by Akim Reinhardt
I teach at a large, public university in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. For about a decade now, the upper administration has had a habit of sending “comforting” emails whenever there’s a major school shooting. Of course there are far too many school shootings in America to send a note for each one, so I suppose the administration tries to keep it “relevant,” for lack of a better word. These heartfelt missives arrive in my Inbox once or twice a year, typically after some lunatic shoots up a college campus. So far as I can tell, they go to everyone. To every faculty member, staff member, and student on campus. To 25,000 people or more.
These emails were introduced by our previous university president, who wore her concern like a badge. She departed last spring for a seven-figure salary at another school. When an email arrived following the Hamas attack on Israel last month, we were still between presidents. That letter included a group sign-off from the interim president, the interim provost, the vice president of student affairs, and the vice president for institutional inclusion and equity.
Then came an email from the dean of my college, followed by yet another email from the interim president, this one signed only by her. In all, I received three letters in less than a week.
So much caring. So much concern.
To say that emails of this nature infuriate me would be an overstatement. They don’t actually make me angry, which I’m sure my therapist will be happy to hear. However, I do find them to be mildly exhausting and rather annoying. They instill a sense of umbrage.
Figuring out how to talk to family and friends about this stuff takes enough energy. Now my bosses have to insert themselves into the conversation too?
Perhaps the phrase that best sums up my reaction to receiving such emails over the last several years is: How dare you.
There is a degree of presumptuousness baked into these emails that I find astonishing. To believe that tens of thousands of strangers would want your unsolicited “thoughts and support” concerning a far-off tragic event just because you’re a top level bureaucrat? Come on now.
The most recent emails were step even beyond that. Comforting notes from strangers concerning a war taking place across an ocean, on a different continent, and that this nation is not sending soldiers to fight in? That assumption might reveal a sociopathic level of narcissism if it were genuine. But of course these emails are probably just the byproduct of adhering to whatever color-by-numbers managerial manual all the American college presidents seem to read and follow these days. I imagine that shockingly high paid consultants insist that such emails enhance the school’s leadership; in reality, they publicly degrade it.
Simply put, I (and many people I speak to) don’t find most of the the emails to be genuine. And because they don’t seem genuine, they come off, at least to me, as sad, unintentional parody. And that’s probably for the best, because if I did think a university president’s motivations for sending such emails were genuine, I’d find myself wondering what kind of megalomaniac is in charge of our school.
One reason the emails don’t seem genuine is the cherry picking. The kindhearted cousin of selective outrage is selective mourning, pity, and condolences. The truth is, bad shit happens all the time, all over America and around the world. But apparently only some of that shit is worthy of these unsolicited, over the top emails.
Here in the city of Baltimore, where I’ve lived since 2001, about 300 people are murdered every year.
I repeat: Every fucking year.
And my school, located just beyond the city line, has far more students, faculty, and staff from Baltimore than we do from the Middle East. Factorially more. But never a peep about any of that. Those thousands who’ve been shot and stabbed to death a few scant miles from campus in the years I’ve been working there? Nothing. But a school shooting in Iowa or yet another war in the Middle East? These administrators can’t stop telling us how much they care about it and care about us and demand that we all come together, whatever that means at an institution with over 25,000 people.
One of those recent emails about the latest Middle East war included a reminder that our “community is resilient.” As if the school itself had suffered some unspeakable tragedy. Truly, the dissonance created by reactions to what happens six miles away and six thousand miles away is head-spinning if you stop to recognize it.
For the record, compliance with a federal law called the Clery Act (1990) requires most colleges to track crimes on and near their campuses, and to disclose them in an annual report. Perhaps driven by a better-safe-than-sorry attitude, some schools, including mine, go beyond annual reporting and send occasional mass emails about stolen laptops, vandalism, dorm scuffles, reports of shady characters, and the occasional car jacking.
