Category Archives for Collegetown USA

A Faculty (Almost) in Revolt: Institutional Loyalty, Acts of Conscience and Votes of No Confidence

When the temperature hovers in the upper 90’s for weeks on end, not much stirs in Collegetown, USA. Most of the underpaid, underappreciated faculty have shipped their kids off to lacrosse or computer camp, or are busy packing for the Vineyard or Prince Edward Island. It’s a tough life.

So I was mildly surprised when I ran into a former faculty colleague coming out of the doctor’s office the other day. After we exchanged languid, semi-sincere pleasantries, she volunteered that she and other faculty were having a terrible summer, and that even the shortest of attempted conversations quickly degenerated into foaming-mouth, expletive-hurling duets of rage-fueled albeit impotent calls for revolution. As a faculty, my friend said, she and her colleagues were scared, angry and disaffected. “We came so close,” she said yearningly, “so close to voting no confidence last fall.”

The faculty cordially request your presence at a pig roast. So read the invitation, but the event was cancelled.

Voting no confidence in their college’s president, to be precise. Alas, misdirected institutional loyalty kept that much-needed vote from taking place. It’s only now, some six months after the aborted insurrection, that the faculty have come to realize that loyalty to ones college is a very different thing than loyalty to ones college president, and that their failure to act when the situation cried out for action has allowed an already fetid and festering wound to continue to eat its way through flesh and bone to the heart of the college they profess to hold dear.

Make no mistake: whistle-blowing is not easy, and its consequences can be terrible. This is a lesson learned the hard way recently by a couple of administrators at Washburn University who were given the heave-ho after answering board member’s questions about university President Jerry Farley’s squirrelly ideas about finances.

According to the Topeka Capitol-Journal Online,

Two former Washburn University administrators allege in a lawsuit filed Thursday [July 8] against the institution, its Board of Regents and president Jerry Farley that they were terminated in retaliation for engaging in protected whistle-blower activities.

Wanda Hill, former treasurer and vice president for administration, was terminated April 1. Robin Bowen, former vice president for academic affairs, was terminated March 30.

A complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Topeka lists three counts for the action: deprivation of the plaintiffs’ Fifth and 14th Amendment rights to due process against all three par ties, breach of contract against Washburn University and the board, and common law retaliatory discharge (whistle-blower) against all three defendants.

Vice Presidents Hill and Bowen were sacked when the president discovered they’d told inquisitive regents that he was cooking enrollment data with no-show students and handing out scholarships to them. So, with phantom students spiriting away $500,000 in grant monies, the trustees were understandably a tad suspicious. And this is where the story gets murky. Were Hill and Bowen duped by board members’ reassurances that their jobs would be safe if they told what they knew, or were they malicious underlings, out to stab their boss in the back?

Freshmen at Washburn U practice the class cheer.

Hard to tell, since Jerry Farley remains ensconced as Washburn’s CEO, and has the “110 percent confidence” of at least regent Dan Lykins, who says President Farley’s “reputation for being honest and upfront is beyond reproach.” On the other hand, the court documents suggest pretty conclusively that there was some sleight of hand in the budgetary cookie jar during Farley’s watch.

What’s of greater interest here, though, is the dangerous game VPs Hill and Bowen entered into with the board of regents. Sure, the regents are their boss’s bosses, but the promise of continued employment was not one that the women should have believed. President Farley had the power to can them, and he did. Unless and until the regents dismiss him, they will not interfere with his presidential prerogatives.

These women were either truly courageous or truly stupid, because they spoke up even though they lacked the protection that tenure would have afforded them. As administrators, they were as expendable, fair game for a vindictive president or a manipulative board. Had they been members of the elect—the faculty, that is—with the guarantee of jobs for life that tenure provides, they could have squealed on their boss with impunity.

Which brings us back to Collegetown, USA, where the faculty’s winter of discontent has given way to a summer of boiling tempers and exploding anxiety. A question gnaws at the faculty’s small, rarely used collective conscience: should we do the right thing? Having given one answer a try and finding it sorely wanting, perhaps now is the time for faculty to stand up for themselves, their students and their college.

Before it is too late.

Remember the princes and do the right thing!

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My Town’s Boycott is Better than Your Town’s Boycott

As you may have gathered, I live in a company town. Three institutions of higher learning—two independent colleges and one large public university—draw thousands of students to my little burgh and employ thousands more of us townies.

