Nik Wallenda and the psychology of danger

-->

On June 23, Nik Wallenda, the aerialist, walked a distance of 1400 feet across a gorge in the Grand Canyon on a cable suspended 1500 feet above the ground, without a tether or safety net. He stopped and crouched twice in his twenty-minute journey to cope with the wind and the unsettling rhythm of the cable. “The Hollywood Reporter said that the response to Wallenda’s death-defying stunt was simply overwhelming, with almost 13 million viewers tuning into the Discovery Channel at the peak of the walk.”

One question is why does a death-defying act compel attention? A simple answer is that it arouses us emotionally, opening us up to range of intense feelings, as long of course as we remain spectators. These feelings -- fear, suspense, thrill, the cycle of tension and release, even pain-- help us feel more alive. These feelings also throw into relief what we too often experience as the tedium of our daily lives, what Thoreau once famously called our “lives of quiet desperation.” Action and horror films, with their counterpoint of the heroes we identify with and the dangers they face, milk this contrast, allowing us in fantasy to escape the obligations and enmeshments that make real risk-taking seem foolhardy. Wallenda’s wire walking does us one better, he is walking on a real cable in real time.

One hypothesis is that extreme sports -- base-jumping, sky-dividing, hang-gliding, soloing,  mountaineering-- have become increasingly popular because they bring us close to danger under controlled conditions, that is, as long as we are disciplined, undergo training, and use good equipment. Moreover, we are attracted to the cultures of deviance they sustain. Skate boarding, extreme biking, and windsurfing have offered participants alternative worlds in which social obligations -- to hold a job, go to school, marry, listen to one’s teachers, and raise children -- seem unimportant. The famous aerialist, Philippe Petit, who walked between the two Twin Towers in New York City’s financial district, saw himself as a rebel and artist. He did not seek permission to walk, but instead trained for the event on the sly by avoiding guards, reaching the top disguised in a work-shirt and helmet, and hiding his equipment in a trolley. In his autobiographical account of his escapade he writes, “By the time I turn eighteen I’ve been expelled from five schools for practicing the art of the pickpocket on my teachers and the art of card manipulation under my desk. I refuse to take the basic exam to prove I can read, write and count, and thereby jeopardize my chances of landing a job picking up garbage or operating a cash register.” This link between risk and deviance, is a common one. Abraham Zaleznik, a theorist of leadership, once proposed that the entrepreneur and the juvenile delinquent share the same psychology. Similarly, when hedge fund traders cut corners by trading on inside information we presume that they are simply motivated by greed or fear. But as risk takers they are already deviants and feel further aroused by breaking the law. Much of popular culture, represented in films, television and novels, is based on the premise that the life of an outlaw is exciting.

Wallenda, however is not readily categorized. In interviews he presents as a very responsible person, motivated partly by his family heritage-- he comes from a long line of tightrope walkers—and grateful to God for his talent. He is anything but reckless. Asked before his walk if he was taking too big a risk, he noted that, “I’ve got three children and a wife. And if I thought there was even a small chance of me losing my life Sunday, I wouldn't be doing it." Should the wind buffet him, or the cable oscillate, he would simply, “lower myself to the wire and cling to it, waiting to be rescued.”

While walking across the gorge he said, “Thank you Jesus,” many times, but he does not believe that “God keeps me on the wire.” “I believe God gives me a unique ability to walk the wire, but it's up to me whether I train properly. There are a lot of people that have amazing relationships with Christ that lose their lives in a car accident. Does that mean they didn't have a good enough relationship with Jesus? No. Life happens and God created us all in his image, but we're all our own people. We're not robots. We make decisions. So I don't think that I'm testing God.” This statement points to a thoughtful and generous humility. Even as he can speak to God, God does not watch over him. Moreover, he is no deviant. The Federal government did not give him permission to walk across the land inside the boundary of the Grand Canyon national park, so he sought and got permission to walk over land that was part of a Navajo reservation. 

