The firing of the basketball coach at Rutgers University: Who controls the narrative?

This past week Rutgers University fired its basketball coach, Mike Rice, and pressured its athletic director to resign. For our European colleagues, Rutgers is the major public university in the state of New Jersey. An assistant basketball coach for the university’s basketball team, Erick Murdock, unhappy over what he described as his dismissal ten months ago, created video footage of Coach Rice hitting players during practice and calling them “faggots” and “homos.” ESPN got hold of the video, most likely from Murdock’s lawyer, and the university, upon learning that ESPN was about to file a report, released the video to the public. The video created a public relations scandal leading to Rice’s firing and the athletic director’s resignation. Some faculty members asked that the University's president, Robert Barchi, resign. Readers interested in seeing an extract from the video can go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElDvw7D3DDI

The press focused on the video and the coach’s distasteful if not abusive behavior. But journalists paid little to attention to a report the university’s outside counsel wrote several months before the video’s release. (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/2013-04-05-rutgers-special-report-with-accepted-changes.pdf) The report, conveys a much more nuanced picture of Rice’s behavior and its meaning. In the popular press Murdock was a whistle blower who was fired after he complained about the Coach’s abusive behavior. But nothing could be farther from the truth. This gap sheds important light on the challenges we face in situating information in its appropriate context. In fact, this case suggests that the "information revolution" strips information from its context.  This is why executives can no longer control the public narrative about the institutions they lead. Their leadership is jeopardized.

Let’s consider four features of the popular narrative about Coach Rice’s behavior. My goal is to not defend or condemn his behavior. Instead, I want to show that when we consider the context of a seemingly straightforward narrative, -- a whistle blowing hero brings down a villain-- its simplicity and evident standing as a morality tale is undermined. We have to ask, “What is real?”  Below, I introduce each section of my analysis by first  italicizing the feature of the narrative I propose to examine.   

Feature 1: The video sequence shows a consistent pattern of abuse: The videos purportedly show that Coach Rice was consistently abusive to players during practice sessions. This conception is based on thirty minutes of an edited tape based on the tapes of over 50 practice sessions, or less that one half of one percent of the total practice time over Rice’s tenure. 18 minutes of the 30-minute clip highlight the coach’s course and offensive language. A few of the clips in the video are repeated and no clips show what precedes or comes after a particular moment, for example, the coach throwing a basketball at a player.

As the report notes, two assistant coaches and one associate head coach who viewed the 30 minute clip, “Pointed out that the scenes depicted on the DVD were out of context, that some of the scenes actually showed Coach Rice playfully kicking a player in the buttocks for doing something positive, and that the 25 DVDs (from which the video clip was created) represented a very small fraction of all of the practices and workouts held by Coach Rice since the Fall of 2010.” Moreover, as the report makes clear, all practices were open to the public. “Despite visits by hundreds of recruits, family members, outside coaches and others, none of those persons complained to the Athletic Director, that Coach Rice’s behavior in practice was improper.”

Murdock’s lawyer had obtained the footage of 50 practices from the university by filing a “freedom of information" claim. He edited them to produce a rhetorical or persuasive argument, rather than to compile an accurate record of the Coach’s behavior. The editing succeeded, since it creates the impression of a continuous barrage of abuse rather than widely separated incidents.  Journalists, who are typically skeptical, if not cynical, overlooked this commonplace use of photos and videos in an era of Photoshop and desktop editing software.

Feature 2: Eric Murdock was fired because he threatened to “blow the whistle” on Coach Rice’s behavior. Murdock was not in fact fired. Instead, the athletic director, Coach Rice’s boss, did not extend his contract. Coach Rice in fact was not authorized to fire anyone. The director closed out Murdock’s contract because he had failed to show up for work at a basketball summer camp one particular Friday. Murdock had asked Coach Rice for permission to take off on that day. Rice said no, and when Murdock failed to appear, Rice insisted that they meet the next Monday to discuss his absence. Murdock did not come to that Monday meeting and so the director let his contract lapse.

As the report states, “When interviewed, Eric Murdock (EM) stated that his ‘firing’ was directly linked to EM leaving the Coach Rice camp without permission and that Coach Rice ‘fired’ him immediately upon learning of EM’s unauthorized absence from the camp. Thus, (even) accepting EM’s version of the facts,” --(LH: he was not in fact fired)—“he was not fired for “whistle-blowing” activity, but for his insubordination with respect to the Coach Rice camp.”

