Thread by @AnnaKeesey

As a professor @LinfieldUniv and a white Oregonian carrying the knowledge of our state’s racist past, I take the NAACP seriously. But this “report” is bogus.

https://twitter.com/opb/status/1388277989142638598

The report cites Davis’s accomplishments at @LinfieldUniv as though they prove him innocent of other problematic behavior. Pro-tip: people do both good things and bad things. #linfield #naacp

The report says that accusations by faculty that Davis has been “divisive,” “abusive,” and “combative” constitute coded racism, arising from our implicit bias against him as a Black man. But there is no evidence presented for this claim.

In fact, there is no evidence that the single author of this report, who leads the @cityofsalem Oregon chapter of the @naacp, ever investigated WHY Davis is seen as divisive and abusive.

Instead, the report cites the racist history of the state of Oregon, and calls it good. The entire college community—the most racially-diverse undergraduate school in the state, with faculty from all over the nation and world—is dismissed as hopelessly tainted by geography.

The report says it “scheduled interviews. It doesn’t say it conducted them. In fact, the faculty who were sought for interviews were, to a person, those who had been quoted in the media offering criticism or evidence against Davis. Believing the requests retaliatory, the faculty

...asked for more information about the investigation, its scope and origins, before agreeing to speak with the report author. The author did not follow up, provide the information, or explain why these whistle-blowers had been targeted. Instead, he issued

...a “report” comprising a wad of boilerplate language, lecturing the university community as if they were, um, unfamiliar with the concepts of structural racism and racial coding. Sheesh.

Let's note the timing: at 5:30 pm on Monday, April 19, the faculty of the college of arts and sciences took a decisive vote of no confidence in both the president and the chair of the board, and asked for their resignations...

...and at 8 am the next morning, the entire faculty received the email announcing that an @naacp investigation was underway and was in its "3rd stage." Later that day, whistle-blower faculty were asked for interviews. Again--the rationale for their inclusion was never explained.

Let's note also that Davis barely avoided an overwhelming vote of no confidence in 2019, when he'd been at @LinfieldUniv for less than a year. He'd already destroyed his relationship with the faculty by then. Why? Perhaps it was by being "divisive" and "abusive"!

(It's worth saying here that the chair of the board, included in the recent vote of no confidence, had been similarly rebuked, overwhelmingly, by the faculty in the spring of 2020. You'd think he, the president, or the board of trustees might have sought to repair their....

...relationship with the faculty at that time. They did not. They arrogantly rejected the grounds the faculty cited, claiming that the faculty had been manipulated by a small group of rabble-rousers. But if you know academics, you know that such a claim is laughable, because...

college professors who are voting on matters of conscience do not yield their votes cheaply. They are independent to a fare-thee-well. You might as well try to herd cats as persuade academics to vote as a mob.

What's been "divisive"? Well, one of the first things Davis did was cultivate the (legitimate) grievances of the staff and point the energy at the faculty. He told them that now the faculty would "feel the hurt" of declining enrollment and resources.

Subsequently, the president quite literally divided the faculty into three groups. Note that he exploited faculty time and good will by suggesting that their input would be considered in how the college would be reorganized. That was a lie. He divided us by fiat.

We did need a re-organization that would allow our business and nursing programs more autonomy. But the usefulness of these smaller constituencies to a president whose doctoral dissertation was in the uses of chaos in reorganization cannot be overstated: divide faculty in order..

to dis-empower them. Subsequently, Davis again gas-lighted the faculty into working for months on a new governance structure that would preserve shreds of our former egalitarian ethos--but when the committee presented their plan, he rejected it out of hand and imposed another.

How about "abusive"? Was the president abusive, or was that just racist code for "Black men are scary"? Well, how about this: in a meeting with the chair of the faculty executive council, Davis said he had to fire 25 faculty, and asked who those people should be.

To anybody familiar with academe and the vital protections of tenure, such a request is ten kinds of insane. But when the council chair, shaken, reported this conversation to the faculty, the president...

held a "town hall" (the kind where no unvetted person gets to ask a question, and if they do, they receive not an answer, but word salad) and publicly berated the chair, denying saying what he'd said, and as much as accusing the chair of lying. That's not...normal.

For months afterward, we kept being told there would terminations of multiple faculty. Not even lip service was paid to the crucial tenure obligations of an accredited institution. And no plan was offered for how we would continue to educate students properly...

...with 20% of the faculty yanked out of the academic program. Per college by-laws, the faculty is in charge of the curriculum and the quality of student learning. Davis's...negligence? ignorance? distraction? was threatening to devastate our life's work.

Some may not call that "abusive." But I do.

Of course, there was all the yelling and bullying, as well, which any number of faculty have publicly and privately attested to. But it was the cavalier attitude toward slashing away faculty that was terrifying.

Finally, a group of faculty designed a voluntary separation program to encourage those faculty to leave who were in the best position to do so. A number were told, against the rules of tenure and "academic prioritization," to jump or be pushed. We lost 13 full-time faculty.

Let's just say this: @LinfieldUniv was not overstaffed. We'd been doing a huge amount on absolutely skinflint staffing--this attested to by outside consultants--and so when 13 professors vanished, most of them from the humanities, many opportunities for our students were gutted.

One program, with 26 majors, has had no tenured professor to teach them--for two full years. If one didn't fear losing one's job in retaliation, one might call this academic fraud.

It was in this situation that reports of sexual misconduct against board members began to surface, reports taken seriously and followed up on diligently by elected faculty trustee Daniel @pollackpelzner. It was his pursuit of truth, transparency, training and remediation...

that was repeatedly thwarted and rejected by the president and the board of trustees. It was during their campaign of obfuscation and vilification of @pollackpelzner that the anti-semitism--whether intentional or unconscious--began to surface.

So while we deeply respect the history and mission of the @naacp, and we in fact want to learn what it has to teach us about ourselves, we have excellent reason to fear that in this one case, the venerable organization has been weaponized, to defend a president who...

for all his many gifts and successes, has conducted himself in a way that gives legitimate rise to descriptors like "divisive" and "abusive." The investigation was not an investigation, and it failed us, and it besmirches, however slightly, the reputation of the NAACP.