Author: Angelo Bonadonna

From the Archives: An Early SSW; A Close Encounter; Family, Friends, and Enemies

March 31, 2021

[Potential spoilers! If you’re not caught up on your Gunsmoke episodes (as of April 27, 1958), go listen to “Squaw.” Then come back here!]

Email to Colleague Suzanne Lee, April 8, 2016

From: Angelo Bonadonna <bonadonna@sxu.edu>
Subject: Yesterday’s Encounter
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2016 08:53:11 -0500
To: Suzanne Lee <slee@sxu.edu>

Hi, Suzanne—it was good seeing you not once, but twice, yesterday!

I want to share with you a little outcome of our first encounter yesterday. Each week with my freshman writing class, I engage in an exercise I call SSW—silent sustained writing (the sibling of SSR). Yesterday when we met, I was on my way to class, and so you made an appearance in my lead-in to my writing session, which I’ve entitled “Miraculous Intrusions of the Day.”

The whole thing brings me a big smile (and some tears as you’ll see if you read on), and I’d like to share it with you. Thank you for being part of the miracles in my life. Let me know if you want me to track down and send you an MP3 of the Gunsmoke episode in question. :)

The writing is not complete or particularly polished, but it does, at the end, touch on grief, and attempts to admire a simple and genuine portrayal of it in the Gunsmoke program. On that level, I want to say again, I’m sorry for […] the sadness around much of our experience these days. But anyway—it was nice seeing you! —Angelo

Here’s the SSW I attached to Suzanne’s emaill:

Miraculous Intrusions of the Day
April 7, 2016:  
 
So much happens in a day that is unexpected. I never would have guessed that I’d be telling Suzanne Lee about George Bahumas running up to me from behind and knocking me down—and how, (at least for the surprise factor), she reminded me of him, though as she said, she hoped there’d be a different outcome than the two of us fighting in the grass. [Comment from 2021: The fight with George Bahumas, (my oldest childhood friend), was the only real, Western-style, fist fight of my life. This was true in 2016, and, somewhat surprisingly, it is still true in 2021, given the the events of the past 5 years at SXU.] 
 
But my surprise conversation with Suzanne is not what I planned to share today. I came to write about another unexpected miraculous intrusion of the day, the Gunsmoke episode, “Squaw,” that I heard on the Old Time Radio station during my morning commute. It caught me by surprise. I’ve never been a Gunsmoke fan, though the show does have some powerful claims on me. The TV version was a favorite of my mother, and I have such warm, simple memories of her watching the show in the basement (?) while she cooked. I have such a devotion to Bonanza, and I think some of the qualities of that show correlate, obviously, to Gunsmoke. Then there’s William Conrad, the great radio actor, maybe the greatest radio voice of all time, but someone destined to become TV’s “Cannon”—such a step down from the Matt Dillon he wanted to play on TV, after giving life to the role on radio. All these, and other, ideas are swirling as I was driving down this morning, listening to “Squaw.” By the end of the show, the tears are welling up in my eyes, unexpectedly. And the tears well up now as I write this. Why? 
 
I’m reminded of King Lear, and the way Shakespeare was able to create a genre—the family drama—a category of experience so powerful, so unique, so important—and so likely to be neglected without the writing and art form, as propelled by a great innovator and artist. King Lear is a tragedy—not of civic matters, or personal ambitions, or tempestuous romances—but rather of parents and children, and their inability to figure out life’s complex ways of putting us in simple, necessary, and fundamental relationships. “Squaw” told of a family conflict, father and son, culture and culture, boy and mother, boy and step-mother—and on all levels, from Freudian sexual motivations, to anthropological confusions, to race relations, to 1950s mores, to fairy tale romances, to current xenophobias, and many swirling dynamics in between—the story strikes a chord.  
 
The boy’s father has remarried—to a Navajo squaw, and the boy is now acting out, getting into bar fights in Dodge. So Matt gets involved, and he and Chester make a visit to the boy’s father. It turns out that the father has married this woman according to Indian custom (where the man “purchases” the woman from the father; note to self: really? is there any accuracy to this thread? is this a case of 1950s racism? but that’s another concern), but he has not married her legally. The boy is living in the shame of being a “squaw man.” His father has disgraced him. The woman is the same age as the boy. So there’s also the narrative of the dirty old man living with the young Indian woman. And one suspects the boy’s attraction to his step-mother causes no little stir to the mix of emotions—the strong hateful emotions he feels towards his new mother. 
 
So Matt and Chester make their trip. They find a woman there—both very beautiful and young, and they further find that, though she can barely speak English, and the father can barely speak Navajo—the marriage is one of genuine love. Kudos to the narrative art of the writers—to “condense” that effect, that impression, in a few verbal exchanges. But the power and authenticity of the love come across to us after all these years and differences, and the woman, in her broken English expresses hope that Matt and Chester will come again—and be fed by her. The sense of hospitality—and the promise of family life is complete in the very brief scene.  
 