There was in fact no reason for Murdock to blow the whistle on Rice, since the athletic director had already warned Rice about being too harsh with certain players, and reprimanded him for losing his temper with a referee during a game. Rice took this feedback seriously since as the report goes on to note, the associate head coach, the athletic director, the school’s sports psychologist and Murdock himself, “Observed that Coach Rice’s conduct had improved when others advised him that his overly critical style was counterproductive for certain players.” It seems reasonable to conclude that the Murdock’s lawyer deployed the “whistle blowing” cultural trope for his client’s advantage. Indeed, the FBI is investigating whether or not Murdock can be charged with extortion since, as several news outlets reported, his lawyer sent Rutgers a letter requesting $950,00 to settle his employment grievance against Rutgers, else he file a lawsuit. The lawsuit was in fact filed in early April after Rutgers, as we noted above, released the video to the public in advance of ESPN’s report. 

Feature 3: Coach Rice verbally and physically abused his players. One question the report raises is whether or not Rice deployed his temper, insults and physicality out of rage, or purposefully, as a method of instruction. The distinction is important because if he was impelled by rage, he can be dangerous to others, while if he was insulting for a purpose, it suggests he can control his behavior. The report notes, “All of the players and coaches with whom we spoke also conveyed to us that they fully understood that the “chaos” created by Coach Rice in practice was not mean-spirited, but was designed to prepare the players to become more competitive and to remain calm when similar “chaos” would occur in their games. Indeed, newspaper accounts at the time reflected comments from Rutgers basketball players, stating their understanding of Coach Rice’s philosophy; that they cannot control everything that might happen during a basketball game, but they can control their response to those events.”

There is in fact a strong cultural trope about demanding teachers in many fields who are harsh with students in the service of their learning. In college sports, such wildly successful bullies as Woody Hayes, who coached football for Ohio State University, and Bob Knight, who coached basketball at Indiana University, were lionized before they were fired for their abusive behavior. I am not defending such behavior, but simply noting that there is a cultural context particularly, but not only within sports, that prizes teachers whose intensity is the basis for their competitiveness but can also may in some cases trigger their abusiveness.

In fact, many students admire tough college teachers. A business school dean cites a passage wherein a student at the Harvard Business School writes admiringly of a teacher named Cooperman;

“This guy was a true hard- liner. In his class, chip shots (lazy comments) would be taboo, and absences the kiss of death. He made this second policy unmistakably clear on the first day of class…It was quickly apparent that any vapid observation in Cooperman’s class invited disaster. Our other professors had tended to let most comments pass with a nod or a brief editorial aside. Cooperman wasn’t like this. He was more likely to interrogate students after they made a point, pushing their analysis further, and gauging how deep their understanding of the case went. His style bordered on confrontation, and intimidated a number of people. . ‘This,’ I said to anyone who’d put up with my sermonizing, ‘is how classes here were meant to be taught!’” (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=294872)

The belief that harshness is potentially educative, (for adults only, not for children who thrive on love), is based on the plausible idea that  young adults are preparing for a competitive and unforgiving environment in which neither their friends nor their enemies will excuse lapses or incompetence. In this sense the teacher is a stand-in for the hostility the student will face in the future and must learn to cope with. Looked at psychologically, we can say that the coach or teacher represents and personalizes the indifference the student must ultimately contend with. The psychoanalytically inclined reader will recognize this as the teacher’s “superego” functioning. There is of course room for debate on this issue, and certainly coaches and teachers may go overboard, humiliating their students. Indeed, one study of 206 college athletes in the US found that 22% of respondents reportedly experienced coaching techniques that were verbally or mentally abusive ( Psychology of Sport and Exercise 12 (2011) 213-221). But the popular rendition of the Coach Rice story precludes considering these complexities.

Feature 4: Coach Rice’s homophobic comments demeaned gays, much as calling African Americans “niggers” or Jews “kikes” would. In the current context, when there is so much contention in the U.S. about gay rights, particularly their right to state-recognized marriage, the use of terms like “homo” and “fagot” feels very offensive and tone deaf. Yet even here on an issue that seems so black and white, there is a cultural context to consider.

In an ethnographic study of adolescent culture in a U.S. high school, “Hey Dude you’re a Fag,” the author C.J. Pascoe found that when boys used the word “Fag” they were policing one another’s masculinity, not insulting gays. When Pascoe interviewed these boys many noted that they would never call a gay person a “fag,” nor would they ever insult a lesbian with foul language. (p. 57) They were focusing on masculinity not sexual orientation. One hypothesis is that Coach Rice was reproducing this playground or adolescent culture hoping to stimulate his players’ sense of their masculinity and their willingness to defend it.

