2. Status: Executives Are Awe-some
Chapter 1 established that enshrinement of university charters both restricts access to governance through the themes it celebrates and also invites faculty and students to hold the institution accountable to founding ideals. University charters and origin stories often hinge on a single actor or idealized figure, though these characters may not represent current efforts at inclusion or, worse yet, might idealize exclusion. As such, this chapter asks, How do faculty find good examples of governance? How does an institution’s celebration of campus leaders materialize governance practices? What models do institutions make available, and by what methods? Making inclusive models of governance recognizable, findable, and visible is a material endeavor as much as it is textual. The methods by which models are amplified materialize how governance is performed. Monuments to university and governance leaders are one such method. The permanence that monuments model influences the stakes and agency faculty perceive to be possible in governance: are the dispositions and personalities that have been historically represented in governance timeless, just as the monuments might represent?
Physical sites of awe, such as statues, plazas, and buildings, are epideictic in that they accelerate institutional values and orthodoxies, particularly the idea that governance leaders are executives. An executive, as we learned in the last chapter, is a rhetorical ideal of vir bonus, the good man speaking well: someone who exhibits control of his [sic] own body and productivity, exerts control over others, and serves as a model of institutional values. Universities physicalize their values in governance through statues and memorials that make exemplars out of campus leaders. These sites of awe present the notion that universities, and governance in particular, are consecrated for special individuals who are financially and intellectually autonomous. However, trusted campus leaders are often those who do the dirty rhetorical and care work of disseminating institutional aspirations to workers decade in and decade out and who are largely forgotten after they retire, are fired, or leave.
A decrease in public deliberation and discourse about university values on campuses underscores the importance of physical monuments and the built environment, particularly the messages these sites send about governance. Material items like inscriptions, gardens, and honorific statues create narratives around notable institutional personalities and turn these narratives into exempla: known stories of extraordinary virtue. The O’Connor Plaza at Temple University and the Faculty Room in Nassau Hall at Princeton University are two such sites that inspire awe of the CEO figure and encourage uptake of the values presented. Both sites situate key institutional figures as exemplars of institutional values. When individual rhetors communicate against the backdrop of these epideictic sites, they take up the orthodoxies and participate in the collaborative imagining of the institution.
Statues and sites of awe enshrine an institution’s governance history for passersby to be enveloped in what classicist Matthew Roller calls the elsewhen: time travel via monument.1 On American campuses, the Greco-Roman import of “the good man” is an undeniable part of this elsewhen. Administrators and faculty materialize orthodoxies of governance through their physical interaction with statues and gardens. Users also interact with orthodoxies of governance through their broad acceptance of monuments. At a time when statues to racist leaders of the past are routinely removed, the monuments in this chapter—very often tied up in exclusionary themes themselves—remain beloved components of the university community. University monuments to governance leaders often contribute to an overarching theme that these “good men” leaders are part of a Greco-Roman lineage of morally exceptional individuals who are financially and intellectually autonomous. Rhetorical traditions of masculinity and power emphasize autonomy as a component of power: to be free of the financial and economic influence of others is to be good and fit for leadership of others.2 Monuments encourage students and faculty to emulate these autonomous governance leaders and, in doing so, materialize the campus and institution as a self-supporting, insulated entity appropriate only for those who are fit enough to survive. Rather than cancel these statues, or tear them down, faculty can break the spectator seal by noticing how the monuments influence themes and agency of current shared governance. Although the act of noticing is not a panacea, it is at least a start at understanding that the veneration of statues—and status—within governance comes from material desire for “the good man.”
