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Inside Higher Ed has a new piece up this morning on the Southwestern College fiasco, bringing the story pretty much up to date. Go check it out.
Also this morning, a source on campus sent me a copy of the latest memo from the administration. It says that hearings for the four suspended (or, to use SWC’s preferred phrasing, withdrawal-of-consent-to-be-on-campused) faculty members have been cancelled at the request of the faculty members involved.
“The Human Resources Deparment,” the memo continues, “is diligently moving to conclude the investigation on this matter in the hopes that it can be resolved and that the three individuals may be returned to campus this week.”
Yet another weird twist in a story composed exclusively of weird twists, in other words. But it gets a little less weird if you look at the text of the law under which the suspensions were authorized.
According to that law, a withdrawal of consent for an individual to be on campus automatically expires after fourteen days, and it cannot be renewed. An individual whose consent has been withdrawn may request a hearing, but the law says nothing about the format of such hearings, who conducts them, or what they are required or empowered to do.
Whether or not “the investigation on this matter … can be resolved” in the next few days, the three suspended professors will be back on campus by the end of the week. The SWC administration’s memo notwithstanding, there’s no “may” about it. On Friday they go back to work.
Assuming that there are no more weird twists, of course.
We have received a PDF copy of a third statement from the administration of Southwestern College regarding last Thursday’s campus rally and subsequent banning of three professors from campus. Highlights:
The statement appears over the signature of Nicholas C. A. Alioto, who is identified within it as SWC’s “Acting Superintendent/President.” Alioto, a Certified Public Accountant, is a recent hire at SWC — he was named as the college’s Vice President for Business and Financial Affairs in July.
The statement says that the primary protest on October 22 “was conducted in accordance with Policy 5550.” Policy 5550 is Administrative Policy 5550 of the Southwestern Community Colllege District, and can be found here. It is based on, and promulgated in accordance with, Section 76120 of the California Education Code.
Note that Section 76120 and Policy 5550 regulate the conduct of students, not faculty.
The statement expresses the administration’s “concern” about events that took place when a “group of individuals left the free speech area” after the rally. It says that three faculty members are being investigated because of “concerns” that “center around three areas” — “[a] Incitement of students to move outside the free speech area and to violate College policies, [b] Disregard for warnings and directives of police officers, and [c] Physical confrontation with police officers.”
According to the statement, these areas are concern are being explored by “an outside investigator” who is not named or otherwise identified. That investigator has been conducting interviews, and his or her investigation “is expected to be concluded in the very near future.”
The statement denies that the three faculty were suspended. Rather, it says, they were “placed on paid administrative leave” and notified of “withdrawal of consent to be on-site.”
The faculty in question have, according to the statement, requested administrative hearings regarding their non-suspension suspensions. The next passage of the statement is worth quoting in full:
“In the interests of being as transparent as possible, administration offered to conduct the hearings in public; however, legal counsel for the three individuals declined that offer.”
Finally, the statement declares that “in order to provide due process,” the administration “must refrain from commenting further until the investigation is concluded.”
More soon.
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.
The American Civil Liberties Union is offering fifteen college scholarships to high school seniors who have “demonstrated a strong commitment to civil liberties through some form of activism.” The ACLU Youth Activist Scholars will receive $7000 each, and will “be invited to participate in ongoing activities with the ACLU, including the Youth Activist Institute training program at the ACLU National office in New York City.”
Candidates for the scholarships must be nominated by their local ACLU affiliates (a directory of affiliates can be found here), and the application deadline is November 30.
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.
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