In visiting a university even for a short period of time, a surprisingly deep grasp of its dominant organizational culture's mentality is possible, especially if it is foreign to the outsider's perspective and yet draws on instinctual urges whose imprints one has previously seen. It is perhaps human, all too human to relish sending harsh messages to outsiders, albeit indirectly because cowardness and self-illusion are included with the appetite for blood. This can be so at a university even if scholarly visitors are among the targets. The primitive instinctual urge to aggressively harm people by reminding them unnecessarily that they are not in the tribe can have sufficient power to overcome other contending urges to characterize the very culture of an organization. I will argue that the University of California at Berkeley can be characterized as such. For I witnessed this triumphant urge in rather obvious behavior of some faculty and administrators. I came rather quickly during my visit to grasp the nature and roots of the favorite blood-sport of enough rude faculty members to get a picture of those primped up, intellectually stunted "scholars" at that heavily passive aggressive university. The message of exclusion for taxpayers visiting the campus and scholars invited to give a lecture there, I being neither, was made clear to me by a student employee at the main library, which tellingly is closed on Saturdays even during the semesters: Even if a visitor on the large campus does not have an umbrella and rain is pouring down, the university's shuttle buses are only for students, faculty, and staff. The student enjoyed his power to say no to me; I could not detect even the slightest tone of shame in representing such an inhospitable institutional host. Bad air! Instead, the he relished the firmness in the power to say no, which is to say, to exclude. In contrast, the campus shuttles at Yale, ironically a private university, transport anyone around campus! So much for California being easy-going. So much for UC Berkeley sporting intellectually curious and passionate scholars in search of new ideas from visitors. Rather, Nietzsche’s new birds of prey, whose spite naturally issues out from deep ressentement, populate the faculty and their bosses. So much for even common courtesy and gratitude to California taxpayers and distinguished professors from other universities invited to deliver a lecture; if you are walking around campus or walk out of a library and get wet, tough luck! Public is apparently below even common.
While visiting California, I spent some time on UC’s main campus. I was "testing the waters" on signing on to be a visiting scholar there. I was dissuaded from any such elongated affiliation within days, however, because the director of that university's visiting scholar's program (such scholars merely use the libraries) refused even to meet with me. Because the program at the time charged $750 for the first year and $1,500 for the second year for what is essentially access to the libraries with a university ID (and use of the campus shuttles), it was entirely reasonable for me to discuss the program with its director, but, alas, she was too important for that, and thus lost some revenue as a result. Her reply to my email went beyond rude dismissiveness.
I met enough faculty, nonacademic administrators, and doctoral students, moreover, to be able to quickly grasp the university's organizational culture, which, incidentally, I found locals knew of surprisingly accurately. One retired scholar who had studied at the University of San Francisco told me that the faculty and faculty-administrators at Berkeley (Cal) only value certain scholars as colleagues, and meanwhile make it intentionally clear to others that they are not wanted. This is the antithesis of scholarly collegial courtesy. This is the bottom line that scholars visiting Berkeley should know.
I witnessed and in fact was subject to the passive-aggressive rude behavior of the director of the university’s Institute of European Studies as he apparently quickly sized me up and reneged on his offer to meet with me concerning my scholarship on the E.U. and U.S. (perhaps this comparison put him off), and then rather blatantly excluded me (and another Yale alum) from his introductions of faculty to each other as we waited to hear a lecture on Churchill. The director, having blown off meeting with me by writing that maybe he would see me at a talk or two, literally stood over the two seated Yalies—myself and a retired Yale College graduate—in the small seating area while introducing his colleagues (actually coworkers) to each other. This explains the lack of scholarly collegiality being extended to scholars from other universities; academic courtesy does not extend to everyone who holds the Ph.D. degree; rather, academic colleague only pertains to the faculty at his university, Cal. During the reception after the talk, he looked over and laughed at me at one point, which explains why he blew off my email so blatantly, and it was clear to me that he had dissuaded the speaker and a similar fellow from speaking with me. I was not alone in noticing this; a local retired restauranteer observed it too. One student working at the wine table told me that it was typical behavior at that university, and the other student working there told me that the faculty in the philosophy department are known for being particularly nasty.
For example, a senior professor of ethics said to me as soon as I told him that I had gone to Yale, "Cal is every bit as good academically as Yale." We could throw Harvard in too. Well, the rankings simply don't support that view. Neither does even a quick contrast between the main reading room of Sterling Library at Yale, where you can hear a pin drop even when the all of the chairs are occupied with even plenty of undergraduate students, and the reading room in Doe Library at Berkeley, where ongoing conversations are not only ongoing, but also stubbornly so. The immaturity and inconsiderateness alone bely any claim to intellectual maturity. So too does the starkly different occupancy levels in the two reading rooms on school nights. One of my favorite phrases is, the proof is in the pudding. Sterling library is open every day during the semesters (except holidays); in contrast, Doe Library, and thus its periodical and reference rooms, is closed on Saturdays even during semesters. There is no film library (the film archive's "library" label is a bloated misnomer), whereas one is housed on the seventh floor of Sterling Library at Yale. Perhaps the biggest difference lies in the capabilities of the managers and the student employees of the respective libraries, especially in fixing problems versus pretending that they simply do not exist. Inflexibly adhering to a broken status quo is a basic sin of management.