This understanding does not excuse Rice’s tone-deaf stance and his insensitivity to his own players’ feelings about the use of such terms. Some may have been more adult than he was, and did not need to re-experience a high school gym setting in college.

Moreover, in September of 2010 a Rutgers gay freshman committed suicide. His roommate secretly recorded a sexual encounter he had in their dorm room and then embarrassed him by posting the video on the Internet This was a traumatic event for the institution and of course a tragedy for the freshman’s family.

This suggests that just as journalists and others did not take account of the cultural context that shaped Rice’s behavior, Rice did not take account of the institutional context that certainly impinged on his own choices and freedom of action. Similarly, even though the outside counsel’s report was thorough and level headed, we could say that its authors’ sense of context was narrowed by their preoccupation with the narrow legal question of whether or not Murdock had been the victim of a “hostile work environment.” If he was not, his grievance was illegitimate and Rutgers owed him nothing. But this brief turned out to be too narrow. The report’s authors did not see the larger context, the institution’s sensitivity to gay rights that reshaped the meaning of the Coach’s actions. This is why they so confidently and summarily dismissed Murdock’s claims without forewarning their clients about possible trouble ahead.  

Moreover, Robert Barchi, the university’s president was pilloried when he admitted to not viewing the video after his subordinates first brought it to his attention. Yet in his context -- he was dealing with a very complicated and politicized merger of several medical-school campuses in the state -- the Rice affair was a distraction, best managed by his subordinates. Yet it led faculty members and others to call for his resignation. The state’s governor, who was depending on Barchi to implement the merger, called Rice an “animal,” a verbal concession to popular anger, which in turn allowed him to protect the president.

The story I am telling here is a story of contexts that go missing, draining meaning everywhere. Moreover, we lose meaning more readily when an issue’s “escape velocity” is high; for example, as is the case here, a video goes ‘viral,” and its subject is sensitive.

Futurists once presumed that the information revolution would give rise to a “systems view” of experience. This meant that we would have access to the resources and technologies we needed to consider all experience in context. But as the case of the viral video suggests, the information revolution, enables people to create “mash-ups” --cultural products that integrate information from disparate and often disconnected sources. Think of them as technological collages. The resulting product creates its own context, since the sources of information disappear from view. This means that people are able to use information to project or tap into fantasies, in this case, the fantasy of the oppressed whistle blower calling abusive authorities to account.

Perhaps we have entered the age of the “simulacrum,” in which, as the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard notes, the copy or the image becomes the “real,” or as he terms it, the “hyperreal.” This is one reason why leaders must be so attuned to the stories people tell about their institutions. Yet as the Rutgers case suggest, it is difficult if not impossible to anticipate what these stories might be. Traditional public relations practice, which rests on the idea that institutions can control these narratives, is in this sense outmoded. This is one reason why leaders today focus more on crisis management and organizational resilience than on “controlling the message.”

There is little doubt that the new information and communication technologies help us hold institutions accountable. Consider how advocates held manufacturers accountable for sweatshop conditions in their suppliers’ factories. Or, how dissidents in undemocratic societies use twitter and mobile phones to coordinate their political activities. But these same technologies blur the distinction between what is real and what is fantasized. They rob information of its context and make the search for truth more difficult and more perilous.  

A vote of no-confidence in the President of New York University: Exploring the dynamics.

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The Arts and Sciences faculty members of New York University (NYU) have voted to consider a vote of “no confidence” in their president, John Sexton, in the coming weeks. Sexton, by all accounts, has been an extraordinary fundraiser and has launched a major effort to position NYU as a global university with branch campuses and study sites throughout the world. He has, without a doubt, raised the standing of the faculty, attracting worldwide talent, Nobel Prize winners, and superb medical researchers. The school also attracts undergraduates who believe that, despite the high tuition, an NYU education in the heart of downtown Manhattan is a plumb opportunity. As one report notes, “Sexton has also overseen growth in the university’s profile. In 2004, he announced a plan to increase the size of the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences by 20 percent – an additional 124 positions. Three NYU faculty members have won the Nobel Prize in Economics since 2001. Applications grew to more than 44,000 in 2012, the fifth consecutive year of record applications.” So, why the vote?

