Faculty Voting No Confidence in the IU President
Yesterday was the big, every ten years or so, grand meeting of the entire Indiana University faculty. Well, actually only 900 of the 3000 attended, but it was a lot.
I could say my photo was fuzzed up on purpose, but it’s a lucky accident. “Lucky”, because a number of the junior and non-tenure track faculty (zero-research lecturers) said that IU has a climate of fear and they didn’t want the targets of the meeting to know who they were. Those targets were the President (of the entire system), the Provost (boss of the flagship Bloomington campus), and the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs (the administrator in charge of persecuting dissident faculty). There was a separate discussion and vote for each. The vote of “no confidence” was something like 700-100-100 for the VPAA, 750-50-100 for the VP, and 775-25-80 for the P.
I had come intending not to speak, just listen. More precisely, I had come to occasionally listen if something interesting was said but expecting just to do publicity for the MFSA debate and homework for my 7th graders. That’s why in the photo above I am sitting in one of the empty seats right up at the front; it was the only place I could find a wall outlet for my laptop. I started out sitting in the very back row, but I couldn’t even recognize anybody on the podium, it was so far away.
In fact, I was pleasantly surprised. Most of the 2-minute speeches were intelligent. It was not just “complaining faculty”. The emphasis was not on the offenses that the organizers of the vote had been talking about, but about more serious offenses, some of which I’d never heard of before.
I ended up speaking three times, actually, since I saw that important points weren’t being made by other people. I’ll give the gist below. I’ve been reading Winston Churchill’s World War I book, where he inserts lots of his memos (he was First Lord of the Admiralty for a couple of years till he was fired by the Prime Minister) and talks about what he was thinking. There was a joke about the book at the time: “Did you hear? Winston’s written yet another book, in six volumes. It’s all about himself. He’s titled it The World Crisis.”
Re: The Vice Provost. Law School Professor Steven Conrad gave a speech about how he was suspended in January (with pay) for wearing a t-shirt to class that said, “I will not be railroaded into retirement by a campaign of lies.” The Vice Provost has been trying to get rid of him by usual route of recruiting students to accuse him of sexual harassment, discrimination on the basis of religion, racism, and a long list of other things, all on the basis of what he’s said, using, in particular, jokes he made in class. The t-shirt counts as “retaliation”, an attempt to frighten students.
Various defenders of the Vice Provost said she was a nice lady and should be forgiven for making just one mistake, suspending Professor Abdulkadir Sinno with pay for deceit in reserving a room for a Palestinian speaker and breaking lots of rules to do so, because she was just listening to the University lawyers. I jumped up to remind everyone that Steve Conrad had also been suspended by her in an even more egregious case, for wearing a t-shirt. I said that it seems unbelievable and there must be more to it, but though Steve would be very happy to give every single detail and have the Vice-Provost respond, the Vice-Provost had imposed a gag order on him. This is a standard university strategy: punish a professor on account of various trivial or clearly false allegations, but don’t make it public because the public would laugh; instead, say “This professor was investigated for sexual harassment and racism, but we can’t give details because this is a personnel matter.”
Before time was up, the line of people who wanted to make speeches ran out, so Steve Conrad leapt up again and went to the microphone. He said, “Remember how I told you about how I was suspended for wearing a t-shirt to my advanced law class saying I wouldn’t be railroaded into retirement by a campaign of lies? I didn’t tell you the title of the class. It was “Free Speech on Campus”.” That got the most laughs of the day.
Re: The Provost. I made sure I would be the first speaker in this section of the agenda. This is because I wanted to respond to a good point by Robert Eno, a professor of Chinese (and leader of the monthly faculty poetry-reading group I go to). He said he was going to abstain from all three votes, because the organizers had circulated a list of grievances and he thought some of them were false and some were undeserving of censure. Even though the resolution was just, “We have no confidence in Person X", it would be interpreted as an endorsement of the circulated list.
