Mocking Sculpture

Recently a sculpture by George Rammell at Capilano University was seized by administration because the sculpture, not so glamorously, depicted the university president and her poodle. This action started a lively discussion about artistic freedom, censorship, and the actions of administration towards faculty.

Now I live in Arizona, over 2,500 km away and if Capilano’s administration would have done nothing about this sculpture I, and probably most people south of the border and east of Vancouver would not know about it but since they seized it everyone knows! There are so many things wrong with this situation it is hard to know where to start.

First; administration. I understand why administration were not fans of this sculpture. According to the President of the Board of Directors, Capilano University (along with every other organization) strives to “to cultivate and protect a respectful workplace in which personal harassment and bullying are prohibited” while this sculpture, according to the President of the Board, “has been used in a manner amounting to workplace harassment of an individual employee, intended to belittle and humiliate the president.”

I assume that all employees of Capilano along with faculty and the president have to acknowledge an employee handbook and in this handbook it states that employees cannot harass each other. At the end of the article Steven Dubin, a professor of arts administration at Columbia was quoted about this situation.

“‘It sounds like it was handled as badly as it could possibly have been handled. I think they lost all credibility when they levied workplace harassment. That’s absurd,’ Dubin said, noting that harassment usually implies a power differential in which the harassed is the comparatively powerless figure.”

I agree that this situation was handled about as badly as it could have been handled but to say that this is not harassment is interesting. Harassment occurs at every level; top to bottom, amongst equals, and bottom to top, and to disregard this as possible harassment means that you have a limited, only top to bottom view of harassment.

“People who are in the public as the university president is and who make decisions that affect a lot of people need to have a thicker skin and there needs to be a higher level of tolerance for satire and caricature and so on."

Again, I agree  with Dubin that people who are in the public sphere have to have a thick skin but does a university president, of a mid-sized university, need to have a tolerance for satire and caricature? Is it common for faculty members to make fun of their boss in a very public manner? Is it okay for a rank a file employee to publicly make fun of the president of their company? Is it okay for a lieutenant to publicly make fun of the general of the army? Or is it because this is academia that people seem to think that faculty members, aka. employees can be blatantly disrespectful in the name of artistic and academic freedom? (FYI, I have a hard time figuring out how this falls under academic freedom; artistic licence, yes, but with artistic licence comes possible consequences.)

Also, does Steven Dubin have any expertise on the topic of workplace harassment being a professor of arts administration or is it because he is from Columbia that his thoughts carry more weight? I would rather read the opinion of a third party Canadian HR expert than just some professor in arts administration.

Next; the artist. Are the crimes committed by the president of Capilano University so heinous that she merits a mocking sculpture? You can’t choose another subject to mock; Stephen Harper, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad or something light to mock like a shuttlecock, American Football, McDonald’s, or Barbie?

With that said I understand why George Rammell is upset. In 2013 Capilano University was facing a budget shortfall and one of the ‘line item’ cuts was the Studio Art Diploma of which he is a faculty member. Does this merit him creating a sculpture that blatantly makes fun of the president? Does it give him the right to publicly disrespect the president of the institution?

The problem with budget cuts is we (usually) do not know steps that led to the actual cuts. Did the arts faculty, including Mr. Rammell attend the budgetary meetings and plead their case for the Studio Arts Diploma? Were they or their faculty representatives part of the governance process or did the administration just make cuts without thought, consultation, or public discussion?

Finally; come on! Get it together people and talk it over. Administration at Capilano University need to talk to its faculty and get their input; faculty need to talk to administration and be part of the governance process including the boring budget meetings. In my mind this is not an us versus them issue, this is bad communication on every level and every side of the equation issue.

Addendum:

At the end of the day this article was longer than I originally intended because the situation is such a mess! What could have been done to make this situation better? Below are three ideas:

- Capilano University should never have seized the sculpture without due process; they should give it back to Mr. Rammell;

- If administration believes harassment occurred, Mr. Rammell needs to be ‘charged’ and be on disciplinary review;

- If administration did not want the sculpture on-campus they should have informed Mr. Rammell of this fact allowing him time to remove it.

If Capilano would have just started with the third bullet point then there still might be a controversy, but it would be much smaller. If Capilano's administration would have informed Mr. Rammell that the sculpture was creating an issue on-campus, <Enter Policy Here> and that he had xx-days to remove it then he would have been fully informed. He could have appealed, allowing for due process or if he refused then the university could remove the sculpture and be within their ‘right’. Or, after informing Mr. Rammell of the need to remove the sculpture he could have moved it to a studio where it could have lived in full glory for the world to view.

But did these events occur? It does not seem like it and so we have an asinine controversy and broken trust because of poor communication, lack of respect, and no desire to follow due process.