Matt prevails on the man to come into town on Saturday to have a legal marriage performed. This will help alleviate the son’s angst—or part of it—or so Matt hopes. 
 
But just what is the nature of the son’s problem? He is very deluded, it seems, about his own motivation—and near the story’s end, after all the horrible tragedy of the family drama has unfolded, Matt Dillon makes the observation about what the son thinks was his motivation. Matt calls out his rationalization explicitly. In doing so, he suggests that the boy was struggling with a mix of perturbed, dark, swirling confusions—about sexual desire, cultural bigotry, family loyalties, the father-kill motive, self-hatred, an Oedipal relationship with his birth mother, and a violence born out of frustrations of efficacy.  
 
So many ideas here—but the tears, I’m sure, stemmed from some simplicities—simplicities of portrayal of the love between these two different people, the father and his new wife who could barely speak to each other. Then there was the portrayal of the grief (spoiler, sorry) of the woman for her dead husband, killed by his own son. The portrayal of grief was twofold. Again, I don’t know the cultural accuracy of the portrayal here, but I do feel the respect that was captured. The woman grieved in a song…and in a way that would not have been offered if it were not genuine. And then there was the knife and the blood—and Matt Dillon’s sleuthing of the crime scene, in part, through his explanation of the widow’s severing of two of her own fingers as an expression of grief for her loss of her husband.

More perspective from 2021

Suzanne Lee was one of those dear friends a professor is blessed to have as a colleague. At every phase of my career at SXU, Suzanne was there—teaching, working on committees, writing articles together, collaborating on teams, and helping me and others adjust to new realities in programs and institutional politics. When she became dean, I felt the School of Education had a chance to recover from its disastrous period of rudderless drift it had endured after the long, slow, and neglected decline of the prior dean. And when Suzanne became provost, I reveled in Rick Venneri’s hallway comment to me, delivered in a nod, with a smile and that confidential gravitas of his, “She’s a straight shooter.”

After Angelo died, she and her partner, Judy, appeared on our doorstep with a pecan pie. I was not there—the family was not there—but sister-in-law Jane was, and she relayed to us later the whole episode—how concerned the visitors were about the pie getting to us, how much they had hoped to be there for us. We couldn’t be there because the whole family had flown to Thailand to recover Angelo. And it now occurs to me: have I ever conveyed to Suzanne how much her gesture of kindness meant to me then, and how much it still means to me now?

It’s hard to blame President Joyner for what happened to Suzanne Lee—i.e., her departure from the university. The two apparently were friends and respected each other. But of course, Suzanne is gone, her career truncated too early at SXU. Whether or not it was Suzanne’s choice to leave, I hold Dr. Joyner responsible, in part, for creating an environment where so many careers have ended prematurely because of, in my view, her flawed vision of who we are, what we should be doing, and how we might position ourselves for growth.

It’s appropriate that, in relaying my impressions of Suzanne’s encounter of April 7, 2016, I thought of childhood memories with George Bahumas. Suzanne’s act was so child-like. She literally ran up behind me—quietly—and put both hands over my eyes, so as to say, “Guess who,” without ever saying it. Can you imagine? How did she have both hands free—wasn’t she carrying anything? Could such a thing happen in the 21th century, with all our sacred notions of “personal space”? Could such a playful encounter occur between a dean and a faculty member ever at SXU?

Update 2021, Looking Back Again, on Angelo, through Suzanne

“Miraculous Intrusions of the Day,” Version 2, would go even deeper into the Angelo archives—before 2008, his year of graduation. Suzanne and I were having a conversation in the second-floor hallway by the stairwell, and Angelo approached to meet up with me for some reason (or maybe not? Maybe it was just one of those chance encounters, where we wound up falling into a conversation because we happened to run into each other? I’m not sure…).

As Suzanne and I conversed, in that animated way we had, I could sense Angelo looking on, maybe too intently, in my peripheral vision. When we finished and Suzanne left, Angelo looked at me, with that grin of his—I mean that really characteristic grin of his that is best described by Virginia Uphues in the documentary (at the 45:29 minute mark).

“What?” I said.

Angelo’s response was destined to become one of my favorite memories of him:

“She digs you!”

