Angelo Bonadonna – Page 8 – Angelo Bonadonna's Blog

SXU and HLC: Who gets the (dis)credit?

November 4, 2021

The recent online discussion among colleagues who assess the current Administration of SXU in opposite ways has led me to reflect, once again, on where we are as an institution. As I prepare my comments for HLC next week, I find myself reflecting on issues like agreements and disagreements and how to navigate them fully and respectfully, “love/hatred of SXU,” sabotage/”disruption” of HLC, and, perhaps most of all, how so many of us feel traumatized and depressed by institutional life at this university in 2021—where the conflicts and destabilizations of our own community are compounded by those prevalent throughout both higher education and our society as a whole .

Suffice to say, the SXU community is divided on how best to plan for, invest in, and pursue its future. Some point to the current administration as being instrumental in turning the university around, making operations leaner, saving money, and investing in programs in new ways so as to focus and strengthen the SXU “brand.” Others point to the administration as weakening longstanding programs, creating end-arounds on faculty ownership of the curriculum, reducing the role of faculty input, damaging established governance structures and processes, and promoting a climate of perpetual crisis and need to anticipate potential crises on the horizon.

Both sides seem motivated by worthy intentions to shape the university into a sustainable and successful institution of education. Their means and ends vary. Divisions abound—among those who have been long-serving and those who are newly hired; among those serving in tenured and those in non-tenured roles; among staff and faculty members; among those in the president’s inner circle and those not; among those who are well-compensated and those who are not; among pragmatists and justice seekers; and more.

Not enough has been done to heal divisions. I have been a vocal critic of the president and of those I’ve considered her enablers, and so, I must accept some responsibility in not always promoting the conditions of unity. I have placed blame at the feet of the president and Board of Trustees for promoting divisions and ignoring pleas for conversations and joint problem solving. I believe that the current administration has embraced a dynamic of “you’re with us or you’re against us.” I believe their actions have been power moves above all else and strategizing for strengthening their base and weakening opposition.

My convictions along these lines have prevented me from adopting a more balanced rhetoric.

This semester in my Rhetoric, Writing, and Society class, we have studied some alternatives to the (essentially male) rhetorical tradition that focuses on persuasion and argumentation by proofs to get the audience to accept a pre-established conclusion that the speaker (as a kind of leader) would have the audience accept. In contrast, certain versions of emerging feminist rhetoric place less emphasis on “changing the audience,” or even “adapting the message to the audience,” and instead features “bearing witness” of a speaker, who often attempts to relay the ways in which they have been hurt, but yet who, often with brutal honesty, confide their own weaknesses, contradictions, and deficiencies—all in an effort to “raise consciousness” and possibly enlist humanizing consubstantiality of other conflicted, complex individuals.

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell presents the outlines of a feminist rhetoric that features personal, concrete, and individual experience—even in addressing exigent circumstances that carry life and death implications—and that would seem to require focused and directed or “led” collective action. In contradiction to a traditionally rhetorical, “persuasive” response, a feminist response could be oriented around consciousness raising as the sine qua non or starting point:

The only effective response to the sensation of being threatened existentially is a rhetorical act that treats the personal, emotional, and concrete directly and explicitly, that is dialogic and participatory, that speaks from personal experience to personal experience.
“The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation”

And so, what would it look like if those of us on opposite sides of our SXU chasm were to attempt such rhetoric?

Even now as I write with a conscious desire to take a more unifying stance, as I try to bear witness to my experience, rather than call out the misdeeds of others, I find myself rehearsing my grievances, unable to let go of the rationales, defenses, attacks … the list of breakdowns, the threats … that I “know could be remedied, if only”—If we just could come to the table, direct our energies, and start pulling in the same direction. That is, I am trapped by my traditional, argumentative, prove-my-point, male rhetoric that ever propels me to shout, louder and louder, the validity of my thesis.

How do I retrench? My own history has been full of so much emotion and heartache; I should have little trouble being “personal, emotional, and concrete.”