But Wallenda thanking Jesus does point to an important dimension of courting danger and taking risks. Sports psychologists note that extreme sports participants often experience a moment of “sublime awareness” in which they experience the world’s majesty and their small place in it. A hang glider writes in a blog that, “for me hang gliding is the ultimate in achieving union with the forces of nature, immersion within them. Gravity, wind, lift, sink, these are all invisible and exploiting them to savor for a few minutes requires understanding of physics, sensory acuity, and various types of reasoning….Unfettered movement in three dimension with only the sound of wind in the ears is fantastic. Flying close to hawks and eagles, flying with them, is beyond description. (http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=15838)

One hypothesis is that such sublime experiences result from the sports person’s calm or low arousal state while in the moment of performance. A skilled participant is highly aroused, feeling a mix up of both anxiety and excitement, both before and after his performance, but remains supremely calm and focused during it. We can understand this by drawing on Freud's concept of "sublimation,"  the way in which sexual feelings are “sublimated” through the process of creating a beautiful poem or painting. He meant that when the artist creates something beautiful, he invests it with her love, and hopes that her audience will love it in turn. That is why artists often refer to their creations, at the moment they let them go, as their “babies.” In this same way of thinking we can say that the extreme-sports participant sublimates his excitement and anxiety, transforming these feelings into a sense of awe. This experience of awe, while at first arousing, is then calming; arousing because he experiences the majesty of his surrounding or setting, calming because he realizes what a small and limited part he can possibly play in shaping it. One has  no choice” but to “go with the flow.” The resulting focus on the present moment enables the participant to attend to the tasks of navigating obstacles without distraction.

A recently published study of 370 adults aged 19 to 103 found what wise people have known for a long time, that our biggest regrets are for risks not taken. One researcher on the study notes that, “as people rise higher in our culture, there is a perception of greater opportunities. Paradoxically, the more opportunities you have, the more ways you can see how you could have gotten more . . . Opportunity fuels the regret experience." (http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/brain-and-behavior/articles/2011/06/29/when-americans-think-of-regrets-love-tops-list). Yet much of the academic and popular discourse about risk today, is about threats; from nature, technologies, and our own irresponsible behavior, for example in global warming discourse. One school of academic thought even elevates the experience of “dread” as central to our experience of risk. Yet Steven Pinker, the MIT psychologist and linguist, argues strikingly in, The Better Angels of our Nature, that the level of interpersonal violence throughout the world had declined across the centuries, decades and years. In the United States the homicide rate today is as low as it was in the peaceful 1950’s. The question is why this discrepancy between discourse and experience? Why the focus on risks imposed rather than risks not taken?

Freud's famous essay, Civilization and its Discontents provides a clue.  Freud suggested that we accept our obligations, and the guilt we feel when we are tempted to violate them, because in the end civilization offers us security in return. His pessimism was based on the idea that as civilization advances, it enmeshes us even more, intensifying the guilt we feel for simply dreaming of escape. Perhaps the conviction that each person’s carbon footprint is destructive is one curious expression of Freud’s prediction. To consume, in others words, to pleasure oneself, is to destroy.

One hypothesis is that we face a new and compelling tension today between the empathy we feel for the lives of others- Pinker believes this is one reason violence has declined – and the individual opportunities we believe are almost within our grasp. How does a culture express this tension, and support our ability to face it rather than evade it? Perhaps Wallenda does provide one model. He is man who takes significant risks, but does so within a matrix of attachment to his lineage, love for this family and subordination to God. What are some other models? 

