In Higher Education News: Bethune-Cookman University President Trudie Kibbe Reed Resigns/Retires

In the world of higher education, a very strange story now coming out of Bethune-Cookman University in Florida: as Michael Stratford reports  in the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, the university president, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, has retired in the middle of the academic year.  At least, that appears to be the story.  But getting a clear picture of whether this is a resignation or a retirement or why it's taking place: that's another story altogether.

Soul Struggle: Tending One's Own Garden or Speaking Truth to Power?

I’m struggling lately with a spiritual-journey question that seems to recycle itself through my experiences again and again in a karmic way. The best way I know how to formulate this question is as follows: in a world sodden with the effects of sin, is it sometimes better to withdraw, live one’s life with integrity according to one’s best lights? Or is it better to engage?

A huge chunk of my soul has always wanted the first option. But circumstances seem to keep poking me to take the second path—even as I kick against that choice.

The immediate occasion for the renewal of this struggle in my soul is that I recently had the opportunity—or obligation—to write a report about a university at which I worked a few years ago, which is now undergoing reaccreditation. The academic oversight body that accredits the school invites third-party comments prior to its accrediting visits.

I had pretty much decided, some time ago, to wash my hands of the place, after some experiences of brutal injustice with the school. The school’s leader is adroit about using issues of gender and race to triangulate the institution she leads, as well as the public. The triangulation, and her penchant for surrounding herself with corrupt assistants, assures that she remains on top, no matter what comes along to expose her malfeasance.

As she does this, she has the active assistance of some powerful and wealthy white men whose interests she serves as a token African-American female leader. Though she depicts herself as a person of conspicuous integrity and strong faith, she uses behind-the-scenes finagling and high-powered lawyers ruthlessly to destroy her perceived enemies. And she gets away with this, over and over, because of her backers and their access to the media, to legislative and judicial bodies, and to the white male leaders of the church that also keeps this ruthless, ethically compromised academic dictator in power.

As I say, I had decided some time ago to wash my hands of this institution and its leader, and to let God deal with her in God’s time and way. But then, as the window for submitting a third-party comment to the school’s accrediting body began to close, and as a number of people whose discernment I respect encouraged me to write a statement, I did so. I produced an extensive, carefully documented report about the school’s lapses of integrity, violations of academic freedom, and leadership challenges.

And I doubt that this report will make any difference at all to the outcome of the accrediting body’s deliberations. In fact, it may well backfire and cause the accreditors to give the school and its leader higher marks than they would have assigned in the absence of my feedback.

And the report will almost certainly cause me grief, when the school’s dictatorial president threatens me yet again (she has done this repeatedly following my time there) with legal action, if I blow the whistle on her. Hence that tug of my soul to the way of silent peace and integrity, tending my own garden . . . . One can only fight so long without seeing much positive effect from the fighting, before one begins to look longingly at a cloister of some kind.

Interestingly enough, though, as I’ve been mulling these questions over and as I wrote my report, word reached me about the outcome of a report I left at the school at which I worked prior to the one about which I’ve just written the third-party comment. This report took five years to see the light of day. And now that it has come to light, it has confirmed my judgment about a horrible situation at that institution which I asked its president to resolve, and which he refused to resolve, despite my pleas and the documentation I produced for him to demonstrate that he needed to act immediately.

Here’s what happened: in 2004, when the then president of the school left it to take another job, she assigned an employee to me to supervise. Why she did that, I don’t know. I suspect a bit of malice in the choice to give this employee to me to supervise. I wonder how much the outgoing president knew about the employee’s financial records, and about why the outgoing president seems to have turned a blind eye to this employee’s blatant misuse of federal funds. This is an employee who should always have been under my supervision, but who was not placed under me until a change of regimes in the school.

When I began to supervise the employee, I was shocked at what I found in her records. She was the overseer of a well-funded (a federally funded) program to assist first-generation African-American college students, to help them make it in college. Her financial records and reports were a tangle, a mess.

As I began to sift through them as the supervisor of this employee, I began to see some shocking patterns of fiscal impropriety: duplicate receipts for the same expenditure; huge receipts for expenditures that were clearly personal and had nothing to do with the program in question; payments to family members who were somehow connected to the program in a large nepotistic network, and so forth.

I documented all of this carefully, and then began to report first to the school’s interim president and then to its new president. I asked them both to act, to call the employee to accountability. I warned them that because this was a federally funded program, the fiscal impropriety of the employee would probably raise questions at the federal level, one day down the road.

And the two presidents completely ignored my reports. The interim president, in fact, permitted the employee to submit the federal grant proposal for a new cycle of funding without my even seeing the proposal. I knew that the reason for the evasion was to prevent my seeing the employee’s salary, which I had every reason to believe was astronomical, certainly far higher than mine as the school’s chief academic officer.

The next president accepted the judgment of the interim president about the employee, and blocked my attempt to move forward with any disciplinary action. The employee, who was an African-American woman, was permitted to ignore my supervision and to claim that I was harassing her as a white male.

And then I left this school to take another job, leaving behind a final, detailed report documenting the fiscal impropriety and insubordination of the employee in question. I produced this final report to protect myself, when the shit inevitably hit the fan, and the employee’s misuse of federal funds became public knowledge. I wanted it to be clear that I was not guilty of malfeasance as a supervisor, or any complicity in this employee’s misuse of federal funds.

And now I hear that, more than five years down the road, the president has finally realized that everything I reported to him about this employee was the gospel truth. She has been fired. The president has just now discovered that her salary on the books was second only to his in the entire institution—and that is the salary that is on the books. In all likelihood, what she was taking home in under-the-counter payments to herself was much larger.

I don’t know if the outcome of this process of whistle-blowing is encouraging or depressing. The employee got away with another five years of graft and nepotistic pay-offs to family members. Because I sought to do the job assigned to me, I was treated as a bigoted white man pursuing a black woman for racist and sexist reasons. The employee and her family members spread the word far and wide that I had documented her fiscal impropriety because my real motive was to take over their grant program and, as one of her family members put it, take their honey pot and make it my own!

Still, what I reported turned out to be true, when those with the authority to make a difference finally chose to listen. And I suspect something very similar will happen to the report I have just now written about the school at which I worked previously. The accrediting body will ignore my report and will re-accredit the school, which will pass its accreditation with flying colors.

Meanwhile, I’ll hold onto my report until the day comes when it will be needed to document precisely the problems I’m reporting right now, which will one day come to light and cause the school grief and embarrassment. And meanwhile, I may also leak the report to a few well-selected media sources, watchdog groups, and government agencies, so they can begin breathing down the neck of an accrediting body that hardly ever takes decisive action in the case of malfeasance of the sort I’m reporting to it. And nothing prevents my publishing the report in a condensed form on this blog, either.

And, as the brilliant African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman University, noted frequently in her writings, even gardens, as idyllic and restful as they appear, take courage and work—especially when they're the kind of which Bethune dreamed, places in which rich and poor folks, black and white ones, Europeans and Africans and Americans, can sit and talk about building a more humane world. The kind of garden about which Dr. Bethune dreamed is certainly not an escape.

The graphic is South African artist Gerard Sokoto's "Man Tending a Garden," Durban Art Gallery.

Getting Democracy Back: Sara Robinson on Education in a Fascist-Proof Society

As an educator, I’ve written extensively (most recently here) on this blog about my intent concern that American higher education is now failing the nation, as it adopts leadership models drawn from the corporate world. And as it substitutes the values of the corporate business world for the values of higher education—values that higher education has a serious obligation to communicate to students, if we want to keep democracy alive.

