[Note: I wrote this post in May 2020, in sequestration during COVID but at the same time embroiled in dispute at Wayne State University over the events described here. I did not publish it; I was silenced. I want to take up this history now, five years after its onset and four years after this withheld post. I will discuss the particular mechanism for silencing in writings that follow. I was successful in countering the act of silencing, but being enmeshed in a series of union grievances and the subsequent arbitration, I had no choice but to withhold discussion. As well, “silence” may have been the best response to the overwhelming torrent of falsehoods brought against me; perhaps all would quiet down. Or perhaps not—perhaps what I would experience is a withering endgame, a vendetta whose motives and content have long since left the station, hoping that I would eventually tire and give up the fight, leaving my teaching career in ruins. That is the situation in which I find myself, and that I will try to address—with the intent not to continue indefinitely but to end this bad history—in posts to come.]

[May 2020] About one year ago, on 22 April 2019, I was nearing the end of Winter Semester at Wayne State University—reading papers, getting in grades, and looking ahead to an unplanned summer—when a public social media campaign against me, and my work as a teacher and mentor, was set in motion that would, in digital form, go viral and spread to the far ends of the globe. I would not become aware of the campaign until a day later, when a friend at some distance wrote asking, What is this about you and Wayne State, it’s all over the internet. And so it was. A series of events unfolded—better, exploded—that quickly reached a peak of hysteria: an intense call-out and shaming campaign the likes of which has rarely been seen. It is still unresolved; in fact it has been renewed. My purpose here is to describe and comment on the public aspect of this campaign—far beyond anything confined to my work at Wayne State University—as until now I have believed it to be impossible to do so.

FERPA and FIRE

What changed that is a clearer understanding of the misuse of FERPA at Wayne State—the Family Educational Rights Protection Act (1974)—after a thorough analysis by the public advocacy group FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education [now Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression; see here]. As a public advocacy group, FIRE is interested in questions of academic speech from a rights-based perspective. While this may be linked to “Free Speech” issues regarding high-profile, obnoxious spokespersons from the Alt Right or worse, that is not the main emphasis of their work—which is largely to scrutinize the micropolitics of university policies that, in the aggregate, have worked to severely curtail Academic Freedom and protected speech over the last two decades. Their mission is charged “to defend and sustain the individual rights of students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, [and] legal equality”—principles they see as at risk primarily due to the overreach of administrators. FIRE had a central role in promoting the Chicago Statement, which, while advocating speech in general, also decries expression “that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes [. . .] harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests”—each of which is at issue in the acts of speech I am discussing here.

On 20 April 2020 FIRE sent a 23-page legal analysis of Wayne State’s misuse and overextension of FERPA to the president of the university and other administrators. After a pallid response from the university, they published it online (redacted version, here; response here). FIRE looked at WSU’s official FERPA policy (here), but also its use in relation to the public social media campaign against me. FIRE clearly shows that FERPA was used—at several key moments—to silence me from responding to the media campaign because it was raised by students, about whom, I was told, I could not comment in response. The students, however, were exercising protected speech, I was also told; they could say anything they wanted. FIRE concludes:

FIRE is concerned that Wayne State continues to invoke FERPA improperly in ways calculated to silence Watten’s speech. FIRE is more concerned, however, that Watten’s experience may not be isolated. At other institutions, we have seen administrators invoke FERPA in contexts unrelated to its scope or purpose, generally to paper over institutional wrongdoing. Wayne State’s current posture finds it on the path to joining these institutions.

I will not discuss any internal FERPA issues, though they were crucial in denying me Due Process. What I want to chronicle is the sequence of public acts beginning with the first social media posts, and the constraints placed on my response. Such public acts include posts, petitions, blogs, articles, letters, and statements made public by the students themselves. In so doing, the students were participating in a public campaign they believed to be guaranteed by the First Amendment. If it is possible to identify them in these documents, it is because they themselves provided identifying information. Nothing I discuss here discloses educational records maintained at Wayne State University—the proper legal definition of a FERPA document. In so doing, I am pushing back—after FIRE’s analysis—against the overreach of WSU’s use of FERPA to limit or cancel my ability to respond to what was said about me. What I want to document here is a year-long public campaign, organized by the students, to call out, mob, and cancel. [4/24: That campaign, however, continued over the past year, as I only recently found out.]