P.S.  I recommend looking at the YouTube video of free soloing- rock climbing without ropes, as an emotional doorway into these issues. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrX0ohmu1zw

The Boston Marathon Bombers

-->
The Boston Marathon bombing raises important questions about the evolving nature of terrorist activities. As Mark Sageman suggests in his new book, Leaderless Jihad, social media now play an instrumental role in helping potential jihadists acquire the skill, motivation and materials to become terrorists. But the bombing also poses some interesting questions for psychology. People who knew the younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, are mystified by his transformation from an ordinary person into a terrorist who would kill innocents. As Dzhokahr’s one time roommate said, “I have had almost two weeks to think about it (Dzhokhar’s involvement) and it still makes no more sense than the day I found out it was him.”   Similarly, his high school wrestling coach said,  “Everyone is completely bewildered. Not one person -- not one -- said, 'Oh yeah, I knew this. I knew he used to shoot puppies in the backyard.'" 

Bewilderment is sensible. Dzhokhar’s wrestling teammates in high school had voted him captain. He displayed good sportsmanship and supported his teammates’ development as wrestlers. As his coach noted, “After a match, there’s a prime opportunity to be mad, to say the ref robbed you. He just accepted what was done. If he lost a match, he’d put his arms out; ‘Well, I tried my best.’ And when he won, he’d pump his fist, both fists at head level: ‘Yeah, I won!’ But it was never anything excessive.” Similarly, his teammates say they looked up to him as a teacher and motivator. “We’d be running stairs for hours,” said Zeaed Abu-Rubieh. “Every time I’d stop, when I was thinking about leaving, he’d push me forward, physically push me. And he was strong. He’d say; ‘Go on. Run. You can do it.’ He believed in people.”

One frame of reference for understanding Dzhokhar’s transformation is to de-emphasize the role of character in shaping behavior, and to highlight instead situational forces. We focus on “states” not “traits.” The famous Milgram obedience experiment at Yale University, in which naive subjects gave electric shocks to a supposed peer (in fact an actor) for answering memory questions incorrectly, is suggestive here. The scientist in a white coat who conducts the supposed memory experiment, convinced 2/3 of his subjects to administer supposedly painful shocks despite verbal protestations from the peer/actor (In fact no shocks were administered. The shocking machine was fake).  

Milgram said his experiment showed how people would obey authority figures, in this case a scientist, even it meant violating their own ethical standards or suppressing their compassionate responses. But the experiment also shows that character is labile, vulnerable to influences exercised within a situation. Ordinary people who for the most part would help people in distress, were willing to inflict pain on a peer. In studying group psychology, Freud argued that group members readily internalize the group’s leader as representing each member’s conception of what it means to be an ideal person. The leader becomes the members’ “ego ideal.” This is what binds the group together and makes the leader legitimate. This suggests that what seems to lie within a person, for example, his conscience, is actually shaped by what surrounds a person. Some psychoanalysts describe this as a process of “introjection” through which social facts readily become constituents of our individual minds. Environmental psychology depends on such an assumption. If we live in a dirty or disorderly setting, we are likely to feel dirty and disorderly within. Indeed, Milgram varied his experiment to demonstrate the impact of situational factors. For example, when subjects were physically close to the peer/actor they were less likely to obey the scientist. 

We can see a situation’s impact on character in more benign settings as well. Consider for example, the “shipboard romance,” in which a woman and man who might not normally find romance together, are freed by the ships’ isolation- it is a social island- to overcome personal or social inhibitions and thus have an affair. The ship’s isolation, its psychological and physical distance from home, makes ongoing relationships appears less consequential, and as a result the romantic partners experience more personal freedom. Isolation plays the same role in the shipboard romance as authority does in the Milgram experiment. It opens up the mind to influence. 

Some journalists have reasonably supposed that Dzhokhar experienced his older brother, Tamerlan, as a familial authority. As one journalist writes, “By (Chechen) tradition it is up to the family’s eldest son to enforce the rules for his siblings.” The journalist reports that when their sister Bella was seen “in the company of a boy during her junior year of high school... father dispatched Tamerlan, “to teach his sister’s would be wooer a lesson: Tamerlan found the boy and beat him up.” Moreover, one of Dzhokhar’s friends “recalls that Tamerlan exercised a similarly domineering influence over his younger brother especially after their father decided to return to Russia about a year ago, leaving them behind.” This is why many journalists have assumed reasonably, that Tamerlan influenced his brother’s thinking about Islam and the west. Indeed, Dzhokhar told his friend, “ My brother is telling me to be more Islamic.” As a result, Dzhokhar started praying, and watching “online sermons by the radical cleric and al-Qaeda sympathizer Anwar al-Awlaki. “ 