I’ve noted that American colleges and universities have a strong obligation to teach students to respect diversity, to collaborate with others across racial, ideological, religious, and national boundaries, to use critical thinking skills to understand the socio-economic and political world, and to draw marginalized communities into social structures. I’ve also noted that American institutions of higher learning—including church-owned ones—benefit largely from public tax dollars precisely because our culture has always understood that, in receiving such public support, universities and colleges covenant themselves to inculcate values necessary to sustain democracy, and to produce leaders for the future.

In my view, the shift to a corporate model of doing business in American higher education is seriously undermining its ability to fulfill this social contract. So I’m very interested to note that Sara Robinson’s recent list of steps concerned citizens need to take to make our society “fascist proof” includes rebuilding our educational system.

Robinson states,

We need to get serious about investing in education. It's well understood now that our broken health care system is right on the bottom of the barrel among industrialized countries; but most of us don't realize that our schools are in the same comparatively wretched shape.

Thomas Jefferson understood that liberal democracy is impossible without a literate, well-informed populace; and the endless parade of teabagger loonitude is precisely the kind of know-nothing nightmare he most feared. . . . .

Don't know much about history -- so the Christian right is busily rewriting it to argue that there's no such thing as a wall between church and state. Don't know much biology -- so fewer than half of all Americans think the theory of evolution explains our origins. Don't know much about the science book -- so we're ready to believe whatever junk science the corporate PR folks can conjure up. Don't know much about the French I took -- which has left the country insular, parochial and unable to work and play well with others in a world it purports to lead.

But the worst failure is that we went through a decades-long patch where we didn't teach civics -- and still don't much, especially in states where it's not part of the standardized tests. Which means that there are tens of millions among us who have absolutely no idea what's in the Bill of Rights, or how a law gets made, or where the limits of state power lie.

It's quite possible that if the conservatives hadn't undermined universal civics education, the right-wing talking heads would have never found an audience. Instead, what we have is a country where most people are getting their basic political education from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

If we want our democracy back, that has to change.

And:

We need to focus on restoring our basic liberal institutions. In 2005, Chris Bowers noted that progressive ideology has always been disseminated through four major cultural drivers: the universities (and related intellectual infrastructure); unions; the media; and liberal religious organizations. Knowing this, conservatives set out back in the 1970s to undermine all four of these institutions -- and over time, they've largely succeeded in blunting their historic capacity to disseminate and perpetuate the progressive worldview.

As I’ve noted before, if American higher education expects to have a viable future, if it wants to retain its traditional academic identity and not simply become a propaganda machine for the corporate business community, it needs to take another look at some of the founding figures of modern American higher education, including John Dewey, who made the democracy-education link explicit.

Or at Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman University, who made that link explicit, and then deepened the analysis by applying the link specifically to one historically marginalized community, her African-American community. Bethune’s passion for education was driven by her vision of democracy as a network of social participation in which every voice was needed, and should be welcome. If you want a treat on this late-summer weekend in which it seems we’ve been bombarded for far too long with voices of hate and destruction rather than reason and hope, listen to Bethune’s contribution to NBC’s 23 November 1939 town meeting of the air on the question, What does democracy mean to me?

The Revolving-Door Syndrome: More on the Hazards of The Corporate CEO Model of Educational Leadership

I said earlier that I had made my final post for the day--but I should know better than to say that anything I plan or do is ever final. I'm logging in now to share some thoughts provoked by a Huffington Post article today linking to a story by Christian Rexrode at the McClatchy website, which announces that three more of Bank of America's board of directors have just quit. That brings the total of those who have resigned from the 2009-2010 class of directors to nine--half of the board.

This story of pronounced organizational instability jogs my memory to post something that I intended to say in a story about the sociopathic CEO and the application of that concept to leaders in higher education.

One of the negative consequences that those who study leadership in higher education are tracking in colleges and universities which adopt the corporate CEO style of leadership is the destruction of collegiality by presidents acting like CEOs on many college campuses. The corporte CEO style of leadership in universities is corrosive to the ties that bind a college community together--and, in this respect, it's corrosive to everything that colleges and universities are supposed to be about.

The concept of "collegiality" stresses the calling of a community of scholars and students to "bind together" in the pursuit of truth. The word "collegiality" comes from Latin roots meaning "bind" and "with."

The corporate CEO style of leadership disrupts collegiality, by imposing on institutions that are meant to employ a model of shared governance a top-down, and often autocratic, governance model. In the corporate world, CEOs are by their nature top dogs, the ones who make the decisions and hand them down to those "beneath" the CEO, who are expected to implement the decisions without questioning.

This model of leadership is a bad fit for higher education because higher education depends, at its most fundamental level, on a concept of leadership that values collaborative decision making involving the whole university community. This model of leadership sees decision-making as a shared venture, in which a community of scholars and students collaborate to generate ideas, discuss them, and then craft institutions to facilitate the implementation of those ideas.

At its worst--when a university president-as-corporate CEO moves toward that sociopathic edge described by Hartmann in the posting I discussed yesterday--an autocratic university president who views herself or himself as a CEO can create total insability throughout an entire institution. When his or her power is unchecked by governing boards who see no incompatibility between the corporate CEO style of management and university leadership, an autocratic university president can produce a revolving-door syndrome in the institution she or he leads, such that key offices see one person after another moving through them, causing serious instability in the whole organization.

That kind of instability, especially when it occurs in key university positions, undermines continuity, leading to institutional chaos, since the rules are constantly shifting, the chain of command is new every day, and no one knows to whom to report or what the expectations of the new supervisor might be. Such organizational chaos, induced from the top by autocratic leaders employing a corporate CEO style of management antithetical to the core values of higher education, seriously impedes a college or university's mission. It siphons off precious energy the college community needs to devote to the pursuit of its mission, since that energy has to be devoted, instead, to constantly adapting to new supervisors and new ways of doing business.

The loss of energy for the university's mission, in turn, causes misssteps that can lead to problems with accrediting bodies, whose primary function is to assure that universities have a clear mission, pursue that mission with integrity, and have strong processes of self-correction when the mission is not being pursued successfully. And when accrediting bodies begin to look askance at a university that is faltering in its pursuit of its mission due to autocratic leadership, donations from granting bodies and the university's stakeholders begins to dip, as well, since donors are hesitant to give funds to a university that seems to be spinning out of control with organizational chaos, a revolving-door syndrome in key offices, and loss of energy and focus for its mission.

It is the responsibility of a governing board, of course, to rein in leaders whose leadership style induces constant organizational instability and chaos, a revolving door in key offices, and a loss of energy for a university's mission, with consequent loss of credibility by the university. Unfortunately, in some institutions, the governing board is the source of these problems, in that it deliberately enables the out-of-control, or even sociopathic, autocratic university leader because she or he appears to be a tough, decisive CEO in the corporate style.

To the extent that the governing boards of American colleges and universities continue to refashion institutions of higher education around ideals and models drawn from corporate experience, which are ill-suited to the mission of higher education, and to the extent that boards choose and keep empowering leaders who employ those corporate models even when strong evidence suggests that such leadership is harming colleges and universities, we're in trouble, as a culture. We're in trouble because we depend, all of us, on the ability of our institutions of higher learning to produce leaders with values and skills necessary to keep democracy alive.

And that's not the goal of corporate culture, in most of its embodiments--not in any shape, form, or fashion. As the "Spiritual Autobiography" of a significant leader of higher education in the 20th century, Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded Bethune-Cookman University, repeatedly notes, higher education has a crucial role to play in sustaining democratic institutions, by inculcating in students the core values necessary to keep participatory democracy alive. When we allow the values of corporate culture to dominate our institutions of higher learning, we court trouble for our culture as a whole.

Thom Hartmann on the CEO as Sociopath: Applications for Higher Education

Thom Hartmann posted an interesting piece at the Alternet site a few days ago. He suggests that, to be a successful CEO—particularly in the corporate, for-profit sector—one needs to have sociopathic tendencies.

