Never having been asked to comment on anything on this blog, I felt a little puzzled, but eventually thought, why not? So here, if you like, are some theses on understanding this instance of a presidential speech.

(1) A presidential speech is a balancing act, a diplomatic performance; and as such, it is almost inevitably produced under severe institutional and diplomatic constraints. One might put it like this: university presidents enjoy no right to free speech. Or at least, no free speech without the threat of retribution from any of numerous quarters. If you read Dean Dad’s wonderful blog about his life as a community college dean, the first thing you find out is that university management (call them leadership or administrators if you prefer) operates in a state of constant compromise and constraint. In a great recent post, he explains something about the constraints on what one can say in his role: “When I spoke only for myself, it didn’t really matter what I said. But as a leader in the institution, comments that once would have been merely snarky were suddenly taken as indications of larger directions.” Just think of Larry Summers. As president, one is heavily vetted to begin with, continuously accountable to multiple constituencies, and under pressure not to rock the boat. And as Dean Dad points out, “front-room talk” isn’t the same as “back-room talk”: even if presidents may be frank in private, they are seldom unguarded when acting in their ceremonial role. First thesis: presidents are not free agents. Corollary: a presidential speech on academic freedom invokes a value that it cannot practice.

(2) The presidential speech is a kind of self-instituting, self-authorizing ceremonial language that functions to assure or reassure the continued dignity of the institution. And a presidential speech is hence less an empirical report on an institution than a moment in the reproduction of an institutional self-image. As in commercial advertising or a political campaign, one puts one’s best foot forward. It’s less that what is said is false as that campus life is glossed with the veneer of an institutional fantasy. This fantasy — one can see it in Zimmer’s speech — implicitly embodies its own criteria of evaluation, which are essentially aesthetic. In such a speech, institutional reality vanishes into the self-satisfied ether of institutional desires for beautiful self-representations.

Hence one of the most striking moments in Zimmer’s speech is when he says — his speech by the way is about academic freedom and hence he talks about the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, a document which I have already examined on this blog — anyway, Zimmer, I was saying, rightly says that to understand the Kalven Report we must situate it in its institutional context. But to my eyes as an anthropologist, what Zimmer calls “contextualiz[ing] the Kalven report within institutional culture” would be better called contextualizing the Kalven report in his obligatory presidential fantasy of institutional culture. See for yourself:

…I believe it is necessary to contextualize the Kalven report within institutional culture. The commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom is not a simple one. It is difficult and to succeed demands a culture and community that will support it. The University of Chicago holds these as its highest values and we seek to reinforce them at every turn. The Kalven report is a component of this culture. Many other institutions push other values forward as legitimate competing interests, and their culture may not support such a strong position on this particular set of values. Every institution needs to come to its own conclusion as to what it is and what it wants to be. It needs to decide how much weight to give to various competing interests. Kalven only works at the University of Chicago because of these common values at the University, and can only be fully understood as a part of the realization of these values.

The University of Chicago’s “culture” here is one that is presented as having monolithically shared and uncontested values. Its community is portrayed as a heroic agent that has managed to maintain a difficult but successful “commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom.” This obviously is not an empirical description but an artfully patterned and arranged permutation of highly valorized ceremonial language. There are no real people in this description, no disciplinary or economic or political differences, none of the gritty detail of routine institutional dysfunction. Uttered by a janitor, this description would be surreal (given the class and educational connotations that lie hidden within this governing language); uttered by a student, it would be sycophantic. Uttered by a president, it is a moment that shows the empty self-referentiality of ceremonial rhetoric. (I don’t mean to completely trash these fantasies of institutional valor, and I’m certainly not saying there’s nothing good about the university, but I do want to emphasize the aesthetic fixations of this discourse.) And while presidential descriptions do vary over the years, this public affirmation of institutional virtue is clearly part of the obligations of the president’s job, and not mainly the expression of a personal or scholarly opinion. Second thesis: a presidential speech is institutional fantasy hour, an obligatory ritual pause whose ideological emptiness guarantees that its form will be more significant than its content.