Tamerlan’s own turn to a conservative vision of Islam was in fact quite sudden. After he abandoned a promising boxing career, he grew a beard, insisted that his American born wife wear a black scarf to cover her head, posted videos on his YouTube channel “in support of fundamentalism and violent jihad,” and “interrupted prayers at his mosque on two occasions with outbursts denouncing the idea that Muslims should observe American secular holidays.” Tamerlan also appeared comfortable with personal violence. As we have seen, he beat up his sister’s wooer, while a girl friend once complained to the police that he had beat her. Indeed this is one reason the authorities held up his application for citizenship.
So one hypothesis is that Tamerlan played the same role with his brother that the scientist in Milgram’s experiment played with his subjects. Dzokhar turned over his ethical compass to this brother in a gesture of obedience. 

But having stated this hypothesis, I don’t find it entirely convincing. It is interesting in this regard that when subjects in Milgram’s experiment resisted shocking their supposed peer, the scientist, in addition to telling them that they “must go on,” also told them that the shocks while painful, were not dangerous.” Killing innocent runners and observers at a marathon appears to be act quite distinct from, and discontinuous with, railing against the west, watching dramatic videos of Jihad, and even beating up people. 

Consider the following. Dzhokhar had a close relationship with his high school wrestling coach, Peter Payack. The latter had run in twelve marathons, and “his love of the race is a given among his wrestlers.” Early in 2013  Dzhokhar “unexpectedly returned to his high school, wrestling shoes in hand, to grapple with the team.  ‘We’re all laughing. Everyone’s pulling his hair and saying you ought to do cornrows,’ Mr. Payack said. ‘Eight weeks later, he blows up the marathon. Why would he embrace us if he wants to blow us up?’” Indeed, on the day of the marathon, “Mr. Payack was more than a block from the finish line, hurrying to watch his son complete the race when the first bomb went off. He still has difficulty hearing in one ear.” Trying to make sense of Dzhokhar’s behavior, Payack as we saw, told a reporter, "Everyone is completely bewildered.” I think we should take this bewilderment seriously. 

I am drawn here to the fact that the story of how Tamerlan died and Dzokhar was arrested suggests strongly that the brothers were quite amateurish. After the bombing they made no plans to escape, discounting it seems the likelihood that surveillance cameras, and smart phone cameras would eventually identify them. Instead, “the two suspects had gone about their lives as if nothing had happened in the three days following the bombings. Dzhokhar had returned to classes at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth where he was a student, slept every night in his dorm room, worked out at his gym, gone to a party with friends on Wednesday night and posted frequent comments on his Twitter account.”

When their photographs were published the brothers finally realized they were in danger. They stopped a campus policeman in his car apparently to get his gun, but as one police official notes, “He had a triple-lock holster, and they could not figure it out.” They shot and killed the officer and then hijacked an SUV and its driver, and “drove through Cambridge to nearby Watertown, a middle-class suburb of 30,000 where they searched for bank machines. They told the driver that they were the marathon bombers and after using his bankcard to withdraw money from an ATM, photographed of course by an ATM surveillance camera, they inexplicably released him at a gas station. The driver left his cell phone in the car and the police, notified of his kidnapping and release, pinged his phone to track and locate the stolen car. In the ensuing shoot out the elder brother, Tamerlan, “walked toward the officers, firing his gun until he appeared to run out of bullets. Officers tackled him and were trying to get handcuffs on him, when the stolen SUV came roaring at them, the younger brother at the wheel. The officers scattered and the SUV plowed over Tamerlan, who was dragged briefly under the car and killed.” In short, Dzhokhar killed his brother. If the situation were not so tragic, one could almost write this story as keystone-cops farce. The question is, why were the brothers’ so unprepared and so clumsy?

