"Deplorable." That's what a new #AAUP report called the state of academic freedom and shared governance at #LinfieldUniversity. As I tweeted last year, the president and board had many opportunities to make common cause with a willing faculty, but chose to bully and silence them.
https://twitter.com/AnnaKeesey/status/1389312921079930881
Here's the report: insidehighered.com/news/2022/04/1…
This administration has driven many accomplished and dedicated faculty away, decimated the humanities, and targeted particular faculty for their legitimate expressions of dissent, particularly Prof @pollackpelzner, a fiduciary of the university, whose warnings were ignored.
This is how you ruin a college. Yes, enrollment was and is a problem for small colleges; yes, the pandemic made it worse. But the abuse of faculty as individuals and as a constituency began as soon as the president arrived on campus. How differently this might have played out...
...if either the president or the board chair had shown respect for faculty not only as teachers but as stewards of the school's mission, if instead of avoiding, patronizing, gaslighting, silencing,and denigrating, they had sought cooperation. They then would have reaped...
...the benefit of a spirited, talented, engaged workforce contributing their best to the survival of a venerable, creative and worthy college. But key administrators were either unwilling or unable to make a joint plan for the future. When neither the president...
...nor the chair of the board can speak clearly to faculty, nor take responsibility for harm they've caused, when they treat faculty like an encumbrance, as mere content-providers in a machine built by businessmen, they guarantee that the education students receive...
will be mechanical. It will be cynical. It will be work done for a paycheck. Students will suffer, and the communities they join as adults will suffer. But Linfield is only one of many schools facing catastrophic re-organization in this way. When tenure and...
shared governance collapse, American higher education will collapse--though the buildings will be populated and classes will be held. That's because these institutions are where a great deal of vital independent knowledge is discovered, created, formulated, and...
shared with the public. The public needs to understand that independence from outside pressure is vital to good scholarship.
And without the protections given to faculty by the tenure system, university presidents will be able to dictate to faculty what research they do, for whom, for what benefit to the bottom line. Faculty control of curriculum, now based in the best knowledge in individual...
disciplines, will become vulnerable to political intrusion and influence, as K-12 schools are now vulnerable via takeovers of their school boards. Most higher ed administrators, of course, are educated, dedicated, exemplary colleagues to faculty. But they have mixed agendas...
...agendas that may allow financial or other motives to distort or corrupt scholarship, unless the firewall of tenure prevents such influence. Independent thought in academia cannot be allowed to depend upon the character of a particular administrative leader or the flavor of...
a cultural moment.That's why this #AAUP report on #LinfieldUniversity is so important. If a college can legally treat a professor the way Linfield treated Prof. Pollack-Pelzner, then any faculty scholar is vulnerable to the whims of the administration,...
no matter how benevolent that administration believes itself to be. So this lawsuit not only concerns the dismal administrative mishandling of events at a small Pacific Northwestern university. It's not just about the unprofessional, arrogant, not-ready-for-prime-time behaviors..
...of its administrators in the face of principled dissent by an acclaimed teacher and scholar. It's also a bellwether showing the direction of American higher education. This proceeding, and others like it, will tell us whether--in an era
when seats in Congress or on the Supreme Court can be bought and sold--American universities will retain the vigor and independence that has made them the centers of inquiry and creativity they have been for decades. So as this unfolds...
...keep in mind that that Prof. Pollack-Pelzner's lawsuit is not just about the wrongful termination of a fine scholar; it also has significant implications for the future of college education and, thereby, for the future of our informed and self-examining democracy.
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