Et tu?

Being harmed by someone who knows exactly what harm feels like is not the same as being harmed by someone cruel, or careless, or ignorant. Injury is produced in those sorts of situations. Harm caused by one who knows how it feels to be harmed in the exact same way is different. It’s a particular sort of betrayal that Shakespeare named so precisely that we have never needed another phrase for it. Et tu? Not a how could you. But, you, of all people. You, who were here before, in the exact same spot. You, who sat where I am sitting right now. You, who know, who ought to remember.

I have been thinking about administrators lately, in the concrete sense of their roles. I’m thinking especially of the ones who were once faculty or staff members. They were also monitored, evaluated, managed through concern framing at one point in time. They know the weight of an email that is framed as care, but actually comes loaded with the subtext that you are not performing to expectations, in a manner that befits a professional.

They know. They have been there. They should at least remember. They should also be aware that they crossed a threshold into administration, into the role of supervision, into the institutional logic that requires a different level of relationship from the ones they knew before. They carried that knowledge with them across the line. Because, yes, there is a line.

And then they used it as a tool.

What do I mean by the integrity cost of administration? I am not making a simple argument about hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is saying one thing, and then doing another. What I am describing here is subtler and, I think, much more serious.

It is the deliberate decision to stop letting what you know change what you do.

Every administrator who came up through faculty ranks, who was junior once, precarious once, subject to the informal pressures and surveillance architectures of academic hierarchy at one point, carries an education, a formation, in what institutional power feels like. They know the specifics of being targets of concern-framing, the care that’s really not care at all. They know the difference between a welfare check and a labor relations action obscured and disguised by wellness language.

They know because it was done to them. Or they watched it done to someone close enough that they felt the blast radius.

At some point in the ascent to administration, to power, a choice is made. Sure, it may not always be conscious, not always sudden. Sometimes it’s so gradual, it doesn’t hardly seem like a choice at all. Eventually, it is a choice, conscious or no, to set the knowledge earned down. To stop carrying it as a restraint. To let it become, instead, a map of the terrain, useful for navigation, yet no longer useful for conscience.

That is the integrity cost. Not the doing of the harm. It is the decision to do it with full knowledge of what it costs both you and the person in front of you.

Brutus knew Caesar. That is the whole point of the scene. Not that an enemy raised a knife. Enemies raise knives. That’s just what enemies do. This is clean logic. The grief is plain and ordinary in such circumstances. But Brutus. Brutus was trusted. Brutus was inside the circle. Brutus knew what the knife would find because he had stood close enough to the man to understand exactly where the vulnerability is.

Et tu, Brute?

The question is not accusatory. It is almost a surprise. The kind that precedes the recognition of grief and implication. After everything. You too?

I think about this when I think about the particular cruelty of being hugged while being knifed at the same time. The hug is not necessary to the harm. It is the mechanism of delivery. The warmth creates access. The care creates proximity. The concern creates a framework in which the knife, when it arrives, cannot quite be identified. To identify the knife, you would have to reject the hug. Rejecting the hug makes you the difficult one, the ungrateful one, the person who can’t accept that people care and are just worried about you. Didn’t you want care? You said you did. So why are you rejecting the care that you said was a hallmark of good leadership?

Let’s remember: this is not an accident. Institutions do not just happen upon concern framing. It is a practiced, learned move that has been refined across decades of managing. Entry is often workers saying they want and need caring leaders. The institution responds. The people in leadership positions who deploy it most fluently are the ones who once had it deployed against them. And they learned exactly how it works.

The hug teaches you where the knife goes. The true question is whether you carry that learning as a warning or as a method.

Related to this is something I call the work silence does.

Silence in institutions is never just about absence. It is also almost always about labor. It is loaded. The colleague who sees the targeting and does not say anything. The one who confirms it privately, over coffee, in a forwarded email, but will not go on record. This is just one of the ways silence does work. The administrator who performs concern rather than speaking plainly about what is actually happening is also doing work. The union activist who files reports on measurable progress while the mountain (in other words, the institution) remains unconcerned is doing work. All of them are holding something up through what they decline to say.