And that smile. And then, of course, my smile, because I did not expect him to say that. I didn’t feel a need to explain that I wasn’t Suzanne’s type. It was true that she dug me—and I dug her. Suzanne and I had such a friendship, one filled with sparkling eyes on both our parts and lots of inappropriate language (mostly on her part). Angelo’s observation was one of those moments where you see your kid has not only grown up, but is celebrating a kind of adult thing—here, love and friendship—in a way beyond the silliness and worry of the family drama (to get back to Lear and Gunsmoke). Angelo, in his natural hippie-speak, was being himself, capturing a truth, celebrating his dad, inhabiting the chance moment, but not letting it go till the love was communicated. I put it in the category of another comment he had made a few years earlier, where, after I had driven through the night on the last leg of a long family vacation, he commented (sensing, no doubt, my need for validation of my driving prowess), “You’re a warrior!”—a statement he made without irony, and one that caused (and still does cause) those suffusions of the heart that the recipient (till now) doesn’t talk about. Such power we have for one another as family and friends in affirmations like these. So seldom, it seems, do we (or I at least) use this super-power. It came spontaneously and naturally to Angelo in moments.

I think now of my trollish ways of interacting with loved ones, and I want to do better. And I’ll try.

Another Ride with the Hitchhiker

SSW for March 25, 2021

[Potential spoilers! If you’re not caught up on your Suspense episodes (as of September 2, 1942), go listen to “The Hitchhiker” first. Then come back here!]

The “drive-in” today, like last week, brought another bout with eternity, this time through Lucille Fletcher’s “The Hitchhiker,” a Suspense episode on Sirius XM’s Old Time Radio station. I saw the title as I was flipping through the stations, and I had that immediate thought: “Do I want to go there?”

I knew the story and I knew the effect. Orson Welles. The driving. The narration. The other-worldliness. The common, relatable story of a cross-country trip. The impenetrable story of crossing over—not the Brooklyn Bridge, but the breach between here and eternity. Has Orson, or Ronald Adams, as his character was named, made it to his destination yet? Is he still making that cross-country trek, picking up hitchhiking women, crashing into a field of cows? Or did he, soon after making that phone call home, succumb to the Hitchhiker’s “Hallo!” and find out “who he really was” and where he was going?

My first reflection is the moment of indecision in me to listen to the episode this morning. In a flash of a moment when I read the title on the radio display, all the thoughts above ran through my mind—one of those flashes of eternity in an instant—and I hesitated, not sure it was right, at 5:12 AM, to be entering into reflections of the sort that this story would, yet once again, arouse and confound in my mind and soul. My first thought is: this instantaneous thought process would not have been possible just a few years ago, before the time of radios that sent written messages—words denoting station and program and song titles—across a display screen. So here is how the modern world is separate from the world of the Hitchhiker, the world of September, 1942. Yet, as I listened, my dominant thought was how unchanged our worlds are: a mother saying goodbye to her son getting in his car on a journey. And indeed, there’s so much about the journey and the situation that is unchanged: the sound of the engine accelerating, the highway sights, the roadside cafes, the radio, and the narrator’s drifty and precise observations as he makes his way over monotonous terrain and terrifying preoccupations in his mind. This does sound a lot like my morning commute.

The difference/similarity between 1942 and 2021—the driving, the moment in time, the eternity—is one of those recurrent themes, those instantaneous flashes of big meaning, that appear in my mind, time and again as I make my way through the story. I can’t help feeling I’m somehow with Ronald: we’re both driving; we’re both terrified; we’re both talking our way through somehow (and sometimes, alas, with aggressive thoughts, though mine don’t verge, fortunately, into contemplations of murder, as Ronald’s do, in his time of greatest crisis). My car is very different from his—I with my radio-messaging-display and quiet electric motor—he, with his internal combustion engine and manual transmission accelerating through all the gears. But the internal combustion engine is still in the forefront of my mind: it’s what I think of when I think of cars and highways. Everything about his trip stimulates feelings of familiarity and hominess. His reflection of his mother at the end brings quiet hope and familiar images. He’s read somewhere that “Love can conquer demons,” and he pictures his mom in her “crisp house dress” (that moms wore in the 40s, 50s, and 60s when we were young, when we needed our moms so, when there was such comfort there—both otherworldly and oh so simple and understandable).

Ronald drives, endlessly it seems, across so many regions of our country, with many descriptive details evoking the grandeur and monotony familiar to anyone who has gone on a road trip. It isn’t until he is in a surreal part of the great American Southwest, in New Mexico, with its “lunar” landscape and barren and sublime mountains and prairies and mesas, that he decides to make the phone call. We get the operator, speaking operator-speak, something none of us have heard these many years, yet still so familiar. Ronald has to request “Long distance”—as indeed there was a time, long ago, when local and long distance were different services needing different operators who had to talk to each other—and, essentially, “build” or link a connection across a network or series of networks to reach a place really far away. Ronald was attempting to reach a place far away—but not just physically far. Wherever Ronald was—and it wasn’t New Mexico—he was connecting to Brooklyn, and he did get connected—to his confusion and woe.

