Bedbug Letters

By now, most online readers have probably come across BedbugGate. A tenured but relatively unknown academic, Dave Karpf, tweeted a so-so joke about New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, whose work we apparently both find underwhelming. Stephens responded with a huffy letter taking umbrage at such cheek, which was bad enough, but also copied Karpf’s provost and several other administrators at his college in a clear attempt to scare him into thinking his job was in danger.  Who's the “snowflake” is in this scenario, I’ll leave to the reader.

As the closest thing my last two colleges have had to a provost, I can attest that I get variations on letters like that about once a year. (I used to call them “nastygrams,” but I think I’ll start calling them “Bedbug Letters” instead. Thanks, Bret Stephens!) Sometimes they’re allegations of political agendas that the sender thinks I’m supposed to find unacceptable. Sometimes they’re identity-based, with insinuations that suspect identities are carriers of suspect ideas. (Actual example from a previous college: an angry young male student appeared in my office, shouting breathlessly “I think my professor is a lesbian!” I paused, shrugged, and responded “Could be. We don’t discriminate.” He didn’t know what to do with that.) Sometimes they’re from outside organizations, trying to pick a fight on their pet issue. Sometimes they’re so baroque that it’s not entirely clear what point they’re making, other than that they’re angry.

They can be disconcerting, but there’s a bigger picture.

For example, a couple of years ago I received a five-page, single-spaced letter, cc’ing over a dozen news organizations, claiming that a professor here was ... fasten your seat belt ... an outspoken liberal. The letter was technically anonymous, although there were enough context clues that I wouldn’t call its author a mystery; it was someone who had been connected to the college. To steal from Wodehouse, while he may not have been disgruntled, he was certainly far from gruntled. The letter insinuated that if we didn’t make an example of that professor, then we’d be all over the media, or at least the side of the media that enjoys bashing liberals.

In reading the letter closely, though, noticed that the professor it targeted wasn’t among the addressees, either up top or among the cc’s. The professor himself didn’t know that he was being attacked.

Moments like these are when it’s important to have provosts (or their equivalents) who understand academic freedom and free speech. Media swarms aren’t pretty, and they can do real damage. Part of the job of administrators is protecting the image and reputation of the institution.  In a moment like that, I could understand the immediate temptation to tell the professor to lay low for a while. But if you do that, the heckler wins. Instead, I called the professor to my office to give him the letter, assured him that I thought it was both cowardly and asinine, let him know I had his back, and that as far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. (Almost: I’ll admit ragging a little on his choice of college teams to root for.) The letter itself was consigned to the dustbin of history, where it belongs. So far, I haven’t seen it in the media. If it eventually gets there and somehow gets traction, I’ll be happy to explain that there remains, as yet, no law against liberalism. The professor is still here, still teaching, and still sharing his views with the world.  

Moments like these happen often enough that admins should be prepared for them. What made the Stephens case unusual was twofold: it actually went public, and Stephens seemingly went out of his way to make himself cartoonishly villainous. But the underlying story is fairly common.

Bedbug letters sometimes cross over into genuine threat territory. Threats of bodily harm are not protected as free speech. In a couple of cases over the years, I’ve brought in campus police when it seemed warranted. But in those cases, the threat was the letter-writer, not the target of the letter. In one case years ago in which a professor was targeted with something really vile, the campus police tracked the writer down, referred the threat to the local police, and had the author arrested. He was nowhere near the swaggering badass he had tried to get us to believe. I don’t regret that referral at all.

As both a writer and an administrator, I’m frequently in the position of annoying people by saying or doing things they consider objectionable. It comes with the gigs. Sometimes that irritation leads to criticism, and sometimes that criticism gets nasty. It can be frustrating and even hurtful. (As the saying goes, nobody ever erected a statue of a critic.) So far I’ve only had one death threat that I can remember, but I’ve had any number of career threats and plenty of slander. Some of that comes with the gigs, too. I wish that weren’t true, but it is. Women seem to get targeted much more severely, often with credible threats of physical harm. Culturally, we have a lot of work to do. To the extent that Bedbug-shaming reduces aggressive trolling, it may actually do some good. Calling out the toxicity may help tamp it down, or at least assure its recipients that they’re not crazy. There’s value in that.

So kudos to Karpf’s provost, who did what any good provost would do. We can’t reward toxic behaviors like these, or we’ll get more of them. And thanks to Bret Stephens for accidentally providing a nifty little term I didn’t know I needed.