The Review: Schlissel Fizzles Amid Knishes; Career Now Sleeps With Fishes

But did his ouster have to be so vicious? ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. By the time he was [fired]( for cause, the University of Michigan’s president, Mark S. Schlissel, appears to have been broadly, even universally, disliked. He seems to have mishandled almost every crisis that came his way, from a series of sexual-misconduct scandals to labor disputes to Covid-19 policy. In September of 2020, faculty passed (albeit narrowly) a no-confidence vote against him. Graduate students went on strike. Survivors of sexual abuse at the hands of Robert Anderson, the now-deceased Michigan athletic doctor, camped outside of his house. Schlissel, with the avoidance and incompetence that marked his whole tenure as president, refused to talk to them. As a commenter on a blog devoted to University of Michigan news [put]( it, Schlissel “seemed unpopular with basically every constituency.” And he knew it, too, since he’d already announced that he [planned]( to retire in 2023, before his contract was up. There’s no reason to mourn his even earlier departure. But there are many reasons to take alarm at the way it came about. The Board of Regents’ [announcement]( implies (although does not explicitly state) that Schlissel’s firing is due to the discovery of “an inappropriate relationship with a university employee.” More: “In the interest of full public disclosure, we have released dozens of Dr. Schlissel’s communications that illustrate this inappropriate conduct.” The letters are the banal and occasionally touching record of the apparently entirely consensual affair between Schlissel and what the regents call a “subordinate.” Although he evinces no particular literary skill as an author of love letters — when the subordinate forwards him Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73" (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”), which one might have expected to resonate with the then 63-year-old president, he fails to respond altogether — his culinary tastes are appealing. “Get psyched,” is his comment on an order of Indian food (rogan josh, chicken korma, vegetable samosa). Elsewhere, he plies his paramour with knishes, which suggests that in at least one area of his life his judgment was good. What could possibly justify the public release of all of these documents? Why was this relationship anything other than a private matter? As Silke-Maria Weineck, who has been one of Schlissel’s severest critics, [told]( Inside Higher Ed, “he should have been fired for treating faculty, staff, and students with naked contempt, not for an apparently consensual affair. … Posting the correspondence on our main website is a classless and dickish move.” What if the punitive publication of the emails was less an incidental bit of nastiness than the real point? Normalizing the bureaucratic authorization of sexual and social shaming — a punishment made possible by the panoptic surveillance of university email correspondence — would give boards of regents and other administrators a tremendous cudgel. In the case of Schlissel, there’s some reason to think that the whole moralizing show is largely pretextual, a sensational way of getting rid of a leader whose real faults have nothing to do with his romantic life. So the question becomes: Why the spectacle? Everyone who works in a university should be concerned about the precedent set by Schlissel’s scarlet letter. What’s in your outbox? SPONSOR CONTENT | kennesaw state university [Undergraduate research with relevance provides students a foundation for careers.]( ADVERTISEMENT SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY OFFER Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access and save 50% for the first year with this limited-time offer. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [The Great Faculty Disengagement]( By Kevin R. McClure and Alisa Hicklin Fryar [STORY IMAGE]( Faculty members aren’t leaving in droves, but they are increasingly pulling away. 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Recommended - Jasper Johns is “saturnine, wily, elegant, reserved.” At The New York Times, Jason Farago [writes]( about Johns’s 1961 painting “In Memory of My Feelings — Frank O’Hara.” - “If there was a turning point in her thinking, a far better candidate than her mysticism would be her experience at the front during the Spanish Civil War, which is too often dismissed as a bit of a joke because she had to be rescued by her parents when she tripped and immersed her leg in a drum of burning oil, or because, to her credit as I see it, she was useless at aiming a gun.” At The New York Review of Books, Jacqueline Rose [writes about]( Simone Weil. - For more on Simone Weil, check out Meghan O’Gieblyn’s [new essay]( on time, habit, routine, and machines, which begins with medieval monasteries and ends up with Weil on the “unconditional surrender to caprice.” Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | the university of sydney [Combatting addiction with 'the love hormone']( Addressing the urgent need to find solutions for those affected by drug use disorders, learn how two new approaches to managing substance abuse are revolutionizing the treatment of addiction. FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [The Missing Men on Campus]( [The Missing Men on Campus]( The gender gap in college enrollment has been growing for decades and has broad implications for colleges and beyond. Explore how some colleges are trying to draw more men of all backgrounds — and help them succeed once they get there. [Order your copy today.]( JOB OPPORTUNITIES Apply for the top jobs in higher education and [search all our open positions](. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK What did you think of today’s newsletter? [Strongly disliked]( | [It was ok]( | [Loved it]( This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. 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