Dartblog

An undergraduate friend reports:

A few days back I was in a meeting between Sylvia Spears and a group of students. She was regaling us with a tearjerking anecdote about walking into a room full of colleagues right after she had been selected Acting Dean of the College, and seeing three distinct responses among them. The first was one of excitement, and the second of pleasant surprise. The third response was the interesting one: utter dismay and incredulity that she had been selected.

Spears attributed the negativity of this third group to three things: her short tenure at the College, her sex, and her race. She focused much more on the latter two, though, stating as fact that she knew many of her colleagues were uncomfortable with her appointment primarily because of her race and gender.

What a transparent way to set up a straw man: explaining away opposition to her appointment as grounded in her colleagues’ racism and male chauvinism.

I wish I had asked Spears how she knew that a white male with the same C.V., upon appointment to the same post, would have received a more favorable reception to her own. Of course, she can’t know. After hearing her speak it’s apparent to me that she thinks she does, though.

Now what does this anecdote tell us? Our reporter’s first observation is a good one: that Ms. Spears sees the world almost entirely through the lens of race and gender. Her listeners’ surprise at her appointment could not have been due to the absence of any real administrative experience in her background, right? I guess the good Dean thinks that the leap from administering OPAL’s twelve employees to managing the many hundreds of people under the purview of the Dean of the College is one that anyone could easily make. Merit and trifling things like experience seem to play no role in Sylvia’s worldview.

Even more worthy of consideration, however, is the pre-emptive message that Sylvia was communicating to her listeners: Criticize me and you will be labeled a racist/sexist/whatever in short order. And I won’t hesitate to do so. When she drolly recounts her little story — and I am sure that she has done so often — Sylvia is laying down the law. She has few cards to play, but she is playing them with élan.

All this from a senior administrator at an institution where the President is a Korean-American and the Provost/Dean of the College is a woman (and at a time when the President of the United States is an African-American)…

*The Riot Act [1] (1713) (1 Geo.1 St.2 c.5) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain which authorised local authorities to declare any group of more than twelve people to be unlawfully assembled, and thus have to disperse or face punitive action. To this day many jurisdictions that have inherited the tradition of English Common Law still employ statutes that require police or other executive agents to deliver an oral warning, much like the Riot Act, before an unlawful public assembly may be forcibly dispersed. Because the authorities were required to read the proclamation that referred to the Riot Act before they could enforce it, the expression “to read the Riot Act” entered into common language as a phrase meaning “to reprimand severely”, with the added sense of a stern warning.