Icon Status: Material Calls for Morality
The educational function of monuments makes them epideictic and also makes them sites of exemplarity. Epideictic rhetoric, the language of praise and blame, educates a culture on what is valued by hyping up a figure, place, or event through exaggeration, repetition, and “value talk.” A culture’s most celebrated figures may be remembered through a particular type of epideictic rhetoric, the exemplar. Historian Roller describes the “exempla,” or common stories, of ancient Rome as celebrating and normalizing idealized virtue. Exempla function by crowdsourcing of myth or the “commonplace”: monuments to exemplars educate viewers about the values that are celebrated. According to Roller, exempla can either be stories that are widely circulated in a culture or people who have become celebrated for their participation in a story. Roller’s heuristic for what makes an exemplum comes from his analysis of ancient Roman stories, which normalized virtue in that culture. The heuristic is not explicitly about epideictic—rather, I see exempla as a kind of epideictic.3 Roller’s heuristic proceeds as follows: definition of the deed, evaluation, commemoration, and norm setting. A “deed” is an event that happened where an audience witnessed it, “evaluation” refers to whether that deed was good and what virtues the culture ascribes to it, “commemoration” documents the deed and associated virtues for people elsewhere and elsewhen, and “norm setting” compares the deed or virtue to other events or people.4 Commemoration and norm setting have particular stakes in governance, as these are weak areas of faculty awareness nationally—few faculty senators are formally trained, for example, in how to be a good senator. Exemplars fill this vacuum of training.
Present-day portraits of beloved faculty and statues of governance leaders are not carbon copies of ancient Roman encomium (formal praise). Instead, they are ancient precedent that can be used, as rhetoricians Michele Kennerly and Damien Pfister argue, to “cue” modern rhetorical situations.5 Noticing epideictic gestures like exaggeration can prompt us to think about how the elements of a rhetorical situation may be repeated over time. One cue, for example, is the material representation of holding out an ideal. Kathleen Lamp’s work on the ancient Augustan building program, for example, suggests that visual and textual epideictic gestures were central to the power of the early Roman Empire.6 Imperial themes, like the piety of the emperor and piety itself, repeat across modalities (coins, buildings, inscriptions, sculpted depictions of leaders) and demonstrate the wide acceptance and uptake of the themes by everyday people. Lamp analyzes the summi viri, or short biographies of great mean, inscribed at the bottoms of statues in the Forum of Augustus. Although the summi viri are millennia removed from present-day universities, they offer an important precedent for the honorific statues discussed here. The ancient Roman orator Quintilian, whose treatise on rhetorical pedagogy has trained centuries of speakers, describes encomia as speeches that “hold out an ideal.”7 The summi viri created a benchmark of virtue to which all citizens would aspire. This same honorific gesture is clearly present across a university’s material and textual footprint: consider the imitative quality of statues, portraits of beloved professors, and plaques in honor of donors.
Part of epideictic discourse is its timelessness: the sense that an item, phrase, or behavior exists beyond the reach of fad or fashion. Laurent Pernot refers to this timelessness as “immobilization.”8 When the presence of past governance actors is marked materially on campuses, governance itself can become timeless, a site of elsewhen, or even immobile. These past actors can be hard to shake, and our interactions with the collective memory of these past actors construct the institution. A university’s collective memory is supported by exemplars, physicalized or not, that steer faculty expectations of what is possible in shared governance. As one faculty senator, a law professor, explained about a contentious handbook revision process,
governance is about relationships. And trauma is about relationships. When there’s a traumatic relationship, that relationship continues to be played out over and over again, into the present. So that people who are interacting with each other in the present might actually not be interacting with each other, but with an old relationship. The same thing with systems. A lot of distrust was not necessarily a relationship with the current players. Some of that was a relationship with the past. People were still acting and reacting to old interactions that predated me.
History as I am trying to represent it is not so much objectively what happened as how one imagines one’s place in it. As we saw in the discussion of charters and origin stories in chapter 1, there is no objective history to uncover—excavation of the history of governance is inherently excavation of one’s own desire for a place in the institution.
Honorific portraits and statues hold out an ideal and are sites of desire, refusal, and belonging. They are also made to matter by our interaction with them. As the feminist theorist Karen Barad notes, intra-action happens at the atomic level. From this understanding, time is not chronological but relational; time that is far away may be made closer by our intra-action with it.9 Even though the spectator stance of governance tries to restrict decisive agency, none of us is, as Barad suggests, a “modest witness” to history.10 Memorable figures in an institution’s governance are often positioned as icons. Whether we try to measure up indicates our approval of the ideals being expressed. None of us is a bystander to an institution’s calls.