But I get ahead of myself. That call, with all the operators, and the coins falling in the slot with the familiar ding, so perfectly inhabited that space between the familiar and the surreal. While the new technologies of electric cars and radio displays did not essentially change the experience of driving and all its attendant fears and possibilities and routines, the new technology of the cell phone, once again, has made narrative drama and suspense all the more difficult for writers. I forgot how dramatic a pay phone could be! Ronald’s call was expensive, even by 2021 standards: $3.85, to be deposited in coins, one at a time: 15 quarters and one dime. We hear each one fall—but not only that, there are instructions from the operator: “After you deposit $1.50, please wait. When I have collected the money, you may deposit the next $1.50.” So, we hear the six coins fall—and the suspense builds through this most quotidian of processes. The operator collects and gives permission to continue. Six more coins, six more dings. Then the final four coins—and that most familiar and most shocking of phone calls.

The story ends, and I have to shut off the radio before there is any disruption to the mood of fear and worry over the eternity—or end—of Ronald’s fate. But I recover soon, as it occurs to me that perhaps Greg Bell has some provocative notes on the story. So I turn the radio back on, and it comes on right away, since radios nowadays no longer use tubes that need to warm up—and it’s Orson Welles I hear. He’s talking about the war effort … in a most visual way that would require its own essay to depict. He pronounces the first syllable of “Nazi” as though it were “gnat” (gnat-zi)—a pronunciation I haven’t heard before. So, the thematic mixture of familiar/other (or different)-worldly continues. Welles is encouraging people to buy war bonds—to lend Uncle Sam 10 cents on the dollar … possibly through a payroll savings plan. He has much to say about it, with a fine statement about the preferability of US bonds over Nazi or Axis bonds—on our wrists. So we’re right there, in September of 1942, just about 10 months into this war, with such a long way to go, an eternity, but still the movement from Brooklyn to New Mexico, and ordinary life and transitions to eternity are happening at home, on the radio, as though no war ever disrupted and took over life as we know it.

The Hitchhiker—strange and right there (always appearing, always surprising)—is a moment in time, and a forever, out of time. Greg Bell comes on and reminds us of Lucille Fletcher’s stature as a suspense writer (she of “Sorry, Wrong Number” fame). I think of her relationship (wife) to the great musical composer of Suspense, Bernard Herrmann, who was, it so happens, the musical composer for tonight’s episode. Fletcher, we learn, wrote the Hitchhiker specifically for Orson Welles, and sure enough, Orson Welles, put his usual genius right there and made it become what it needed to become: a piece of terrifying moment in time, across time, repeatedly casting us into the familiar, made just unfamiliar enough. Ronald describes it when he is traversing New Mexico, near the end. In his loneliness, he looks out on the gloomy landscape and his movement across that country, which he pictures in terms of the indifference of a fly walking across the face of the moon. And then he calls his mom.

Water on Mars, Marcus Tullius Cicero, and Nancy Sinatra

SSW for March 18, 2021

And now Part 2 of this semester’s notebook begins. I reflect: the process is becoming more a “thing,” certainly for me personally: I’m doing what I ask my students to do: think all week about possible topics; plan for a good session; start early so I have momentum; try not to think too much about specific lines of possible development—so as not to forget them by “writing” them (in water, like John Keats’s name); try to keep open to the late discovery of a topic; try to let the discovery energize me; try to get some work done that needs getting done; try to find the meaning in life, as in “what, really, needs to be done?”

I’m still facing the abyss, looking into eternity … trying to make sense of it all … trying to make sense of this single moment in time. I read in the news about water on Mars—there was a lot of it, apparently, but we’re talking about 3 billion years ago. That’s literally something that some scientists have said: Mars was such and such 3 billion years ago (but now all that water has gone somewhere—in the rocks below the surface? Into outer space?). Three billion years ago: That’s so long before any of my three topics of today: vaccine purgatory, Nancy Sinatra, and really going back, Cicero, who, ancient as he is, still is not all that close to even one billion years ago. All these billions of years bang against the limits of my comprehension and imagination, kinda like the trillions of dollars being spent so lavishly and stingily and carefully and crudely in President Biden’s Coronavirus stimulus package. I think of Terry’s comment about how he conceives of amounts like that: he can’t. So, it has no meaning. And we’re probably all in Terry’s boat, as we throw up our hands at the seas of thousands and millions and billions and trillions, and figure it must all work out somehow—whether it’s through making things up (printing money? declaring victory and moving on? Imploding in insolvency?) or just hoping for the best.

My three topics cover some range: the news of the day, the heartstrings of a daughter’s devotion; the connections to eternity and fleeting urgency and eternal resonance—if disguised in continuing preoccupations that have no hope of permanence, despite how persistent they’ve been in continuing on. As for this last, I’m thinking of Cicero, who both seems so relevant and so completely gone from existence.