There is to be sure, one very contentious issue. Starting in 2002, Sexton “identified a lack of physical space as a critical issue to be addressed. That led to a plan called ‘NYU2031’ in honor of the university’s bicentennial – to develop 1.9 million square feet on two blocks in Greenwich Village owned by the institution.” Many faculty members, close to 40% of whom live in the area, believe that the construction, which will last almost two decades, will disrupt life in the neighborhood significantly, and deprive them of much valued parkland and gym facilities. They also believe that the breadth and scope of the building plan is both unwarranted and too costly, and will require NYU to raise tuition to levels that will make it uncompetitive with its peers. 

One question I want to raise is whether or not this issue alone accounts for the faculty’s discontent or whether, instead, it has come to symbolize some wider anxieties about Sexton’s leadership and the institution’s direction. 

Consider NYU’s “business model.” Its endowment at $2.5 billion is small relative to its competitors.  Columbia University, its uptown neighbor has an endowment of $7.8 billion, Yale has $20 billion, and Harvard, $32 billion. NYU has grown rapidly in size and prestige by charging high tuition, limiting the amount of financial aid (scholarships) it offers, and spending the funds it raises on facilities and programs. The business model in effect is “tuition driven.” By contrast, “Princeton University funds nearly half of its operating budget with its endowment, while at NYU, the figure is 5 percent.” Moreover, in order to amass the capital it has needed to increase the faculty, expand its footprint, and establish a reputation as an academic powerhouse, it has to admit a higher percent of its applicants. Currently, NYU has over 22,000 undergraduates and accepts close to 1/3 of its applicants, while, as one NYU professor notes, “…the Harvards, Princetons, Columbias, have fewer than 6,500 undergraduates and admit only 10%.” Even though NYU is not nearly as selective as some of its peers, its location in downtown Manhattan, (Greenwich Village) its scale, and the reputation of its faculty leads students to pay high tuition to attend.

The same professor, in assessing NYU’s real estate expansions plans, goes on to ask, “What makes NYU think that bigger is always better?" But ironically, John Sexton did not invent the “bigger is better” strategy. Rather, this phrase accurately describes NYU’s strategy since its rebirth in the 1960s when it nearly went bankrupt. NYU was then a low prestige, “commuter (non-residential) school" when it incurred enrollment declines, and a growing deficit. Under the then President John Bradamus’ leadership, NYU sold its Bronx campus (at the time, a secondary borough of New York city) and “rebranded itself as the school in the heart of downtown.” Bradamas launched a billion-dollar fundraising campaign, “but contrary to conventional doctrine, NYU socked little of the money away, instead going on a spending spree, expanding the university's Greenwich Village footprint, (in lower Manhattan) and upgrading its existing facilities.” Sexton in this sense has been pursuing a strategy – using current income from tuition and fundraising to grow in scale and thus in prestige-- that Bradamus established half-a-century ago. Moreover, this strategy has been to date an unqualified success. So once again we can ask, why the discontent?

Perhaps one realistic worry is that the strategy of “bigger is better” rests on the ability and willingness of students and their parents to take on significant debt to finance their NYU education. This is the only way in which NYU can charge high tuition to finance its growth. Otherwise, an NYU education would be unaffordable for all but the very rich. As one faculty member noted, “Our average graduate owes around $41,000—some 40% above the national average.” In fact as one-report notes, “NYU creates more student debt than any other nonprofit college or university in the country.” While student debt does not formally show up on NYU’s balance sheet -- students borrow from private lenders and the federal government --if we integrated students’ balance sheets with NYU’s we would most likely see a system that is substantially leveraged. Moreover, we have learned since the financial collapse of 2008, that overleveraged institutions are at risk of failing spectacularly. This suggests that the business model of growing prestige by growing volume may have reached its limits. This is one reason that faculty members from the University's economics department and the business school worry that the debt NYU will incur to finance its real estate expansion in downtown Manhattan will push tuition up to unsustainable levels.

One counter argument to this grim scenario, is that in in its next phase of development, NYU will grow in scale by growing its foreign branch campuses and study sites. It opened a campus in Abu Dhabi in 2012 and is opening up one in Shanghai. “The campus in Abu Dhabi initially attracted an elite group of students -- on a 1600-point scale, the median SAT score for this year's entering class was 1460 -- from all over the globe. The 151 students in the Class of 2016 come from 65 countries. All told, there are currently about 450 students, of which the two largest groups are North Americans (25 percent) and UAE nationals (7 percent). Once the college moves to its permanent campus, under construction on Saadiyat Island, the plan is to grow undergraduate enrollment to 2,000 to 2,200.” The royal family has subsidized this development. As Sexton noted, “We couldn’t do it if the assets were not provided.”