From here we will investigate two sites of awe that hold out an ideal for faculty leaders to follow. O’Connor Plaza at Temple University, the reconstructed grave site of Temple University founder Russell Conwell, and the Faculty Room in Nassau Hall at Princeton University both hold out an ideal of governance leaders as autonomous, morally strong, and generous men. These physical monuments related to governance expect faculty participation in celebrating executive leaders and maintaining social hierarchies. Both sites tell a triumphant story of how executives—natural leaders who filed down their rhetorical excess to reveal lean, moral cores, as Quintilian says—have contributed to the institutions’ persistence. The sheer quantity of statues to great men on American college campuses is an indication of a theme; I could have chosen many statues for this examination, as it is the rare campus that does not have a memorial or statue to an administrative or faculty leader. While it is easy to blame individual leaders for bombastic celebration of their own accomplishment, faculty participate in the desire for this narrative. As the rhetorical theorist James Porter says, and as so many writing faculty teach our students, a speaker can only say what an audience will hear.11
The administration building at Princeton University, Nassau Hall, is a materialization of the institution’s endurance. The building served as George Washington’s headquarters during the American Revolution and housed the Continental Congress during a period of evasion from the British. Constructed in 1756, it “stands as a symbol of determination, perseverance, and freedom,” according to Princeton’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library blog.12 Nassau Hall survived the battle of Princeton; retains structural wounds from a British cannonball; and stood through two fires, after which Thomas Jefferson contributed to its rehabilitation. George Washington received news of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, in Nassau Hall. Today, the building serves as the administration building for Princeton University, including the office of the president. The construction of the campus around the building—Nassau Hall positioned at the front, as an introduction—sets up the idea that the university is the inheritor of a revolutionary legacy. That the administration occupies the building suggests that university leaders are particular inheritors of this legacy.
The Faculty Room inside Nassau Hall is the “seat of institutional memory,” according to the exhibit titled Inner Sanctum: Memory and Meaning in Princeton’s Faculty Room at Nassau Hall.13 This room, which is off-limits to visitors but very much present online in descriptions of the university’s history, is paneled in mahogany, with portraits on the walls and parliamentary-style seating; a long table but no chairs indicate its British precedent. Although it is called the “Faculty Room,” the room houses portraits of university presidents—and King George II and George Washington. George Washington after the Battle of Princeton by Charles Willson Peale shows Washington haughtily leaning on a cannon outside Nassau Hall, with troops and horses in the background. The British flag is crumpled on the ground behind him. He holds his hat in his hand and wears a blue sash over his shoulder: he is decidedly, unequivocally, the victor.14 Roller’s heuristic prompts us to consider what is celebrated: achievement. Roller notes of the concept of a deed, “The witnesses may regard [the actor] as standing in a synecdochic relationship with themselves: the actor’s performance is theirs; he or she embodies, or stands as a surrogate for, the community they represent.”15 The actor is Washington, a surrogate for viewers drawn to these inner chambers of power; the community Washington represents is would-be government—and governance—leaders. Washington’s deed is moral victory, a fact underscored by the portrait on the same wall of King George II, who approved the university’s charter but lost imperial claim to the institution. The two paintings at the head of the room position all further executive action as following their precedent. Though neither King George II nor George Washington was ever a president of Princeton, or even affiliated with the university, they are situated as the progenitors of all subsequent Princeton executives.
The portraits in the Faculty Room create a sweeping lineage of morally and intellectually inspiring leaders, leading ultimately to the door. Taken together, the two portraits at the head of the room commemorate the transfer of power from executive to executive. Roller’s heuristic advises that a community judges an exemplary event based on their shared values: Princeton alumni, donors, and administration have judged the transfer of power between Washington and King George, on down the lineage, as worthy of celebration. Evaluation happens through the gilt frames, the placement of the portraits at the front of the room, and the restricted access to the paintings and the room. Commemoration occurs when members of a group are reminded of the deed: the circulation of the portraits through the art exhibit and the presence of the room online suggest that the room is not intended solely for a Princeton audience. The Faculty Room reminds outsiders that the university has an exceptional history of leadership. The “inner sanctum” is a consecrated space where the viewer’s presence—or their desire to be present—indicates their potential for exceptionality. The exemplars are the university presidents, descended from imperial power.
