academic culture, I’ve heard that a good amount. I’ve heard that a good amount after the story came out. But I’ve heard that a good amount before the story came out, including from people who are kind of across the political spectrum.

Jack Stripling: So one of the remarkable things about this case is just how long it dragged on. I mean, in a lot of ways, you could describe this as an interpersonal dispute between three people. But it dragged on for years through mediation, a formal investigation, and went to court. Is this kind of thing common in higher education?

Emma Pettit So that’s so hard to know, because a lot of times these things stay private. Often when there is an investigator who’s hired by a college to look into something like this, they never see the light of day. I will say, just based on anecdotal evidence, I think it’s relatively common that these types of disputes, these types of fights, do end up being pored over by a lawyer, either in-house or someone that’s hired by a college to lift the rocks and look at what’s scuttling underneath on all of these issues. At least that’s what I’m being told in my inbox.

Jack Stripling We should talk about these investigations and say that colleges that receive federal money, which is the vast majority of them, they’re legally obligated to create an environment that doesn’t have discrimination, right? And so that means that Pomona, or pretty much any college, has to look into these reports. And I think most people on the surface would say that’s a good thing. But I wonder what your reporting at Pomona tells you about whether these formal investigations are the best way to resolve these kinds of disputes among colleagues?

Emma Pettit Yes, that’s a good question. And it’s such a thorny one for the reasons that you’re describing. I think we all want a higher education system that takes discrimination seriously, that takes retaliation seriously, that takes harassment seriously. And there’s been a real effort to ramp up reporting mechanisms and the visibility of the ways to report harassment, discrimination, retaliation, etc., to have a real effort to have colleges that have ignored those problems for so long really deal with them. On the other hand, I think if you read this story, it’s reasonable to question if, again, hiring an outside investigator who had to learn the norms of this particular English department, I guess probably educate herself on like Ralph Ellison scholarship and spend who knows how many billable hours looking into these really, again, fiddly and just bureaucratic disputes between colleagues. You know, is that the best use of anyone’s time? I think that’s a question worth pondering.

Jack Stripling What’s the alternative, Emma though, if they don’t have formal investigations?

Emma Pettit I don’t know. And I don’t have an easy answer to that, especially because I should say that Tompkins and Thomas, from their point of view, there was discrimination, there was harassment, there was retaliation that needed to be taken seriously. And they do not see this as an interpersonal dispute, at least in the way that we’re describing here. They see it as structural problems and something that needs a bigger solution than just talking to Kunin face to face or talking to the dean. Mediation is an interesting tool that some colleges are using to resolve conflicts. Ideally, the process brings people together and helps guide them toward a resolution in this informal and confidential way. At Pomona, they brought in a mediator, but it didn’t resolve the issue. So it’s a challenge colleges are struggling with.

Jack Stripling Congrats on this reporting, Emma, because it’s a fascinating story. It also was incredibly widely read, and people shared it with me asking if I had seen it. Of course I had. And I know that it’s sparked quite a conversation. I’m curious why you think that is and what you maybe have heard from people since you published.

Emma Pettit Yeah, I was, I guess, pleasantly surprised with how well read it was. It’s the story I’ve heard the most from readers on by far. My inbox and Twitter feeds were flooded for a couple of days. What’s interesting to me is that I got a lot of feedback saying how familiar this sounded. And Kunin is a very particular guy. Tompkins and Thomas are particular people, and the disputes that they’re having are, there’s universal things that I think people can point to, but on the one hand, they’re quite specific to Pomona or to English departments. So it’s really interesting to me that I was getting emails that say things, “like rings true of many departments in academe, including my own.” Someone else told me, “interview almost anyone who has spent decades in an English department, I suspect. And you will unearth similarly hairraising stories.” Another person told me, “I recently retired after 35 years of teaching, and this story rings so true with me and parallels much of what I observed there in my last few years.” So that’s just a sample of really the feedback I’ve gotten in my inbox of people saying how familiar this sounds.

Jack Stripling Which suggests Pomona isn’t much of an outlier.

Emma Pettit That’s what’s been so fascinating. And I think people are really responding to some of the elements of the story that you identified, which is that in many ways this is a workplace dispute or a workplace drama. You know, people getting frustrated by what they see as these small indignities of questioning if they’re being disadvantaged compared to their colleagues, especially if that has a racial element to it. Another element that readers are responding to, I think, is the, I guess for lack of a better term, identity politics element to it. I’ve gotten some emails of people saying that they know of claims of racial identity or racism being, in their view, weaponized in the workplace to tamp down on disagreement or to avoid hashing things out. So that’s another, I think, element of the story that some people are reading and responding to.

Jack Stripling Did you get any feedback from people who suggested that maybe there was more to the complaints from the professors? That maybe the racial element, while hard to pin down, was actually probably present?

Emma Pettit Yes. I heard from people who thought that we presented the story in a way that was a bit one-sided because we are entering it through Kunin’s vantage point. There are people who thought that there were racist or racial elements to what Kunin was doing, and that there was more credence to what Thomas and Tompkins were saying. And there’s certainly people who read the story, as, you know, Kunin doing a lot wrong. It’s a really interesting, I guess, kind of Rorschach for people’s own values and ideas about the work that they do and how they see themselves in their own work lives.

Jack Stripling So Emma, this is a big, complicated story. Lots of documents, long investigation. What’s it really about?

Emma Pettit Yeah, I mean, it’s about a lot of things. It’s about respect in the workplace. It’s about who has the credentials to do what. It’s about how much leniency and how much grace you give your colleagues. And it’s about how do we work out conflict when we really disagree with each other?

Jack Stripling And it sounds like we’re not seeing a great example of how to resolve those types of issues.

Emma Pettit No, we’re seeing kind of the opposite of that. We’re seeing people just hash things out in email and things just reaching a tenor that’s pretty remarkable. And then we’re seeing an investigation and an attempt at mediation and a court case. We’re seeing kind of the, the worst of conflict resolution.

Jack Stripling Yeah. Well, Emma, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for your reporting. I really appreciate it.

Emma Pettit Of course. Thanks so much for having me.

Jack Stripling You can find a link to Emma’s story When a Department Self-Destructs, in the notes of this show. College Matters from the Chronicle, is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen and remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our original podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Laura Krantz, Sarah Brown, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.