But however successful, the campus’ small scale means that it cannot contribute significantly to ongoing revenue. As one professor noted, “It's just not scaled right…NYU Abu Dhabi is a small liberal arts college. If they want to have it, fine, but it's a tiny fraction of what this major research university with professional schools does." It is also unlikely that the royal family, which was eager to establish a university as a tool for building a modern economy, would be willing to subsidize tuition and expenses over the longer run to support NYU’s flagship campus in New York City. Indeed, NYU’s Tisch School of Arts’ branch campus in Singapore closed down recently, because the government would not commit to subsidizing its operations over the longer run. 

This suggests that the faculty’s underlying worry is that NYU’s business model is broken and that no substitute has emerged. I think this worry is realistic. The question is how can they, or should they respond?

In this context, it is interesting to look at the document that the faculty released, some months prior to their decision to take a vote, in which they described their “ideal president.” They suggested that such a president, and by inference unlike John Sexton, would make the following commitments. Below is an extract from their document. 

“New York University, as one of the nation’s leading universities, needs a president who is deeply committed to:

The Ethos and Practice of shared governance who therefore supports

a.     The right and obligation of faculty to define and shape all new academic and curricular initiatives, including those at global locations.

b.     The right and obligation of faculty to be represented on the Board of Trustees.

c.     The right and obligation of faculty to participate fully in choosing new presidents and provosts.

d.    The right and obligation of faculty to serve, as elected representatives, not as ad- hoc appointees on top-level committees.

At first glance, these requirements describe a president who believes in shared governance, that is a process of ongoing and organized consultation between the faculty and the administration. But point “d,” if implemented, would represent a radical departure from customary practice. It suggests that the president would not and could not appoint faculty members to committees, or even request their participation. Instead, faculty members would elect their representatives to committees, whose primary obligation would then be to their constituencies. This is radical proposal because if implemented, it risks politicizing decision-making significantly. Faculty members would, after all have different interests and could hardly be expected to speak with one voice. Instead, different faculty coalitions, tenured versus untenured, medical school faculty versus arts and science faculty, would vie for influence. Moreover, if implemented, all high stakes administrative decisions would be subject to faculty votes. This would certainly upend the customary arrangement in which authority is vested first and foremost in the board of trustees, not in elected bodies.  I don’t mean to evaluate this proposal here, but just to note that it is quite radical in its conception.

One question is whether or not the faculty authors of this document even expected that this proposal would be taken seriously, or whether, instead, they hoped simply to be provocative. Some evidence for the latter idea is another clause in the same document in which the authors describe a president committed to reducing the salaries of senior administrators by, “at least 25%.” Again, I am not evaluating this idea.  Rather, I suggest that the board and the administration would regard this idea as implausible and possibly reckless and that the faculty authors knew this. This suggests that they included it in their document, not to establish a framework for negotiation, but rather as a provocation.

Indeed, as several journalists have already reported, the Board of Trustees strongly supports President Sexton and will in all likelihood disregard a vote of no confidence by the Arts and Science faculty. As one reporter notes, “Meanwhile, Sexton retains the full support from the Board of Trustees, a group comprised mostly of NYU alumni whose main responsibilities include fundraising for NYU, determining university policy and electing the university president.” The reporter goes on to note that that the board chair, Martin Lipton, released a formal statement to the Washington Square News, a local newspaper, saying, “We see a strong, thriving, advancing university under [Sexton’s] leadership.”  This suggests strongly that the board will ignore the faculty, in effect calling its bluff.  This is likely to reduce rather than increase faculty influence and power.

This point of view is consistent with another curious moment in the unfolding of this story.  In a (video) interview with the President, a New York Times reporter suggests that the faculty was voting to unseat him. Her phrase is; "looking back on a vote designed to unseat you..." Sexton interrupts at this point and in a quizzical tone, while almost whispering, asks the reporter “why do you keep saying that?”

Some observers interpreted his response, as meek or cautious, even though it was an interruption. But if my hypothesis has merit it is more likely that he cannot and will not take the vote seriously, even though in the interview he talks humbly, noting that he makes mistakes, “I am not perfect, I am not perfect in my services to NYU,” and that a university is always a seat of contention. In this way of thinking, his whisper is a cautious, almost suppressed acknowledgement that the faculty, while undoubtedly upset, is not a serious contender for power.