If there ever was a foil for Princeton University, it is Temple University. Public in every way, the boundaries of the campus seep out into the neighboring community, a neighborhood dotted with dialysis and twenty-four-hour childcare centers. Yet it shares a similar enshrinement of executive status with Princeton. O’Connor Plaza, the reconstructed grave site of Temple University founder Russell Conwell, represents the institution’s obsession with great men, particularly financially autonomous leaders. Conwell, the university’s first president, is an icon at the institution thanks in part to his “Acres of Diamonds” sermon, originally delivered in the late nineteenth century, in which he argues that the ability to achieve financial success is innate in every person.16 The widespread circulation of “Acres of Diamonds”—it is taught in general education courses at the university, for example—contributes to how the speech and Conwell himself have been marked for the “collective good.”17 The speech promotes a bootstraps approach to success: that good men are simple and hardworking; that money is power; that one’s greatest achievement is to be “unmortgaged,” or financially autonomous; and that people who are poor live in poverty by choice. The plaza is a rebranding of the university’s old Founder’s Garden, which was originally designed to pay homage to these values and to Conwell. The rebranding superimposes Patrick O’Connor, a wealthy Philadelphia attorney and chair of the board of trustees, who represented Bill Cosby during Cosby’s rape trial, over Conwell’s legacy. The somber wrought iron gates that say “O’Connor” at either entrance to the plaza retitle Conwell’s values as O’Connor’s. The honorific inscriptions dedicated to O’Connor borrow Conwell’s exemplarity to rehabilitate O’Connor’s own struggling public image.
O’Connor Plaza is the actual grave site of Russell Conwell, whose body has been moved three times to accommodate continually revised expressions of Temple’s upward mobility. Conwell was originally buried in Monument Cemetery, but university developers purchased that cemetery and demolished it to make way for parking and athletics facilities, moving Conwell and his wife to a temporary location.18 Remains from Monument Cemetery that were not claimed were disposed in a mass grave, the headstones dumped into the Delaware River, where they are still visible at low tide.19 According to Temple University’s account, the bodies of Conwell and his wife were then moved twice more to retain the physical presence of the founder: they were “returned” to Temple from the temporary site in 1959 and buried on campus, then moved again in 1968 to a more scenic location, a garden funded by alumni. The university explains that it is “impossible to dismiss the astounding amount of hope and opportunity Conwell offered to countless thousands of men and women in his lifetime. That hope and opportunity remain today so firmly a part of the Temple mission.”20 The idea that the Conwells were “returned” to the university from Monument Cemetery suggests institutions’ desire to own their leaders, or, at the very least, the memory of them. Conwell’s on-campus grave signals this dead man’s would-be approval of Patrick O’Connor’s leadership. Temple’s removal of the Conwells, and superimposition of O’Connor, demonstrates that trust in an institution’s leadership requires material evidence of agreement.
Today, the front of the plaza is emblazoned with encomiastic inscription about O’Connor—and his wife—that seem to anticipate the board member’s own mortality. The front of the plaza features a large, predatory-looking owl in mid-takeoff, its talons clasped around a large university-font T. (The owl is the university’s mascot.) At the base of the owl statue is an inscription that celebrates O’Connor’s generosity and highlights his achievements at Temple:
Temple University proudly dedicates this plaza in the heart of campus in honor of Patrick and Marie O’Connor / Their inspired generosity and distinguished leadership create life-changing opportunities for our students and others. Patrick J. O’Connor joined the Temple University Board of Trustees in 1971 as the youngest trustee in the university’s history and served until 1984. He returned to the board in 2001 and was elected chairman in 2009. In 2013 he received an honorary degree from Temple University.