Living in a college town has many perks, a fact real estate hustlers but a few short years ago exploited by marketing the laid-back life academical to gullible empty nesters. The pitch was short and sweet: live amongst faculty and students and you too will be immersed in a scholarly miasma of heady debate, controversial artistic endeavor, and exuberant youth with a thirst for knowledge.

As anyone who has observed the discarded beer cans after a weekend of youthful exuberance knows, those college kids are thirsting for more than book-learning. But don’t let a little detail like nightly noisy campus parties going strong at 1 a.m. deter you from living on the perimeter of a campus.

Hey! You didn't tell us about the keggers!

Those same real estate hucksters dreamed up a similar fantasy for land-rich, cash poor colleges looking for ways to spin hay fields into goldmines. Indeed, in the midst of the housing bubble, a new industry grew up, one in which a corporation had two branches, the first made up of impartial consultants who for a significant fee would conduct a market survey to see what interest was out there amongst the 55+ set for selling the family home and moving into new campus-side digs. The second arm of the corporation was—I see you are ahead of me here—developers of said digs.

More than one board of trustees grew intoxicated by market surveys that indicated Buster and Barbara Boomer’s eagerness to surround themselves with other on-the-go seniors and set up housekeeping in hastily constructed, densely populated condominium “communities.” More than one board of trustees was eager to unleash on their campuses a pride of cougars and a pack of horn dogs, if it meant that these marauding species kept the wolf from the college door.

The possibilities for rental income are endless, when you live in Collegetown USA!

Some of the more fatuous trustees were even coaxed into believing that such high-density housing, plunked down in a rural setting, was far kinder to the land than, say, a handful of single-family residences designed to preserve the bucolic, gentleman-farmer spirit of the neighborhood. But no, many a board bought hook, line and sinker the developer’s assurance that quick cash from a land-lease agreement and a continuing cash crop of rental payments was a green investment for all concerned.

The joys of country condo living in Collegetown USA.

That many of these developments are now stalled due to the caprices of the real estate market is a blessing in disguise for boomers and colleges alike. Maybe each will come to their senses, and realize that grown-ups (no matter how fervently they reject the nomenclature) and college students (of the pricy residential college variety) do not mix. They do not have the same intellectual interests. They do not have the same capacity for self-discovery. And they most emphatically do not have the same taste in adult beverages.

And the BEST part is, I can see the campus from my backyard!

But, I digress.

I admit that I am a boomer who lives across the street from a college; in fact, I once sold the school some of my acreage so that it could expand its developable holdings. But I held on to enough of my land so that there is a comfortable buffer between me and the undergraduates.

No buffer, though, can insulate a resident of an academic company town from the hi-jinks of its governing bodies. In a community such as mine, town meetings come to resemble nothing so much as faculty meetings on steroids. They are not for the faint of heart, and if you attend one, better be packing your Robert’s Rules along with the No-Doze.

Members of the Select Board, Collegetown USA

Town meeting time only rolls around once a year, though, and in between times the “select board” keeps my town safe from the dangers that lurk outside the comforting, cocooning certainty of its intellectual and moral superiority. In fact, back in the 1980’s when declaring this, that, and the other “nuclear-free zones” was all the rage, my town was among the first to jump on the bandwagon but presciently added a “reality-free” amendment to its no-nukes resolution.

I cannot tell you how well that humble amendment has served my town. Under its sheltering auspices we’ve been able to cancel high school performances of Leonard Bernstein’s ferociously racist musical West Side Story, roll out the welcome mat for sprung denizens of Guantanamo, direct the federal government to reduce military spending, impeach George Bush, and, most recently, ban town employees and representatives from conducting business with or traveling to entities and locations in Arizona.

The Arizona boycott also urges citizens and businesses within my town to do likewise. To comply with this suggestion, for the colleges and university that call my town home, this means true sacrifice: they will have to return donations from alumni who live in Arizona and cease asking them for additional gifts. The schools will not be able to send admissions recruiters to Arizona (a great place to find applicants who will beef up the institution’s diversity profile) or accept tuition dollars from current students who have the bad luck to be permanent residents of the state.

I’m sure these fine institutions of higher learning will find a way to cope with the loss of income. Maybe start charging a fee or two for all of those town-gown activities that give university towns such a great quality of life. Perhaps reduce the custodial staff that picks up the beer cans after a long night of parties. Maybe let the grass on the quad go uncut a little longer. Maybe decide not to make the payment in lieu of taxes that would otherwise have helped the town buy a new fire engine. Maybe even lease more land, this time to a strip-mall developer. The possibilities are endless!