In bearing witness, I have to ask, “How did I become a ‘faculty leader’?” It is not something I sought, and for many reasons: I am not a particularly good public speaker; I am not the best informed on the history of issues; I don’t think well on my feet; I am one who will always shift the focus from specific tasks at hand to some kind of “larger picture”—that, whatever its value, would always seem to subvert timely action. But when I was offered the position to lead—first, through mere representation on the Faculty Affairs Committee, and then to the position of chairperson, I felt that I did possess certain strengths that might be of help—qualities of character, emotional maturity, patience, right-sized ego, courage, right-sized assertiveness, general goodwill, and—yes—love of SXU, where 3 of my children have graduated, where, in 1996, my wife, an Irish Catholic, and I, an Italian Catholic, both alums of Loyola University, felt blessed to be able to plan on setting down roots and becoming members of a campus that reinforced the best aspects of our Catholic identity—both for ourselves and our young children who might someday attend. I felt the integrity of my intentions in accepting a leadership role would compensate for my deficiencies of leadership and organization. The challenges were all-consuming, but the work, ultimately, led to responsible purpose and action.

Much of the difficulty of serving on a faculty committee involves the “herding of cats” problem that ensues when so many independent, intelligent, and often strong-willed people, as faculty are, find themselves trying to organize and serve a collective purpose. There were divisions in FAC, as there were in the general community, and those divisions could be intense and stymieing.

Yet, above FAC’s divisions was a deep consubstantiality of the value of the committee’s work. For years we had had such exemplary leadership from colleagues like Arunas Dagys. I say “colleagues like,” though truth be told, I’ve never seen another like him. He’s larger than life—physically, emotionally, morally. He exudes strength, humility, and pragmatism all in equal doses, all with confidence and intelligence and resilience. I hesitate to call Arunas my mentor, for fear that I, in my failures, might cast some shadow over his excellences. I don’t mean to be sycophantic in my adulation, but I know no proper way to “eulogize” Arunas. Whether or not he was my mentor, he was certainly my inspiration.

I think of my failures when I relive the phone call of May 28, when Board Chair, Patricia Morris, with a quaver in her voice, in the “presence” of me, Associate Chair Jackie Battalora, and our attorney, Robert Bloch (“presence” in quotes because the message was sent via a conference call in those early days of the pandemic) took a stab at faculty governance and severed the university’s longstanding relationship with both the union and the Faculty Affairs Committee. Even then, I, in my arrogance thought “This will not stand.” Or I was, “Okay, okay…our move. We’ve got Robert Bloch. We got a new faculty unity. We have a new approach of exposing in public and with reason and professional calm and direct statement.”

But I was foolhardy to have hope, and that hope has not been helpful, and the damage done by FAC’s arrogance to take on the president rather than retrenching and waiting her out and preserving the union structure is inestimable. Throughout my time as chair, I would rehearse the first principle of the Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm.” And here it was: under my watch, the university union was crushed. My ensuing depression centers on this failure. And a vortex of anger and disappointment and licking of wounds has left me confused and despondent, but also scrambling, as I find my resilience, fortunately, has not reached its limit.

For one, I mustn’t elevate my role so as to take on that full responsibility. The truth is that the May 28^th action was but the logical endpoint of many prior actions, all set in motion through a decision made years earlier in the hiring by the university of an expensive anti-labor law firm. This action, while regrettable, was not illegal, or perhaps not even immoral. But as Arunas’s voice echoes in my head: it was not pragmatic—not in the “big” sense of pragmatic, the sense that the union and the university could work together to find a sustainable path that protected all with some basic minimums of compensation and working conditions that laid the necessary groundwork for future developments. Arunas’s rhetoric of pragmatism was always so persuasive, since its fruits, always, were so visible in principled decisions over many years that featured the big view of sustainability. “Neither side should be allowed to game the system.” And in listening to the comparisons, analyses, and solutions he would propose in recommending policies, it was clear he had done his homework, a lot of it.

The busting of the union struck me to my core. Beyond the personal disappointment in myself for not knowing how to sidestep this disaster, there was the transformation of SXU, there was the setback to the labor movement in world-historical terms, there was the collective failure—of the FAC group to unify the faculty, but also of the faculty to understand what was happening, to trust the leaders as to implications, to commit to doing whatever was possible to forestall permanent damage, and to honor the tradition that had been built, with such promise and potential, for 40 years.