The plaque roughly checks off the list of “goods” that encomia, as summarized by Pernot, emphasize: exterior goods (birth, education, wealth, power, success), bodily goods (beauty, health, ability), goods of the soul (virtues, virtuous actions).21 The plaque states that it is authored by Temple University and makes no mention of O’Connor’s own funding of the plaza.22 Taking into account Pernot’s summary, we might say that O’Connor’s exterior goods are his wealth, as exhibited by his generosity; his wife, as exhibited by her contribution to his success; his popularity, as evidenced by his election to chair; and his success, as evidenced by his honorary degree. His bodily goods include his longevity on the board and the young age at which he ascended to this leadership position. The goods of the soul include his “distinguished leadership” and “inspired generosity.” The plaque evaluates O’Connor’s generosity as extraordinary and normalizes his autonomy and individual excellence.
Roller’s heuristic for exemplarity prompts a more pernicious reading of the plaza: the deed is the overwriting of Conwell’s legacy by O’Connor. The evaluation is that material rewriting, as we saw with the demolition of Monument Cemetery and the schlepping around of Conwell’s remains, is necessary and welcomed for the good of the university, even if it hurts those who came before. The fact that the plaza is intentionally designed as a destination for students and faculty—unavoidably right in the middle of campus, across from the library—demonstrates that the university community is obliged to commemorate potentially harmful transitions that benefit the university. Faculty leaders are also proximal to O’Connor’s standard. The names of faculty award winners line the inside of the plaza, etched into the marble sides of the garden. The words GREAT TEACHERS are repeated, with the names of the winners from that year below. While the great teachers are not explicitly celebrated for their financial autonomy and dedication to university expansion, the presence of their names in the same space as Conwell’s grave and O’Connor’s inscriptions suggests that they approve of these values, even if that is not the case.
While Princeton and Temple have very different campuses, with drastically different institutional governance structures, both built environments support the orthodoxy that universities are stewarded by executives who are natural leaders, financially autonomous, and unfettered in their emotional, intellectual, and financial debts to others. Both sites of awe are expected to be taken up uncritically by the university community. How faculty might deviate from these exemplars is the subject of our final section in this chapter.
Call My Name, Governance
Rhondda Robinson Thomas’s Call My Name, Clemson begins with Thomas’s desire to reinstate her own family’s contributions to Clemson University. Call My Name, Clemson documents stories in a call-and-response format, with history of individuals’ contributions in the first part of the chapter and present-day university community members’ responses in the second. The call-and-response format, which Thomas details as central to the African American oral tradition, is the basis of the book.23 It is also reminiscent of the calling that occurs in epideictic discourse. Monuments to university leaders do not directly impact the outcome of a bylaw revision or explicitly communicate a committee’s charges. Faculty considering whether to dodge a new committee assignment likely do not loiter in memorial gardens to find the answer. However, monuments and sites of awe related to university leaders hold out an ideal of governance leaders. The deeds depicted in these sites of awe suggest dispositions that a governance leader—a committee chair, a faculty administrator, a reviewer of a tenure file—might adopt in defining moments. Exemplars of executive status influence how governance operates because they normalize who is welcome. These exemplars require serious consideration for those invested in strengthening shared governance, particularly those who want to break the seal of spectatorship surrounding it.
One way to break the spectator seal that celebrates “the good man” as governance leader is to consider how the institution itself remembers and memorializes governance. The two examples here demonstrate how governance can be mistaken for a coterie of the president and a few choice faculty. This view inaccurately and unhelpfully simplifies the extent to which faculty can and do, at some institutions, play a part in steering the university. Noticing the kinds of governance leaders that are already celebrated suggests that we might also notice the kinds of governance leaders who are not celebrated, their contributions hidden from view. Institutions regularly use awards, rankings, and accreditation as an impetus for celebration of what is already entrenched. Can faculty senates or other governance entities use awards in a similar fashion, but to call attention to those who are not typically celebrated? Institutional histories like Call My Name are rich models for reclaiming governance as a site of participation of varied actors and making available for noticing the many styles, situations, and representations of leadership. Naming committees within shared governance systems, which are often charged with reviewing building, award, and other names, particularly those from donors, are another opportunity for traction.24 Creating such a committee, or insisting that faculty are on this committee, if it exists, are first steps. In the next chapter, we will explore how, at institutions that aspire to be elite, authorship of shared governance documents is a process so appointed and rarified that it nearly authors the system out of existence.