Drug-Free Workplaces -- A Cautionary Tale

Campus elites have exploited faculty credulity before.


Confidentiality Cons force on faculty a decision common to citizenship: to question authority or to live under questionable authority. Gover­nance brakes fickle or facile changes in the Faculty Code or the Bylaws, so genuine authority seldom imperils the rights or security of the faculty. Fictional authority, by contrast, expands or contracts to suit the exigencies of committees or colleagues. Such Procrustean stretching and lopping is not new to Puget Sound, as the following will demonstrate.

In the early 1990s, Congress passed the Drug-Free Workplace Act. Among other symbols and gestures, this act required educational institutions that got federal funds – which is to say solvent educational institutions – to create severe sanctions for use of drugs on campuses.

Certain apparatchiks [that is, members of elite apparati beneath the level of the President or Vice President] presented the faculty in a plenary meeting with a proposal that, unbeknownst to the faculty, far exceeded the Congress’s requirements. When facul­ty mocked the proposal, the Dean of Students gravely intoned that the proposal had been im­posed on students and staff already. This led a certain campus wag to ask, “Is your point that, since staff and students have been stripped of dignity, faculty should be so stripped for fellowship’s sake?” [Adapted from Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons” http://imdb.com/title/tt0060665/quotes] The case for the proposal depended on belief that federal aid would be denied Puget Sound stu­dents unless faculty voted gentle for a good night to liberties.

That campus wag then went to Human Relations to get a copy of the legislation. Having persuaded a staffer that, actually, someone who specialized in teaching law to undergraduates could read a congressional enactment, I then made the far less capacious demands of Congress beknownst to the faculty, and the Professional Standards Commit­tee [PSC] created a far less Draconian measure. The FBI, freed from searching for a bottle of Scotch in my filing cabinet, then apprehended the Unabomber.

The moral of this story seems to me clear. It is not uncivil or confrontational to ask by what authority administrators or other decision-makers act. It is needful and rational. Campus elites have exploited “civility” ― usually a euphemism for credulity and servility ― before.