So, all of you “active seniors” out there contemplating a move to Collegetown, USA: caveat emptor.

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Presidential Politics, College Edition

I’m reading Game Change, which is every bit as juicy as I’d hoped it would be. I recommend it highly.

As I read about primary fights and smoke-filled rooms, though, my thoughts are carried back into the past, and try as I might to resist this tide, I can’t. So I will share with you reflections on how presidents of another venerable American institution, our liberal arts colleges, are selected. The money involved and the stakes at risk are teeny-tiny compared to our national elections, but the hubris and the ego of the players every bit as supersized.

Much soul-searching takes place campus-wide when a president announces she’s leaving. Such an announcement comes for a variety of reasons; it could be because the president has gained a new perch on a higher branch of the tree of learning, or because he’s ready at last to start living large on his pension, swollen as it is by deferred compensation, or because the faculty is coming after him with flaming torches and weaponized copies of the college’s governance documents. No matter. The trustees will gravely instruct the faculty to think deeply about the qualities most important for the institution’s next leader, and will themselves endeavor to answer the same question. Not, you understand, that they actually will do the q-and-a themselves. No, for that and other time-consuming tasks they will hire an executive search firm, just like Fortune 500’s do.

The real fun begins when the board, which—contrary to faculty conceit—is the hiring authority for bodies presidential, inevitably must choose between the lady or the tiger: academic vision or fiscal know-how. There is not a board of trustees of a liberal arts college, even the ones with bloated $1 billion-plus endowments, that does not agonize over this awful decision.

The board at a small Ursuline women’s college, the College of New Rochelle, recently had to decide. In justifying the board’s choice, the chairman said,

“Although financial needs and educational needs are both part of the picture, in the College of New Rochelle’s case, financial needs are absolutely paramount at this time,” said Michael N. Ambler, a former lawyer at Texaco and a member of the college’s board since 1993. “We felt that the crying need for the college over the long haul was financial in order to keep it alive, and without that, we were nowhere.”

To pull the CNR back from the brink of nowhere, the board in its wisdom dispensed with a search and named the vice president of finance, eight-year employee Judith Huntington, president. Ms. Huntington is a former audit manager at KPMG and holds a baccalaureate degree.

The chairman elaborates on the board’s choice:

With “virtually no endowment” (about $20 million, for an enrollment of 6,000 students), “the financial requirements of CNR are very difficult to meet,” Ambler says. “We have balanced our books, based on regular revenue and rather small gifts from alumnae, and Judy has been responsible for a great deal of our ability to do that.”

Huntington, he says, has nearly a year to more fully “familiarize herself with the educational side, to the extent she didn’t already have it.” Hiring a president with stronger academic credentials and lesser financial bona fides could have put the college’s future at risk, he suggests. “If we had an educator as president, I’m not sure the college would survive.”

There are two sets of Monday morning quarterbacks that sit in judgment of a board’s actions: the faculty and the alumnae. Both groups at the College of New Rochelle began full tilt analyzing the decision, writing letters and issuing statements. Did these manifestos take the board to task for its failure to consider the academic mission of the institution? Did either group question if the board investigated whether the education offered by CNR might be the reason for its shaky finances? No, of course not. In fact, education seems to have been the last thing on the quarterbacks’ minds. They were upset—stop me if you have heard this one before—over process. Seems the trustees conducted their “search” under cover of darkness, so sure enough

a group of alums wrote an impassioned letter (which was soon followed by others) urging the board to “recognize that more than anything else, at this critical time, the College needs a rigorous, open, inclusive and transparent process to identify the best person to lead CNR.”

The head of the Council of Faculty had these fighting words to offer: “I understand the concerns of others and respect and share the concern for the procedures that were followed in this case, we’re all best served at this juncture to be behind [the board’s decision].”

I wish President-elect Huntington all the best. She seems like a nice lady with a big job ahead of her. But I weep for my former professional home, of which CNR is but a leading indicator of the demise of liberal arts colleges should they continue down the path it has blazed. The choice between academic vision and fiscal know-how is no choice at all, because if you don’t have the former you don’t need the latter. A sustainable budget that sustains a poor curriculum is sustainable in name only. The financials might be balanced, but after the students have gone and the faculty are left scratching their heads trying to figure out what happened, the accountant can shut off the lights on his way out.