Hartmann is a trained psychotherapist as well as a journalist. In this piece, he argues that to make decisions on an ongoing basis that ruin the lives of other human beings, and to be willing to reap rewards for doing that as a “leader,” one has to have sociopathic tendencies. How otherwise to put your head on the pillow at night (and take the big paycheck to the bank), without ever wondering about the lives of those you destroy?

The heart of Hartmann’s argument:

CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths -- people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

I think Thom Hartmann is onto something. As I’ve noted in previous postings, I’ve found this pattern of academic-leader-as-sociopathic-CEO on the rise in institutions of higher learning, and I believe that it’s a pattern that ought to concern everyone in American society, due to the trend-setting influence of higher education in our culture.

As university boards of trustees are dominated more and more by those with ties to the corporate world (corporate attorneys, business leaders, church leaders who run big church corporations, etc.), boards of trustees look more and more for presidents who think like CEOs, who act like CEOs, who proudly profess to be CEOs rather than academic leaders. And the consequences for the institutions such CEO-presidents lead could not be more dismal.

Academic inquiry and academic excellence suffer in these institutions, because faculty are exploited and know they’re exploited. Some academic CEO-presidents gleefully undermine faculty governance and faculty rights, ignore due process in firing faculty, threaten faculty members with reprisal if faculty ask critical questions: they reduce faculty to the level of dispensable workers-cum-things in a labor pool without the protections from workplace harassment long afforded to academics to enable them to engage in serious thought and serious research.

This approach to academic life undermines academic excellence in the grossest way possible, by making faculty frightened to think, speak, publish, and teach. In institutions governed by fear, where a ruthless CEO-president can fire at will (and there are such institutions of higher learning out there), faculty become so intimidated that they will not open their mouths even when academic integrity is at stake.

I have seen a case like this first-hand, and it has been sobering to watch. The president-CEO whose behavior I’ve observed closely, since I have had to work closely with her, actually calls herself a CEO—and proudly so. Her pattern, by now a well-established one, is to go into a relatively stable academic institution and immediately produce such chaos that the institution starts to malfunction, and then falls on financial hard times.

The chaos results from a pathological tendency of this leader to imagine that even those she has placed in positions of trust, and needs to trust in order to keep her institution functioning, are conspiring against her. When she begins to distrust a member of her own team, she actually targets that person and begins actively subverting his or her work, to lay a foundation for firing him or her with allegations that the team member did not work hard enough or competently enough.

The economic hard times this president-CEO induces through her deliberate creation of institutional chaos then become an excuse to fire more faculty at will—targeted faculty whom the president suspects of being enemies—without due process or strong proof of financial exigency. This, in turn, leads to negative media attention and negative scrutiny from accrediting bodies and academic watchdog agencies, who censure the schools led by this president. And the negative media attention and censuring by academic bodies in turn causes further attrition of funding to the school from donors who would otherwise support the school’s mission, but become concerned that its current leader is undermining the mission.

I’ve become convinced that this person’s behavior does, indeed, have a very strong sociopathic basis. She seems tragically incapable of viewing the other human beings around her, including members of her own academic team, as human. She treats people as objects—dispensable objects to be moved around at her whim on any given day, and when she has grown tired of those objects or suspicious of them, to be discarded like used tissue, with nary a thought about the consequences of such treatment for their human lives.

To behave that way, and to do so over and over again, even when the consequences for oneself are painful (e.g., negative media attention, complaints to academic watchdog bodies, lawsuits), one has to be sick, I’ve concluded. One has to be incapable of learning to change one's dysfunctional patterns, even when those patterns cause one increasing pain. This is a very specific kind of soul-sickness, a soul-sickness rooted in a remarkable capacity of a CEO to view other human beings as less human than herself, as, in fact, dispensable objects.

The corporate world rewards such sociopathic behavior in its CEOs by paying them big bucks. Sadly, the academic world has begun to do the same, as it makes dollar signs rather than academic integrity its bottom line—as its governing boards do this, that is.

In the case I’m discussing above, though the CEO-president in question has now replicated the pattern I’m describing at each institution she leads, her governing boards have stood behind her. Her ruthless, inhumane treatment of her employees is justified as good economic stewardship, necessary hard-nosed pragmatic decision making to keep an institution economically viable.

When this approach to academic leadership is allowed to go unchallenged in our society, and when it’s allowed to become prevalent throughout higher education, we’re in trouble as a society. Higher education is not, in the final analysis, about making big bucks. It should not be about that goal, at least.

It should be about producing leaders who have sound values necessary to keep democracy alive. We fund all institutions of higher learning, both public and private, lavishly because of the social contract colleges and universities have made with our culture, to use those funds to produce strong, ethically grounded leaders with the skill to build democratic institutions for the next generation.

When we allow sociopaths to run our universities, and to justify their sociopathic behavior by claiming that they are simply being good CEOs, we’re headed for big trouble as a society. Academic leaders who betray core democratic values in how they run a university teach an unhappy lesson about values to the students of their university.

As I've noted in previous postings about this topic, before it loses its soul definitively, American higher education would be well advised to re-examine the philosophy of some of the prophetic founding figures of values-oriented, transformative higher education, including Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of Bethune-Cookman University. In her "Spiritual Autobiography," Dr. Bethune notes the foundational significance of institutions of higher learning in imparting the values necessary for democracy to thrive, as she concludes, “In this atomic age, when one small materialistic possession has wrought fear among peoples of the world, I am convinced that leadership must strive hard to show the value of these spiritual tools which are as real as anything we touch or feel, and far more powerful."

Somebody Is Responsible: National Day of Silence to Combat School Bullying

And because today is GLSEN's annual Day of Silence to combat school bullying, I'm going to reissue this post from a few days ago, in observance of the Day of Silence:

Courtesy of Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin (here), an important CNN video by Anderson Cooper about school bullying . . . .

The video links to the horrific recent story of the suicide of 11-year old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover in Springfield, Massachusetts, and to an earlier story about the suicide of another American school boy, Eric Mohat in Mentor, Ohio (here). Both were taunted by classmates with slurs about their perceived sexual orientation, called gay and effeminate. In both cases, their parents reported the problems to school administrators and begged for help, without being heard.

And each time a horrific, painful story like these hits the news, I ask myself,

1. Who's responsible? Where do schoolchildren learn to use language like this, to taunt a peer for being gay?

2. Who's teaching our children? Who teaches children that being gay is something to be made fun of, the basis for ostracism and ridicule?

3. Who legitimates this behavior? Where are parents, as this is going on? Where are teachers? Where are pastors? Where are churches?

4. What are our colleges and universities doing to produce teachers and school administrators that work vigilantly to produce a safe, tolerant, non-homophobic environment in our schools? What are church-owned colleges and universities, which speak of their commitment to healing social wounds, doing to address these problems in their formation of future teachers?

Behavior like this doesn't happen in a vacuum. The children doing the taunting, making the lives of some youngsters intolerable, come from homes. They have parents. They have brothers and sisters. They have aunts and uncles. They have grandparents. They go to church, in many cases.

They certainly have teachers. It's happening at school, after all.

Someone is teaching these children to bully. And that someone is responsible for the death of someone else's son or daughter. And someone is standing by in silence doing nothing as these lessons in bullying are being passed on within families and on the playground.

Someone is standing in front of a college classroom or running a college and turning her head away as story after story breaks of suicides of gay youths bullied in American classrooms. Someone is assuming it's somebody's else's problem, not hers, somebody else's child, not hers; assuming that someone else can take the political heat for standing up and doing what is right, making the hard decisions to teach future teachers that bullying based on sexual orientation is not okay.