The PR campaign of the administration to point fingers at FAC for the decision they made also hurt. For the year prior to the action, public communications between Admin and FAC were strained, verging on hostile, while always delivered under some veneer of professionalism. But there was a dishonesty, slander even, in many characterizations of our committee by the Administration. We were accused of distributing “erroneous, flawed, and misleading” data; despite our proofs of the correctness of our information, no retraction of such accusations took place. In one notable public slander made directly by the president, we were blamed for the decision not to record negotiation sessions; and post-May 28, we were accused, without evidence, of behaviors and advocacies on our part that led to the breakdown in negotiations.

The slander, mischaracterizations, and imputing of motives by the Administration were indignities, yes, but most of all they hurt me as a person. To quote another feminist critic, Natanson, the hurt is more than just a passing blow:

When an argument hurts me, cuts me, or cleanses and liberates me it is not because a particular stratum or segment of my world view is shaken up or jarred free but because I am wounded or enlivened—I in my particularity, and that means in my existential immediacy: feelings, pride, love, and sullenness, the world of my actuality as I live it.
“Claims of Immediacy“

The busting of the union was unnecessary, immoral, and unproductive—and the hurt it caused me sent me into a depression that, dark as it was, was primarily a private matter of me adjusting to a new reality. I was thrown, as one colleague put it, “into a fugue state” (or was she talking about herself? Not totally clear…). But what happened the next year went beyond me, and beyond the union.

What happened the next year, in the context of Covid, was a barrage of brazen actions by the Administration to solidify their centralized and unchecked power. The counterpart success of unification by the faculty in response produced a strong Senate voice, who pronounced clear and important decisions on matters of bylaws, faculty voice, and curriculum. I needn’t rehearse here the faculty vote of no confidence, the Board’s doubling down in their knee-jerk affirmation of the president’s leadership, the dismissiveness of the entire administration of 2/3 of the faculty in expressing such dissatisfaction with the direction of the university: What FAC had seen in private for the first three years of the Joyner presidency was now laid bare, obviously and loudly, for all to see and hear.

Where are we now? We are as divided as ever. But I hold out hope that, through some adjustment—I hope on the part of all, including me—we can begin moving forward and shore up our mission and collective resolve to realize it in its strongest aspects.

Reading A Wonderful Waste of Time

I started reading son Terry’s book, A Wonderful Waste of Time, right when it came out—of course. But that was in the midst of the chaos—all the disruptions of the pandemic, teaching, union busting, and the general apocalypse of modern life. Once I ascertained, a hundred pages in, that the book was indeed a treasure to be savored, I set it aside to be lingered over—well, dare I say?-—when I had time to waste. And, as SXU duties subsided this year in June, that time was here.

What I like about Terry’s book—in particular, reading it now—is that I feel I am re-entering the world after a weird 15-month interlude. The pandemic brought a sense of doom, and nothing can be the same after our collective descent into the fugue state that has been quarantine. At this time, despite the very real devastation and suffering experienced by some, many of us have emerged unscathed or even improved. It’s confusing. Yet somehow Terry’s recollections of the summer of 2017 resonate–oddly—with both pre- and post-pandemic psychology, all of it overcast somehow with the cloud that was the pandemic itself. The mix in this book—Terry’s wistfulness, his realness, sweetness, misanthropy, simple appreciation, hope, and wry resignation—all of it seems such a good fit for my summer mind this particular summer. I’m doing my reading super slowly, a chapter a day, trying as best I can to synch up the dates of this summer with those of 2017, the year chronicled in the book.

My momentary (but recurrent) takeaway is that there’s a hopelessness to everything about the Frontier League. And yet today I heard Terry describe himself (in the book) as a “Frontier League junkie.” That’s an unusual expression for a stolid fellow like Terry, and in the book, he has put a spotlight on the highs and lows (and even-keels?) of his addiction, not necessarily to say or do or request anything urgent. The Frontier League is what it is. But in the process of being that, we’re learning about this cranky broadcaster, as he gently and rigorously thinks through everything, openly sharing his quirks and not-so-quirkish dispositions and routines: his love of walks (in town, not in games, heaven forfend!), his love of work—of escape from work, of talking shop with colleagues, and—always—of giving and receiving what is expected, whether it is in the making of an accurate, informative call for an anxious fan or in providing lunch and a clean work space for a visiting team’s broadcaster.