A good starting point—a theme of my notebooks lately—is the “drive in”: I drive in on Cicero Ave., so Cicero the man is “right there”—kinda—living on, despite the avenue having nothing really Ciceronian about it. It’s large, I suppose, like the man. I can’t stop thinking of Cicero’s mortality: He was 63 when he died, my age, and he had accomplished so much. How can not every human relate to Cicero? He was given privilege at the start of his life born into the “middle class”; he had family he loved (Brother Quintus in De Oratore); he achieved greatness in oratory, law, and politics. And he died before his time—because he was so important. He had to be murdered. So, he never had the chance of fading away, becoming irrelevant and forgotten. I remember you, Cicero; I read your treatise of “oratory”—one of many you wrote on that topic, and I can see your development in theory, your love of your brother, your admiration for your mentor, Crassus, your nostalgia for an earlier, happier time. I think of the reflective, “end of life” tone of De Oratore, a book written while you were in your mid-fifties—still a man with a lot of living left, but nonetheless, a man who was looking back, looking to teach, looking to create a dialogue of friendly and different voices trying to figure out just what is it about persuasion, performance, public life, responsibility, exploitation, strategy—all the stuff that goes into, surrounds, comes out of effective, responsible, service-oriented speech? I feel you right here, in my mind, Cicero. Yet, I also feel those nagging questions: Why all this effort? Why are we remembering you? Why did you have to be killed, after such a valuable life, at a point in your life when retirement beckoned, with those pursuits away from the forum and Senate—the reading, and math, and music, and leisure you talked about in De Oratore?

Maybe my sadness in reading you this year is my connection to you, at age 63 this year—this pandemic year, when thoughts of mortality are heavy in the air each day, despite me being almost one week into my post first-dose vaccination. Yesterday’s front page Tribune story was about people my age—or a tad older: the 64-year-olds who were too young to be in that over-65 1a group, first to be vaccinated, but who, as folk approaching their mid-60s, were also in a somewhat increased risk group because of age. The article spoke of the state of “vaccine purgatory” some people this age felt—both too young and too old, kinda neglected or not taken care of, as they wait their turn for a vaccine. But who, at whatever age, does not think this way? We are all in purgatory—waiting, uneasy, unsettled. For though we may have led full lives—who knows? Will some Mark Antony put the hit on us?

The article spoke of a couple who had retired last year. The man pictured and his wife were enjoying their retirement, but yet there was this cloud over them. Was it the fear of pestilence and death that was afflicting people like them all over the world, and no place worse than right here in America? It could be. The Page 1 picture was flattering—I looked at that 64-year-old, and thought: Yes, he’s got some miles left on him. If I didn’t know this was a story about his age, I wouldn’t have thought of his age. He had a smile, not too many wrinkles, some hair on top, not too thin and not totally snowy. He looked good—happy—ready for the good life. I thought: how am I looking? In some ways, I’m at my best; I certainly, as I’ve often said, don’t feel any different from when I was 18…. But I am different … by some 45 years. I didn’t have to wait, by the way, for my vaccine—such being the benefits of the hypertension and diabetes that my 45-years-post-18 have brought. So, I’ve acquired issues—but I don’t feel them. I feel connected and disconnected to the man in the paper, and I wonder how Cicero would have felt to be 63 in 2021, and part of me thinks he would have been just the same, and that’s a comfort.

The warmest comfort in this drama of “grasping at something that lasts” in the midst of disappearing-water-on Mars after billions of years, comes, however, with the melancholy confirmation today, on the ride in down Cicero Ave., that Nancy Sinatra, after 14 years of being “Nancy for Frank,” will be airing her final show this Sunday—thus, closing off a significant portion of her life, and concluding this picture she has created of … what? A daughter’s love? A music expert’s analysis? An insider’s look at the context behind the art?

I was so surprised at how touched I’ve been by her show these many years. Have I been an XM customer that long? My first satellite radio predates “Nancy for Frank”; it even predates “Siriusly Sinatra,” as the station was called “Frank’s Place” back then. The station has evolved over the years and across the name change—with all of the changes improvements, with one exception (where are you, O, Jonathan Schwartz?). Nancy’s tenure doesn’t seem to be situated in time: she exists, reflecting “Sinatra,” always there, as indeed she has always been. The first child, the inspiration for Phil Silvers, the daughter, the sister, who, during her tenure on the station had to say goodbye to her brother and mother—sic transit gloria mundi—losses we all felt as family, because that’s what happened in this tenure: we became family. Nancy was herself always, and that honesty made it so easy to be with her. She didn’t need to argue a case for her father, but she lived that case so naturally and lovingly. I’ll leave to others to characterize the art of her programming, but it was artful—playing whole albums, always with attributions and stories, geeking out with Chuck Granata, signing off with “sleep warm Poppa; sleep warm, Frank….”

