The Widener faculty meets to discuss its options regarding the persecution of Prof. Lawrence Connell
When we last left the ethics train wreck at the Widener University School of Law, Dean Linda Ammons had succeeded in exacting her revenge on long-time tenured professor Lawrence Connell, forcing him into a year-long suspension and demanding that he undergo psychiatric evaluation for political correctness infractions that she took as as a personal affront, despite the fact that a university inquiry cleared him. (The supposed justification for his punishment was the Catch-22 offense that he had “retaliated” against the students who had wrongfully accused him by publicly denouncing their claims.) Nothing much has changed in the interim. Connell is gone, and is in the process of suing. Widener’s reputation continues to sink, as it has abandoned academic freedom for lock-step ideological conformity; its Dean, Linda Ammons, maintains her silence about the affair despite unanimous condemnation by observers, reinforcing the conclusion that she has a vendetta against Connell, and the faculty remains mum. It is that last the commentators find most fascinating: why have none of Prof. Connell’s colleagues at the law school stood up for him? After all, the principle involved, academic freedom, is core to their profession, and the facts are straightforward.
They also have an obligation to speak out. One of their number is being persecuted and abused based on trumped-up charges of racism and sexism. They should be protesting, writing letters, organizing as a group, or resigning. It is not as if the incident doesn’t affect them too: Widener’s stature in the legal community is sinking fast, and that means their employment there is becoming a professional liability. The faculty is in the best position to demand Connell’s vindication and Ammons’ dismissal. Why aren’t they doing it?
But not one faculty member has taken any action in support of Connell, or uttered any criticism of Ammons. Sixteen of the Widener professors have blogs, yet not one of them have written about the incident. Economist Eric Rasmusen sent a letter to each member of the faculty asking their opinion on the matter by posing this multiple choice question: Which of the following best represent your position?
- “I approve of punishing Professor Connell.”
- “I disapprove of punishing Professor Connell.”
- “I’m too scared to give my opinion on punishing Professor Connell.”
None of the faculty replied, except two members, Larry Hamermesh and John Culhane,who indignantly argued that it was erroneous for anyone to draw conclusions from their silence , since they “prefer to be judicious and await presentation of available evidence before taking a private, let alone public, position.”
Needless to say, this is an obvious rationalization, and a disingenuous one. The evidence is voluminous now, and unequivocal.
Rasmusen, an expert on game theory, lays out “several excuses people try to use to avoid taking a stand.” In the Widener situation, he writes, “they allow someone to avoid taking a stand either way when asked by the Dean or by a scholar from another university.”
Excuse 1. “I don’t know enough about the situation to have an opinion.”
Counterpoint. Sure you do. This is the biggest thing going on in your building, so I don’t believe you when you say you don’t know enough. Or, the only reason you don’t know enough is that you know which side you’d have to come down on, so you purposely bury your head in the sand so you can pretend you don’t know enough.
Excuse 2. “I can’t comment on personnel matters.”
Counterpoint 1. Sure you can, especially when the person in question wants you to. Rules about someone’s privacy should protect him, not act as a cover-up when his employer is persecuting him.
Counterpoint 2. Does your answer mean you will comment if I get his permission? I can send off a quick email…
Excuse 3. “I see that the correct procedures have been followed.”
Counterpoint 1. The procedures are no good, so following them is not enough. When the decisionmakers are pre-selected to biased, it doesn’t matter if they have to follow rules in making their decision; they might as well have made the decision at the start of the process.
Counterpoint 2. Even if the procedures are good, the decisionmakers can still be massively unfair. Think of the novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, for example. The procedures are fair, and by the end of the trial the jurors all believed the black man accused of rape was innocent, but they voted guilty anyway.
Excuse 4. “I shouldn’t comment while a lawsuit is in progress.”
Counterpoint. Why not? You’re not a party to the suit, so you don’t need to worry about incautious wording being used in court against you. Even if you were a party, there’s nothing in the law that says you can’t talk about your case outside the courtroom. Otherwise, you’d have to keep silent for years as the suit dragged on— which is perhaps your intent.
Good job. The unavoidable conclusion is that the faculty is unwilling to do what it knows is the right thing out of a desire to keep their jobs and paychecks and avoid the fate of Professor Connell. One Widener faculty member has spoken out, but only after he had left the law school.
