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On Tuesday night someone left a comment on one of my posts on the Southwestern College faculty suspensions that that passed on the text of SWC Governing Board President Jean Roesch’s Monday statement on the incident. Here’s that statement, quoted in full:
To: College Community
Many of you have learned that four faculty members were placed on paid administrative leave on Thursday, October 22, 2009 and three faculty members remain on paid administrative leave at this time, pending the outcome of the investigation. Please understand that no formal charges or allegations have been made against any College faculty member or employee at this time.
The student rally held between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m. on October 22, 2009, is not the focus of the investigation. The College is investigating safety and security issues that arose after the approved organized student rally. The College respects, values and is committed to lawful free expression and the student rally provided an opportunity for our students to voice their concerns and to underscore the challenges that all community college students, and community colleges, are experiencing.
The College is committed to maintaining a safe environment for our students and staff, which is the focus of the investigation.
I’m guessing, since the comment was placed in response to a blogpost critical of the SWC administration, and since the commenter adopted the moniker “SWC Professor,” that I and my readers are intended to take this statement as a rebuttal to our criticisms. If so, it’s a deeply disappointing one.
President Roesch seems to believe that if you give students and faculty authorization to hold a one-hour rally at a specific on-campus location, you’ve dispensed with your obligations to protect “lawful free expression” in the college community. But that’s not how the First Amendment works, and it’s not how a college should work.
The First Amendment doesn’t just protect free speech. It also explicitly protects the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances. A public college administrator is in a very literal sense an agent of the government, and SWC is a public college.
Students and faculty at a public college have a moral right to hold a peaceful rally on campus. They have a moral right to peacefully march across campus to the president’s office. There should be no difference in the eyes of the law, and there should be no difference in the eyes of any campus administrator, between a “approved organized student rally” and a spontaneous, extemporaneous one.
The SWC administration has so far offered no evidence that any incident that took place on Thursday afternoon placed that day’s march outside the bounds of fundamental First Amendment protections.
A community college dean who blogs anonymously at Inside Higher Ed has weighed in on the faculty suspensions at California’s Southwestern College, and his piece is definitely required reading.
“Dean Dad,” as he styles himself, is not a fan of campus protesters. “People who don’t deal with budgets for a living often don’t understand the constraints within them,” he writes, and too frequently “leap to the moral high ground and start passing judgments, loudly and publicly, based on misinformation.”
That said, he notes that when you’re a college administrator, dealing with such criticism — fair or unfair — is part of your job. And there are a bunch of ways you can do it:
You can work together with your critics to lobby for more government aid. You can bring those critics to the table and ask them for concrete recommendations. You can divide them. You can co-opt them. You can ignore them. You can conduct a PR blitz. (He takes a couple of sentences to describe each of these options, and as I said above it’s all well worth reading.)
Finally, he says, you can adopt the strategy that SWC president Raj Chopra has apparently chosen. You can “do your best imitation of Dr. Evil, go out on limbs that will be sawed off quickly in court, and make yourself look like an idiot in public.”
Again, DD is no friend of Chopra’s critics. He’s writing from the premise that Chopra’s position on the budget is reasonable, and that his student and faculty antagonists are unreasonable and ill-informed. And he still thinks Chopra is acting like a grade-A clod.
The title of DD’s piece is “Power 101.” He’s not concerned with whether Chopra had a technical legal right to authorize the suspensions, or what specifically happened on campus last Thursday. He doesn’t care, because those questions aren’t questions Chopra should have been asking.
A college like Southwestern is an institution, embedded in a network of other institutions — state government, unions, student groups, advocacy groups, non-profits, businesses, media. If you’re looking to transform an institution like that, or you’re hoping to thwart someone else’s attempts to transform it, you need to understand power. You need to understand the response that your actions will provoke, and the effect of that response on your position.
A leader of the ANC in South Africa once chastised a reporter who was trying to understand the long-term strategy of the apartheid government with regard to Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment. “You’re thinking like a chess player,” he said. “They play checkers.”
Most college and university administrators in the 21st century are adept chess players.
Raj Chopra plays checkers.
Update: I’ve posted a further discussion of Chopra’s actions here.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has its first major article up this morning on the Southwestern College faculty suspensions, and it, along with a couple other new stories, clears up some of yesterday’s unanswered questions.
None of those answers make the situation any less bizarre.
To recap: last Thursday a few hundred students and faculty carried out a peaceful protest against budget cuts at SWC, a southern California community college. That night four professors, including the president of the SWC faculty union, were suspended from their positions and barred from campus. The next morning the college’s president and HR director both left on extended vacations, leaving a low-level administrator behind to insist that the suspensions were “unrelated to the student rally.”
That’s what I had gleaned last night. Here’s what I’ve learned this morning…
The claim that the suspensions had nothing to do with “the student rally” can most charitably be described as deceptive. Yesterday the university clarified its previous statement, declaring that the suspensions came about because of an incident that took place during the protest, but after the officially sanctioned rally had formally ended.
SWC, like far too many American colleges, has a designated “free speech zone” in an isolated corner of the campus, and permission for the rally was limited to that area. At the end of the rally, however, a group of students and faculty marched on the offices of college president Raj K. Chopra, where they were stopped by a line of campus police officers.
