When Tim Craine invited me to participate in this panel, he said the purpose of this meeting was to look forward, and in five minutes I should present an idea to help the university in its current crisis. I accepted the invitation despite the immensity of the charge, and I decided to speak about what I believe to be the one necessary pre-condition for progress.

Disagreement is the stuff of academic life. Universities were created to disseminate knowledge, but they soon became fertile ground of disagreement and controversy. And wherever conditions were created for the free exchange of ideas and that exchange was protected, knowledge was produced, progress was made, and humankind benefited. All of us were educated to look beyond the obvious; we were educated to question the accepted, the normal, the norm and the normative. It is, therefore, not to anyone’s surprise that academics thrive on disagreement.

However, when the atmosphere of a university is such that the smallest disagreement is treated as a personal offense, then something’s wrong. When the atmosphere of a university is such that the public statement of any one of its members is replied to with personal disqualifications, then something is wrong. When faculty members dare not speak their minds in a meeting attended only by colleagues and must ask someone else to read anonymously the words they are in fear to utter in front of their peers, then something is very wrong. And when the elected members of the Faculty Senate —many of them protected by tenure, all of them protected by their status as department representatives—, when they dare not speak in front of the university authorities for fear of reprisals, then something is definitely wrong. And I say: this has to stop. It must stop. This university cannot continue to function under the current cloud of mistrust and fear.

I don’t know about you, but I can assure you this was not the kind of university I dreamt about when I decided to pursue a career in academia, with nothing but a diploma in my hand, enthusiasm in my heart, and dreams in my mind —dreams about the power or reason; dreams about the organizing power of the intellect; dreams of joining a community of scholars.

I don’t know about President Miller, but I have my doubts that when he was applying for his current position, he was dreaming of a university where members of the intellectual elite of the United States would be so afraid of him that they could not express dissenting views in his presence. I have no way of entering the heart and mind of President Miller, but I seriously doubt that he was planning to lead this university with the fear he inspired.

How did this come about? Did this happen overnight, or is it the result of a long slide? Perhaps one day we will approach these questions with sincerity and candor. Our task today is to reflect on our own role in this crisis. We must search the back room of our lives, where we store the rags of our forgotten hopes. Today we must dig deep into those memories, bring them out, polish them up and say, “This, this is the university I cherish. Why must I settle for less?”

We must remember in the first place that, as faculty members of this university, we don’t owe ourselves to ourselves. We owe ourselves to the student body of CCSU, a university that will never become the Harvard of Connecticut, but one that is already the lifeline to students who bring the real world into academia. We owe ourselves to the illusions of those students, many of whom struggle and juggle with life in its harshest, and who come here looking for models, looking at us for inspiration. And we must remember that we can give more and better.

And you too, President Miller, you need to take a step back and regain contact with your own ideals, and remember that you don’t owe yourself to yourself or to those who voted you in, but to the institution as a whole, and that if you want to move it forward, you must do so through inclusion, respect, humility. Triumphant speeches will not move this university towards the future. Even a semblance of arrogance, imposition or discrimination will not move this university towards the future.

President Miller, you need to extend a hand, and we, the faculty, need to take that hand, because only by working together we can move this university towards the future.

A few days ago an editorial of the Hartford Courant suggested that President Miller had many fences to mend. I will add that the faculty of this university also have many fences to mend, beginning with those that separate them from themselves. But let me close with a snippet of conventional wisdom: the best way to mend a fence is by tearing it down altogether.