I’m struggling lately with a spiritual-journey question that seems to recycle itself through my experiences again and again in a karmic way. The best way I know how to formulate this question is as follows: in a world sodden with the effects of sin, is it sometimes better to withdraw, live one’s life with integrity according to one’s best lights? Or is it better to engage?A huge chunk of my soul has always wanted the first option. But circumstances seem to keep poking me to take the second path—even as I kick against that choice.
The immediate occasion for the renewal of this struggle in my soul is that I recently had the opportunity—or obligation—to write a report about a university at which I worked a few years ago, which is now undergoing reaccreditation. The academic oversight body that accredits the school invites third-party comments prior to its accrediting visits.
I had pretty much decided, some time ago, to wash my hands of the place, after some experiences of brutal injustice with the school. The school’s leader is adroit about using issues of gender and race to triangulate the institution she leads, as well as the public. The triangulation, and her penchant for surrounding herself with corrupt assistants, assures that she remains on top, no matter what comes along to expose her malfeasance.
As she does this, she has the active assistance of some powerful and wealthy white men whose interests she serves as a token African-American female leader. Though she depicts herself as a person of conspicuous integrity and strong faith, she uses behind-the-scenes finagling and high-powered lawyers ruthlessly to destroy her perceived enemies. And she gets away with this, over and over, because of her backers and their access to the media, to legislative and judicial bodies, and to the white male leaders of the church that also keeps this ruthless, ethically compromised academic dictator in power.
As I say, I had decided some time ago to wash my hands of this institution and its leader, and to let God deal with her in God’s time and way. But then, as the window for submitting a third-party comment to the school’s accrediting body began to close, and as a number of people whose discernment I respect encouraged me to write a statement, I did so. I produced an extensive, carefully documented report about the school’s lapses of integrity, violations of academic freedom, and leadership challenges.
And I doubt that this report will make any difference at all to the outcome of the accrediting body’s deliberations. In fact, it may well backfire and cause the accreditors to give the school and its leader higher marks than they would have assigned in the absence of my feedback.
And the report will almost certainly cause me grief, when the school’s dictatorial president threatens me yet again (she has done this repeatedly following my time there) with legal action, if I blow the whistle on her. Hence that tug of my soul to the way of silent peace and integrity, tending my own garden . . . . One can only fight so long without seeing much positive effect from the fighting, before one begins to look longingly at a cloister of some kind.
Interestingly enough, though, as I’ve been mulling these questions over and as I wrote my report, word reached me about the outcome of a report I left at the school at which I worked prior to the one about which I’ve just written the third-party comment. This report took five years to see the light of day. And now that it has come to light, it has confirmed my judgment about a horrible situation at that institution which I asked its president to resolve, and which he refused to resolve, despite my pleas and the documentation I produced for him to demonstrate that he needed to act immediately.
Here’s what happened: in 2004, when the then president of the school left it to take another job, she assigned an employee to me to supervise. Why she did that, I don’t know. I suspect a bit of malice in the choice to give this employee to me to supervise. I wonder how much the outgoing president knew about the employee’s financial records, and about why the outgoing president seems to have turned a blind eye to this employee’s blatant misuse of federal funds. This is an employee who should always have been under my supervision, but who was not placed under me until a change of regimes in the school.
When I began to supervise the employee, I was shocked at what I found in her records. She was the overseer of a well-funded (a federally funded) program to assist first-generation African-American college students, to help them make it in college. Her financial records and reports were a tangle, a mess.
As I began to sift through them as the supervisor of this employee, I began to see some shocking patterns of fiscal impropriety: duplicate receipts for the same expenditure; huge receipts for expenditures that were clearly personal and had nothing to do with the program in question; payments to family members who were somehow connected to the program in a large nepotistic network, and so forth.
I documented all of this carefully, and then began to report first to the school’s interim president and then to its new president. I asked them both to act, to call the employee to accountability. I warned them that because this was a federally funded program, the fiscal impropriety of the employee would probably raise questions at the federal level, one day down the road.
And the two presidents completely ignored my reports. The interim president, in fact, permitted the employee to submit the federal grant proposal for a new cycle of funding without my even seeing the proposal. I knew that the reason for the evasion was to prevent my seeing the employee’s salary, which I had every reason to believe was astronomical, certainly far higher than mine as the school’s chief academic officer.
The next president accepted the judgment of the interim president about the employee, and blocked my attempt to move forward with any disciplinary action. The employee, who was an African-American woman, was permitted to ignore my supervision and to claim that I was harassing her as a white male.
And then I left this school to take another job, leaving behind a final, detailed report documenting the fiscal impropriety and insubordination of the employee in question. I produced this final report to protect myself, when the shit inevitably hit the fan, and the employee’s misuse of federal funds became public knowledge. I wanted it to be clear that I was not guilty of malfeasance as a supervisor, or any complicity in this employee’s misuse of federal funds.
And now I hear that, more than five years down the road, the president has finally realized that everything I reported to him about this employee was the gospel truth. She has been fired. The president has just now discovered that her salary on the books was second only to his in the entire institution—and that is the salary that is on the books. In all likelihood, what she was taking home in under-the-counter payments to herself was much larger.
I don’t know if the outcome of this process of whistle-blowing is encouraging or depressing. The employee got away with another five years of graft and nepotistic pay-offs to family members. Because I sought to do the job assigned to me, I was treated as a bigoted white man pursuing a black woman for racist and sexist reasons. The employee and her family members spread the word far and wide that I had documented her fiscal impropriety because my real motive was to take over their grant program and, as one of her family members put it, take their honey pot and make it my own!
Still, what I reported turned out to be true, when those with the authority to make a difference finally chose to listen. And I suspect something very similar will happen to the report I have just now written about the school at which I worked previously. The accrediting body will ignore my report and will re-accredit the school, which will pass its accreditation with flying colors.
Meanwhile, I’ll hold onto my report until the day comes when it will be needed to document precisely the problems I’m reporting right now, which will one day come to light and cause the school grief and embarrassment. And meanwhile, I may also leak the report to a few well-selected media sources, watchdog groups, and government agencies, so they can begin breathing down the neck of an accrediting body that hardly ever takes decisive action in the case of malfeasance of the sort I’m reporting to it. And nothing prevents my publishing the report in a condensed form on this blog, either.
And, as the brilliant African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman University, noted frequently in her writings, even gardens, as idyllic and restful as they appear, take courage and work—especially when they're the kind of which Bethune dreamed, places in which rich and poor folks, black and white ones, Europeans and Africans and Americans, can sit and talk about building a more humane world. The kind of garden about which Dr. Bethune dreamed is certainly not an escape.
The graphic is South African artist Gerard Sokoto's "Man Tending a Garden," Durban Art Gallery.