Someone is standing in a pulpit and pounding that pulpit Sunday after Sunday and legitimating hatred of his brothers and sisters who happen to be gay. Someone standing in the pulpit is allowing his parishioners to go home with the message that it's not only okay, but holy, to persecute those who are gay.

This won't stop until all those someones own their responsibility for these unnecessary deaths of precious, talented young people. It won't stop until we follow the philosophy of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, Bethune-Cookman University, and recognize that every youngster we meet on the street is a potential Mary McLeod Bethune, a young person of incalculable worth, who deserves an education and a future full of hope.

Gay or straight.

New York Legislation Opposing School Bullying: Implications for Church-Owned Universities

Pam Spaulding’s House Blend blog is reporting (here) today that the New York house has just passed a Dignity for All Students act which promises all students in the state—including those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered—a learning environment free of bullying.

This is an important initiative, and it strikes me as significant that the legislative measure comes right at the same time that Julie Halpert has published an essay in Newsweek about the difficulties her daughter, who is a lesbian, faces as she searches for a university to attend this fall (here).

Halpert notes a survey by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) last October finds that 86 percent of LGBT students report being verbally harassed in high school, and 44 percent report physical abuse. As she notes, this makes the search of gay young people for safe and accepting college campuses imperative, since youth who have experienced harassment in high school do not want to step into an unwelcoming environment at the college level.

However, as she notes, though a handful of universities now publish information about gay support groups or the campus environment for LGBT students, many campuses continue to overlook the need for such information (and even for support for their gay students).

As I’ve noted on this blog, these challenges matter to me not only as someone concerned about bullying of gay youth, but as a professional educator whose service has been in church-owned universities. It’s our universities that produce the teachers who then go into the classroom at the elementary and high-school level.

When our universities are silent about the presence of gay students (and faculty, staff, and administrators) on their campuses, of, even worse—and this is the case with not a few church-owned universities—when they actively punish faculty or staff who call for an end to such silence and a safe environment for gay students, they do a huge disservice to all of us. By their refusal to address gay issues, they help to shape educators for our school system who will transmit the same silence—or, even worse, outright prejudice—towards gay youth.

It’s time for our churches and church-owned universities to stop being part of the problem here and to become part of the solution. It’s time for churches to assure that the universities they sponsor do not protect homophobic administrators who punish gay faculty, staff, and students. It is time for church-owned universities to create networks to assist gay students, who deserve to pursue their college educations in environments free of prejudice and harassment.

As I have noted in previous postings about this issue, church-owned institutions ought to lead the way here, not drag up the rear. Churches are committed to healing social wounds, not making them deeper.

And as I have also noted (here), church-owned institutions would do well to follow the lead of the prophetic African-American educator who founded Bethune-Cookman University, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. Dr. Bethune once noted that she regarded every little girl she met on the street as a future Mary McLeod Bethune.

No young person who comes to an educational institution—whether at the elementary, high school, or college level—deserves to be treated as anything other than a human being full of promise for a bright future. The continuing refusal of many church-owned universities to create environments welcoming to gay students (and faculty, administrators, and staff), and to educate students about tolerance and inclusivity in a pluralistic society, is a betrayal of all that churches ought to stand for, if they read the gospels with open eyes.

The Continuing Challenge of Combating Bullying of LGBT Students: GLSEN's 2009 Day of Silence

I know that all broken bones heal, all bleeding stops, all bruises fade, but a wound that has deflated your self esteem never fully heals"

- Andrew W., age 13 - Vorhees NJ*

GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) has announced today (here) that Reps. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and 33 co-sponsors have introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives to recognize and support GLSEN’s annual Day of Silence on 17 April. The Day of Silence calls on schools to combat name-calling and bullying of LGBT students.

As the GLSEN press release about the Day of Silence notes,

Nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT youth (86.2%) reported being verbally harassed at school in the past year because of their sexual orientation, nearly half (44.1%) reported being physically harassed and about a quarter (22.1%) reported being physically assaulted, according to GLSEN’s 2007 National School Climate Survey of more than 6,000 LGBT students.

As GLSEN’s resource materials note, it is very important that colleges and universities prepare future teachers to deal with the challenge of bullying of gay and lesbian youth in classrooms, on playgrounds, and in our schools in general. I’m convinced that one important way to do this is to take advantage of the shift that various polls show now underway among American youth regarding the place of gay and lesbian people in society. There is growing acceptance among American youth of gay and lesbian people.

Colleges and universities that hope to educate the youth of this generation well, to retain students, and to move them to graduation, are wise to develop freshman programs (e.g., freshman colleges) that capitalize on the social awareness of students, and make that awareness asignificant part of their educational experience. Studies show that colleges and universities with well-run freshman programs (often called freshman colleges on many campuses) centered on learning communities and geared to civic engagement have a better chance of moving students to graduation than do colleges and universities that ignore the unique needs of entering students, and/or refuse to engage those students in projects of positive social engagement and in dialogue about those projects.

I’ve long been struck by the approach of the prophetic founder of Bethune-University, Mary McLeod Bethune, to the responsibilities of educators. Dr. Bethune once stated that she never passed a young African-American girl in the streets without thinking to herself that this little girl might one day be Mary McLeod Bethune. Bethune placed herself in the shoes of the students she taught, and drew forth from them the best they had to give, engaging them in the social and cultural world in which they lived, and building on that engagement to bring them into the world of higher education. She put her students above her own ego needs and reputation as the leader of an educational institution, and in doing so, she became a powerful educational figure and world leader.

There is still, unfortunately, resistance to the extremely important goals of groups like GLSEN in some church-related institutions of higher learning. As I’ve noted on this blog, I had an unfortunate experience in the past when I was asked to lead a faculty project to train students in civic engagement at a United Methodist university. When I recommended GLSEN among many other organizations working for progressive change in a variety of areas, my supervisor informed me that I had put my “lifestyle” in the face of the campus community by this recommendation. I was punished for suggesting to the faculty I was leading that bullying of gay and lesbian students in schools was a valid concern for the students we were teaching at our church-related university, even though the body that accredits the teacher education program of the school requires that prospective teachers address these issues and that the faculty model diversity and inclusion.

This needs to stop, this resistance to the inclusion of gay and lesbian people in our world, on the part of churches and church-related schools. It needs to stop because, as the GLSEN report cited above notes, bullying of children who are perceived to be gay or lesbian hasn’t stopped in our schools. As long as such bullying continues, educators (and churches and church folks) need to be concerned about it.

*From the January 2009 annual GLSEN No-Name Calling Week Creative Expression Contest.

CEOs, Meritocracy, and Values in Higher Education: The Witness of Mary McLeod Bethune

CNBC telejournalist Mark Haines made an interesting comment yesterday about the big men and women on top of the corporate world, and what they think they are owed for being on top (here). In an interview with Rep. Charlie Rangel, Haines stated,

But you can’t really, it seems to me, expect that these Wall Street companies are going to be run well by a bunch of people who don’t make more than $250,000.

As I have noted, this myth of “pay-for-performance meritocracy” has also invaded American higher education, with disastrous results (here). As in corporate culture, increasingly in American higher education, there is the presupposition that the big woman or man on top deserves big bucks because she/he merits them—works harder, achieves more, is more ruthless about decision-making than anyone beneath her or him. This presupposition enters American higher education through governing boards, which are dominated by those imbued with the mentality of corporate culture.

As my numerous postings about this problem have noted (see, e.g., here), the adoption of a corporate model of pay-for-performance meritocracy in university leadership has assured that universities today are sometimes run by ruthless, power-hungry, egotists who do not understand or value academic life. When those academic big women or big men on top lead church-owned universities, they often sell out the core values of the faith-based university as they apply their business model to education. Their attitudes towards co-workers, their respect for the human rights of their employees, their commitment to collaboration, to mission, to empowering others: these often shockingly contradict the core values of the institutions they claim to serve, and of the social principles of the churches that own these universities.