Although the weather is better in Berkeley than in New Haven, and the interpersonal climate is admittedly harsh at both universities, the faculty (and faculty administrators) at Berkeley stuck me as particularly hostile with regard to visitors (whereas too many Yale employees, including faculty and fundraisers, relish intentionally inflicting anger by excluding some insider groups but not others). The ethics professor at Berkeley, whom I had emailed in vain before my arrival and met at a talk, even felt inclined to insult Yale in talking with me. "I bet its cosy and accommodating there," he said with a smart-ass. demeaning tone. He clearly didn’t realize that a cosy and accommodating organizational culture is a good thing. I could gleam from his assumption that the cultural mentality dominant at his university was not at all cosy and accommodating, and definitely not to visiters! Not welcoming for sure. Nevertheless, I was polite; I held myself back from replying that being cosy and accomodating is better than being frosty and hostile towards visitors.
Regarding visiting scholars
who affiliate with the university library to do their own research for a year or two, I found out
that that UC charges them $750 for the first year, and $1,500 for the
second. This implies not only a certain institutional greediness, but also an implicit refusal to extend collegial courtesy to scholars, which is to say holders of true doctoral degrees (e.g., Ph.D., Ed.D., J.S.D., D.Sci.M., D.B.A., and Th.D.). I don't
understand why a scholar would stay there even a few months, given how
dismissively faculty regard outsiders not on the faculty. You’re not one of us is a very primitive, tribal instinctual
urge that Nietzsche would likely say is out of control in the weak who seek
nonetheless to dominate even the strong. I saw a lot of passive aggressive weakly
constituted inhabitants on what is outwardly a very beautiful campus during my visit to the Bay Area.
I've hardly been uncritical of Yale in my
writings, but this has ultimately been geared to improving the university by
raising awareness among my fellow alums of the wordening atmosphere on campus. In contrast, I don't think the
conceited mentality of bloated intellect and primitive ill-will towards people
deemed "outsiders" at Cal deserve the fruits that come from
improvement. A professor in Cal’s law school had gone to Yale; I met him in
person at Cal on the second day of my visit. He claimed to have left teaching
at Yale because of the toxicity at Yale’s law school, that toxicity being definitely true,
but in not replying to my subsequent emails, he too seemed rather toxic to me; perhaps
one toxic organizational culture had spit him out and he subsequently added to
the toxicity of another university. I attended a talk at that law
school during my visit. Tellingly, the event coordinator took over the Q&A
when the speaker from Harvard would have called on me. I left immediately, disgusted even as I passed the awaiting reception food. A bad odor nixes even good food.
Even doctoral students at Cal talked down
to me as if they were spoiled, immature children dismissive of an adult. I told them that I am a scholar visiting from somewhere else and had
studied at Yale, but I was to be put in my place anyway. The philosophy students whom I met, both undergraduates and
doctoral students, seemed eerily to resemble so closely the immaturity and the abrupt anti-social characteristic of the philosophy professors I had met that I couldn’t help but remember that an apple doesn’t fall
far from its tree. Paul wrote that you can know a tree from its fruit. Who would stay long in a room of pretentious, rotting fruit?
To illustrate: I sat in on two lectures in a class on Nietzsche; the professor, it seems, was incapable of replying to emails that she herself admitted she had received, and her graduate student behaved quite boorish to me. “I’ll take those!” he harshly as I was returning extra copies of a handout to the professor. That student had heard me introduce myself as a scholar from elsewhere at another talk (where I had met the "ethics" guy) I complied with the teaching assistant politely; had I been equally demanding and disrespectful, I would have put the copies on the professor’s desk, and told her disciple, you need to go through your professor rather than talk to me directly. After all, he was not even a colleague.
Besides applying reason to master that temptation into fueling my decision not to return even though I was keenly interested in Nietzsche’s startlingly paradigmatic
philosophy. Days later, an undergraduate student majoring in philosophy admitted
to me at a reception that that department is even more toxic than the university moreover. It is nice to have one's hunches confirmed. When I had been a student at Yale, it was common to avoid the philosophy
department there, as it was not yet in recovery from the toxic implosion from
contending personalities that had nearly rid that department of its faculty.
That such deep thinking as philosophy encourages could be associated with such petty,
even mean people would seem to defy some natural law.
Perhaps a dysfunctional organizational culture is simply a tree whose fruit is sour. Such culture is notoriously difficult to change. Besides the sheer number of people who conveniently conform to viciousness to feel a sense of belonging—of being on the inside—and to feel plearure by excluding outsiders, group-think is very hard and thick against internal and external second-guessing. The sheer distance between an organization’s leader and the herd animals who reside within an organization enables the status quo to continue even as the organization’s own message to itself and society is quite different. I think a dysfunctional organization must decline quite a bit before its inhabitants have to recognize that being more welcoming is in their own self-interest.
More than one local resident in Berkeley told me that in part due to budget cuts from the government of California, Cal-Berkeley had been in a slow decline for twenty years. “They feel threatened and are defensive,” I was told by more than one scholar who lived in San Francisco at the time of my visit. One such scholar, who had received her doctorate at the University of San Francisco, said, “The faculty at Cal want specific people; they treat them like shit. If they have sized you up even as a visitor, it won't get better.” That is to say, the faculty administrators, like the director of European Studies, and the faculty quickly size outsiders up and are not shy about slamming the door shut in a way that is intended to say, you aren’t worth anything to us, but other people are. That mentality is quite toxic and yet it can thrive because of the pleasure that is gained by self-love from exercising the underlying sordid instinctual urge. According to Nietzsche, the strong are able to master even their most intractable urge, whereas the weak cannot. Hence they are slaves to it. This is perhaps partly why the weak resent the strong and try to bring them down, such as by insisting that a university saturated with immaturity and hostile pettiness is nonetheless equivalent academically to a Yale or Harvard. Such a claim, made by such people, belies its own validity and actually makes transparent the probable thesis that petty, immature professors don’t come up with mind-blowing new theories that are paradigmatic. Instead, such "scholars" are pedestrian academics.
