Why I’m Not Crying Over the Fate of Chancellor Wise

I’m hearing a certain amount of ruefulness being expressed over Chancellor Wise’s fate: that she’s somehow the victim here, that she was compelled to do the bidding of forces more powerful than she, that she’s a scapegoat for a larger, more fetid community of rule. I wish we on the left had memories that extended past yesterday’s headlines—and a larger appetite for justice. That Wise is being thrown under the bus by her co-conspirators I have no doubt. And I’m thrilled. For two reasons. First, Wise was never without agency. There’s sometimes a tendency on the left—whether out of a manic structuralism or a liberal sentimentality at moments of poetic justice, I don’t know—to so want to make individuals in power the faceless emblems of a structure that those individuals cease to have power at all. There are structures, there are constraints, but Wise always had the option of bucking those structures and constraints. She could have resigned in protest (not to mention get a better outcome for Steven Salaita​) if she opposed the direction of things. Indeed, she’d be in a much stronger position now if she had: her reputation would be burnished rather than stained, and she’d probably have that goddamn $400,000 bonus, too. But she didn’t. Instead, for whatever combination of reasons, she pursued the course that got her to the place she’s now in. And for that she has no one to blame but herself. She was part of the rotten structure that did what it did to Steven Salaita; if she thought she was exempt from its workings, she was a fool. Second, if we want to honor our structuralism, we have to have a better sense of how this structure works. Right now, it’s a bit of a mystery: Who’s pulling the strings? The donors, the trustees, the president, who knows? The more pressure is put on Wise, the more she’ll be inclined to talk. And then not only may we find out how this damn thing works but we may also be able to throw it—or at least more emblems of it—under the bus. And get Steven Salaita his job back, which has always been my number-one priority in this fight. I often complain around here that we academics are optimists of the intellect and pessimists of the will. But in this case we seem to lack a will to power AND a will to knowledge. This is a moment to press on, to demand more, to expose more. It is not the time to express concern for someone who, whatever happens, will still return to a tenured position on the faculty where she earns $300,000 a year. Steven Salaita should have been so lucky.