At first (has it really been 14 years??) it didn’t seem like Nancy—or like her voice. Such a singer she was, and such an alluring young woman—of course, in those boots. I always thought of her with that power—walking (that’s what they were made for, you see) but not only that, but walking over something, on to something. But this Nancy, with Frank, seemed to have gotten someplace—and that place was one of appreciation, love—and scholarship. I found so much more to appreciate in Frank Sinatra through the person he was through the person Nancy is. Such a gift she’s given us, in so many layers and in such beauty. We have the music—her father’s and hers, yes, and we have the context of family and memories and other artists and easy humility and pride about it, because that’s the easy truth of it. Rest well, Nancy. No sleep yet, okay? But warmth, yes.

Choosing for SXU

March 16, 2021

[Note: The entry below comments on the ongoing labor and governance crisis that has beset Saint Xavier University the past 5 years. Like many institutions of higher learning, Saint Xavier is at a crossroads: after years of tight budgets, failed Administrative initiatives, and deepening questions of identity and purpose, the SXU Administration has taken decisive action to cut costs and refocus the institution in controversial ways, namely through measures to weaken the faculty union, reduce the number of tenure lines, reduce academic requirements in general education (a move which would facilitate further reductions in faculty ranks), and reallocate resources in ways the Administration thought best, but with reduced faculty input. The post below is an open appeal to faculty colleagues to resist the Administration’s attempt to revise faculty bylaws against the express wishes of the faculty as represented in a faculty vote in which nearly 90% of voting members rejected an Administrative-led rewriting of faculty bylaws to reduce the role of the Faculty Affairs Committee, which has served as the faculty union for over 40 years. See the previous entry for more context on the faculty vote taken on February 28, 2021.]

Choosing for SXU

Faculty have a choice. We can support the current Administration in their efforts to lead the university as they think best. Or we can critique that leadership, resist it, and opt for a different path. I am writing to advocate for resistance and a different path—but to do so properly and fairly, I need to clarify my motives and my past involvement in resistance.

Since President Joyner’s arrival at Saint Xavier University, I have been one of her most persistent and vocal critics. I have written to her personally on many occasions, voicing concerns on many matters, including strategic planning priorities, morale issues, and, as tensions heightened, statements she had made that I and others believed to be slanderous about the faculty. Aside from my direct appeals to her, I have critiqued Dr. Joyner’s leadership at both public and private faculty meetings. At multiple meetings of the Board of Trustees I have provided evidence of the wrong path I believed our university to be pursuing. I have enlisted my daughter, an SXU alum, to produce a documentary that told part of the story of the University’s anti-labor practices and the dangers posed to our mission by our current course. As Chair of the Faculty Affairs Committee (the committee designated in the bylaws as the faculty’s representative in negotiating salary, compensation, and workload with the Administration), I posted numerous updates to the faculty listserv that identified some of the obstacles and unfair practices of the Administration in negotiations. I have spoken from the head and heart—providing access to documents and events that call into question the good faith of the negotiations on the part of the Administration; I have shared, time and again, my worries about the morale of the faculty who have been beaten down, in my view, much like the mule in the Parable of the Farmer and the Mule.

I have persisted in my critique not as a result of a vendetta or cantankerousness or ego. Rather, I’ve tried to honor the trust the faculty placed in me to represent them. As I have professed to FAC colleagues time and again: We mustn’t let our efforts of the past many years be for naught. We have invested so much of ourselves representing faculty concerns and pursuing agreements that would benefit the university. A healthy, fairly-treated faculty is the best safeguard of our collective academic mission. FAC’s efforts—the behind-the-scenes negotiations; the monitoring of university finances; the contextualizing in AAUP and other relevant frames of reference for stances that would benefit faculty in appropriate and balanced ways; the institutional memory we preserved and consulted; and the corrective opposition we attempted: I’ve been motivated by a belief we mustn’t leave this infrastructure behind.

All that notwithstanding, I have long felt that the challenges and dangers facing SXU should not be framed in terms of the “President Joyner problem.”

All sides can agree that SXU’s challenges are bigger and longer-in-the-making than the actions by President Joyner and the Board of Trustees. I worry about the distraction caused by framing SXU’s challenges in terms of the current Administration (president, interim provost, or board). Personalizing the threat in terms of Dr. Joyner or other individuals feeds into an unhelpful demonizing dynamic on both sides. I have long said to my colleagues on FAC and others that I believe that Dr. Joyner may have good intentions—that she pursues bold (though often disguised) power moves out of a sense of, or commitment to, pragmatic and benevolent tactics of control— “Do it my way, and it’ll work out.” She seems to think she knows—not only patterns of change occurring in higher education, but also the strategies for best positioning the institution in terms of those changes. My critiques of Dr. Joyner have been that she doesn’t really know the character of SXU (which was the source of so much of the institution’s resiliency in the past). I have criticized her poor listening (not once during the three years in which her Administration negotiated with FAC did she ever meet with or invite discussion with FAC or its leaders). And, most important of all, and most relevant for our current moment, I criticize the subversions of governance she employs to pursue her good intentions.