Let’s go with my hypothesis that the faculty document and vote is a provocation rather than a serious bid for influence, and ask why and how faculty members now find themselves in this situation.  I want to suggest that the prospect of a broken business model has stimulated anxiety sufficient to block thinking and thus realistic action. Instead, faculty members are acting expressively through symbolic gestures.

If I am right about the NYU business model, their anxiety is realistic. After all, the faculty has benefited immensely from the business model to date. They have very good salaries, in a prestigious institution, living in wonderful section, of one of the world’s greatest global cities. How can they entertain the institution’s potential demise without at the same time entertaining their own decline? 

Moreover, should the institution fail to finance its growth, they would most likely face increasing divisiveness in their own ranks as different schools and classes of faculty, e.g. tenure track versus adjunct, fought over a shrinking pie. This suggests that one reason that the faculty authors suggested that faculty members be elected rather than appointed to committees, however unrealistic, is that it expressed a fantasy that the faculty could in fact speak with one voice against the administration’s plans. 

Indeed, in another section of the document the faculty authors suggest that an ideal president would commit to, “The steady conversion of NTT (non-tenure-track) into TT (tenure-track) faculty positions at every NYU location.” While if implemented, this could be fatal financially, it nonetheless expresses the wish for an undivided faculty body, that could speak with one unified voice.

The faculty many not be the only party susceptible to symbolic thinking. Sexton has described his plans for building a global network university (a “GNU”) by comparing his vision to the “the Italian Renaissance, when painters circulated throughout Milan, Venice, Florence and Rome.” As he suggests, “If you change the nouns today and instead of Milan and Venice and Florence and Rome, you have Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, London and New York, there’s a similar circulatory system that characterizes the world. Faculty have always participated in that circulatory system. The question then becomes, is it possible to re-imagine the infrastructure of a university in a way that facilitates that circulation?”

It is certainly reasonable to ask if this vision of circulation is realistic and if the metaphor of the Renaissance is not a tad grandiose. One counter-argument is that the circulation of scholars and students will evolve naturally, outside the boundaries of any single institution that can control it, and that this circulation will at first integrate the extant world cities New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Business theorists will recognize here the challenge of “disintermediation.” Can and should a single institution be a “one-stop-shop” so to speak, or will the most value be created when people and institutions act in a decentralized fashion through markets, individual choice and many sided negotiations to build and use an “infrastructure of circulation.” This is, after all, how most economic development takes place. 

Moreover, though Shanghai is a global city in terms of scale and commerce, as long as it is under the thumb of the Chinese Communist party its ability to contribute to human culture and its evolution will be stymied. In addition, Abu Dhabi, with a population of only 613,00 people, still has feudal roots. NYU chose them as branch campus sites because their respective governments paid for building the campus and its associated infrastructure, not because these cities were at the forefront of creating a global culture. In this light, the reference to the Renaissance feels like wishful thinking.

My argument suggests that when institutional leaders face a potentially broken business model they are vulnerable to discharging their anxiety through symbolic thinking and expressive actions, rather than through realistic thinking and concrete plans. This process, I suggest, can impair leaders’ abilities to navigate the future and build a consensus for a new strategy. Perhaps both John Sexton and faculty leaders are susceptible to wishful thinking just at a time when they have to be resolutely realistic. This also suggests that the faculty’s anger at the university’s real estate expansion plans in their own neighborhood has become a symbol of their own potential demise rather than simply the agent of their day-to-day disruption.  If this seems like an exaggeration perhaps it is worth nothing that today we feel that even some of the greatest institutions are vulnerable to unpredicted trends and unexpected events.    

    

Why does Andrew Wiles, the mathematician, cry?

This post is different from the ones I typically write, focused as they are on current events in business and society. Instead, I wrote this post in response to a BBC video documentary posted on Youtube, which I found moving and perplexing. I am interested in readers' responses to these videos. 

In 1995 Andrew Wiles, a British mathematician, proved a theorem, known as Fermat’s last theorem, which had stumped mathematicians for three and a half centuries. In proving it, he opened up a new vista in the abstruse world of topology, highlighting unexpected links between different domains of mathematical inquiry. At the end of this blog post I describe the theorem, and what it posits, for those who are interested. In the body of this post,  I include two video segments that I extracted from a BBC documentary on Youtube, describing his discovery. (Also, here is the link to the full BBC video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkz45Ivr12k)

If you click on this first video below, you will note immediately that Wiles begins to cry as he describes his moment of discovery, likening it to the sudden illumination of a dark room,  Feeling somewhat embarrassed he then turns away from the camera.