(3) This description of institutional culture should be taken as official self-image rather than a genuine description, but let’s say we read it naively as a description, since Zimmer does gesture towards describing a culture, even if somewhat rhetorically. Now, frankly, this description of a “culture” strains my ethnographic faculties. If Zimmer ever happens to read this blog — a moment I do not foresee — I must protest that my experience suggests that, as an empirical description, what he says is quite false. Chicago is in reality not as special as it imagines itself: it is an institution much more like institutions elsewhere: it is a university where one hears plenty of false and unrigorous claims, plenty of lazy inquiries that are neither open nor intense, plenty of situations where “intellectual freedom” is limited by prevailing disciplinary prejudice and intellectual narrow-mindedness. Zimmer states that the university has a “commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom,” but interpreted empirically, this statement is not only false but also performatively self-refuting. In other words, the very sloppiness and clearly deeply constrained nature of this presidential statement is already evidence in itself that institutional culture is neither perfectly rigorous nor perfectly free. Third thesis: read inside-out, contextually and symptomatically, presidential speech can serve as a barometer of the disingenousness of campus self-images.

(4) The rhetoric of “culture” and “community” serves to conceal all the ways in which the university is neither a settled culture nor a community of equals. Particularly disingenuously, the university administration disappears as an actor, as if the voice of the president was, unproblematically, the voice of the university. It seems, in fact, that Zimmer has a deeply autocratic view of himself as the sole authorized voice of the university:

Were [former president] Hutchins’s political activities an expression of academic freedom or were they chilling, given that he embodied the University as its president? Many today, including myself, would question this level of political engagement for a University president. While separating the University from its president in a legal sense is easy enough, it is problematic practically, and thus the potential chilling effect of a politically active president is something I and other of Hutchins’s successors have tried to avoid.

Now, indeed as I said above, it is difficult for a president not to be viewed as a spokesperson for a university, but what strikes me here is that Zimmer sees his only option as being one of retreat into his role as the practical “embodiment” of the university. He shows no interest in developing a campus process for developing a more democratic university consensus. Indeed, insofar as he ardently defends the Kalven Report — which asserts that the university (administration) must take no political positions, even ones overwhelmingly demanded by faculty and students — he asserts that the university president’s role is to resist the will of the campus majority. For Zimmer, the administration’s role appears to be to resist outside as well as inside pressures. (There is something deeply disturbing to me, frankly, about his equation of 1930s Nazi dominance of the University of Berlin with 1980s calls on the university to divest from South Africa. The idea that he would very nearly equate these as unwanted political influences is frightening.) What he doesn’t mention, of course, is that the administration is permanently obliged to bring in funds for the university and that this might be relevant to an assessment of political neutrality. “Investing” for him does not count as a political act, only “divesting,” which is suspect, apparently, because it involves imposing an outside political will on what should be a strictly internal business decision.

Thus again we are back at the nexus of institutional power and money, two major features of university life that, one might think, would be highly relevant for a theory of academic freedom. And yet are so thoroughly unexplored in Zimmer’s speech. But in the end, I almost pity this president. Even if he happened personally to agree with everything I had said here, he would, on my assessment, be incapable of saying anything so scathing in a public forum. His role, and the dignity of the institution he claims to embody, would prohibit it.

One day when I have time to write a longer article, a comparative analysis of university presidents’ discourse from both sides of the Atlantic would seem to be in order.

But I’m getting ahead of the textual excerpt I wanted to present. Although it doesn’t always manage to be an accurate description of the university, it compensates by being entertaining and at times outrageous. (Outrageousness being nothing to sneeze at when it comes to desanctifying institutional self-images.)

The University of Chicago is more self-absorbed—more precisely, self-obsessed—than any other institution of higher learning in America. Its animating myth was manufactured by Robert Maynard Hutchins, the institution’s pivotal president and promoter non pareil. “It’s not a very good university,” Hutchins declared, “it’s only the best there is.” Never mind Oxford or Berkeley. Harvard and Yale may fill the corridors of power, loyalists say; in the domain of ideas, Chicago rules. Nowhere else is the “Ivy League” a term of derision—the land of academic “Jay Leno-ism,” it is called, a reference to its veneration of big-name professors derided at Chicago as “dying elephants.” A passing remark made long ago by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead is recycled as if it were gospel: “I think the one place where I have been that is most like ancient Athens is the University of Chicago.”