One reads, and asks “Why? Why is this story being told?” Answer: It’s a wonderful waste of time. Kinda like this span of 80-90 years some of us are blessed to have. And in this sense, I put Terry’s book in the category of Ken Burns’s remarkable reflection on life shared with Terry Gross at the end of the interview on his Vietnam documentary (coincidentally recorded in the late summer of 2017 (September 27), right about the time that Terry is chronicling). If war is “human nature on steroids,” Frontier League baseball is the “ambivalence of summer on steroids.” In passing the time with us, Terry takes us into the side-roads of his mind, league history, local color, personal stories and rituals, a tragedy here and there, kindness, reflections on motivation, and, in one memorable passage, an image of Gary Cooper/Lou Gehrig at the carnival on a game day(!). It’s wonderfully connected, the hopes, disappointments, and enduring possibilities of all these professionals traveling by bus through the night, across the Midwest. You can take almost any passage to get the feel, and so, here I share a characteristic moment snatched from today’s reading in Chapter 15:

We finish in the early evening and I’m left with a night to myself in Florence [Kentucky]. I decide to expand my horizons and really explore the area by foot in a way that I haven’t before. Florence is famous for its mall, immortalized by a water tower that is visible from the highway that proclaims “Florence Y’all.” The legend goes that the tower originally said “Florence Mall” back in the 70s, but because the mall hadn’t opened yet, they weren’t allowed to advertise for a not-yet-existent business. Rather than paint over it, they changed “Mall” to “Y’all” with the intention of changing it back when the mall opened. The redesigned tower, though, proved so popular that the sign has remained as repainted all these years later.

Today, I make my first ever trip to this mall that is so famous it needed a misprinted water tower advertisement. I feel like working in the Frontier League has allowed me to witness first-hand the collapse of American malls. Often, local malls are the only place to hang out near the hotel, perfect for getaway days. They also provide the richest array of restaurants. I’ve become a regular mall walker, getting my exercise in by going from one end to the other with all of the octogenarians. When I first started in this league, the local malls were still bustling, full of strong businesses and hearty customers. Now, it seems as though half the storefronts are empty and the mall walkers are sparse. One of them approaches me today and frantically demands, “Do you know what the Enola Gay is?” “Sure,” I tell her, and she sighs contentedly, thanks me and walks away. What a strange encounter. I didn’t even prove to her that I knew the Enola Gay was the ship that sunk the Titanic.

Why I Voted No Confidence in SXU President, Dr. Laurie Joyner

April 13, 2021

Since her appointment in January 2017, Dr. Laurie Joyner has been a controversial leader. For the first year or so of her presidency, I had access to an unusual amount of detailed information about her performance and approach to leadership—the consequence of various university positions I held (associate chair of FAC, department chair, member of several committees). What I experienced in that time led me to question whether the university was on the right path—specifically, whether Dr. Joyner’s leadership posed a greater threat to the viability of the institution than the challenges she was brought in to address.

Thus, at a union meeting in April 2018 (fifteen months into Dr. Joyner’s administration), I voted with over 60 other faculty to ask our Senate to engage in a research project—one intended to extend, if necessary, over the course of the full academic year, 2018-2019. The goal of this project was to investigate, with fairness, rigor, and thoroughness, the question of whether a vote of no confidence should be taken on Dr. Joyner. Even though by that time, I had concluded that there were serious deficiencies in Dr. Joyner’s approach to faculty, fairness, curriculum, and vision for the university, I realized that my colleagues, for the most part, lacked specific information that would justify such a strong move. But I believed that a dispassionate and thorough look at the facts would build towards a clear conclusion that would be accepted by objective onlookers.

For a variety of reasons—some political, some strategic, some the result of unfortunate divisions in our community, and some the result of the hopeful, generous, and forgiving nature of SXU faculty—the yearlong investigation of the president’s leadership did not take place.

