In Vituperationem, Robert J. Zimmer (1947-2023): UChicago President, Skirt-Chaser, F*ck-up
Not content to let the dead rest in peace, UChicago PR machinery has already begun to raise $ off of a corpse of ill-repute.
On May 23rd, recent University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer passed away after a lingering illness.
“Effective and influential” says the current trustees chairman, “Bold and visionary leadership” says the current provost, “An unprecedented legacy” says the section heading of the rather lengthy news release.
What else can be said?
Well, a lot, actually.
Aside from the issue of whether Zimmer’s living will complemented any DNR with an order not to pimp out his corpse à la the late and much-loved literary theorist Lauren Berlant – “Admire her? Give us money!” – much of Zimmer’s history is well-documented and speaks for itself.
Zimmer’s arrival at UChicago was inauspicious from the get-go; perhaps incited by the easy availability of Viagra and his emerging research on superrigidity, his time at Brown had led to an affair, somehow forcing into him into local exile as he left his wife in the president’s mansion.
Many things happen in relationships, but it did hit the higher education press, not least because of legal issues around occupancy of non-profit university property. Ethically, too, the very public humiliation of a long-time spouse was involved, presenting a very simple question: “Bobby, why didn’t you just keep it in your pants for a bit?”
Sadly, one can only assume that he no longer had such moral voices around him, or at least not from anyone he would listen to.
Apart from other more nebulous areas like reports that he wouldn’t let campus workers share the elevator with him, this bad character was matched by his relationship with money. Although obscene higher ed administrative payraises are now de rigueur, there was a time not so long ago when these large sums were popping up all over and beginning to be shocking. There, the numbers don’t lie, and show that over about five years “eight high-level UChicago administrators… received more than $7.6 million in compensation increases… even as the school moved toward and suffered a credit downgrade.” Besides raising eyebrows in the contemporary business press, such numbers were actually so large and out-of-proportion for their time that they actually called into question a small point about obscene compensation in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, since if Piketty had paid attention to figures coming out of Zimmer’s UChicago, he maybe should have pegged one of his upper ceiling numbers a bit higher! So too in modest retirement was Zimmer an early adopter of a new and abominable trend in higher education, the “Chancellorship,” a historically unnecessary and seemingly duty-light position in which the “bros helping bros out” C-suite mentality has now extended to provision of post-presidency troughs from which select peeps can slake their thirst, to the tune of mid-six figures annually.
And, lest you think this was somehow matched by productive societal contributions – a most dubious position, since why would someone truly devoted to education and research take so much money away from it? – Zimmer’s self-enrichment was perhaps only outstripped by the circus he ran, where in a common institutional malfunction decently known from around the higher ed universe, the folksy-dolksies up the food chain would blooper around and pretty much do whatever they wanted, letting central legal scamper about and clean up the messes afterwards. Here, the best exhibits of this are probably the two major donor scandals to hit the press during his term – one where some already litigious donors fronted cash only to feel they were wronged with their institute studying (of all things) conflict, and another where trustee-cum-fishy donor Steve Stevanovich wasn’t ponying up money that he had pledged and that the school had planned on despite internal concerns being raised, including at least once with the explicit phrase “red flags.” No institution is perfect and in-the-moment responses do always vary in quality, but you have to admit, it takes a special kind of manager for stuff that bad to happen, where decision-makers are getting very solid advice from mid- to low-level people in the know but then they go and actively refuse it.
Indeed, in a confluence of events that seems more like a lame-o academic version of the end of an episode of Seinfeld or Larry David than real life, Zimmer’s affair, entitlement, and incompetence actually all combined together at once in a recent turn-of-events around a listless research center that got gifted to his home-wrecking chickey-poo. As an idea, the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge née Stevanovich isn’t half-bad; themes glomming onto the sociology of knowledge are some of the most exciting and dangerous out there. In execution, however, it seems mostly gatherings of people with the most random projects who are scrounging around for money, and that’s besides the fact that it quietly lost its original name, likely due to some dust-up over troublesome donor money from that Stevanovich guy. It’s true that the jokes write themselves – Dr. Bartsch-Zimmer dons her designer wear to go into her place that’s been stripped of its name (get it?) – but still, the excess is such and so blatant that one can’t help feeling that the joke is somehow on all of us. It’s made even worse since the people involved are indeed real personalities, but they don’t have that delightful quirkiness you can still find tucked away here and there in academia, or even the car-crash can’t-turn-your-eyes-away grotesqueness of an Avital Ronell; yeah, they’re pretty out there even in that milieu, but you come away from them with no delight at all, and instead just feel gross.