The College of New Rochelle isn’t the first institution to make this potentially fatal mistake; it’s just taken it to the next level. For years many colleges have instructed their search firms to find them a president who can raise money. The search firms do their best to comply, but with this “or else” dictum guiding their actions they must range further and further afield from the traditional academic leader, a man or woman of scholarly accomplishment, comfortable in the classroom and capable of making informed decisions about the business of education—teaching, learning, and research. Instead, they offer up pseudo-executive types, who may or, more likely, may not have had up-through-the-ranks academic careers, but who know their way around a spreadsheet and a cocktail party of high rollers.

Sadly, the colleges who look for this kind of savior in a pinstripe suit often get exactly what they want. The new president arrives. The beans are counted. The procedures are put in place. The outside experts are brought in. Never mind that the faculty is in turmoil, so distracted are they by the thought that something new or, horror of horrors, something additional might be asked of them, that they fail to realize the Sturm-und-Drang of the new regime has sapped them of any capacity to invigorate what very possibly is an anemic academic program much in need of a transfusion of new ideas, new commitment, and new passion. The place grinds to a halt, but, by golly, it can account for every bean!

I am a great fan of capitalism. Maybe I even think that greed is good. But as a capitalist I look at liberal arts colleges who hire accountants as their presidents and I scratch my head. Isn’t the first principle of capitalism to make your product so good it’s the one everybody wants to buy? Are penny-perfect spreadsheets and word-perfect governance documents an acceptable substitute for an education that will enable students to stretch their minds, test their principles, and expand their aesthetic capacity?

I don’t think so.

NOTE to readers: All quotations are from “Finances First,” by Doug Lederman in the Febuary 8, 2010 edition of Inside Higher Education.

Campus Free Speech

Excerpt from a September 30 press release:

Sponsored by the UMass Amherst Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), this year’s Colloquium on Social Change will examine how ideas about social justice have shaped American lives with speakers who represent distinctly different radical challenges to American society.

The press release continues,

On Thursday, November 12, at 7:00 p.m., Ray Luc Levasseur will speak on “Ray Luc Levasseur: Defendant in the Landmark Sedition Trial of Western Mass Returns after 20 Years,” with opening remarks by Bill Newman, the Director of the Western Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

The release then describes the speaker as follows,

In 1989, Ray Luc Levasseur and his associates Pat Levasseur and Richard Williams stood trial in Springfield, Mass., on federal charges of seditious conspiracy. After 10 months of deliberation, in the most expensive trial in Massachusetts history, a jury found all three not guilty of conspiring to overthrow the United States government. In his first public address in the Pioneer Valley after serving 20 years in prison for his involvement in a series of bombings carried out to protest what he viewed as U.S. backing of South Africa’s apartheid government and Central American death squads, Levasseur will reflect on his past and present, and the significance of the Springfield Sedition trial.

What the release does not say, according to masslive, a news website, is, “Levasseur, who spent several years in hiding, was part of the United Freedom Front, a group that was charged with eight Boston-area bombings between 1976 and 1979, the murder of a New Jersey state trooper, the attempted murder of a Massachusetts state trooper, several other assaults on law enforcement officers, and several armed bank robberies. Levasseur was not at the scene of the trooper’s shooting and never charged in the murder.”
You know what happened next. Police, state troopers, even the Governor of the Commonwealth, started screeching about a “cop killer” being allowed to shape the young, impressionable minds of UMass Amherst students, and, in something of a surprise move, the hosts of the event—UMass librarians—cancelled Levasseur’s talk. And I suspect you also know what happened after that—those brave defenders of free speech who populate university campuses sprang into action, and voila, just like that, the invitation was reinstated.

Lest you ever, ever doubt the courage and the principled, coherent stands academics take on issues of free speech, here’s UMass President Jack Wilson weighing in on the controversy:

“I am opposed to convicted terrorist Raymond Luc Levasseur speaking at the University of Massachusetts,” college President Jack Wilson said. “The University of Massachusetts stands squarely against the outrageous actions he has committed in the past. As a university, we defend the principles of free speech and of academic freedom. However, we deplore the example Levasseur sets for our students and the University community.” (Boston Herald)

Huh? I’m nominating that gem for the dictionary illustration of “doublespeak.” Bravo, President Wilson!

One of the reasons there is never a dull moment in higher education is that if things get to quiet around the quad, there’s always a free-speech controversy to stir up. Some group—usually but not always, as in this instance, a student group—seeks to bring a controversial speaker to campus. Another group—often but not always also students—gets offended in advance and starts beseeching the administration to shut down the event before it takes place. Need I point out that “administration” consists of those same busy-body bean counters that students and faculty usually keep at arms’ length. That is, until they want something.