The imposition of a top-down meritocratic model of management in universities—a model totally unsuited to the mission of a university—threatens academic freedom, since the control techniques employed by corporate managers prioritize conformity to the imperatives of the big woman or man on top, rather than pursuit of the truth. The top-down meritocratic management model is also inimical to collegiality, to the formation of communities of free, shared discourse of colleagues seeking the truth together. By their very existence, such collegial communities of discourse—which are the lifeblood of academic life—are a threat to the big woman or man on top who is intent on controlling others, in order to dominate and stay on top.

The damning faults of the grotesque hybrid created by the union of a corporate business model and the ideals of higher education are becoming increasingly apparent in this period of economic downturn, when many universities are reporting major losses in their endowments. Reports about the effects of this downturn on universities are everywhere: faculty workloads are increasing; salaries are being frozen and tenure put on hold; faculty are receiving imperatives from on high to teach ever-increasing numbers of students with ever dwindling resources.

And as these challenges to the pursuit of academic excellence face teachers in many universities—serious, fundamental challenges—the salaries of top administrators lincluding presidents and CFOs do not diminish, but in many cases, are even being augmented (see, e.g., here).

Something is wrong with this picture. Seriously wrong. As I think about Mark Haines’ absurd claim that you can’t really expect Wall Street companies to be well run by those who don’t make more than $250,000, I renew my call to President Obama and others with the ability to make constructive changes in American higher education to look critically at the negative effects of the top-down, meritocratic business model of leadership in American higher education.

As I note in my open letter to President Obama on the occasion of his public forum at Bethune-Cookman University last September (see, e.g., here), prophetic leaders of higher education such as the founder of that university, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, point the way to a viable future for American higher education by emphasizing the values on which higher education is based. In her “Spiritual Autobiography” Dr. Bethune notes, “In this atomic age, when one small materialistic possession has wrought fear among peoples of the world, I am convinced that leadership must strive hard to show the value of these spiritual tools which are as real as anything we touch or feel, and far more powerful.”

Dr. Bethune constantly insisted that higher education is foundational for American democracy, precisely because of its emphasis on values. She noted that universities play a premier role in assuring the success of democracy by imparting to students the values essential to a culture of civic virtue. And she recognized that those values have to be lived first and foremost by leaders in higher education, by faculty and presidents and CFOs and boards of trustees.

Pay-for-performance meritocracy betrays core values of academic life and undermines civic virtue. In this period when the excesses of corporate CEOs are being carefully considered by the public at large and when the bogus claims to meritocracy of the corporate elite are being exposed, it is high time for a similar reappraisal of the meritocratic claims of the CEOs of American higher education.

Reissuing the Appeal: Open Letter to Barack Obama on HBCUs and Homophobia

The following is an open letter to Mr. Obama that I published on this blog on 19 September last year. Since I published this piece prior to his election and he has now been elected, I want to reissue it, as a way of keeping my appeal to the new president open, to find ways to address the homophobia that troubles our society in so many ways. My 19 September letter follows:

Dear Mr. Obama:

To address this open letter to you, I am interrupting a thread on this blog that touches on painful personal experiences of homophobia in my professional life. Those experiences have resulted in my being unemployed and without health insurance at age 58—despite my proven track record of hard, productive, successful work.

My unemployment and lack of access to health care have everything to do with the fact that I have chosen not to hide that I am openly gay, and have lived my entire adult life in a committed relationship with another openly gay man.

Despite my lack of income and the dwindling of the scant retirement funds I’ve been able to save while working in church-owned universities (most of them HBCUs), I have donated repeatedly to your campaign. I have done so because I support your policies. I am working hard in every way I can to assist your election.

I have been particularly impressed by your willingness to address the unconscionable stigmatization and marginalization of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons in our democratic society. I have noted with delight your willingness to speak truth about the ugliness of homophobia to your own African-American brothers and sisters.

When you challenged homophobia at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta last January, I was moved profoundly—as I was also moved by your courage when you addressed these issues again before an audience not likely to share your views in Beaumont, Texas, in February. I have been equally impressed with your wife’s clarity and courage about these issues. I appreciate your support and that of your wife. This is among the reasons you have my vote, as well as that of many members of my family.

For this reason, I am respectfully asking you to think about your opportunity and responsibility, as you speak at HBCUs, to continue calling your own African-American brothers and sisters, and our nation at large, to recognize and address the ugly phenomenon of homophobia. I note that you will speak tomorrow at an HBCU in Daytona Beach—Bethune-Cookman University. I feel certain that you will be speaking at a number of HBCUs during this campaign.

This is as it ought to be. HBCUs have played a significant and often unrecognized role in the educational life of our nation. They have historically graduated, and they continue to graduate, the majority of African Americans who go on to earn doctorates in the U.S.

However, as I am sure you are aware, many HBCUs lack policies prohibiting discrimination against gay faculty, staff, administrators, and students. I have addressed these issues repeatedly on this Bilgrimage blog. A search of the blog for the term “HBCU” will link anyone who wants to examine this issue to numerous studies and statements about the track record of HBCUs, vis-à-vis homophobic discrimination.

I believe I have a right (and an obligation) to address the issue of anti-gay discrimination in HBCUs for a number of reasons. First, I’m a citizen who has long worked for equal rights for everyone in our democratic society, and, in particular, for those shoved away from the table of participatory democracy.

Second, I am a theologian whose vocational life has been centered on calling churches and religious groups to greater awareness of the mechanisms by which social structures stigmatize and exclude scapegoated groups. In my view, faith communities do not have the right to expect to command attention as credible moral guides, when, in their own practices, they violate key moral principles including the obligation to reach out and include the marginalized, or the obligation to refrain from harming those already harmed by structures of social exclusion.

Third, at the beginning of my career as a theologian, I deliberately chose to work in HBCUs. At the outset of my career, I had the opportunity either to take a highly paid position at a prestigious majority-culture university, or a modestly paid position at an HBCU, Xavier University in New Orleans.

I chose Xavier, and did so gladly, though my starting salary was $15,500 (to the best of my recollection) in 1984. The impulse to serve and give to those in need that brought me to the vocation of theology in the first place, as well as my history as a white Southerner who came of age in the Civil Rights period, made it obvious to me that I had an important obligation (and graced opportunity) to offer my talents, such as they are, to HBCUs.

In the narrative I am interrupting to address this letter to you, I am speaking forthrightly about the economic effects my choice to work in HBCUs has had on my life and that of my partner Steve Schafer. We both knew when we accepted jobs at HBCUs that we would never enjoy lives of economic luxury.

I spent almost two decades teaching and doing administrative work in HBCUs. During those two decades, from 1984 up to my last year in an HBCU (2006-2007), I never earned a salary in excess of $60,000 until my final year as academic vice-president at an HBCU. At Philander Smith College in Little Rock, I had the honor of serving as academic dean for a number of years. Even in that position—one that involved intense work—I drew a salary of only $29,000 for several years, until the president told me that she considered it an embarrassment to the college that it was paying its dean such a salary.

I am not complaining. I am not seeking to embarrass or adversely affect any particular HBCU, in writing this letter. I knew when I began working at HBCUs that I would not enjoy economic comfort. It was a privilege, an honor, to work in HBCUs, to have the opportunity to give something to a community that has suffered historic marginalization. I gave without expecting thanks.

What I did not expect, however, was to be slapped in the face because I am openly gay. That, unfortunately, was my experience at one HBCU, where, when the harassment began, I discovered, I had no legal recourse to protect myself against misrepresentation of my work record, and deeply personal vilification of my character.

At this institution, I had again been honored to accept the position of academic vice-president, though I was told that the salary I was being offered was some $30,000 less than that offered to my predecessor. It was enough to be wanted, to be needed, to be allowed to serve.

