Listen to "The Red Queen's Rules"

Sour Milk Podcast now has an audio version of “The Red Queen’s Rules.” The original text was published on September 8, 2021:

The Red Queen’s Rules:

Academic star chamber courts are becoming increasingly common in American colleges and universities. Due process, the basic principle of fairness in all legal matters, is rapidly disappearing for both professors and students. The sad suicide of Stanford’s star soccer player, Katie Meyer, reminded me that it has been more than six months since the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in Shively v. Astrid S. Tuminez, Karen Clemes, Utah Valley University, and Sara J. Flood.

Although the facts about Katie Meyer’s death by suicide have yet to emerge, it appears that, like Michael Shively, she was also the subject of a long, drawn investigation conducted by an academic judiciary. Her father, Steven, explained on the Today Show that Katie had defended a teammate over an on-campus incident and was facing some form of academic discipline. "We have not seen that email yet," Gina said. "She had been getting letters for a couple months. This letter was kind of the final letter that there was going to be a trial or some kind of something. This is the only thing that we can come up with that triggered something." (Citing confidentiality, Stanford University has refused to disclose the facts of their investigation of Katie Meyer.)

Professor Peter Fleming best described modern academic bureaucracies as “Darkocracies” in his book Dark Academia: How Universities Die.  In his article, "The Authoritarian Turn in Universities,” Fleming wrote, “Darkocracies thrive on these arbitrary and unaccountable expressions of power, including the backstabbing colleague who threw his fellow-traveller under the bus.”  In this article, Fleming offers the hypothetical case of “the imaginary academic” who is embarking on his career and asks, “What emotional challenges would this otherwise sane and stable person encounter upon entering the corporate university today?  Fleming goes on to argues that the bureaucrat and student-led appraisal system is “designed to ensure everyone falls short in some shape or form. This introduces anxiety into the mix, which today is an ordinary part of university life. Our imaginary academic would then experience the stress associated with relentless measurement and evaluation.”  

The grim fate of Fleming’s "imaginary academic” is eerily reminiscent of Michael Shively’s, “Feeling inadequate and stressed. Neurotic and paranoid. Dreading the office. Highly irritable and unhappy. Constantly tired and addicted to office email. Our imaginary academic is now a creature of the neoliberal university. The labour of love they once knew has somehow opened a black hole at the centre of their being. Before long, the darkness closes in.”  The Tuminez tribunal, which I believe led to Michael Shively’s suicide, was the most biased, one-sided, and unprofessional investigation I have read in my thirty years as a professor, college trustee and legal investigator. Hopefully, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals will concur in Shively v. Utah Valley University (UVU) et al.