Since the day the university withdrew recognition of the faculty union, our community has needed a full discussion of the meaning and significance of the action. That discussion has not taken place, despite repeated calls for it by many faculty members.

There are many misconceptions about what led to and followed the University’s May 28th action to withdraw recognition of SXU’s faculty union. Many faculty (and administrators), for instance, are unaware that the Faculty Affairs Committee is not simply the same thing as our faculty union. FAC is a committee that is charged with duties and rights granted to it by the bylaws of the faculty. The committee predates the formation of the union, and—whether we have a recognized union or not—the bylaws assign to the Faculty Affairs Committee the sole responsibility of representing faculty in matters of salary, compensation, and working conditions.  The removal of recognition of the union simply means that the union’s legal protections through the NLRA and NLRB have been called into question (and in ways which may be answered by legal means that have not yet run their full course). In any case, the committee’s representative function, as inscribed and protected by the bylaws, can only be removed by an appropriate bylaws change—something which has not occurred.

The Administration has characterized their bylaws changes as “editorial cleanup,” or updating our documents to reflect our new reality, or in other ways to suggest minimal significance. But there are at least three offenses—of the highest significance—to shared governance in play here:

  1. The Board’s unilateral rewriting of the bylaws to remove the representative function from FAC (and assign it to Senate or other faculty groups) represents a substantive change in governance structure, and one that was attempted without any involvement of faculty voice;
  2. The revision process did not originate, as nearly all prior faculty bylaws/handbook changes have, from the faculty, but rather followed a top-down process to which faculty were not privy; and
  3. The Board’s recent choice to ignore the faculty vote on this change (when a vote was finally conducted) constitutes an explicit contradiction of the amendment provisions clearly delineated in the bylaws, the institution’s governing documents which hold authority over all constituents of the institution—even the Board, which has been entrusted to honor the institution’s commitments as delineated and prescribed.

Closing Thought on our Current Context

We find ourselves in a time marked by unusual stress and anxiety on matters of existence, health, and welfare. Many faculty are fearful that if they do not go along with our Administration, SXU will be imperiled, and its chances for rebounding fully from its economic crisis of the pre-Joyner years will be damaged. Since the start of the pandemic, faculty, along with all other constituents in the university, have focused on matters of survival, creative adjustment, and generous sacrifice to keep the institution functional. Unfortunately, through every turn of adjustment and sacrifice, the Administration has continued its drumbeat of crisis, the need to cut costs, and the urgency to reshape the character of the institution.

So, we have seen reductions in tenure and non-tenure track faculty lines; eliminations of general education requirement; pressures to close programs (despite financial analyses that show either limited, no, or negative monetary benefits); and now a brazen attempt to subvert and refashion governance structures, in terms of a lie or mistake about just what is being changed in the bylaws and why.

All of this, plus a climate of division and anxiety—which many believe to be deliberately cultivated by the Administration for strategic purposes—have led us to uncertainties about our institution and our resiliency going forward. But faculty have a choice. We can choose to own our mission and reclaim the character and promise of Saint Xavier that many of us remember and cherish.

We need to talk more about this.

Letter to My Colleagues [Part 1]

March 7, 2021

Bearing Testimony; Saying Goodbye to What Was; Coming to Terms with Now; Envisioning What Awaits Us 

The stress of living in the contemporary world has been well-documented by many, and worse, thoroughly experienced by every living person. Nonetheless, I feel a need to give testimony to my grief and worry about life at Saint Xavier University.

On one level, SXU’s problems pale in comparison with the multiple crises facing our society: there’s the pandemic, obviously, but the inventory is easy to summon in 2020-2021: our social unrest, our damaged natural environment, our polarized politics, our inability to remedy longstanding injustices, our impulses to hate, and more. On another level, SXU’s problems reflect dynamics in play that threaten higher education in particular and society’s well-being in general—namely, the growing pains, let us call them, of suddenly-rampant “technologized approaches not only to information, but to knowledge, and even social interaction,” all on top of, or underneath evolving notions of work and career. All of this has called into question the essentially medieval conceptions and traditions of a college education.  And on yet another level, SXU’s story is a heartbreaking drama (melodrama? case study?) all its own, with highs and lows of our unique accomplishments and failures–our distinctive dysfunctions, missteps, adjustments, and adaptations.