It was a delight, too, to have a salary that permitted me to give more than I had ever been able to give in the past. When I found that my salary included an augment from a state grant program in the amount of $20,000, I divided the augment in half and gave half of that amount to my associate, who, in my view, worked as hard as I did and deserved as much reward. In the year in which my partner Steve Schafer and I worked for this HBCU, together we donated more to the school than all other members of the university leadership team combined.

I will not rehearse the full story. Due to legal threats on the part of the same HBCU that has rewarded my hard work and that of my partner with such shameful and ugly treatment for our years of hard work and sacrifice in HBCUs, I am not even permitted to tell the whole story.

And I know that as a presidential candidate, you can do nothing about a situation of conflict between a former employee and an employer. What you can do, however, and what I believe you must do, to be true to your principles, is to call each and every HBCU at which you speak to accountability regarding issues of sexual orientation.

May I respectfully ask that, if an HBCU at which you speak has no policy forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, you call the HBCU to accountability about its obligation to forbid such discrimination through official policy statements? Please also call on HBCUs to implement support groups for faculty, staff, and students dealing with issues of sexual orientation. Please ask HBCUs to form task forces to educate their own constituencies, as well as the public at large, about the damage that homophobia does in our society.

Please challenge HBCUs not to harass openly gay employees or students, not to issue written demands that openly gay employees refrain from traveling or making doctors’ visits with their partners, when such demands are not issued to married couples working for the same institution. Please call on HBCUs and their leaders not to demean gay employees and students, and not to punish gay employees and students who promote dialogue about homophobia in the campus community.

The state in which you will be speaking tomorrow is one with an alarming record when it comes to recent incidents of gay-bashing. Historically, HBCUs have been a part of the solution and not a part of the problem, when it comes to significant social issues affecting minorities. The prophetic African-American leader Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the institution at which you will speak tomorrow, asked that HBCUs create town-hall meetings in which those shoved from the table of participatory democracy could gather together to discuss solutions to the problems they experienced.

Please continue Dr. Bethune’s legacy as you speak at Bethune-Cookman and other HBCUs. Please continue to remind HBCUs of their commitment to include, to refrain from discrimination, to refrain from harming those already harmed by social stigmatization. Please assist all of us who are working for justice within the faith communities of this nation, as we call on those who talk the talk to walk the walk. Faith-based institutions, including HBCUs and their leaders, should not have the luxury of representing themselves as opposed to discrimination, while they practice discrimination towards their LGBT brothers and sisters.

Thank you for hearing my plea. It comes from the heart.

Respectfully yours,

William D. Lindsey.

More on Connections between the Economic Crisis and the Crisis in Higher Education

Good for gutsy Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill. Huffington Post is reporting that she has just introduced a bill to cap compensation for CEOs of companies that have just benefited from the federal buyout (www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/30/mccaskill-lays-down-law-o_n_162662.html). It's beyond obscene that the big women and big men on top continue slopping at the trough while asking for handouts from the public, after their greed and malfeasance have already caused many of us to lose jobs and considerable savings.

I continue to wonder what down-the-road implications the economic downturn will have for American higher education. As my last posting on the crisis in leadership in American universities notes,

Faculty in many institutions note increasing workloads and decreasing support for their classroom work: frozen salaries, tenure on hold, imperatives from on high to teach ever-increasing numbers of students with ever dwindling resources. And as these challenges to the pursuit of academic excellence—serious, fundamental ones—face teachers in many universities, the salaries of top administrators, including presidents and CFOs, skyrocket (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-administration-of-barack-obama.html).

This gross disparity between how we reward those who do the real work of academic life--that is, teaching and mentoring students--and how we have chosen to reward those who do the far less important work of numbers crunching (university presidents and CFOs), is why the crisis in academic leadership is there in the first place. The disparity between what we proclaim academic life should be all about, and what we actually practice with our university pay scales, is obvious, and deeply troubling. We're not fooling anyone. Those at the top raking in the big bucks are all too frequently neither academic leaders who value academic life, nor leaders of any sort at all.

Until we address that problem, we will continue to see a decline in American higher education. Until we stop allowing presidents and boards of trustees dominated by business elites whose bottom line is the dollar sign to refashion the academy along the lines of corporate life, we will continue to see our universities produce far too many soulless, woefully uneducated graduates with no commitment to building a better society.

And in many private, church-based universities--those who make the loudest claims about values education and education for civic leadership--the disparity between faculty salaries and those at the top is even more glaring. And it is often hidden, since those universities often do not disclose salaries, as they do not the lavish perks provided for many of their top "leaders."

As my last posting on this topic notes, I hope that the new president will take his cue in addressing the crisis in American higher education from that powerful educational leader of the early 20th century, Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman University. Her insistence that students learn from what they see their mentors doing, and not from what they say, is right on target, and has strong implications for university leaders. Her attempt to wed classical education with education for civic virtue deserves attention at the important new turning point in our history represented by the new administration.

There's work to do aplenty. And we need to stop rewarding those who do not do it, and start rewarding those who do.

New Administration of Barack Obama: Challenges to American Higher Education

As the inauguration of the new president nears, I’m wondering what effect the change in government will have for education. I’ve just read a thought-provoking article in the Chronicle for Higher Education that addresses some of the questions confronting higher education today in the wake of serious economic downturn. This is Jeff Abernathy’s “Into the Wild.” Abernathy is vice-president and dean of Augustana College in Illinois.

I blogged some time ago about my hopes for the new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/12/ive-been-ho-hum-about-most-of-mr.html). In that posting, I reflected on what I hope will happen in the Department of Education, given the new Secretary’s promising history in the area of early childhood education.

My thoughts this week have turned to higher education, a subject about which I have blogged repeatedly here. I’m thinking of the crisis of American higher education these days (a crisis of leadership that I’ve addressed in numerous postings) because more and more stories are breaking regarding the effects of the economic downturn on higher education. I believe these stories will become more numerous in the coming year.

I also think they will call on us to look carefully at what we have allowed higher education to become—to examine how we are letting university leaders with little understanding of or respect for academic life reduce higher education to a numbers game, thereby betraying historic commitments to academic excellence. If we address the growing economic crisis in higher education as a purely economic matter, we will contribute to a serious problem that has developed in our university and college life in recent decades, and will further undermine American higher education.

The problem? As many of my postings on this theme in the past year have noted, our institutions of higher learning are increasingly led by boards and presidents whose claim to fame is numbers crunching. Ask faculty, who do the actual work of teaching and of carrying on the legacy of the founders of universities, what is wrong with higher education, and you will get an earful. And a consistent one at that. And an instructive one, which could well be used as a model for reform, if anyone chose to listen to faculty and not the big women and big men on top, for a change.

Faculty in many institutions note increasing workloads and decreasing support for their classroom work: frozen salaries, tenure on hold, imperatives from on high to teach ever-increasing numbers of students with ever dwindling resources. And as these challenges to the pursuit of academic excellence—serious, fundamental ones—face teachers in many universities, the salaries of top administrators, including presidents and CFOs, skyrocket.

Frozen faculty salaries while those at the top are augmented when they are already grossly out of proportion with the salaries of those who do the real work of keeping academic traditions and founders’ legacies alive . . . . This demoralizes faculty, makes faculty cynical, siphons off commitment as they pursue their important teaching tasks; it raises questions about what universities really value, and whether academic excellence is really what presidents and boards wish to highlight. And these considerations of grossly overpaid top administrators do not even take into account the considerable perks and lavish benefit packages enjoyed by many top leaders of universities, many of which are not even disclosed to faculty, staff, and students, particularly in private colleges and universities.