Three-quarters of the faculty live within a mile of the campus in the enclave of Hyde Park, a hothouse of learned chatter and salacious gossip set apart, by design, from the bombed-out inner-city landscape, peopled mainly by dirt-poor blacks, which surrounds it. The fact of isolation, it is said half-jokingly, is why the university’s athletic teams are known as the Maroons. The Chicago tribe takes pleasure in furious disputations about everything from monetarism to metaphysics. While Harvard preens, Chicago navel-gazes, turning out bookshelves’-worth of histories and biographies, faculty committee reports, student newspapers, broadsheets, and websites devoted to itself. There are several hundred listings in the “introductory” bibliography of the university’s history that the campus librarians have prepared.

Seemingly everyone is an amateur historian, mining the past for ammunition that can be used in the present. “No episode was more important in shaping the outlook and expectations [of higher education in the decade following the Civil War] than the founding of the University of Chicago,” writes Frederick Rudolph in his benchmark history of American higher education. It is “one of those events in American history that brought into focus the spirit of an age.” When John D. Rockefeller launched the university with a gift of $2.3 million, he expressed the hope that an institution situated far from the tradition-bound East Coast would “strike out upon lines in full sympathy with the spirit of the age.” Although Chicago is a great school, in this respect Rockefeller would be disappointed. The dominant trope, observes Dennis Hutchinson, professors of law and longtime dean of the undergraduate college, is that “at Chicago we’ve always done ‘X,'” meaning whatever is being advocated at the moment.

There is another, less frequently acknowledged tradition in Hyde Park, a willingness on the part of the university’s leaders, including Hutchins and William Rainey Harper, the founding president, to do whatever has been necessary to raise money for a chronically cash-starved school. Among its past ventures are a junior college and the nation’s biggest correspondence school; in 1998 it attached itself to Unext.com, a for-profit business school.

(34-35)

…Only senior professors should teach the core couses, Andrew Abbott asserted, because only a widely published academic can stand as a “central authority figure who can model for the students the discipline of rethinking ideas.” What a marvelous notion: Kant or Mill interpreted by Mortimer Adler or Allan Bloom, transcendent texts in the hands of master interpreters. But you would have to go elsewhere to find it. At Chicago, the ideal of a college where intellectually obsessive undergraduates are instructed in small classes by full professors, Socrates among the genius set, collides with a shabbier reality. Science courses are delivered lecture-style, as in most universities, and few sections are led by faculty members. Even in the humanities and social sciences, points out Richard Saller, the university’s provost since 2001, nearly two-thirds of classes are taught by graduate students and non-tenure track faculty.

At Chicago, faculty devotion to the core isn’t bred in the bone. It’s a historical accident resulting from the university’s peculiar division into two separate faculties. Until the 1960s, the graduate faculty, based in the disciplines, taught Ph.D. candidates, while the college faculty, hired separately, instructed undergraduates. Although the intention was to build a university that rewarded teaching as well as research, the result was a rancorous split between the discipline-based professors, who regarded themselves as the “real faculty,” and the “have-not” college instructors, dismissed as glorified high school teachers. “There were people teaching economics who didn’t know Milton Friedman was a professor here,” Saller says, shaking his head at the oddity of it all.

This division of labor was abolished in the 1960s. Since those who have subsequently been hired, like faculty everywhere, have more specialized interests, when the college instructors retired there was no one to fill the classroom void. At the same time, in order to compete with leading universities, Chicago has cut the teaching load from six to four quarter courses, and many professors teach only one undergraduate course.

These fact on the ground make for decidedly odd bedfellows. Donald Levine, a sociology professor and the former dean of the college, for whom the common core is a passion, found himself in rare agreement with anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose enthusiasm for a substantial diet of required courses was premised on his fear that if undergraduate had more opportunities to take electives, people like himself would have to teach them. “I’m not a college type,” Sahlins says. That’s an understatement, since he refers to himself as a member of the graduate department of anthropology and rarely sees undergraduates.

“What we’re doing has intellectual integrity!” was the rallying cry of the traditionalists. But “you can only go so far,” observes one professor, “before you have to point at the faculty and ask, ‘Why aren’t you teaching?'”

“The contradiction we’re trying to resolve,” says Richard Saller, “is that we don’t want to be Harvard or Yale, and use the large lecture format. We want to do as much as possible in small classes—but we can’t do this with tenured faculty.” The irony is palpable. At a university where devotion to general education is the watchword, until a few years ago professors were not expected to teach any undergraduates.