In the intervening months and years, faculty and others have had a chance to see more public evidence of Dr. Joyner’s leadership that has raised questions about her ability to lead us going forward. The turnover of provosts, deans, and important staff leaders, and the reliance on interim appointments, are two indicators of instability and untenable circumstances within her own leadership team. The transformation of the Board of Trustees from a broadly representative group of 20-plus members to a group of less than 10 individuals who show strong and uncritical (and uninformed) support of the president is another troubling indicator. The recent aggressive behavior of the interim provost and deans on a variety of matters—including bylaws changes, proposed program closures, course caps, to name the more contentious issues—has raised awareness and concern among faculty in all three colleges, across disciplines, tenure status, and years of service.

The union busting of this administration is the single most significant breach of trust, and the attempt to change the bylaws is perhaps the most brazen action of the Administration to weaken faculty voice in governance. The rationale repeated often by the Administration and their supporters in the faculty—that the proposed bylaws change was merely editorial clean-up to have our documents align more accurately with our “new reality”—was premised on a falsehood or error (namely, that the discontinuation of collective bargaining with the union was the same thing as the shifting of faculty representation from the Faculty Affairs Committee to Faculty Senate). This matter has yet to be discussed and judged by the full faculty—an omission abetted, unfortunately, by some of our own Faculty Senate leaders. It is not too late for the faculty to conduct this discussion, one that, one hopes, a new leadership team in the university would find both valuable and necessary for the building of a new trust for the future.

The Pro Argument for Dr. Joyner

President Joyner has succeeded in consolidating her power and cutting costs—both of which outcomes are not dangerous or wrong per se. But the consolidation of power has been characterized by dividing stake holders—faculty and faculty, faculty and staff, faculty and administrators, faculty and the Board of Trustees. The consolidation has created winners and losers. Many disaffected faculty and staff—often key individuals who have built programs and have devoted long and distinguished careers to this institution—have opted to end their association with SXU either through early retirement, a move to another institution of higher learning, or a move out of academia altogether. The consolidation of power has been, in the eyes of many, ruthless (and as prime evidence of this claim, I would point to the pattern of behavior in the university’s march to May 28, 2020, the day the University withdrew its recognition of the faculty union). Many have commented on the president’s micromanaging across the board; some have critiqued her use of “good cop-bad cop” techniques in creating appearances that the source of unpopular changes were underlings and not her. Many have commented on being given directives in private that never were destined to be part of the public record but nevertheless served well to advance the Administration’s agenda.

As for the cutting of costs, Dr. Joyner’s leadership deserves some credit. Under her watch, many expensive professor salaries were cut through various means. First of all, though I’m not sure I would put this in the “credit” column, the emergency cuts of 2015-2016 were made permanent, despite the assurances of the prior administration that the pay cuts were to be temporary. Second, many professors who were nearing retirement were encouraged to retire early under generous buyout provisions, which though defined in the CBA, were completely voluntary on the part of the administration to offer.

Lack of Balance

But how much cutting is too much? With each buyout and reduction in a tenure line, the university both saves money and loses a resource. The most cost saving approach would be to fire all faculty and staff and reduce expenses to zero, but of course, that is not a sustainable financial plan. There is a mid-point, or sweet spot, in the balancing of costs and investments in resources. In the area of faculty resources, the evidence shows a lack of balance in Dr. Joyner’s approach. Or at least the formula is skewed.

A disturbing example of the lack of balance can be seen in the approach the administration took to teacher preparation programs. Clearly, in 2015, there was compelling justification for cuts in faculty and staff and programs. The School of Education was converted to a Department of Education, a move that was arguably correct—or at least defensible. But a closer look shows that the problem solving here lacked proper balance, as the administration moved as quickly and thoroughly as possible to reduce costs, cut programs, buy-out faculty, eliminate lines—all with minimal or no consideration of a stopping point or planning for future investment. The diminishment both prevented not only needed growth/reallocation, but also prevented minimal maintenance of basic operations. Under the watch of Dr. Joyner, the university decided to forego compliance with CAEP, a prestigious accreditation and a mark of excellence for the university that many faculty and programs had already devoted significant resources to secure.

