George Rammell with the remnants of Blathering On in Krisendom, which Capilano university officials confiscated and dismantled.
Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, October 8, 2014– It took 53 days for George Rammell to get back a sculpture he’d made caricaturing his university’s president and, when officials at British Columbia’s Capilano University finally returned it to him, it was in pieces.
“They gave it back to me all smashed up,” said Rammell, a former instructor at Capilano whose sculpture was seized from the studio arts building last spring by university officials on the grounds that it constituted “harassment” of Capilano President Kris Bulcroft.
“They claim they had to destroy it in order to move it, which is absolutely ridiculous. I’ve moved it myself.”
The original sculpture, titled Blathering On in Krisendom, depicted the president and her poodle as ventriloquist dolls draped in an American flag and was conceived, as Rammell explained it, as an “anti-monument” to the president in protest of her role in carrying out program cuts. Bulcroft oversaw the elimination of several programs, including the studio arts program in which Rammell taught, in a process that was later deemed by British Columbia’s Supreme Court to be contrary to the province’s University Act in that Capilano’s Senate was not consulted.
Rammell described the original sculpture as an example of constitutionally protected caricature, but Capilano’s former board chair, Jane Shackell, directed that it be confiscated from university property because it was, she said, being “used in a manner amounting to workplace harassment of an individual employee, intended to belittle and humiliate the president.”
In order to reclaim his artwork, Rammell said, he signed an agreement that stated that he would be permitted to work on the piece in the studio arts building until his employment at the university ended on July 31. After that time, he would remove the sculpture from campus and would not bring it back. Rammell said the agreement also stipulated that he would not display any photographs of the sculpture on campus until five years after the president’s retirement. (Rammell declined to share the text of the agreement he signed but described its contents to Inside Higher Ed. Capilano officials declined to comment on the specific terms of the grievance agreement, which a university spokeswoman described as related to a personnel matter and thus confidential.)
In compensation for the damages to the sculpture, Rammell said, he received the equivalent of four days’ teaching wages.
“In retrospect I should never have signed the stupid thing; I could have finished the sculpture without getting the heap back,” said Rammell.
Finish the sculpture he has. The new sculpture, made up of pieces of the original as well as newly created components, was unveiled last week in an event at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, in Vancouver. The piece has two faces, or fronts: a newly sculpted depiction of the president holding a mace backs up against the reassembled components of the original sculpture. Among the new elements of the sculpture, Rammell said a mace is intended to signify the trust placed in the university president, and a pen is intended to represent Bulcroft’s “unilateral” signing authority in eliminating the studio arts and other Capilano programs. The new piece is entitled Margaux and the Monarch, Margaux being the name of Bulcroft’s dog.
As for the American flag, Bulcroft previously worked at Western Washington University. Rammell said that while he has nothing against international hires, he did object to Bulcroft’s seeming disregard for a Canadian law, specifically the University Act.
“The whole piece is about academic freedom and everybody seems to be under threat,” Rammell said.
Bulcroft declined an interview through a Capilano spokeswoman, Borjana Slipicevic. A statement emailed by Slipicevic that repeatedly misspelled Rammell’s name said that “Capilano University is aware of Mr. Rammel’s current actions. The university is committed to a safe and respectful workplace for all faculty and staff; the decision to remove Mr. Rammel’s sculpture from campus was made in this vein. Capilano University and Mr. Rammel’s union negotiated a mutually acceptable settlement that resulted in giving the sculpture to Mr. Rammell; thus Capilano University considers this matter closed.”
As for the condition of the sculpture upon its return, the university’s statement said, “The effigy was dismantled to facilitate its removal; Mr. Rammel was advised that this was the case.”