(39-40).

The Kirp chapter centers on the tale of 1990s conflicts with then-President Sonnenschein, which had everything to do with money, professorial labor, and the university’s self-image. It’s somewhat amazing if you read that link (to the official website) how thoroughly the nationally-publicized conflicts during Sonnenschein’s watch have been effaced from his official biography.

It’s quite a long piece, this confession. But it has a recurring image that seems deeply suggestive: the male husband polishing the woman president’s shoes.

If they could see me now. I am sitting on the floor of the president’s house, polishing the president’s shoes for her. My wife is now a lot busier than I am, and has a sizeable staff. Her importance on and off campus is a lot greater than mine, so I suppose it makes sense that I polish the presidential shoes – which are smaller and easier to polish than my own shoes (which rarely need to be shiny). I have sometimes seen people polish the shoes of other people, but only when they were paid for it. And the polishers were always male, as were the polishees. Shoe-polishing used to occur in railroad stations, or in old-fashioned barber shops that were bastions of maleness – quiet places, with discreet sounds of snipping and stropping of razors, with a ballgame on the radio, and smells of witch hazel, shaving lather, and shoe polish. So here I sit polishing a woman’s shoes and not even getting paid for it.

So when he polishes shoes, it seems, he finds himself in a moment of gendered abjection. He’s down on the floor, not even getting paid, polishing shoes which are symbols of power and sometimes sexuality and are themselves down on the ground, protecting the foot from the grime of the world; he’s in a position of no (relative) importance on campus so it’s pragmatically sensible for him to devote his time to polishing the shoes, for him to be doing this traditionally feminine work of the care of the working spouse’s appearance.

Alongside the structural sexism of this whole outlook, there’s something slightly poignant about the fact that what this man has to do is hard for him and takes re-learning and is symbolically dissonant for him. The echoes of his 50s upbringing are loud, as if he’s judging his life against the gender norms of the past even as he knows the world has changed, gender norms have blurred, roles have reversed. He feels like he’s just not completely ready for the task of taking care of the household while his wife works long presidential days. He seems happiest when he gets to take care of the car, when he drives his wife around, when he cooks dinner.

As boys, most men of my generation never learned to do “girl things”. As a consequence we are not very good at the practical or aesthetic details of maintaining an elegant home, or paying attention to all the important minutiae that underlie the public lives of presidents and their spouses. Things like making sure the silver is polished, as well as the shoes, and checking that napkins and table cloths are ironed and matching. Before her dinner parties I can recall my Mum putting out ashtrays and placing cigarettes in elegant silver receptacles from which smokers (a majority back in those days) would extract their smokes. The most she expected me to do was tidy up my own room. Surveys have shown that the only task husbands do almost universally is taking out the trash. In recent decades some of us also learned to do cooking, cleaning, shopping, looking after the kids, etc., but we reminded many people of the chimpanzee who typed out a novel — nobody expected us to do such things well, and it was remarkable if we could do them at all.

And he seems sad that some things he might be doing – making the house elegant, polishing the silver, doing the ashtrays – are things that boys just weren’t taught. Masculinity here is a practical predicament. Masculinity here is not just a gender identity but a set of quotidian competences and another set of lacking competences, of practical incapacities. Gender as point of pride, as product of socialization, as disability, as occasion for solidarity with other men who like to work on cars. Gender would seem to be a contradictory situation that causes many things to happen at once. He seems half sad that he can’t do some things and half accepting, with an almost traumatized calmness, that he probably won’t do and wouldn’t entirely be expected to do women’s work that still, in the crevices of the language of this text, seems to appear to him as abject.

Structure here is the man’s incapacity to see shoe-shining as not abject. Structure is this unexplained incapacity to shift contexts. Since shoeshining used to be something just done among men, accepted as an odd form of masculine care labor a bit like a pedicure. Shoeshining started to feel bad to him when it was an uncompensated service to a woman.

Someone in the comments section of the article asked if she (I think she) could drop her shoes off outside the man’s office door. But she was joking.

Jokes show us that something real is at stake.

Masculine consciousness here is so deeply about shame and managing shame. As if what underlay this whole system of masculine values was a systemic fear of women and a phobic hatred of being in their shoes. Over which humanistic values are overlaid, like upholstery for a lethal structure.