                                                                First video

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To recapitulate he says,  “At the beginning of September I was sitting at this desk, when suddenly, totally unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation.. It was the most important moment in my working life…(he is tearing)..  nothing I ever do again.. (he is overcome by feeling)..  I’m sorry.. (he turns away from the camera). 

My question is, why does he cry? 

I have asked many of my colleagues this question. Here are four possibilities.

Explanation 1: Wiles is paradoxically moved by his sense of loss just as he recounts his glorious achievement.  As he begins to say, “nothing I ever do again..,’’ the listener can fill in the missing words, “will ever match my experience of that moment.” It is as if as all of his subsequent work will pale in comparison to his moment of illumination. How will he be able to take this prospective work seriously?

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Explanation 2: It is a common experience that people cry at the happy ending of an otherwise sad movie. Why should this be? One conception is that while watching the movie, people steel themselves against feeling overwhelmed by the movie’s sadness.  But upon experiencing the happy ending, they can now acknowledge their sadness. In effect they now feel that it is safe to cry.

A great undertaking, shot through with frustration, creates this same dynamic. One has to bear up under the tension and frustration, lest these feelings overwhelm one’s ability to do good work. Only upon reaching the goal, is it safe to acknowledge the overwhelming impact the frustration has had on one’s emotional life.  Indeed, Wiles had circulated an earlier version of the proof a year earlier, which proved faulty. After another year of encountering dead ends, he was prepared to relinquish his entire effort. This suggests that his illumination came at a moment of despair.

Now in the video, Wiles notes that the BBC reporter is interviewing him as he is sitting at the same desk where he made his discovery and experienced his revelation. Perhaps the stimulus of the desk, as a cue, triggers his reliving the tension and release associated with seven years of strenuous effort and frustration that led up to his moment of illumination.

Explanation 3: Wiles had a kind of religious experience through which he came into touch with the profound and unexpected unity of mathematics. He was both the agent of, and witness to, this profound unity.  Indeed, in the documentary Wiles describes the experience of a paradox. At the moment he was ready to finally give up, he realized that the reason his effort, based on work by the mathematician Flach, had failed, provided just the explanation for why an even an earlier attempt based on a theory by Iwasawa was at first unsuccessful. But paradoxically this revelation showed him how Iwasawa’s theory could now provide a way forward! I think that paradoxes intensify the experience of having uncovered hidden connections. When a contradiction leads to a truth, two distinct arguments, are now seen as two sides of the same coin. 

But why should someone cry at such a revelation? Drawing on the second explanation, perhaps we cry at the revelation of an unexpected unity, because the discovery makes it safe for us to acknowledge the day-to-day alienation we all feel as finite beings in a completely mysterious universe. After all, few of us know why the universe exists and why any one of us was born. Normally, we keep this feeling under wraps because it is too difficult to bear. But when we experience unexpectedly our link to this universe by witnessing its coherence, when in effect it reveals its secrets to us, it is safe for us to acknowledge the repressed pain of our existential separation. Hence we cry.

This explanation has the merit of connecting us to one of the greatest puzzles of our culture. How is that mathematics, a human invention, should give us a language for describing the universe, an object that stands outside of culture and is of course indifferent to human striving. How strange that a product of our mind is connected in this way to the most basic elements of matter! It is no accident in this sense that Pythagoras, the founder of a school of mathematics in ancient Greece ,was also a mystic.

Explanation 4: Recall that Freud, argued that religious experiences, stimulated by what a colleague of his called the “oceanic feeling,” move us emotionally because they help us relive the infant’s sense of unity when at the mother’s breast. Freud’s explanation has that distinctive character that makes many of his ideas appear ironic. In other words, he is saying that profound religious experiences, which at first glance appear to express a great cultural achievement, are “nothing but” the feelings of an infant whose psychological life is after all primitive.

Perhaps Wiles too experienced this oceanic feeling, but because his was not directly a religious experience, based for example on a belief in a God or a spirit to whom he could then be permanently connected, he recognized that his experience was as temporary and fleeting as it was profound. This sense of both having and then losing moved him to tears. He did not simply lose the prospect of doing work in the future that could engage him, as our first explanation suggests, Instead he lost his connection to the universe. This experience may be similar to losing a great love, though in Wiles case, the loss was inevitable and meaningful, while in the case of a lost loved one, the loss may seem arbitrary and cruel. 