As this situation has developed—and as it has unfolded in direct relation to similar trends in corporate economic life under the neoconservative political administrations of recent years—what has been the response of university boards, who are charged with ultimate supervision of their institutions, of assuring that academic goals remain paramount in the institution? Boards have generally been part of the problem. Many boards are dominated, after all, by the very culture of neoconservatism that has gotten American higher education into the mess it is now in.

Boards are increasingly dominated by powerful business and political leaders who see the dollar as the bottom line. Who give carte blanche to ruthless top administrators who assure profit in a university, even if that profit is earned at the cost of shoving faculty into a quasi-feudal status in which faculty rights are violated and faculty voices are muted . . . .

Many university boards are now under the control of those who have little understanding of or sympathy for academic life and academic excellence, and who appoint and defend presidents who are equally unqualified to lead academic institutions. Under the leadership of such boards and such presidents and CFOs, academic institutions in the United States are now in serious danger—danger of losing their souls, of selling themselves out as institutions committed to academic excellence and to shaping culture by imparting to students the core values necessary to keep democracy alive. Some universities I am monitoring—rare ones, I’ll admit, but they do exist—have sold their soul to neoconservative polity to such an extent that they have placed their chief academic officer under the supervision of their CFO!

The solution? In the situation of increasing stress that academic institutions will be going through now as a result of economic downturn, it would be advisable for boards to reassess the performance of presidents in areas other than the economic (and even there, in the economic area, it would be advisable for boards to look beyond glitzy charts prepared by presidents and their CFOs and to do some sober numbers-crunching of their own). It would be advisable for boards to ask how presidents are actually (as opposed to rhetorically) strengthening the academic life of their universities, and serving the mission of their universities. To look at what students are learning, and whether they are learning, and how the values the university professes to cherish are being transmitted to students—effectively (as opposed to rhetorically) transmitted.

Will this solution be applied in many universities, under the impetus of economic downturn? I doubt it. From my experience as an academic administrator whose work has required him to interact closely with university boards, I do not have much confidence that many boards will begin to look carefully at the growing discrepancy between what their institutions profess and what they practice. I do not expect university boards, on the whole, to call to accountability presidents who are grossly undermining academic excellence. It was those boards who placed the presidents in the positions of power the presidents enjoy, after all.

What I do look for in coming days, and am already seeing in some institutions, is this: more freezing of faculty salaries, more setting tenure aside, increased teaching loads for faculty, and more draconian penalties for faculty who dare to protest. In a few institutions, I am seeing worrisome signs that the economic downturn may be used as a pretext by some presidents (with board approval) to target and dismiss faculty who are critical of those presidents’ betrayal of academic excellence and of the legacy of their universities’ founders.

If this happens—and I expect it to happen on some campuses I am monitoring—I also do not expect to see accrediting bodies doing their job and protecting academic freedom of faculty. Some accrediting bodies—notably the Southern Association (SACS), which oversees colleges and universities in the Southeast—have a history of giving generous benefit of the doubt to presidents and boards, in situations of conflict in which faculty allege that their academic freedom has been violated. In states that afford faculty no legal protection against unjust dismissal—so-called right-to-work states, which are numerous in the very geographic area covered by SACS—faculty also lack any strong legal recourse when they are dismissed for reasons that are clearly spurious.

If the economic downturn does not result in attempts to address the crisis of soul in American higher education, and if university presidents and boards are continued to be allowed to get away with attempts to rob faculty of rights necessary to assure academic freedom, I do not foresee a bright future for American higher education. I do not see a bright future because the problems of higher education have become systemic, deeply entrenched, and intertwined with issues of economic power and prestige that are not easily resolved.

There was a time in which I held hope for a fix to the substantial problems I’m describing. I did so because I saw them as rooted primarily in the lust for power on the part of out-of-control egotistical top administrators intent on shoring up their power over others. The longer I have worked in academic administration, however, the more I have come to recognize that these problems are rooted in both unjust use of power over others and in economic motives that encourage top administrators and boards to turn too many universities into feeding troughs for those at the top.

One of the reasons faculty have to be relegated to quasi-feudal status in universities reorganizing themselves along neoconservative economic principles is that more and more money has to flow to the top, to support the lavish (and increasing) salaries and perks of those at the top. That money has to come from somewhere. When no questions can or will be raised about the inequity of salary distribution from the top down to the lowly faculty, then cuts will always be made at the bottom, if economic times are grim.

And boards will not protest or demand a reconsideration of the unequal distribution of salaries within the university, because many members of university boards are there not merely for the power they expect to enjoy as board members, but for the economic perks, as well. It has taken me some time to recognize many of the ramifications of the economic games being played with some college boards, because those games are skillfully hidden.

At several institutions at which I have worked and with whose boards I have interacted, for instance, it has seemed strange to me that fundraising has been carefully controlled—and even discouraged—at precisely this time in which a developing economic crunch has been on the horizon in the past five years. At such a time, one would expect a president and her or his board to turn intently to a strong fundraising program. Then I began to think about why these particular presidents and their boards were unwilling to empower and support their fundraising officers, particularly when they had outstanding fundraisers at their disposal with proven track records of success in that area.

As I reflected on this anomalous situation, I began to realize that key board members did not want strong fundraising programs, insofar as those programs would threaten those board members’ control of the university’s fundraising activities—and would threaten, as well, the perks those key board members received when they brought in grants. What had appeared to me as all about (and only about) ego and power—the need of the president and key board members to take all credit for any fundraising coups—began to appear in a different light, as I observed the economic benefits coming to board members who sought to control the fundraising of the university, and even to run off talented fundraisers with a proven track record of success.

It’s about a feeding trough, sad to say, at which the privileged few intend to keep feeding, as they shove the many away. And this is not lost on faculty, who see the clear disproportion between the amount of work they are required to do and the amount done at the top (though those at the top are loud about how hard they work for their high salaries). The reduction of the university to a feeding trough for the big men and big women on top is not lost on faculty, who see the discrepancy between what they are paid for doing the real work of the university, and what presidents and CFOs are paid.

And so to the Augustana story with which I began this posting: the story Jeff Abernathy tells is a powerful one, because it sketches an alternative future for institutions of higher education faced with economic downturn. Abernathy notes that Augustana has responded to the current downturn both by tightening its belt significantly, and by hiring more faculty.

Why the latter? In Abernathy’s view, keeping a strong faculty even (and especially) in times of economic crisis is essential to keeping academic excellence alive, because gifted and devoted faculty are a college’s greatest asset. Augustana College has decided that, even (and especially) in times of economic crisis, it must build towards the future—and it is doing so by hiring the best faculty possible in as many numbers as the college can afford:

Building on the faculty strength that is already here, we're hoping to be excellent for generations. Being greedy now, in this most fearful of markets, might just be the right path to the kind of riches we value most: excellence in student learning and growth.

My hope for the new administration in the area of higher education? Study the Augustana model. Do all in the government’s power to encourage academic excellence in higher education. See that faculty are valued and rewarded, and that academic freedom is promoted.

But be aware that in doing this, the greatest foes you will encounter will be within the academy itself: they will be sitting on university boards and in the top administrative positions in universities. And if you open the can of worms—the economic can of worms—that several generations of neoconservative political and economic models have created within our universities and colleges, be prepared for a fight. People who have created a comfortable feeding trough for themselves and have shoved everyone else away from that trough will not relinquish the trough and allow others to share without a fight.

But take heart as you do battle. Listen to the courageous, prophetic words of the founder of Bethune-Cookman University, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune:

I listened to God this morning and the thought came to me, “Any idea that keeps anybody out is too small for this age—open your heart and let everybody in—every class, every race, every nation.” We must remake the world. The task is nothing less than that (emphasis in original).*

It is, in the final analysis, all about creating democratic institutions (including academic ones) that keep nobody out. Our democracy depends on offering strong educations to everyone. And it depends on building academic institutions that do not serve the needs of the few—that become feeding troughs for a privileged elite, and shamefully, for an elite administering the university rather than for an elite served by the university—but that recognize and reward the merits of everyone. The task of remaking the world of our participatory democracy demands nothing less.