Courage is one of what I call the “activating virtues.” By itself, courage is value-neutral, for it can be applied in the service of evil as well as good. But it is often an essential character trait for ethical conduct, especially in situations where doing the right thing involves risk or sacrifice. The conduct of Widener’s faculty constitutes a mass abdication of ethical duty, and proves that a deplorable culture of fear, self-interest, and cowardice exists at the school. It has been suggested that Connell must not be personally popular, which may be accurate but is irrelevant: the injustice is the same whether he is an insufferable jerk or Mr. Congeniality.
I don’t think any further evidence is needed to make a judgment about the Widener Law School faculty. They are all as cowardly as the school’s Dean is corrupt, and their failure to use their influence to support a persecuted colleague while protecting the reputation of their school and the principle of academic integrity is shameful.
Ethics Alarms 
What kind of university/college has been created here? Is this the future of all higher education? When I was in college it was a hotbed of faculty disagreements, outspoken criticisms of policies, and a place where just about anything could be said — especially as a hypothetical — without student protest or administrative oppression.
Has political correctness taken us to a literally fascist higher educational system? So great for Widener Law School to be the harbinger of this decay. Heil Dean Ammons! Sieg Heil American higher education!
I’ve been thinking about how to respond to this post since it was first published. Here’s my attempt:
Certainly, Professor Connell has been pretty clearly demonstrated, as you and I both argued and predicted months ago, to be the victim in this little charade. Moreover, the “retaliation” claims are largely (perhaps not entirely) preposterous: serving subpoenas as students are about to enter final exams is certainly tacky, though. Interestingly, no one has seemed to make the (to me) obvious case that bogus claims of retaliation are themselves far more retaliatory against an individual with a complaint against a person in authority (i.e., the dean) than anything Professor Connell did.
It is also true that the silence from the rest of the Widener faculty is deafening. Probably a lack of moral courage is indeed a factor. But not all the evidence adduced by Mr. Rasmussen is as damning to me as it seems to be to you.
First, if I’d received the e-mail described by Mr. Rasmussen, I’d have deleted it immediately. I have no idea who Mr. Rasmussen is, but I’d take him as a crank, best ignored. Clearly, he has an agenda; there is no suggestion of protecting respondents’ privacy; there appears to be no legitimate academic purpose to his exercise. To agree with what Rasmussen obviously believes, then, gets me in trouble with my dean for no good purpose (I don’t think serving someone else’s political agenda qualifies, even if I generally agree with it). To disagree holds me up to ridicule on his page without an upside. The position taken by Mssrs. Hamermesh and Culhane—suggesting that knowing the facts before forming a judgment is a good thing—is appropriate but unnecessary.
Moreover, the argumentation on Mr. Rasmussen’s linked blog post is pretty shaky. A number of faculty have blogs, but didn’t comment on an internal personnel matter on a blog devoted to environmental law or activities while in China. Outrage! Of course, it’s doubtful that Mr. Rasmussen knows how many faculty have personal blogs—or how many may have commented in such venues— because the school doesn’t know, either. Faculty may well have objected in private, where it could actually do some good, but chosen not to go scampering to the press to air their school’s dirty linen. I don’t think that’s an inherently bad thing.
Then comes Mr. Rasmussen’s dismissal of any argument that faculty members don’t know the facts: “This is the biggest thing going on in your building, so I don’t believe you when you say you don’t know enough.” Trouble is, Rasmussen is more smug than accurate. I can’t speak for law school faculties in particular, but I’ve spent my entire career in academia, and I can say with certainty that there’s plenty I don’t know about what goes on not that far away. Rumors and hearsay, sure, but law professors more than anyone ought to know enough to stay clear of that. Indeed, they’ve been inundated with so much data, much of it false, that they are in some ways the worst possible judges of what is actually happening: there’s a reason jurors are questioned about how much they know (or think they know) about a case. This, added to the fact that faculty are likely to know both Ammons and Connell personally—and are influenced by whether they like the parties involved—makes them particularly poor candidates to have an unbiased opinion.