There are always two sides to any free speech issue on a college campus. Side one: the free speech hardliners. The spirit of Votaire animates this group. One would be tempted to join their team were it not for the extraordinary narrow band of speech they defend. Case in point, the above-referenced lecture series, which purports to show “how ideas about social justice have shaped American lives with speakers who represent distinctly different radical challenges [emphasis added] to American society.” Never no mind that the deceased subject of one of the speakers and the other speakers themselves all are graying white male relics of the counter-culture ‘60’s, they “represent distinctly different radical challenges to American society.” That feminism was a radical force to be reckoned with in the 1960’s, as was the civil rights movement, as was the founding of the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student group, is irrelevant, really, because, hey!, a bunch of warmed-over (except for the dead one) lefties from the most shameful decade in 20th Century American history are here to bring those bad old days up close and personal to the denizens of the W.E.B. DuBois Library. “Distinctly different radical challenges,” my arse. It is exactly the insidiousness of the fatuous platitudes of the free-speechers that riles me. They say one thing, and mean another under the protective albeit perverted mantle of free speech. But don’t get me wrong—I’ll defend to the death their right to do it.

One the other side of the debate, generally, are the sensitivity-censors, who seek to curtail the free-speech rights because somebody, somewhere, might be offended. In this instance, it’s the state police and the governor. They make a compelling case, murder being about as offensive a crime as one can imagine, but it’s also true that this particular jailbird has been set free. Presumably his debt to society has been paid, and his right to spew his invective in the village square that is a public university campus restored. I don’t fault him for trying to make a few bucks on the lecture circuit, although I question both the motives and the intellect of those who invited him.

It is, in fact, rare that the sensitivity-censors have such a clear-cut case, although occasionally they do, as when Columbia University (a private institution that can do as it pleases, unlike UMass) invited Iranian hate-monger/lunatic Ahmadinejad to speak. But the show went on in Morningside Heights, just as it will at UMass. No, more often the sensitivity-censors have an urgent need to prohibit the speech of somebody who might make a racially insensitive comment, who might want to critique the Palestinians, who might want to oppose gay marriage. Those wicked, wicked ideas have no place on a college campus, and if you do not understand that, then you, my friend, are part of the problem. There’s a case to be made for censorship, but hurt feelings or politics that fail to pass the political litmus test are not among them.

Having spent decades working at both private and public institutions, I have had a bellyful of the lot of them, free-speechers and sensitivity-censors alike. Censorship is practiced every minute of every day on college campuses. Every time an acquisitions librarian buys this book instead of that, she’s committing an act of censorship. Only it’s not called it that. It’s called “exercising her professional judgment” and she’s paid to do it! Every time a faculty member puts together a syllabus, she’s engaged in censorship: read this, not that, she’s telling her students. And once again, she is paid to perform this service, her “primary faculty responsibility.” Truly “free speech” on a college campus is a fiction, and that’s not a bad thing.

But when the banner of free speech is raised to the parapets, you can usually be confident that the faculty member hoisting it is also the first to make sweeping derogatory pronouncements about politicians right of Barney Frank, thus making abundantly clear to students just how free their speech really is. One memorable faculty member stands out in my mind. A radical/lesbian/feminist, she was a staunch defender of students’ right to disrupt or walk out of classes; she defended flag-burners (who chose to torch Old Glory during a 9/11 memorial service); and she was a proud and consistent voice for social justice and social change. That she also owned multiple homes in two different countries while living rent-free courtesy of da man, her employer, really does not speak to the sincerity of her radical beliefs, does it? This particular academic played a vicious game with students, colleagues and administrators. Any time she felt like making trouble, she’d gather a band of true-believing students, manipulate them into complaining to the administration, then—get this, I am not, making it up!—play double-agent, coaching the administration on how best to respond to the students. Of course, she’d never put her name to any of the agitprop she’d bamboozled her students into producing, leaving no doubt about the courage of her convictions. Or about how seriously she took the greatest gift of a free society: free speech.

Let me leave you with a few truisms about free speech on campus:
1) Campuses should be bastions of free and open inquiry. Too often they are not.
2) Free speech on a college campus does not mean, nor should it mean, rolling out the welcome mat to every writer or speaker. The educational purpose to be served demands that faculty organize and prioritize knowledge for students. However, there should be a concomitant responsibility to justify any censorious decision. There seldom if ever is.
3) Until the academy itself is willing to hold up the mirror of censorship to its own practices, there will never really be “free speech” on campus. Only invitations to “offensive speakers” that mask the deeper and more disturbing questions of free expression.