Michael Apter in his provocative book, The Dangerous Edge: The Psychology of Excitement, argues that people are excited by danger when they experience a “protective frame.” Sometimes, the protective frame is based on a person’s confidence in her skills, for example when she goes rock climbing without tools or equipment (called, “soloing”). In war, the presence of buddies, “a band of brothers,” provides a protective frame, enabling soldiers to feel excited by war as an occasion to express deep friendship. In a recent documentary of a war photographer who was killed in Libya, Sebastian Junger describes dangerous war zones as the occasions to experience “a male Eden.” 

Consider as well Apter’s quote of  a Vietnam veteran. “As is frequently the case before an operation, we are filled with a ‘happy warrior spirit’ and tend to dramatize ourselves. With our helmets cocked to one side and cigarettes hanging out of our mouths we pose as hard-bitten veterans for the headquarters Marines. We are starring in our very own war movie and the howitzer battery nearby provides some noisy background music.” He goes on to write, “I had enjoyed the killing of the Viet Cong who had run out of the tree line. Strangest of all had been that sensation of watching myself in a movie. One part of me was doing something while the other part watched from a distance, shocked by the things it saw, yet powerless to stop them from happening.” (p. 170) 

As this quote suggests, a theatrical or dramatic conception of one’s experience can also provide a protective frame. One’s performance is not in fact “real” but is instead a fictional version of real events. Under these conditions one is both an actor but also a spectator. Consequently, the danger is exciting rather than anxiety producing, in the same way that a ferocious tiger in a cage is exciting rather than threatening. One hypothesis is that the brothers’ amateurish “performance” and their fantasy that they could in fact return to their normal lives after the bombing, meant that they had not in fact actually killed people. They had only acted as if they had. Moreover, and this is important, once danger, along with belief is suspended, actions that would typically promote anxiety and perhaps witdrawal, stimulate excitement and high arousal instead. The arousal in turn further drives out caution. 

This speculative hypothesis fits as well with Tamerlan’s own propensity to dramatize his actions. As several journalists reported, Tamerlan was a flamboyant dresser “partial to white fur and snakeskin.” “During registration for a boxing tournament in Lowell (Mass) he sat down at a piano and lost himself for 20 minutes in a piece of classical music. The impromptu performance, so out of place in that world, finished to a burst of applause from surprised onlookers.  “He just walked over from the line and started playing like he was in the Boston Pops,” his trainer at the time, Gene McCarthy, 77, recalled… He also incorporated showy gymnastics into his training and fighting, walking on his hands, falling into splits, tumbling into corners.”

 

This hypothesis of drama or theater as a protective frame also fits with our growing understanding of social media and the virtual world.  If young people can become jihadists in the absence of leaders, one powerful force is the way in which social media create an alternative universe.  A young man can immerse himself in an assemblage of videos, manuals, chat-rooms and podcasts without ever leaving his home. The battlefront is in his bedroom. It is common of course to note that we can readily conflate the virtual and the real. Indeed, this is why we find violent movies and video games exciting. In effect the movie “cages” the tiger. But if we can mistake the virtual for the real, why can’t we mistake the real for the virtual? 

In short, I am suggesting that Dzhokhar faced two reinforcing situational forces. First he gave over his conscience to his brother, but second, and I am suggesting  more importantly, he suspended belief in the reality of his actions. Instead, aroused by his brother’s plans and social media’s dramatization of jihad, he became an actor in Jihadi Theater. This is what allowed him to kill innocent people. 

If Mark Sageman is right, that we now face a “leaderless Jihad,” it also suggests that we will face increasingly an “irrational Jihad.’ Instead of cells planning action with care and precision, the prototype of this is the cell of the 9/11 attackers, we will have singletons or pairs acting out roles in a Jihadi “theater of the mind.”

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.

-->

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.