The serious tragedies half-a-continent or a world away? Emails. The everyday crime in our backyard? Emails. Lethal tragedies just down the road occurring on a near-daily basis? Virtually nothing.
The Clery Act reporting emails are easy enough to avoid. I began marking them as Junk, and for quite a while now, they’ve gone straight to my Spam folder. Done and done. But the saintly meditations ripped from today’s national and international headlines? Those typically come directly from the president or from University Communications, a source of wide-ranging and sometimes important information. As an employee, I can’t afford to blackball either of those sources. So I’m stuck receiving these emails, and that leads me to consider what this means for labor relations.
Dear University President: I am not a friend, a relative, or a fellow parishioner. I am a worker. An employee, your subordinate who gets paid to perform tasks, and whom you can fire for cause (Here’s hoping that me publicly whining about your emails doesn’t constitute cause.) Yet here I am, being subjected to personal condolences from my boss(es) on matters that do not personally affect me, and in which my place of work is not directly involved.
Furthermore, as a subordinate state employee at a public university, your emails are the VOICE OF THE STATE, and now the VOICE OF THE STATE is implying how I should feel about the news of the day.
That seems wildly inappropriate to me. And what’s more, in these emails the VOICE OF THE STATE usually suggests that maybe I should get counseling to help deal with the tragedy du jour.
Holy shit. Seriously? Boundaries, people!
In an effort to establish clear lines for a professional relationship, I did respond to one of these emails last year. I politely explained that I understood how some people might actually find these emails comforting, but for a variety of professional reasons, which I listed, I found them anything but, and that I did not want to receive anymore of them in the future.
I never heard back. I assume my email went unread. But I still get theirs.
For the record, let me say that I actually like many of the college administrators I’m speaking about. And I’m not just saying that so my bosses won’t hate me should they end up reading this essay. College professors like to make sport of whining about administrators, and often it’s warranted. But in my case, I think our interim president was (we now have a brand new permanent president) a swell person. I was more cynical about the last permanent president, who started this tradition of sending unwanted Gloria Gaynor-style “We Will Survive” emails to everyone on campus, and whose own reputation was fairly tarnished by the time she hightailed it out of here for a massive cash-in elsewhere. But based on our brief encounters and her general approach to doing things, I like the recent interim president quite a bit. And the dean and the rest of them. Which is to say, none of what I’ve written here is personal. Indeed, my entire point is that I don’t want any of what transpires between us at work to be personal. I don’t think our top university administrators are bad people, or even bad administrators; I just want them to stop sending me bloated Hallmark sympathy cards about national or world news events.
If there were ever a time to stop sending them, this would be it. One of those three emails about the Middle East included a soft command that we should all “come together as a community in this most difficult time with minds that are open to hear the feelings of our colleagues and classmates, with understanding of our collective differences and our similarities, and join in a unified stance that we must all advocate for one another and for peace.”
I must say, the naivete of imploring everyone to “come together” over the most recent war in the Middle East was almost charming.
Almost.
Since then, of course, the notion of us all coming together over an Arab-Israeli war has gone from laughable to explosive. Israel has predictably responded to Hamas’ war crimes with its own war crimes. The world is now divided over which is worse, anti-semitism or Islamophobia, murdering and kidnaping babies or bombing hospitals.
I assume that college administrators around the country who sent similar kumbaya come-together emails in the early days of this horrific and wretched war now regret it. Good. Turnaround is fair play. I’ve regretted receiving such letters ever since they first began arriving about a decade ago. Let us be done with them once and for all. Let us stop pretending that a huge school with a transient adult student population is a “community”; that we all come together on much of anything; or that headlines announcing distant tragedies lead us to crave soothing and support from top level bureaucrats the great majority of over 25,000 students and employees have never met.
Let us be adults. Let us be professional. And leave us to manage our own reactions to the world’s horrors as we deem fit, in our personal lives, and without your unsolicited and frankly inappropriate guidance.
Akim Reinhardt’s website is ThePublicProfessor.com