I said that I didn’t know how I’d vote on the Provost (I’m retired, so though I met him and the President once at a party I knew very little about him), I did think Bob Eno had a good point. I asked if any reporters were present. No. So, I said, somebody should be sure to write up a press release within an hour of the end of the meeting to say, in a fair way, what issues had come up in the discussion. Otherwise, the reporters would have to make something up based on what had been talked about by a few people before the meeting. We needed to do that, or the public— and in particular, the Trustees and the Legislature— would just think, “Oh, there go those nutty professors again.”
And indeed that happened. In private, I asked the leadership if they were going to send out a press release and if they’d like my notes on what was said. They said they would, and no thank you. If they did, it looks like it was just the numbers in the vote. My wife pointed out the article in Forbes the next day. to me. She said it sounded like the faculty just didn’t like it that the President disagreed with them politically on things like Gaza. That’s the impression that was left. In fact, the silly issues— Gaza, unionizing the grad students, the recent Indiana S.B. 202 law on diversity statements— were hardly mentioned. The big things were the Sinno suspension, incompetence in budgeting, secrecy, reliance on legal opinions by university lawyers who are paid to agree with the Administration, the atmosphere of fear of punishment by the Administration, blatant breaking of the policies and rules of the University, lack of a moral sense (that is, of even considering whether an action was right or wrong), and the corporatization of the university.
You’d think that when Foucault is so cited, professors would get his point, that to achieve power you need to control the narrative. We game theory professors make a similar point: information is power, and if you don’t convey the truth to people, they will make mistakes. Either way, you have to tell the reporters what your side of the story is before their deadline or they’ll have to go with what they’ve got. You can’t wait 24 hours; it’s too late.
Re: The President. The meeting had been going for two hours at this point, and people were getting tired. A number of them said they wanted to go home and take care of children. One speaker said that he was going to leave, because University rules said that if less than 800 faculty were present at the meeting, then if the vote of No Confidence passed it would have to go an electronic ballot of the entire 3000 faculty, and he thought it would convey a stronger message to the Trustees if that happened. So he walked out amidst cries of “No” and “Come back”. I was persuaded, though, so I went out to the entrance and gave back my ballot and told the clerk, “I am now officially gone, but I’m going back in to see the show.”
So, although I did speak again, I wasn’t there. Not officially. This is how parliamentary rules work, and has been the cause of great controversy. In the days of U.S. House speaker “Uncle Joe” Cannon (I think it was), or maybe of his predecessor, around 1900, there was a problem of Democrats saying they were not present, so they could prevent a quorum and prevent any voting. At one point the Speaker changed the custom, and started counting them as Present. “I am NOT present,” one Representative replied in outrage.
Not many people wanted to speak— the line was short— and there were loud mutters and a couple of speeches asking the Chair to call a vote immediately. The Chair responded that this was not a regular meeting of the Faculty Council and under the announced rules, the entire time would be used if anybody wanted to speak, and no motions to “call the question” would be allowed. This provoked further murmurs and grunts. Somebody gave a long, professorial, speech and went past the time limit, and people started saying, “Sit down”.
I walked up to the end of the line. A professor I know who likes to tease me (once she said, “Even Eric supports this. And he’s the most conservative person in all of Bloomington”) saw me and said, “Sit down, Eric”, in a voice with just the right one— light-hearted, but conveying that she really wanted me to set a good example and end the speeches so we could vote.
I was going to talk about the Mark McPhail case, which although it was at Indiana University-Northwest (Gary), was under the jurisdiction of IU President Whitten and the legal staff down here in Bloomington. I’ve substacked on the McPhail case before, and you can read it there, but most of the faculty hadn’t heard of it. And I did tell that story in one of my minutes.
Before I did that, though, I turned the microphone stand around so I was facing the audience instead of the podium. I said, “I know we’re all tired. But we have to go on. We’re condemning the Administration for breaking the rules and suppressing faculty speech, so we’d better not do that ourselves. The ordinary rule in parliamentary procedure is that it takes a 2/3 vote to end debate, but we’re not in an ordinary meeting here; we have special rules.” I got a lot of vigorous nods, and the murmurs of people who wanted to vote right away died down.
Well, yet again I have too much to say. So I’ll continue another time.
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