Sorett has revealed himself to be the most despicable, incompetent and untrustworthy leader of a prestigious U.S. college, an astounding achievement when you consider the competition.
Silly me, I thought the original story was as bad as it could get. How wrong I was. To recap this post, during a Columbia panel on the campus’s anti-Semitism, Sorett, the Dean of Columbia College, exchanged mocking and derisive texts about the panelists statements about how the pro-Hamas protesters had poisoned the educational environment for Jewish students with the vice dean and chief administrative officer of the college, the dean of undergraduate student life; and the associate dean for student and family support. Unfortunately for all of them, another attendee behind one of the texters took incriminating snap shots of the cell phone screen that revealed the dismissive texts.
After being busted, Sorett tried the Pazuzu Excuse (‘what I said or did wasn’t really me!’) which is bad enough, but “the rest of the story” is worse. This creep fuzzed over the fact that he was part of the texting orgy in his original statement after the texts were revealed, and then put the other three administrators on leave! Nice. The least he could have done was show some solidarity with his fellow anti-Semites and suspend himself. As the highest ranking member of the gossip group, a strong argument can be made that he ratified and enabled the offensive discussion. In fact, I’ll make it: he was more accountable than the three administrators he punished.
After Sorett announced that his colleagues had been placed on leave pending an investigation into their text exchanges (with him!), Sorett finally admitted his own role in an email to Columbia University’s Board of Visitors, an alumni body that advises the Dean. “I deeply regret my role in these text exchanges and the impact they have had on our community,” he wrote. “I am cooperating fully with the University’s investigation of these matters. I am committed to learning from this situation and to the work of confronting antisemitism, discrimination, and hate at Columbia.”
Yeah, probably one aspect of confronting antisemitism, discrimination, and hate is not participating in them, especially if you’re the dean. Can you believe this guy? A Columbia spokesman said last week that Sorett “will be recused from all matters relating to the investigation while continuing to serve as dean of the College.” I guess that’s a start.
But wait, there’s more! When a reporter from a the Washington Free Beacon, which had initially broken the story about the texts, knocked on his door to ask him some question, Sorett called the both the campus police and New York City Police Department officers. As the Free Beacon properly notes, this is rather hypocritical behavior from someone who signed a 2020 faculty letter calling to “defund the NYPD by $1 billion.” “We support the movement’s call for defunding the police, and a fundamental change in the investments in our communities,” the letter read. “The demand to defund the police is a declaration of our democratic right as community members to wrest the power to commit violence away from the police.”
How does someone this ethically inert get the job of running a respectable—well, once-–college? Where do they find these people? Sorett makes some of the other college and university presidents fired or forced to resign recently look like models of character and propriety by comparison. He’s bigoted, biased, irresponsible, unaccountable, dishonest, disrespectful, unfair, cowardly and untrustworthy.
To cap it all, he’s not very bright. He and his defenders (like this Columbia professor who can’t spell “McCarthy”) are really and truly trying to claim victim status for the Four Texters on the theory that they never should have been caught, arguing that it was unfair of those cell-phone photographers to snap shots of the mocking messages. Sending and receiving texts on a cell phone in public is no more private than having a phone conversation in public loud enough for bystanders to hear.
What an ennobling defense: Rationalization # 56. The Scooby Doo Deflection, or “I should have gotten away with it!”
Ethics Alarms 
Inmates running ALL the asylums.
“He and his defenders (like this Columbia professor who can’t spell “McCarthy”) …”
I love this. In reference to the Columbia professor, the article says:
“Hochberg, who declined to comment, conducts research on the ‘intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality’,…”
I think if I were to do university again I’d study the intersections among urban planning, deep sea diving, Bossa Nova music, and lima beans.
I’d take that course!
I wish Curmie would weigh in on these “administrators.” I’m guessing they have been in schools their entire lives. I think they’ve been removed from reality since they entered undergraduate school. Professors don’t seem to have any real-world experience anymore. Their weird “studies” indulgence has taken them too far afield. I think this is a problem.
At your service, OB.
I think there are three issues here.
First, there is the texting during the presentation. That’s rude, but I’m not ready to say it’s more than that. Certainly there’s a context by which the image at the top of this page shows an appropriate interest in hearing from people who disagree. And it’s not like the Washington Free Beacon is devoid of any political agenda. If “I’m trying to keep an open mind” is the best they can do to impugn these administrators, then in this case absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. Do I suspect there’s some fire behind all that smoke? Yes, but probably not as much as the WFB would have us believe.
Second, there’s the response: Sorett’s throwing his colleagues under the bus while casually omitting any reference to his own participation. This is despicable behavior, even by university administrator standards. He’s clearly a hypocritical asshole, but the academy does seem to attract a lot of them into positions of authority of late.
I think those last two words are important. I started college as the Vietnam war was winding down. Needless to say, there were some pretty tense moments on campus. But whereas I disagreed with the president about this or the dean about that, I always understood their perspective and believed they were trying to do what was best.
This attitude continued as I went to grad school and started my career. There was one president with whom I disagreed virtually all the time; I thought he was rather dim-witted and unimaginative, but I’d have been shocked to discover that he was dishonest in any way.
That scenario changed in the last 20 years or so. When I came to the university where I still keep an office, everyone up the food chain from me–department chair, dean, provost, president–was good or better, and a couple of them were outstanding. That situation had been pretty well inverted by the time I retired a couple of years ago, a change that played a significant role in my decision to leave before I’d intended to. I didn’t trust them, and when I say “trust,” I mean not merely their competence, but their integrity. Some of that pressure may have been relieved recently, but the jury is still out.
I have no explanation for the change, but my friends at other universities tell me the same thing about their campuses. Is it an increased interest in institutional finances, bringing with it all of the bad things and few of the good things about capitalism? Maybe. Or that trustees have injected themselves into the day-to-day operations of universities in ways they’d never done before? Maybe. Or that there’s a class of people who don’t like having underlings who are smarter than they are? Maybe. Is it a conscious move towards groupthink encouraged by those in power? Maybe. Probably a little of all of these…
Finally, there’s the question of “real-world experience.” I am unapologetic that over a career that started in the 1970s my total income from non-academic sources doesn’t approach five figures, let alone seven. I don’t think I’m disconnected from the “real world.” Of course, if I tell you that I’m a theatre historian, critic, and director, you might not know exactly what I do, but you’ve got a pretty good idea. But if you read that Josef Sorett’s previous job was “director of the Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics & Social Justice,” I could forgive you if your eyes glazed over a little. Mine did.
Of course, he’d say that such a combination of disciplines necessitates active engagement with the world at large. Perhaps it does. That doesn’t make him any less of a jerk.