Social media post #1

The first post in the social media campaign was time stamped 1:56 PM, Monday, April 22.[1] It was posted about twenty minutes after a public interaction initiated by the student, outside the Maccabees Building (where my department is located at Wayne State). I had been having an informal conversation with the chair about my graduate seminar grading standards. The student broke in and claimed that I was a bully and wanted to flunk him out of the program. The post, it is evident, was not written on the spur of the moment but was prepared earlier for release. This unacknowledged motive for the public media campaign is readable on a page created by the student as part of their campaign, in what amounts to an online dossier.[2]

The content of post #1 is entirely false: I do not “groom” and “bully” students, and there were no accusations against me at Wayne State University, and particularly no Title IX charges. The term grooming is sexually suggestive slander, likely taken from the Avital Ronell case, but having meanings that range from personal hygiene to selective mentoring to sexual predation. Once used, however, its misuse proliferates. Bullying is a slander word as well, open to all kinds of interpretation in the absence of any context, and is being used to impugn my objectivity in fulfilling my professional role—grading papers and assigning grades. This motive is entirely missing from the students’ claims against me and is the keystone of their dishonest campaign.

Social media post #2

The second post was uploaded about an hour later, at 3:00 PM.[3] The post reprints post #1 but frames it with my correspondence with African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey, uploaded at Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, which I comment on at length [here]. Post #2 claims that my past support for Mackey’s work is a duplicitous gesture, with racial overtones: “There is an invisible price-tag attached to Barrett’s support.” By analogy, my support for students would be “with strings”: the “grooming” in the first post is the duplicitous support, and the “bullying” its withdrawal. The debate with Mackey, in any event, concerned politics of affiliation and the poetic use of “myth.” If it was heated, it was on matters of principle—not race. Race is simply being used as a gratuitous call-out to add to the first complaint.

This post refers to a situation in our department where students felt they needed a “saint” to protect them in a climate of faculty antagonism. The post is a direct reflection of the insecurity such a climate generates. But whatever the nature of these complaints, I should have heard about them, but did not. That they were not addressed, and had to go public, is the point: an institutional culture that encourages insecurity, and a department climate of toxicity sabotage anything like openness and transparency, the responsibility to talk matters through. This climate of negativity leads to the fear of “retaliation,” at the outset of the post. A circular dynamic repeats over and over again: fear of retaliation mobilizes preemptive defense. But there is a manipulative side to this calling out as well: to protect the first student from evaluation, as the online dossier reveals.

Department reaction

I was unaware that the two posts had gone viral until I was told the next day. I went to the chair’s office (3 PM, April 23); they downloaded the second post. We discussed what to do and I was encouraged to file a complaint. Earlier that semester, I had been instructed on the use of such procedures and was given a manual of Student Conduct policies, with the relevant sections tagged. I consulted with the Student Conduct office several times, to seek their advice but with no intention to proceed. With the onset of the social media campaign, the public form it took, and my knowledge of the real reason behind it, I had no other recourse to get the students to stop. The Student Conduct office responded by opening two complaints, which went out the same day [publicized by the students on the “blog”]. In terms of the social media campaign, the result could not have been more perfect. I was then accused of retaliation; by being drawn into a conflict, I could no longer be seen as objective; and I would be relieved of my responsibility (and right) to grade as a result. The right to grade, it may be added, is seen by AAUP as a protected Academic Freedom [here].

The department response, at least initially, was as shocked and horrified as I was. That did not last, however. I was told by the chair, on advice of University Counsel, that the students had a right to say what they were saying; I replied that the First Amendment does not include slander, harassment, hate speech, or shouting fire in a crowded theater, as everyone knows. The next day, Wednesday, April 24, with the academic issue still unresolved but the social media campaign intensifying, and spreading throughout the graduate cohort and faculty—I discussed responding to it on social media with the chair and wrote a short statement on Facebook that I intended to send to the faculty as well. The chair’s immediate response was to shut me down: “Do not send this message over the Department listserv. Do not publicize the misconduct charges of students over our university system since that would be a violation of FERPA and may open us to liability. . . . Please confirm that you understand not to post the message or use the department listserv for this purpose” (24 April, 11:31 PM; FIRE, 16).