The silence of someone who knows is different from the silence of someone who doesn’t. The first is a choice with consequences they understand. The second is just absence. We tend, in institutions, to treat all silence as equivalent, as non-participation, as neutrality, as the simple failure to speak. But the silence of the person who knows is not ever neutral or benign. It is weight distributed elsewhere. It is pressure redirected. It is the structure maintained by the strategic withholding of testimony.

The administrator who does not say: I remember what this felt like from the other side, and I will not do it to you. That represents silence doing specific work. It keeps the machinery running. It allows the concern framing to function without contradiction. It permits the hug to conceal the knife because no one with standing will name what the hug is for.

This is why I have never wanted to be an administrator. Not because I couldn’t do the operational work. Not because I lack the capacity for institutional navigation or strategic thinking or the management of competing demands. Plainly, it’s because I am not willing to set down what I know about what it costs to be on the receiving end of a knife concealed with a hug. I am not willing to let that knowledge become a map instead of a conscience. I am not willing to do the work that silence does.

I have heard many former faculty friends, now administrators, complain about how their faculty colleagues treat them. They express surprise, even hurt, that people who once considered them peers now regard them with wariness or distance or hostility and outright adversarial positioning. They seem genuinely puzzled by it. They still think of themselves as one of us, just with a different title and a different set of responsibilities.

What I never say out loud in those moments, because the social cost of saying it is higher than the relief of saying it: what did you expect?

You picked up the role. The role comes with the machinery. The machinery hands you a list of expectations and a toolkit that includes the concealed knife. The machinery does what it does to the people under it. Did you think we wouldn’t notice? Did you think we assume the hug is really just a hug, or it would cancel out the knife, the way it apparently cancels it for you? Or that I will put down the awareness that that knife you now hold will not make its way to my back?

The surprise tells me everything. It means they believe the warmth of their intentions modifies the function of the instrument. It means the conversion happened without full consciousness. They don’t experience themselves as having made a choice, so they don’t understand why the relationship changed. They crossed the threshold, accepted the knife, and are now confused that the people on the receiving end of it treat them as someone holding a knife.

The people who remember what the pointed edge of the knife feels like are exactly the people institutions need and most reliably push out. The ascending pressure is always toward the choice Brutus made. It’s toward letting what you know become useful rather than restraining. Toward the hug with the knife already in hand. Toward the Wednesday afternoon welfare check that is not a welfare check.

I don’t think the people who do this are monsters. I want to be clear about that. Monstrousness would be simpler. What I am focused on is the ordinary cost of institutional ascent. It’s the ordinary way that knowledge gets converted into method. The experience becomes technique. The memory of harm gets transformed into the capacity to harm more precisely.

These changes are not cruel. They are simply professionalized.

And that, in some ways, is harder to live with. Cruelty has a face. Professionalized harm has a workflow. It has procedures. It has bureaucratic apparatuses embodied in Human Resource requirements and expectations, documented timelines, and a concern-framing so practiced it may have stopped feeling like framing and started feeling like genuine care. The people inside it may not experience the contradiction someone from the outside experiences. The hug and the knife do not feel contradictory to the hugger. They feel like responsible administration. But to you, the person being hugged, the outsider, you feel it as betrayal.

Part of what makes the conversion so seamless is that the knife was never really theirs to begin with. This is the part they don’t understand when they cross the threshold. They think they are picking up a tool, something they think they will wield differently, with more care, with the hard-won wisdom of having been on the other end of the knife’s edge. They think their intentions will temper the instrument. They focus on the money, the responsibility, the scope of influence, the chance to do things better than what was done to them. They think they will be different.

But the knife belongs to the machine. It comes with the role. The machine doesn’t care about your intentions or your history or your good faith. It hands you the knife and points you at someone and the only real choice is whether you take the role on those terms or you don’t take it at all. Most people don’t see the terms clearly until they’re already holding the blade. Sometimes, not even then. Sometimes they don’t see the terms until they’re twisting it into someone’s back.

They forget the knife that found them because remembering it would make the knife in their hand unbearable. So they don’t remember. The money helps. The responsibility helps. The sense of finally having standing, finally being the one who gets to decide. These help most of all. The forgetting isn’t malicious. It’s self-protection and self-preservation. It is the psychic cost of the conversion, paid quietly, usually without noticing the payment.