In bearing testimony, I will try to do so in a way that respects people’s levels of patience and their finite attention spans. I note that the matters in play are of crucial relevance to the SXU community: my contributions to the faculty resistance movement against what many view to be a runaway Administration require respect for the collective enterprise. Specifically, I must ensure accuracy and objectivity in stating (or certainly, attempting to represent) our collective complaints. But there’s also an element of self-pity and emotion in all my commentary on the SXU situation that I have to guard against. Part of me wants to cry out, “Hear my pain”—both because it’s my story and also because intertwined in that story are so many facts and occurrences that need to be part of the more public record for better decisions in the future. Also, on another track, I’ve seen so much heartache of colleagues who have left SXU, so often under psychologically traumatic circumstances. Families have been left broken and careers have ended; so many lives have been damaged by the yearslong turmoil at this institution. The voices of these many—if not silenced per se—are certainly absent. My emotional response to SXU’s transformation in recent years is not unique, and I feel parts of it need to be recorded for the welfare of others trying to make sense of just what has been going on. I’ll be relatively brief.

When I was first hired at SXU 25 years ago, I felt I had won the lottery. I was a graduate of a small liberal arts college, Chicagoland’s archdiocesan seminary, Niles College, which was a campus of Loyola University. So the chance—almost 20 years after graduation—to teach English at Chicago’s oldest Catholic university; the chance to have three of my five children become alumni of this institution; the chance to work with students who were becoming leading English teachers throughout the Southside of Chicago has been a fulfilment and payout far bigger than any lottery.

The breakdown in collective bargaining that I witnessed the past three years as a union leader was difficult for me—not only because it was a failure for me in the stances I had taken, but because the breakdowns were a failure in communication (central to my discipline), and those breakdowns occurred on so many levels, including that of friends and colleagues. The eventual weakened support for the union among some of my colleagues was unexpected, but it was ultimately understandable, given how isolated and essentially over-matched our small faculty group of negotiators were in the face of a deep-pockets campaign to weaken and delegitimize our good faith efforts in negotiation.

With the administration, the hardball tactics that came from a new president and her anti-union lawyer and law firms were not a surprise, or particularly unfair—at first. SXU had financial difficulties that all involved agreed were real (though correct information was not available to all parties). For years I had heard of anti-union rhetoric from Board of Trustees members, administrators, and colleagues alike. So, for the incoming administration to put a hand up to the union with hardline absolutes and preconditions to negotiation was, as colleague Peter Kirstein once said at a faculty meeting, well within the range of expectations for contract negotiations between management and a union.

Even so, SXU had never had such adversarial negotiations. In my 25 years as a faculty member, I had served on FAC for 12 years, and in that time, I acquired a lot of context and history in regards to the committee’s purpose, routines, and strategies. Much of that context involved close work with inspiring colleagues from a broad spectrum—Arunas Dagys, of course, but others too many to list, though I can’t resist summoning some names here: Don Cyze, Bill Peters, Tony Rotatori, Peter Hilton, Suzanne Lee, Richard Fritz, Darlene O’Callaghan, Flo Appel, Ann Fillipski, and of course all the current members of FAC. These colleagues respected the sacred trust given to them to vigorously represent faculty and university interests, and to uphold the confidentiality in working behind the scenes, researching its positions, and following through on principled advocacy. And the administration always made clear their respect of process—to treat the other side as worthy of dialogue and to convey, clearly, a commitment to the goal of reaching, at least eventually, an agreement that worked for both sides.

All this is to say that, even though the hardball tactics of the Joyner administration in regards to FAC were not, essentially, unfair in terms of the larger social context of labor-management modes of engagement, they were hurtful to me, as I looked on incredulously as dialogue not only broke down, but degenerated, on the part of the administration, into what many saw as divisive actions, misrepresentations of facts, stonewalling, inuendo, and even slander, as the university slowly wended its way to the May 28th, 2020 phone call when the Board of Trustees chair, with a quaver in her voice, formally announced its decision to withdraw recognition of SXU’s longstanding union.

“May 28th” is a date that has taken on the significance of a title for SXU faculty, a name for a traumatic moment in our history. For me, it was the biggest setback of my professional life. It’s a failure of Catholic mission. It’s a failure of what higher education should be all about—humane and informed and collaborative problem solving. I still view this setback, however, as something that can be remedied.

There are several other blog posts that need to be written to fill out the memoir started here. Entries on the following topics should be written to flesh out themes, facts, and implications of this posting:

  • The breaking of trust by the Administration [Specifics need to be listed].
  • The attempt to change the character of SXU through Administrative end-arounds of established governance structures.
  • The neglect by the Administration to address issues of bullying by administrators and faculty.
  • What SXU was for me as a beginning professor: Judith Hiltner’s mentorship [offered as an example of professional colleagueship and stewardship that is no longer possible in SXU’s divided, changing, over-worked, and disrespectful climate for faculty].

Additional posts on the SXU Crisis of Governance: