By Professor Doom
Every few months I
get some joker giving me grief for posting under a pseudonym; I’d reconsider,
but every few weeks I get a reminder of how fragile the position of an educator
in higher education is today.
Some faculty
bloggers do use their own names; I commend them. They often get smackdown,
however:
“…dispute
over his job involves comments that relate to the role of faculty members, the
rights of students and same-sex marriage...”
Allow me to
add a little detail to the above: a conservative faculty blogger did something
wrong: he mentioned by name the antics of a student/liberal professor regarding a hot-button
issue: gay marriage. This happened at a Catholic/Jesuit university, Marquette,
and the tenured blogger was against gay marriage, so you’d think he’d probably
be cut some slack for his faux pas.
No way. Admin
wanted him fired for his mistake.
Now, faculty
aren’t perfect, they make mistakes. When there’s an accusation like this,
there’s supposed to be a due process. I’ve seen admin deny due process enough
times to know only a fool would count on due process for fairness.
So, first thing
admin does is assemble a committee; I’ve been on a few of these. Mostly, we’re
told what admin wants, and we do that…or else. I’ve seen admin actually
threaten faculty at my community college…there’s no real defense against this,
trust me, I’ve tried.
Anyway, Marquette
is an old school, established late in the 19th century, so it still
has some integrity to the procedures. So, admin picks as loaded a committee as
possible, and puts the screws to them:
“…seven of Professor McAdams’ peers conducted a hearing over a period of
four days last September. The committee consisted of a diverse set of tenured
faculty members from different academic disciplines. After months of
deliberations, the committee issued a thorough 123-page report to my office…”
Four days of hearings! Months of deliberations! A hundred and twenty three page
report…over some blog posts. You better believe the committee was being
browbeaten, and kudos to them for holding on to their integrity.
I’ve been on
committees to address a faculty member repeatedly and openly trying to copulate
with students (with his MySpace page being pretty good evidence…hope I didn’t
date when this happened). We didn’t take 4 months to decide what to do, admin
wanted to keep him (and did, since he was cheap and had good retention. We seriously need to re-evaluate what makes
a good teacher in higher ed nowadays…). Another committee dealt with a faculty
convicted of lascivious acts in a men’s restroom and likewise had some, shall
we say, youth-related predilections; even though the school had many underage
students (from joint programs with the high schools), the committee was forced
to recommend keeping him (again, the “teacher” had great retention, all
students always got an “A” no matter what…seriously, we need to change the rules for what makes a good teacher).
I was the holdout
one time. It was a (fake) hiring committee, and we were given no choice but to
recommend a clueless, terrible, spineless, inexperienced choice for deanling,
but favored by our patriarchal Megaprovost. We also had an applicant who knew
what the word “integrity” meant, with years of experience, but the whole
process was farce and so we could not choose her, though the committee
unanimously agreed she was the best choice. I tried to move towards integrity,
but there was nothing I could do, the spineless sycophants outvoted me, I was
browbeaten until the vote was “unanimous” and so the awful choice was hired (I
paid for that brief bit of spine-showing dearly, I promise you).
Committees are
pretty motivated to make their decisions in a few hours at most.
Bottom line:
we’re human beings. We don’t want 4 days of meetings, months of deliberations
and 123 page reports to come to a decision. It’s very obvious admin wanted
faculty to recommend firing, and it’s very obvious this old school’s procedures
had allowed faculty to have some integrity. All admin could do was refuse to
dissolve the committee until they gave the ruling admin wanted…hence months of threats
“deliberation.”
Meanwhile, this
tenured faculty was suspended without pay during the proceedings…what kind of
protection does tenure grant if you can be suspended without pay for months just
for being accused?
Anyway, the
kangaroo committee was not so kangaroo after all, and resisted for four months
before finally giving in somewhat: no firing, but suspension for another year
without pay. Since that wasn’t enough, admin
just went ahead and did what they always do:
“…report
provided a unanimous recommendation on a path forward regarding the issue under
consideration…”
First, they lied. I promise you, you don’t
have 4 months of deliberations if there’s unanimity in the committee (all the
committees I was on were “unanimous” too, regardless of committee votes…”unanimous”
means whatever admin wants it to mean). It took 4 months of browbeating for the
committee to at least allow a suspension.
Then admin lied
some more, saying the committee also recommended:
Marquette
told McAdams that [he] must admit to his "guilt" within two weeks or
he will not get his job back after the suspension.
Hmm, once
again, Orwell’s
1984 comes to mind, a public apology for wrongthink? Not a likely
recommendation from the committee:
“…the
punishment imposed on McAdams was the recommendation of a faculty panel, the
lawyer for McAdams said that the faculty panel never recommended a required
apology. (A spokesman for Marquette declined to answer questions on whether the
apology was in fact imposed by President Michael Lovell and was not based on a
faculty panel's report.)…”
Admin is lying,
again. The gentle reader needs to understand these aren’t kids arguing over a
foul on the playground basketball court…it’s all done in writing. If the
committee’s recommendation for an apology really was given, it was given in
writing, and the spokesman could just produce that recommendation and be done
with it.
Much like with Germany
needing to wait 7 years to get its gold back from the Fed, a
thinking person can easily deduce someone is lying, and who.
I keep coming
back to the question: what’s tenure worth if a “bad” blog post can lead to a couple
years’ suspension without pay?
The comments
section, of course, sides with the faculty over the kangaroo court ruling (the
commenters don’t have admin browbeating them). One comment does seem to sum
things up:
Shocked I
am. Shocked beyond description. I knew nothing of this story before I accessed
this link. Yet somehow I knew with metaphysical certainty that the Professor
with the reticle on his forehead would turn out to be a political Conservative.
How could I have known this? I must be psychic.
I’ve
written before of the everyday
harassment and bias conservative faculty face, and how they’re a tiny
minority on campus. It’s just one more open secret on campus today. Another
comment gives the reality:
A
“conservative” professor being judged fairly by a panel of his
peers..........not possible.
Again, trying to
get 7 conservative faculty to judge this guy would be tough even at a school
with a thousand faculty…and still what admin wanted to do was so outrageous
that even the liberal faculty thought it was overboard.
A conservative
faculty at a Catholic school posts something that could be interpreted as
against gay marriage, and the admin there want his head on a platter. This kind
of lunacy is quite typical today, for those few faculty that dare to say
anything at all. And there’s confusion over why so many of our campuses are
asylums?
Next time, we’ll
hear from the tenured professor what he thinks about all this, and the
likelihood that he’ll give an apology.
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