Et tu? is the question you ask when you realize the contradiction they are not feeling.

It is not accusatory. It is almost wondering.

You, who were here before. You, who sat where I am sitting. You, who know exactly where the knife goes because you felt it once yourself, in this same building, from someone who had also been here before you.

You too.

Let’s not leave it here. The argument would be too easy if we did. There’s more to be said.

Some people cross the threshold and don’t forget. Some administrators are genuinely good. Not perfect, sure, not without the pressures and constraints of the role. Still, they are fundamentally unwilling to use what they know as a weapon against the people in their care. They remember the knife and they spend their tenure making sure it doesn’t find the people under them. They fight the machine from inside, which means they are usually exhausting to their own superiors. They may rarely be promoted further, because the machine requires conversion and they, in effect, have refused to fully convert.

You know the difference immediately when you work for one of them. There is no subterfuge. No concern framing. No Human Resources protocols or Employee Labor Relations consultations running underneath the welfare check. Disagreements happen in the open. Accountability is direct. The hug, when it comes, does not have a hidden knife in it.

These people exist. I have known them. And their existence is actually the most damning evidence against the ones who chose differently. If the knife were truly unavoidable, if this were simply what the administration roles require, then everyone would use it the same way. The good managers prove that the harm is a choice. Perhaps, not always a conscious one or a cruel one. But it is still a choice.

This means et tu? is not addressed to administrators as a category. It is addressed to specific people, the ones who looked at the knife and the alternative, but still end up choosing the knife. They saw the evidence in the form of colleagues who chose differently, saw that another way was possible. They saw, they knew, and yet ended up using a concealed knife wrapped in a hug anyway.

That is the real question. How could you, having seen that it didn’t have to be this way, still choose this?

You too.

I keep returning to the idea of the threshold. The moment of crossing from faculty to administration. From junior to senior, from outsider to insider, from the person being managed to the person managing. There is always a threshold. Always. And at every threshold, there is something you have to decide between: the accumulated knowledge of what it cost to get to the threshold or the education in harm that the institution provided whether you wanted it or not.

Some people carry it as ballast. It weights their decisions, anchors it down. It makes them slower to deploy the machinery against someone else because they remember what the machinery feels like. They are not perfect — no one is — but the knowledge functions as a restraint, a friction, a voice that says: I know what this does. I know what this costs. Am I sure?

Some people carry it as a map. It tells them where the pressure points are, where the concern framing lands most effectively, where the knife finds the gap. They are not necessarily conscious of the conversion. It may happen slowly, the knowledge shifting from restraint to resource over years of institutional ascent. Until one day they are sending the email they once received and the irony does not register because the role has reorganized what the knowledge is for.

The integrity cost is not the crossing of the threshold. It is what you do with what you carried across. What, if anything, survived the crossing.

I write this because I need to understand it. I can’t yet forgive it. I am still getting there, and I am not sure forgiveness is even the right frame. But I do need to see it clearly. To identify the hug and the knife separately without letting the hug cancel the knife. To hold both at once: the performed care and the institutional function it serves. The administrator who may genuinely believe she was worried about me and who also consulted Employee and Labor Relations before she called my phone.

I grant both things could be true. The caring and the knifing. The hug and the blade. The et tu? and the answer that never quite comes. They don’t deny its existence. It’s just from inside the role that the question doesn’t make sense. They will say: of course, it was me. I’m managing. I’m a manager. Who else would it be? This is what administration requires. This is the role I took. This is the work.

The work silence does. The work concern framing does. The work the hug does, while the knife finds its angle.

I am not an administrator. I am never going to become one. I will keep sitting where I am sitting, on the faculty bench, on the receiving end of the machinery, calling what I see with whatever precision I can muster.

And when someone crosses the threshold and looks back at me with the hidden knife already in hand, I will keep asking the question.

Et tu?

It’s not an accusation. I say it in recognition.

You, who was here before. You, who knows what this means. You, who knows what this costs.

You too.