Sheldon Hackney’s “Spring-From-Hell,” continued

Penn was subjected to such a drubbing in the press that anyone doing a retrospective evaluation is tempted to conclude that any alternative course of action would have been better. That is because the pain of what happened is clear, but the consequences of alternative courses of action are difficult to imagine. Those consequences of my intervention would not have been as public, perhaps, but they would have been more serious and longer lasting. Members of minority communities at Penn would have been outraged by additional evidence that the University put a lower value on their interests than on the interests of other constituencies, even to the extent of being willing to violate the University’s own policies and procedures. The University would have been extremely vulnerable to legal suit. Faculty, staff, and students who care about “constitutional” due process and “shared governance” would have been offended. Just because we have not heard from the people who would have been angered by my intervention does not mean that they were not there.

Because Kors had been straightforward with me, I was not surprised by the WSJ editorial when it appeared on April 26, the day that had been scheduled for the Jacobowitz hearing. The first two sentences of the editorial make its purpose clear: “A freshman, the latest victim of the ideological fever known as political correctness, goes on trial at the University of Pennsylvania today. It’s not irrelevant to note that the head of this institution, Sheldon Hackney, is President Clinton’s nominee to head the National Endowment for the Humanities and a man, university spokesmen insist, committed to free speech.” Thus, the story is positioned as evidence in the running conservative critique of liberalism and liberalism’s habitat on college campuses, and conservatism’s determination to delegitimize President Clinton at the outset of his term in office.

The incident itself is described by the WSJ as “Kafkaesque” and an example of the “theater of the absurd.” Jacobowitz appears as guileless, willing to cooperate with the police, truthful, and innocent of any harmful intent. He is dutifully studying when he is rudely disturbed. The reader pictures him passively looking out the window and gently requesting that the noise makers be more quiet so he can work. In contrast, University authorities are presented as aggressive, determined, out of control, intimidating toward white students, and illogical.

More important, in the mental picture that became the template for almost all subsequent accounts, the women do not exist as individuals. The reader never sees them as real people. In fact, they scarcely exist at all. Similarly, the other white students drop out of the account. The reader envisions Jacobowitz as being alone and not as part of a group, and certainly not as part of an ugly, intimidating, and raucous mob. This literary treatment does not falsify any fact, but it shapes and colors the story by what it leaves out, what it de-emphasizes, what adjectives and adverbs it chooses, and what context or lack of context it provides. Try to imagine this story being “successful” if Jacobowitz had been firmly positioned as part of an unruly mob hurling racial slurs at vulnerable black women, women who had names and whose individual stories were known to the reader in the same way that Jacobowitz’s was.

It is interesting also that this first WSJ editorial argues the case for Jacobowitz being innocent of racial harassment, rather than arguing against racial harassment policies in general. Penn’s problem in the eyes of the WSJ editorial page, at least at the outset, was not that it had a rule against racial harassment but that Jacobowitz had not broken it. Professor Dan Ben-David of Penn is cited as suggesting that water buffalo had popped into Jacobowitz’s mind because it is a literal translation of the Hebrew word, behameh, which is used as a mild pejorative, akin to the English slang term dumb ox. Two black Penn professors are quoted as denying that water buffalo had any history as a racial slur in America.

All of this is fair enough, but it simply ignores the long history of animalistic representations of African Americans as part of white supremacy’s mind game. It also ignores the question of what the women thought they heard and why they got so angry. This is an example perhaps of a cultural disconnect, of the same words carrying different significance in different cultures. It was a “teachable moment” that was squandered by Penn and also by the mainstream press. It was also a moment that was hijacked for ideological purposes.

The hearing that was to have been held on April 26 was postponed by the Judicial Administrative Officer (JAO), a retired professor of medicine, whose task it was to make the machinery of justice work. On this occasion, the JAO had made the decision to postpone the case until the fall semester because the faculty advisor to the complainants had decided to withdraw and they did not yet have another advisor. Postponement was unfair to Jacobowitz, of course, because he would have to live even longer with uncertainty. It was also unfair to the women, some of whom were graduating and would not be around the following year. The end of the term was rapidly approaching, so the JAO had a serious problem, and so did the University. A second WSJ editorial crucified Penn for the muddled postponement.

Before their campaign was over, the WSJ editorial board had not only colored the reports of the events at Penn in ways that were not flattering to me, they also published a number of outright untruths. For example, with regard to the other campus crisis of that spring, over the theft by black students of an edition of the DP, as a protest against perceived racism by the paper and at Penn, the WSJ claimed I had failed to say that the theft of the newspapers was wrong and that I had defended the newspaper thieves on the ground that they were exercising their right to free speech. Other untruths included that I had punished a Wharton professor for insulting black students in class; that I had proposed banning ROTC from the campus because of the anti-gay policies of the military; that I defended political correctness on the grounds that it promoted a free exchange of ideas; that I defended blasphemous slogans written in chalk on Locust Walk in support of a visit by the controversial artist, Andres Serrano; that I followed a double standard in protecting controversial left-wing speakers but not people on the right. All of those charges were demonstrably false.

Meanwhile, newspapers, magazines, news broadcasts, and talk shows all over the country were filled with stories about an appealing young student being persecuted by Penn’s thought police because of a crazy interpretation of innocent words. Eden Jacobowitz became a folk hero for the conservative cause. He made a very sympathetic guest on television and radio talk shows.

I was astounded when I learned of the postponement of the hearing. The provost and I and the vice provost for University Life urged the JAO to schedule another hearing so the matter could be resolved. To his credit, he saw immediately that it had been a mistake to postpone the April 26 hearing, but the University was now in the midst of the exam period. He scheduled a hearing, therefore, for May 14, a week after the end of exams, the Friday of Reunion Weekend, just before Commencement the following Monday. This was the last possible moment.

Even though he and his advisee had been eager to dispose of the matter earlier, Kors now got the JAO to agree that the hearing on May 14 would not be dispositive. It would only hear Kors’ argument on his procedural motion to drop the charges. The JAO agreed that the hearing would not go into the question of guilt or innocence. To make matters worse, the JAO did not tell the other parties to the hearing that he had done this deal with Kors. They all arrived expecting to go through a regular hearing. The result was that no one was happy. Penn again looked inept, if not malevolent. The panel, frustrated by their inability to complete the hearing, warned Kors not to comment in public, and they announced that they would give their procedural report to the VPUL within 10 days.

To the delight of the huddled masses of reporters waiting outside the hearing room, Kors emerged with a handkerchief clenched between his teeth, indicating that he had been gagged. As he revealed later, in his book, The Shadow University, as soon as he was out of the public eye that night, he immediately gave his version of the hearing to Dorothy Rabinowitz at the WSJ. The result of this was another round of exclamation-point headlines and full-throated denunciations. For me, there was more standing in the public stock.

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