SWC campus police chief Brent Chartier told the Chronicle that some of the protesters engaged in “illegal activity” at that point, that the incident is currently under investigation, and that criminal charges against protesters are under consideration. In a letter to the campus community yesterday, the president of SWC’s college district board said that “no formal charges or allegations” had yet “been made against any college faculty member or employee.”
Suspended prof Philip Lopez, the president of the faculty union at SWC, reacted with disbelief to the new statements. “If there are no charges,” he asked, “why were we placed on leave? Rumor? Reputation? Union-busting? Poor personal hygiene?”
It should be noted, by the way, that Thursday’s rally was not just a generic response statewide budget cuts. It was a protest against specific policies and tactics of Chopra’s, most notably a plan to balance SWC’s budget by cutting the number of classes the college offers each semester by 25%.
President Chopra has long been a controversial figure at SWC, and was the subject of a no-confidence vote by the campus chapter of CSEA, the faculty union, in May of this year. In that resolution, the CSEA chapter declared that a campus reorganization plan undertaken by Chopra had been conducted “with a complete lack of regard for Southwestern College’sstanding commitment to its own Shared Governance Guidelines.” As noted above and in yesterday’s post, the current president of CSEA’s SWC chapter, and one of the chapter’s former presidents, were among the four professors suspended on Thursday.
One last bit of background: The section of the California state code that allowed Chopra to kick the faculty members off campus empowers him to bar an individual from campus grounds “whenever there is reasonable cause to believe that such person has willfully disrupted the orderly operation of such campus.” It allows him to ban such an individual for no more than fourteen days, and requires that he hold a hearing on such a ban within seven days of receiving a request for one from a banned individual. If any of the three suspended faculty return to the campus before their suspensions are lifted, they are liable to arrest on misdemeanor charges that carry a maximum penalty of six months in jail.
Update: I’ve put up a follow-up post with new details and links on this story here, and a discussion of Chopra’s actions here.
Wow. This is … wow.
Four professors at Southwestern College, a community college in Chula Vista, California, have been suspended from their jobs and barred from campus — apparently for supporting a peaceful student budget protest.
The protest took place last Thursday, and drew the participation of several hundred SWC students. By Friday, the four professors had all received letters saying that they had been suspended effective immediately. The letters suggested that each of the four had violated a California state law prohibiting the willful disruption of “the orderly operation of the campus.”
English Professor Philip Lopez, the president of the college’s faculty union and one of the four suspended professors said he had been given no clear explanation for his suspension, but was sure it was an act of retaliation for the protest. “Clearly,” he told Inside Higher Ed, “the administration doesn’t think there is such a thing as the First Amendment.”
Another of the suspended professors, creative writing instructor Andrew Rempt, told the San Diego Union Tribune that the college’s head of human resources showed up at his home on Thursday evening with a police officer in tow to deliver his suspension letter by hand.
The president of the college, Raj K. Chopra, is on vacation, and the position of college spokesperson is currently vacant. Inside Higher Ed was unable to reach any other college official for an explanation of their action.
Update | A short, cryptic statement from Chopra’s executive assistant claims that the university is conducting an “investigation” of a matter “unrelated to the student rally.”
Second Update | This story keeps getting weirder. According to the blog Save Our Southwestern College, Chopra and HR director Jackie Osborne both went on vacation on Friday morning, hours after putting the faculty suspensions into effect. Chopra is expected to be gone from campus for three weeks.
Third Update | A post at Save Our Southwestern College identifies all four suspended professors. An anonymous comment on that post states that three of the four suspended professors participated in the budget rally, and that the suspension of the fourth was lifted when it was learned that she had not been in attendance at the protest. That commenter also claims that “at least one student … has received a letter warning him of the consequences of speaking out at SWC.”
Fourth Update | In a new interview with a local television station, targeted professor Philip Lopez calls the suspensions an act of “union busting,” and says all four profs were critics of Chopra’s policies.
Tuesday Update | As noted at the top of this story, I’ve now written a follow-up post with new details and links.
The student government at Idaho’s Boise State University has passed a resolution asking BSU’s faculty senate to amend a proposal that would reportedly end student participation in the academic grievance process.
Under current procedure, if a student’s complaint about an academic issue cannot be resolved through discussions with his or her professor, the chair of department, or the relevant dean, the dispute is brought to an Academic Grievance Board composed of seven faculty members and seven students.
But under a proposal currently under consideration by the faculty senate, students would be removed from the grievance process entirely.
Under the new setup, the final decision on any academic grievance would be made by the provost’s office, with the provost empowered, “at his or her discretion,” to “convene a panel … of three deans or associate deans” to assist in making a judgment.
One BSU administrator called the existing process cumbersome and antiquated, with a vice president of the university’s faculty senate saying that it is often difficult to find seven student members to sit on the grievance board.
But student government leaders rejected the idea that students should be removed from the process entirely, proposing that a six-member panel, including three students selected by the BSU student government and three faculty members selected by the provost, be given ultimate responsibility for grievance appeals.
Hat tip to the National Student News Service for bringing our attention to this story.
studentactivism.net 
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