I was thus explicitly told not to communicate with the faculty in my defense; referring to the public student campaign would be a violation of FERPA and “may open us to liability.” This statement is a total misunderstanding of the nature of FERPA and what counts as a “student record,” which is a document maintained by the university and has no relation to the public social media campaign undertaken by the students (FIRE, 15–18). Facebook and Twitter posts are no sense documents maintained by Wayne State University, and I have every right to respond to them—along with the freedom to write to my colleagues about what is going on. This is the neoliberal university at its administrative height—using spurious policy mandates to control faculty by denying their speech—while giving students, seen as clients and/or consumers, the right to say anything they want. Up to this point, this kind of flame has been largely confined to Rate My Professor, but it can now happen on social media, with greater effect. This is a situation that threatens anyone who teaches; it is truly a matter of public concern.

Not only did the chair come down on my right to speak, University Counsel did as well. On Thursday, April 25, having no support from the university, I contacted my lawyer, who sent a “cease and desist” letter on April 26. That same day, he received an email from University Counsel, with a screen shot of three of my Facebook posts that responded obliquely to the media campaign, in language befitting the mob: “This sort of thing violates the Federal Family Rights and Privacy Act. If he is your client, he will wish to know that the Feds have little sense of humor in this area” (FIRE, 15–16). I was being threatened with action by the “Feds” for responding to a public social media campaign! The intent of FERPA is that universities maintain records; it is not about disciplining faculty speech on social media. As FIRE points out, an individual faculty has never been charged with an offense by the federal government—this is because FERPA is not concerned with individuals, only with institutions and only by withholding funding: “FERPA has only one sanction—the total loss of federal education funding—and it has never been invoked for any reason” (FIRE, 16). This attack on my speech is, again, a truly public matter.

Social media campaign and “mobbing”

Within hours, the public social media campaign took off. When I caught up with it the next day, it had burst out of Facebook and gone viral on the open format of Twitter. Students and others having no knowledge of the true motives for the posts could read them in any manner they liked, in solidarity with the cohort or by projection of their own. This is the basic mechanism of gossip, as in the game of “telephone,” where partial understanding is taken up and spread on the basis of what is not known or communicated [here]. It is safe to say that none of those immediately responding had any sense of the specific issues that motivated the posts, except for what the two students were telling them. There had been, to my knowledge, a consistent campaign of proselytizing in the department through the Winter Semester, with its origins in classroom events in the Fall and particularly in my graduate seminar, which I have partly discussed [here].

This inflamed response happened after several volatile incidents over the academic year that mobilized the students as a group. I will not go into detail, except to note that the first of these, early in the school year, involved mishandling—sending to the wrong listserv—an assessment document by another faculty that may have been a “student record” but probably was not. The resulting student protest was advertised on social media. The second occurred around the Chernobyl-like meltdown of my graduate seminar, along with volatile student-to-student interactions (not concerning me) outside of class that resulted in WSU Police being called [here]. The third also involved a complaint to WSU Police over another student-to-student interaction (again not involving me) that required legal remedies. A student chose to publicize their case on social media, and a sizable group joined in at a sequence of court dates. I do not know if this public matter, for which I gave testimony for the accused, is resolved, but at the time it was emotionally intense. [4/24: I was told by their lawyer that the accused sued and received a settlement in their favor, from the complainant and a nonstudent.] The fourth episode was the social media campaign against me that began with the two posts but had been prepared by events, interactions, and gossip over months. This entire series of events needs to be taken into account to understand why the emotional stakes were so high. What occurred was truly a group catharsis that had built up, for disparate reasons, over the preceding year.

To be contd.

[As of May 2020, I wrote: “To be continued with discussion of the online blog, the student petition, the first article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the outside investigation, more social media campaigning, vandalism to my WSU office and mailbox, false statements circulated to the Academic Senate, a second article in the Chronicle, the petition to ban me from the Louisville Conference, public support against my being banned, and FIRE’s support of my case.” In April 2024, I do not have the time or bandwidth to take up the intervening episodes of the unfolding saga, but I will. Here, I direct the interested reader to the next post in the series, the situation at present.]

Notes and links

1. The posts may be readily found by searching X (formerly Twitter), where they were widely shared.
2. See the statements put up online at the anonymously published “blog,” bwrecords2019.
3. As with n. 1.

Links: Page 01, “Breaking My Own Story”
Page 02, “What Is Mobbing?”
Page 03, “The Aye of Poetry”
Page 04, “My Literary Controversies”
Page 05, “Questions of Unreason”
Page 06, “Defend Louisville!”
Page 07, “Difficult Speech @ Louisville”
Page 08, “Nonsite Speech”
Page 09, “Archive News”
Page 11, “Endgame Notes”