His resignation letter chastises the school for not giving enough attention to his mother's death-- he only got two condolences. Does this strike anyone else as a really strange thing to bring up a tally of condolences in a resignation letter?
Whether that is Spiritual Bankruptcy, or merely Indifference, I know not, but it definitely reflects a culture problem of sorts.
The best workplaces do not involve parking your humanity or caring at the door.
I really don't see that as "spiritually bankrupt".
Spiritually bankrupt? Not sure. It’s not great though.
Complaining about a lack of a sympathy card is basically complaining that the admin support staff dropped the ball on meeting his personal emotional needs. So how old is Cornel?
Be nice if the complaint mentioned the unmet emotional needs of his support staff (garbage collectors, groundskeepers, janitors, food service, admin assistants, etc.) instead of simply the top of the ladder folks. Did he send sympathy cards to them during their moments of need? I’m guessing not, but I don’t know.
In my worlds, anything more public than a sympathy card would have been thought inappropriately intrusive, borderline cruel and just weird. It’s a place of work and the presumption would be the worker values a wall between work and family. An emotional HIPAA policy as it were.
It's probably intended to land best with people who are familiar with how communication works in that school/department, and the general atmosphere there, I'd expect.
likely he suspects that colleagues are afraid to publicly associate with him because he is too left wing / unapologetically Black / hot topic for Harvard.
This is definitely one of those "could be full of shit, or might barely even be scratching the surface and is actually quite restrained" kind of letters. It's hard to tell without more info.
Is it strange for folks to talk about a newborn child, or marriage at work? Conversely, what about infant death or divorce? Can you bring your "whole self" or just the good news?
Weren't there truly any better reasons to resign? If no, then I think Harvard is really a good place to work.
But, if that doesn't make sense to you, how about being systematically passed over for a promotion because of your political views?
It's hard not to see this as being a crappy place to work if you put yourself in his shoes.
Maybe, maybe. I agree with a cousin comment, that this is more of a canary than anything. I posted the whole of his letter at the top level, in large part to examine how much of his letter you're fixating on. Turns out, it's a very small part -- and he spends equal time on other public notices, and you've left that point unaddressed, so I'll expand on it.
In grief, one's loneliness is deafening, even when surrounded by loved ones. When this internal loneliness is accompanied by external loneliness, the pain is amplified to a degree that I cannot express in words. To see extensive public adulation of minor accomplishments, the lack of compassion is drawn out in painful contrast. All this serves an example of "toxic positivity" -- of which he exemplifies through a clear anecdote -- which is one of several complaints he has about the organization.
Now that I have kids, I think back every now and again to when I was in high school and my math teacher's wife miscarried fairly far along into the pregnancy. Looking back, I'm sure that was absolutely devastating for him, but as a class I don't think we gave it a second thought.
I feel bad about that. Kids just have no concept of how big a loss that is. Hopefully the staff was more sympathetic about it.
My theory:
Many of them are passionate, and it makes them good at their job, but their personalities and their job and the relationships with their peers seem almost inseparable... resulting in the sort of mish mash of professional and personal life that seem inseparable. For some almost everything can be personal to some extent... and in some cases I would find it inappropriate to mix all that up in the way some (not all) of them do at times.
It doesn't make them wrong, but it makes it really hard to understand. Such things happen outside of academia too, but it seems particularly prevalent there in my experience.
At least that's how I explain it to myself when I bump into such things.
One wonders if he had gotten tenure and received much beloved public replies he would resign thereafter.