*"Address to a World Assembly for Moral Re-Armament," July 1954, Caux, Switzerland.

Unemployment in the Nation with the Soul of a Church

Yesterday’s news about how grim the national unemployment situation has now become has me thinking about what happens to those who are unemployed. I don’t mean specifically about what happens to create jobs for this growing number of Americans—though that’s a challenge that definitely does concern me.

What I’m thinking about in particular is the meantime—the mean time in which people are out of work. Humane societies, civil ones, make some provision for the humanity of those who have no work.

Being out of work cuts to the quick of a person’s self-esteem. Social psychologists find that this is even more the case with men than with women, since men are socialized to identify their personhood and self-worth with their jobs. People out of work feel useless, thrown away, unable to contribute and as if their contributions (and they themselves) are not valued.

In such situations, the temptation is for the person with no job to collude with the process that erodes self-worth. People with no jobs and no prospect of a job can give up, give in to addictive behavior—eating too much, exercising too little, abusing substances (if they are so inclined), venting rage that destroys their ties to those around them. Unemployment has a pooling effect that reaches well beyond the individual who has lost his/her job: it affects entire families, who have to watch (and who are often drawn into) the decline of the family member with no income.

Thoughts of suicide are common among the unemployed, especially when financial hurdles become insuperable and a person must watch all she or he has worked for vanish, as banks repossess houses, cars, furniture, or as savings put aside for retirement evaporate with the struggle to keep financially solvent here and now. Actual suicides skyrocket in times of high unemployment, such as the ones we’re facing now.

I’ve been thinking about these issues since before Christmas, when I read an article in a Port Orange, Florida, newspaper about a father who was out of work. His business had failed, and he couldn’t buy Christmas presents for his children.

As I have mentioned previously on this blog, Steve and I have a house in that community—well, more precisely, we’re trying to pay for a house in that community—and I follow the news there closely because of our foothold in Port Orange. As I’ve also noted, we assumed the debt of that house, which we did not want or need, solely because a friend invited us to work for her, and made promises to us that enabled us to assume the obligation of a second residence—that required us to assume that obligation, if we were to fulfill our promises to her, to work for her.

When that friend broke those promises and made no provision at all for the debts she had caused us to assume or for the disruption of our entire lives, we began our own cycle of unemployment a few years before the current national one began. That is, I began to be unemployed, since Steve found a job eventually, though not one whose salary can cover our two monthly house payments or provide health coverage for me.

So I have had several years to think about what being out of work does to a human being, a human heart and a human psyche. I’ve had a number of years now to monitor the effect of unemployment on a person’s sense of self-esteem.

Oprah Winfrey’s dialogue about spirituality with Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith, Elizabeth Lesser, and Rev. Ed Bacon last week has drawn attention because of Rev. Bacon’s bold assertion (seconded by Rev. Beckwith) that being gay is a gift from God. However, as I listened to the interview, something else struck me.

The young African-American gay man, Sedrick, whom Rev. Bacon was addressing when he made that observation, had called into Oprah’s show because he was having both financial and self-esteem problems. From what he shared, it’s clear that the two issues were intertwined: his difficulty accepting himself as a gay man in a homophobic culture affected his ability to work; his financial struggles then translated into further questions about his self-worth.

What Rev. Bacon, and following him Rev. Beckwith, told this young man went beyond their bold affirmation that being gay is God’s gift to him. They also noted that nothing is more inhumane, more cruel, than to expel people from human communion. Nothing harms a human being more than being told he or she has no worth, nothing of significance to offer the community—no gifts the community needs.

As the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church state, "The rights and privileges a society bestows upon or withholds from those who comprise it indicate the relative esteem in which that society holds particular persons and groups of persons" (#162). When we place people outside the workforce and make no provision for their future employment, we tell them in no uncertain terms that we regard them as insignificant, as people whose humanity we do not esteem.

The educational philosophy of that powerful African-American leader of the 20th century, Mary McLeod Bethune, builds on this insight that human self-worth is achieved in a social context. In a 1934 essay "The Educational Values of the College-Bred," Dr. Bethune asks why we struggle to educate. Her answer: "Nature has stored up in individuals native powers, possibilities, potentialities, and it is the problem, the work of education to release these powers—to make actual and real these possibilities and potentialities in order that the individual himself may live life to the fullest and make a contribution to the sum total of human happiness." * Bethune founded Bethune-Cookman University because she was convinced that no one is without talent or ability to contribute, and that everyone needs to have a chance to develop and use her or his talents

These are powerful (and deeply theological) statements which have important significance for how we understand the exclusion human communities practice against those who are gay and lesbian. But they are also powerful faith-based statements about what we do to other human beings when we take away their jobs and make no provision for their futures. These are statements, really, about the obligation of communities of faith to do more than pray for those who are unemployed: they are statements about the obligation of churches to reach out to those living through the mean time of unemployment, before a new job can be created or found.

And so I have been thinking: in this nation with the soul of a church, a nation rich with churches on every corner, in this new day of the Obama presidency when the new president says he will continue the faith-based programs of the Bush administration, our churches have a singular opportunity. They have an opportunity to do more than preach about love and inclusion. They are facing a graced moment in which their preaching can enflesh itself in acts of solidarity with and support for the unemployed and their families.

Churches have an opportunity now to make what they preach really believable, since we are called to preach first with our deeds and only as a last resort wit our words . . . .

Churches could do a tremendous amount to cushion the blow of unemployment at both a personal and a social level these days, by sponsoring programs that help people deal with the psychological ravages of unemployment. Churches could offer programs that teach us how to care for our health in the absence of health insurance, how to negotiate the complex, daunting system of health care without health insurance.

In manifold ways, churches can create spaces within which those with no jobs do not feel discarded, useless, and self-hating. These spaces can help the unemployed find their gifts, hone those talents, and share them with various groups. These healing spaces can reinforce the family life of those experiencing unemployment—to help families deal creatively with the tensions caused by unemployment, to find safety valves when the tension threatens to explode and damage family life.

Who knows, maybe churches will respond to such a vision by recognizing that they have an important responsibility to form such support networks for the unemployed precisely because so many churches played a role in getting us into this mess in the first place, by telling us that God wanted us to vote for the leaders who created the mess . . . .

Of course I know that I am dreaming. But if hard times are not times for dreams, then when are dreams ever warranted? And if I am going to dream, why not dream wildly? I even dare to imagine that churches might develop therapy groups for those at the top of the workplace, those who continue to draw obscene salaries while they assault the dignity of employees by firing them.

I know. It often seems as if one of the key requirements of getting to the top is to have no conscience at all.

But I'm a die-hard dreamer. Even in the hardest heart, I dare to believe, shreds of conscience remain alive. Even the big woman or big man on top may occasionally be tormented by pangs of conscience twinging out from those tiny slivers inside her or his heart.

If that's the case (and I believe it is), the harsh period of national unemployment we're headed into now may turn out to be a crisis time not only for the unemployed, but also for those who decree and sign the pink slips while their own fat checks continue to roll in. A guilty conscience can do nasty things to anyone, even those whose conscience has been whittled away to pinhead size by years of cruelty, ruthless ambition, and egotism. And for those poor sinners as for the rest of us, surely the church has balm to soothe the sin-sick soul?

*This 1934 essay is in the Bethune Papers at both Bethune-Cookman University and the Amistad Collection; it was also published in Southern Workman 63 (July 1934), pp. 200-204. The essay is reproduced in Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, ed., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), pp. 109.