And though some things should be tactfully passed over with no or little mention – the death of Robert Zimmer, for one, if the school hadn’t pumped up its hype machinery in a shameless canonization to keep up appearances and keep them dollars coming – it must be pointed out, since they’ve raised it, that the Chicago Principles around free expression aren’t all that, and were even inadequate for UChicago at their moment of inception. Like, even aside from how they might be a marketing and fundraising gimmick, the school has an MFA program, but the Principles don’t really cover art or easily account for the place and complexities of non-rationally discursive aesthetic communication. Just to put that out there.
Quite seriously, though, once you look past the relentless fundraising and expansion that’s the norm for that position nowadays, you have no idea how bad Robert Zimmer drove UChicago into the ground. Like many institutions, it had some underlying weaknesses when he arrived, but under him, everything solidified and spiraled out-of-control in very serious ways that it’s incredibly hard to come back from in any reasonable span of time. Bits of this were even admitted internally in a 2019 committee report on graduate education, particularly its mention of poor professional outcomes and “faculty abuse of power” that was affecting students’ “personal well-being” and “mental health.” Echoing the bad behavior of a few infamous cash-cow master’s programs, the once-legendary UChicago Divinity School, for example, has descended into chronic deceptiveness around placements and still massages outdated numbers to somehow claim almost 60% placement into tenure-track jobs after 5 years. (“If they’re making up numbers like that,” a colleague commented, “Why don’t they pick something real?”) Under Zimmer’s strongly hierarchical ethos where those higher up could run roughshod over anyone, too, academic incivility and bullying ran rampant across multiple divisions at varying levels of severity, becoming so normalized that it even took forms like email flames and public mockery like of community members’ physical characteristics. As an academic once commented about such behavior, “If they keep behaving like that, they won’t have much of a program left,” and all these years later, multiple recent alumni from multiple fields still actively warn people away from enrollment in graduate study there. In many respects, although it’s not as bad as it once was, the institution has simply collapsed.
Throughout this all, there exists what can be described as blithe exercise of power – not just to shovel money to yourself, not just to push others around or stand by as that happens, not just siccing central lawyers to quell the continual problems from the radically unpredictable environment that you helped create, but also to shape reality, through deploying your PR flacks in the comms office to work their journalism contacts and influence the ill-informed and the credulous and to make all the living farces of the erratic string-pullers some kind of giants striding the earth. Given the bizarre and strongly self-interested ‘objective narrator’ emphasis in Zimmer’s death notice on how he gestated “an extraordinary group of future leaders,” one can’t help but wonder if those associated with him are starting to be concerned about their employability. One also wonders if Zimmer was edged away from the easy money-spigot of his Chancellorship not because of ill-health like they said at the time, but because current President Paul Alivisatos flung open the doors of his new home and promptly stepped in heaping piles of dogsh*t everywhere he trod. Just read the article about that one donor fiasco and then the endless and unrelentingly glowing death notice; they simply don’t line up, and if there’s truth anywhere, it’s not to be found from the current central university apparatus.
Indeed, such vast distortions of reality by the powerful are a presumptuous and reprehensible imposition compounded by their extent and their excess and they challenge the integrity of any listener who has ever been paying attention. They are characteristic of some of the worst trends of our time, and they are made even worse by cloyingly and effusively attaching them to one just passed and so shamelessly hiding behind the respect commonly given the dead. It’s just real manipulative chutzpah, to depend on social pressure like that to palm off just voluminous, vomitous amounts of what is effectively a cumulative lie. When people are so profoundly corrupt like at Zimmer’s UChicago, they really do just continually create these dense and turgid situations that elicit complicity or force others towards it. Such disturbed folk have no other way of relating to others, and they in their actions always present a danger of tainting the integrity of anyone who is exposed to them. Any moment of silence becomes agreement, and becomes an opening to much, much worse.
On a more positive note and to be fair, though, Zimmer also did publish some mathematics research, and people who work in that field privately say mixed things, but they do tend mildly towards the positive. So, I guess he did some okay stuff there?
But, as for the rest of it, though, his memory doesn’t seem to be all that much of a blessing.
Barf. Barf. Baaaaarrrrrrrrfffff.
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Author’s note: I privately wondered whether to publish this “counter obituary,” and as someone who tries to act morally, I decided to go for it. Dealing with the corrupt is not like dealing with other categories of people, and also “the Golden Rule” very much applies here; others are very much welcome to write something like this about me after I die, but I suspect I won’t have the position and the corresponding PR apparatus making it necessary or even of interest, nor do I think that my behavior (despite, as with any of us, mistakes) will “give purchase,” to use one of those trendy academic phrases that cycle in and out of existence every few years or so. So, when I’m gone, though, if you feel it, have at it. You have my permission, and I will never revoke it. It’s only fair.
Interestingly, when I was finalizing the draft of this, I heard a radio news blurb about the recent commencement speech where actor Tom Hanks spoke to new graduates about “common decency” and “telling the truth.” I don’t really believe in omens, but it’s interesting, nonetheless, and shows that prominent others are very much thinking about these same social faultlines between representation and reality.
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