Freud’s conception drew me to another segment of the BBC documentary (click on the video segment below)
                                                                   Video two

As Wiles notes, as a ten-year-old boy he was fascinated by Fermat’s last theorem. He says in the video,  “there is no other problem that will mean the same to me. I had this very rare privilege of being able to pursue.. in my adult life what had been my childhood dream. I.. know that it’s a rare privilege, but if one can do this, it is more rewarding than anything I can imagine.”

In a way, consistent with Freud’s conception, Wiles, invokes an early experience, though in this case, of childhood, not infancy. But why does Wiles insist that it is such a rare privilege to solve a problem first encountered when one was a child?  One hypothesis is that Wiles is describing the experience of a certain kind of childhood innocence. What does that innocence consist of? A ten-year-old boy experiences human culture, as itself all encompassing and self justifying. Not yet touched by fears of death, the despair that accompanies the belief that the universe is indifferent to our happiness, or that human striving ends in tragedy, the child anticipates gaining freedom and power by joining in the work of creating culture. In this sense his innocence protects him from feelings of alienation. Indeed, this is the source of his innocence.

In this sense, Wiles is expressing the positive side of what Freud called the Oedipus complex. This is the moment when the child identifies with his elders who promise to turn over to him their work of creating culture, if he is willing to bear the discipline of educating and preparing himself.  The child relinquishes the infant’s bliss at the mother’s breast for the prospect of gaining freedom and power by joining father’s world. This prospect for a ten year may very well be enthralling. After all, children express this when they excitedly talk about what they will be “when they grow up.” Wiles is saying that in solving Fermat’s last theorem he recaptured the innocence of the oedipal child, the belief that father’s world is its own justification and offers unlimited opportunities. 

This suggests in addition, that one reason a person like Wiles is able to soldier on for seven years to achieve something glorious, despite the psychic pain he experiences, is that he retains in his memory the fantasy of a  child's delight in joining father's world as a free and powerful person. In effect, the two video segments are joined, and not simply by my selection of them. Rather,  the second gives an account of how Wiles was able to tolerate the pain of working despite the frustration he faced, the first what happened when at last the frustration was lifted.

If this explanation has merit it also poses some questions about Freud’s conception of religious experience. Freud argued that religious experience reproduced what is now called the “pre-oedipal” child’s experience, when mother was everything. But if a religious experience opens up a path for useful work, for engaging in the work of building culture, rather than just passively accepting God’s love, perhaps it too provokes the child’s excitement of joining the father’s world, where at least in the western tradition, God is also a father. My brother Norbert told me that the composer Handel wrote that he “saw heaven” upon writing the Messiah in just 24 days. It is likely that Wiles and Handel had the same emotional experience.

This line of argument also leads us to the questions that my colleague Howard Schwartz has raised about post-modernism. What happens if and when we come to believe that human culture is intrinsically toxic or destructive, that the Western tradition for example, which gave rise to the glory of modern mathematics, is at its core, flawed.  Does this suggest that our children will no longer have the privilege of experiencing innocence, and that we will lose interest in preparing them to take on the work of building civilization? Howard speaks of an “anti-oedipal” culture, in which the father is seen as an illegitimate authority figure, blocking our return, as pre-oedipal infants, to our mother. His argument suggests that we are at risk of creating an infantilized culture, or what others have called a culture of narcissism. What is the evidence for this?

I am interested in people’s thoughts about all the questions raised in this post.

Fermat's last theorem 

In the seventeenth century Fermat, suggested that the formula known as the Pythagorean theorem and shown as  

A²+B² = C² , or when sounded out., “A squared plus B squared equals C squared,”

is true only when you square the numbers, or raise them to the power of two. In this case you are stating the schoolboy’s formula that in a right triangle,  the sum of the squares of the length of each side is equal to the square of the length of the hypotenuse.

A  triangle that fits this formula is when one side is 3, one is 4 and the hypotenuse is 5 

We have in this case

 3²+4² = 5² or  9+16=25

 

Fermat said that if you try to find three numbers that fit the formula

A³+B³ = C^{3 ,}

In other words, the numbers are cubed, you will never find them. The same goes for raising numbers to the powers of 4 and so on. Fermat wrote in his notebook that he had found a wonderful proof of this theorem but alas, the margins of his notebook were too narrow to permit him to write it down! We now know that he was mistaken. It took late 20^th century mathematics to solve a seventeenth century theorem