Read More: Inside Higher Ed
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THE CASE OF THE MISSING SCULPTURE
Reasonable hostility: Academic freedom & speech under threat #highered #edstudies #criticaled #bced #bcpoli #ubc #yteubc
No disrespect, but… Politic for politic, as faculty and student activism over the last decade was generated in response to administrative measures taken to devalue academic budget lines and increase debt loads, administrators formed policies that shored up their powers to police campus speech and launch investigations. Following an introduction of a Respectful Environment policy in 2008, in anticipation of an upcoming political protest on campus in March 2009, the President of UBC circulated a “Respectful Debate” memo warning students and faculty to “pay special attention to the rules that govern our conduct” for speech. Legislation of respect entangles or snares the left and right in the same finely meshed dragnet attenuating civil liberties. This also recalibrates a network of surveillance media and technologies, challenging nearly all protections in the workplace. Some self-identified centrists or voices of reason welcome the new measures, adopting roles of third persons while reporting to administrators that loose lips sink scholar-ships.
In Canada and the US, these new respectful workplace policies, which anticipate or respond to workplace legislation and court decisions, mean that academic freedom and charter or constitutional rights noticeably contract at the campus gates. Watching postsecondary institution by institution adopt similar respectful workplace policies, the Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), issued a memorandum in late March 2009 advising vigilance: “the test of ‘disrespect’ identified in these policies is for the most part experiential and subjective – notions like ‘feelings of shame’ or ‘embarrassment’ crop up repeatedly.” He subsequently asserted, “a major problem in Canadian universities is not that too many people are asserting their academic freedom, but that too few are.”
Similar policies in the US are compounded by the Supreme Court’s 2006 Garcetti v. Ceballos opinion that “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline,” reinforcing managerial discretion and prerogative. Although academic freedom remains a special concern of free speech rights and was deferred by the Court in Garcetti, legal analysts such as Harvey Gilmore concur that “Garcetti has now become the definitive statement on a public employer’s discretion in managing office operations, and that discretion includes controlling an employee’s speech made in the scope of the employee’s professional capacity.”
Following legislation in four other provinces, on 1 July 2012 new legislation in BC came into effect through an amendment of the mental disorder section of the Workers Compensation Act. The new amendment in Section 5.1 provides for potential compensation if the disorder
(i) is a reaction to one or more traumatic events arising out of and in the course of the worker’s employment, or
(ii) is predominantly caused by a significant work-related stressor, including bullying or harassment, or a cumulative series of significant work-related stressors, arising out of and in the course of the worker’s employment.
For legal preparation for this legislation now common across Canada, universities such as UBC folded a large scope of potential infractions into their respectful workplace policies. What stands as protection for disability or “mental disorder” and against “bullying or harassment” under the law is extended in higher education policy to common modes of academic speech—commentary and criticism—that might be articulated in the wrong tone.
Offices of Human Resources introducing or monitoring respectful workplace policies oversimplify speech by stressing, “it is not what you say but how you say it that counts.” Repeated in HR across higher education and curiously by some administrators, this folksy maxim come respectful workplace policy draws on centuries of etiquette texts. “Rather than seeing public talk occasions as needing politeness or civility, a better norm” Karen Tracy proposes, “is reasonable hostility.” She effectively hashes out parameters for democratic communicative practice and flips this “aphorism on its head, it is not merely how something is said, but what a person says that matters.”
Only certain types of face-attack are legitimate and desirable in local governance situations. ‘Reasonable hostility’ is the name for acts that are. Reasonable hostility involves person-directed attack; it is remarks that imply disrespectful, undesirable things about others. Targets of reasonable hostility will judge speakers uttering those remarks to be rude, disrespectful, unfair, and so on…. A speaker might be cognizant that his or her remarks may have this effect, but their purpose is to express outrage about a wrong. The speaker sees self’s central aim as witnessing a truth or expressing righteous indignation.
Faculty and students are bookended by a reformalization of academic speech on one side and a normalization of administrative equivocation, deception included, on the other. Can voices of critique and voices of liberty speak together, with reasonable hostility, as a voice of truth? Can the left and right speak (together)?
Read More: Petrina, S. & Ross, E. W. (2014). Critical University Studies: Workplace, Milestones, Crossroads, Respect, Truth. Workplace, 23, 62-71.
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Tagged Academic freedom, Administration, Ethics, Free speech, Legal issues, Organizing, Students, Working conditions