Given the reduction in tenure lines (from 21 to 3), staff, and programs in the Department of Education, it is hard to avoid the characterization that the teacher preparation programs have been gutted. Whether or not this outcome was pursued with some faculty involvement is not the issue. The main issue is the administration’s lack of balance and wisdom in allowing, much less promoting, such an outcome. As under-resourced as our Department of Education now finds itself, how capable will we be to meet the demand for teachers that has been widely documented and predicted to worsen in the near future?

Another example of Dr. Joyner’s lack of balance comes from a faculty meeting in which she presented positive financial data in November 2017, just some months after the signing of our final Memo of Understanding in which faculty agreed to austere cuts and workload increases for the final two years of our most recent CBA. In a remarkable exchange between FAC Chair Arunas Dagys and President Joyner, the president noted that a $5 million surplus had been discovered once the FY17 books were closed in June. While the source of the error has not been clearly identified, the implication was that the prior CFO (who had not been hired by Dr. Joyner) had some responsibility for the irregularities or errors in bookkeeping. (It should be noted that the MOU which was signed just before the discovery of the $5 million variance was based on a projected loss for the year in the neighborhood of $250,000.) In discussing the surplus, Dr. Joyner made the comment that “we could give the whole $5 million to faculty as FAC wants…” But FAC had never requested such a thing. FAC was arguing for a more balanced approach. Faculty cumulatively had given back tens of millions of dollars over many years of give backs and cuts. In the current situation where there was an unexpected positive outcome, FAC argued then, as they had (and were to do) in many other negotiations, could we not come up with a formula whereby faculty could partake of the benefit, in some kind of partial or proportionate way?

Mercy Values, Academic Norms, Contractual and Bylaws Obligations to Faculty

Evidence of a lack of balance (in the sense of wise stewardship one expects from a president) can be seen in many other areas of the president’s record. The president’s move into the chapel displacing a Sister of Mercy and student organization, along with the expansion of administrative offices in the Chapel, shows questionable judgment in regards to the best support for our mission.

Throughout her presidency, Dr. Joyner has used task forces, special committees, university fellows, appointees, and favored groups to achieve ends that, while efficient in some cases, often circumvent established governance structures.

As for the breaches in contractual and bylaws obligations to the faculty, those matters, and the larger story behind the breakdowns in negotiation require a thorough, separate treatment all their own. They necessitate a review of many documents, events, and timelines. Much of the story has been preserved and shared in FAC’s OneNote archive and in faculty listserv emails and other documents. The Administration’s cancellation of meetings, its statements in emails and meetings (some of which FAC considered to be slanderous, misleading, or erroneous); its delays or non-compliance in information sharing, and, more recently, its discontinuation of information sharing—all were part of the process that led to the May 28 action by the Board of Trustees.

Limited Tools/Missing Tools

Saint Xavier needs a president who understands how the university has excelled in the past, how the university can draw on its growing potential (for example, as an Hispanic Serving Institution), how the university could unite all community members to face known and unknown challenges, how the university might recruit and retain talented faculty, staff, and administrators, and—most pertinent, after the experience of the past several years—how the university might act with respect for its workers. Saint Xavier needs a president who is effective, talented, and involved in fund raising. Saint Xavier needs a president who can motivate and inspire faculty, staff, students, and donors. Saint Xavier needs a president who fosters hope and belief that things will get better—not as a result of saying such things, but as a result of genuine displays and actions of respect for academic norms and the people throughout the institution, including faculty.

Dr. Joyner has not shown skills or a capacity for growth in these areas. Her primary skills are the ability to demand budget cuts and to consolidate her power, often by pitting groups against one another in a highly-charged, stressful environment, always under a cloud of impending doom.

While I have argued elsewhere my belief that Dr. Joyner may have good intentions and that she may have helped cut some costs, I believe she has put us on a path of diminishing returns. Our academic mission is no longer—in the view of many of us—on a sustainable trajectory. New, more balanced and collaborative leadership may provide us the adjustments we need at this time.

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 21^th 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.