Astonishing letter from WMU on politically-motivated curriculum attacks

Below is a letter from Professor Robert Wait, signer # 871 of the “save the liberal arts at University of Toledo" petition available at gopetition.com. Professor Wait is a sociologist at Western Michigan University, which two years ago experienced a situation much like the one being experienced at University of Toledo—a radical attack on the Liberal Arts as taught in the College of Arts and Sciences and its curriculum. Western Michigan students and faculty revolted, and WMU’s President and Provost lost their jobs. Professor Wait believes there are many parallels between UT and WMU and suggests UT learn by the experiences of Western’s faculty and students. I neither endorse nor reject the opinions he presents, but admire his willingness to share them. O.



Dear Odysseus:

I appreciate your letter, as well as your diligence in looking at the petition list. The regional state universities in Michigan have been under attack for a number of years, and there's an identifiable pattern that has recurred nationwide, which has been supported by a number of well-funded organizations. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, The National Association of Scholars, David Horowitz's Campus Watch, and the right wing of the Republican Party have been involved in a secret but highly organized campaign to discredit higher education and essentially align universities with the business community.
In Michigan, John Engler was governor for 12 years, and after eight years in office he had appointed all-Republican boards of trustees at all universities except U of M, MSU, and Wayne State, whose boards are elected. These unanimously right wing boards would put pressure of University Presidents to get tough with faculty. When opportunities for presidential hiring appeared, they would bring in people who would follow their agenda. Engler had packed the Michigan State Supreme court. The Republican majority ruled in 1999 that the trustees hiring meetings need not be public, so a number of university presidents were hired without faculty input. The two recent Presidents at Eastern were hired on this basis, and both were forced to resign after scandals relating to their greed or incompetence.
Judith Bailey was hired at Northern under similar mysterious circumstances. She attempted to shift power away from faculty by unilaterally reorganizing programs, and Northern is still recovering from this reorganization. Basically, Bailey was waiting in the wings until something bigger opened up, and when there was an opening at WMU, she was appointed President by our trustees. The faculty didn't understand why she had been hired because the process was kept secret, but we hoped for the best. Bailey's agenda was anti-faculty from the beginning. She acted under the cover of financial exigency, efficiency, and the soundness of the business model of university administration. I read your President's speech, and it sounded like a parody of the new biz-speak that marks the subliteracy of right wing educators. Someone should write a paper about that.
Bailey had a couple of unproductive years under two inept provosts she had hired. When she hired Linda Delene, a Marketing Professor, as Provost, her administration suddenly became truly effective at executing her right wing hidden agenda. In consultation with selected faculty (N. A. S?) She instituted a two-year program to revise the University curriculum. She bypassed the legitimate curriculum-revision process, which had been dominated (oh my god!) by faculty. Under her plan, the Provost’s office would take one year to reorganize the graduate curriculum, and the undergraduate curriculum would be reshaped the second year.
Provost Delene resigned and Bailey was fired after that first program year, due, in part, to the no-confidence vote taken by the faculty senate (which generally doesn't do much - I am a senator). There wasn't one issue involved, but 85% of the faculty, with various complaints voted thumbs-down. The Provost went down by a very slightly lower percentage than Bailey. Then our graduate students (whose curriculum had just been revised) voted no confidence by an even larger margin. The chair of the Board of Trustees then declared his absolute faith in Bailey. This seemed peculiar, but he would have had to say that. Her administration must have been following the same directives as he was.
The AAUP then met, and asked for Delene's resignation, but not Bailey's. (The strategy was to divide the two and wait for further developments). She promptly resigned. Kalamazoo is a fairly conservative place, but Bailey but Bailey was unpopular in the community because she didn’t do good things for the university, and enrollment was dropping. Many students absolutely loathed Bailey.
Jennifer Grandholm became our Democratic governor on 2004, and was about to make her third and fourth appointments to the Board of Trustees. This probably influenced the Republican trustees to abandon their sinking administrator. She was fired, to the delight of even the College Republican blog, and our president emeritus, also very right wing, was appointed interim president. Then, after a fair and representative search, our current president was selected, and the sun began to shine again at W.M.U. I hope.
As a social scientist, I wish that I could have known what Provost Delene's reorganization of the undergraduate program would have looked like. Let me give you my speculation. When she was appointed, Delene had gone to the directors of the Women's Studies and Africana Studies programs, informing them that their programs were political, not educational, and would be abolished. I believe that revision of the undergraduate program would have drastically reduced the size of other humanities and social science departments, in the name of financial exigency and elimination of programmatic redundancies. Resources from Arts & Sciences would have been transferred to Engineering, Health Sciences, and our boutique aviation program.
The first year of the curriculum revision process hadn't made any major changes at the graduate level. I believe that the purpose of that first year was mostly to establish new administration-controlled curriculum processes. The second year would have been when the really big changes would have occurred. If the faculty had gone along with the first-year changes, they would have lost some of their power to resist changes the second-year. That was the hidden agenda: to reduce the size of Arts & Sciences, with their purportedly “liberal” faculty.
I need to stop writing now, for reasons of health and sanity, but I will continue in a day or two. Fighting Bailey's regime cost me my idealism and innocence. My wife and I both became targets of the College Republicans, and both of us were placed in their web-based Faculty Hall of Shame two years ago. In spite of my colleagues’ congratulations, I did not see this as an honor. I think of it as a wrongful assault on my character. : )
Let me close with a quote from the student operative who led the College Republicans in their attempt to silence the rest of us. He was a columnist for the Western Herald, which was taken over by right wing students in the third year of Bailey’s regime. This student’s column attacked on our undergraduate curriculum. It specifically targeted humanities and social science courses).
Here it is:

School's emphasis on liberally-slanted courses shows bias
“Young America's Foundation (YAF) released its 9th annual ‘Comedy and Tragedy’ report” (on the state of curriculum in 2003. The columnist identified ten courses at WMU which he perceived as biased. I think that all of them were in Arts & Sciences, although I could be wrong). Here’s his conclusion:
. “What is emerging is an anti-American, sexually perverse, multicultural, anti-male, Marxist agenda that is indoctrinating its subjects to accept the agenda as reality. Unfortunately, most students are oblivious to what is going on around them.”

I guess that’s what your president meant by the failure of American higher education. I did an analysis of the YAF report, and found that 93% of the condemned courses were from Arts & Sciences departments. I’ve attached my table of findings to this letter. I’m glad you wrote, because it may drive me to publish my analysis and the story of what happened at Western. I see the events at Toledo as directly parallel to what happened to us. Once the right wing develops a plan, they keep pursuing it, no matter how often it fails, until it succeeds. They can do that because they have the money, and they’re not very creative. They score higher on persistence than on intelligence. (When I learned about the developments at Toledo a couple of days ago, I told a colleague that I thought right wing administrations attempt to substitute authority for intelligence).
I am now going to say the serenity prayer to calm myself, and go back to grading papers. I’ll write again soon, in the hope that what I have to say will help your cause. Feel free to quote anything I’ve said (except the part about the frog [deleted]).

Until then, good night and good luck.

Bob.

P. S. I realize that this letter could have been more personal and less grim, but I find that to be impossible when I’m sweating with rage. You must play to win (and to destroy if possible!