True, they’re likely to have read the committee decision, but they’re also sure to know that there are issues not in the official documentation. There are three kinds of cases like this: a). the ones are really are what they appear to be, b). the ones where a particular action by a faculty member is the “last straw,” and c). the ones where a particular infraction serves as a stand-in for something else (think, convicting Al Capone for tax evasion). I don’t know which of these scenaria is at play here. The faculty might, and, if it isn’t choice “a,” they might be tempted to accept an apparently unjust verdict in the name of a greater justice. (N.B., I am fully aware that this is an explanation of behavior, not an excuse for it.)
More to the point, it’s quite possible that the details of the case are in fact not known to the faculty at large. Less than a year ago, our university fired the art gallery director, Christian Cutler, after he’d had a tiff with our US Representative, Louis Gohmert. The case got some national headlines, including an appearance for my erstwhile colleague on the Anderson Cooper show. I’ve remained silent on the case, not because I’m afraid of repercussions, but because I really don’t know what happened. Note that this occurred in my own college (Fine Arts). I didn’t know Mr. Cutler, who was relatively new—I’d heard mixed things about his performance—but I know the dean and provost reasonably well, and I respect them both. I’ve met the president, but I doubt that I’m anything more than a name to him. I wouldn’t vote for Mr. Gohmert , but I believe him when he says he made no attempt to get his antagonist fired—nor could he have done so even if he’d wanted to without the compliance of the university administration. And that’s all I know. Was Mr. Cutler unjustly dismissed? I don’t know. I have my suspicions, but that’s it. And no, I’m not going to tell you which way my suspicions lean.
Is the Widener faculty cowardly? Probably. But a blanket condemnation seems a bit extreme.
Finally. You are the person I know with the best perspective on this. I was looking forward to your analysis, and it didn’t disappoint.
Not that I don’t think that your admirable effort to give the benefit of the doubt to the faculty here isn’t more than it deserves, though all your lessons are ones worth learning. If the faculty were Casey Anthony, and the evidence against her was the evidence that the faculty here are sniveling weasels, she’d be on death row right now. It’s circumstantial, but beyond a reasonable doubt.anyway.
I agree that Rasmussen’s survey doesn’t prove much. I’m still surprised that not one faculty member contacted him, asked for anonymity, and spilled the beans. Too many supposedly independent minds, not enough independence. It’s weak evidence, but it still supports Guilt of First Degree Sniveling.
Then we have:
1. The official report, which itself is sniveling. It doesn’t support the punishment given, and in fact exonerates Connell pretty thoroughly. If there is something material that was left out, that’s a cover-up. If there wasn’t, res ipsa loquitur. “Don’t jump to conclusions—there may have been a cover-up!” strikes me as an odd justification for radio silence from the faculty.
2. The fact that no facts to support any version of the story other than what we, who do not work there, know after all these months, coverage, criticism and inquiry is pretty strong evidence that your option #1 is the correct one, not #2 and #3. Now we’re in Truther terrritory—this is pretty big to keep quiet, and it is reasonable to suppose that if Connell wasn’t being railroaded, someone would step up and say so ny now. The fact that nobody has strongly indicates that we do know the relevant facts. By those facts, Connell is being mistreated, and if he is, the faculty should have spoken up and protested.
3. The blog post by the former faculty member.
4. The fact that the Dean has said absolutely nothing, even though the school is taking it in the shorts. This by itself seems like dereliction of duty. Compare this whole mess to the Larry Summers debacle at Harvard. You couldn’t shut that faculty up, on either side, and there was continuing damage control. This looks like a shut-down order if there ever was one—“Say nothing, or else.”
5. The fact that the school’s reputation is being damaged, possibly beyond repair, and being ripped in blogs from hereo Timbuktu, and the whole faculty is still sitting quietly by waiting for more “facts”? Very bizarre. It reminds me of “The Man With Two Brains” when lust-filled Steve Martin asks the spirit of his dead wife if he should marry evil but luscious Kathleen Turner, and says to her portrait, “Send me a sign if I shouldn’t!”…and a voice starts screaming “NO!” and the portrait spins and the house shakes, and Martin says after all this, “Just any kind of sign!”
All the facts point to a persecution. No credible defense has been made or offered of the school’s decision. No reason, other than the Dean setting a record for insane political correctness and stifling of academic freedom. has been suggested. Unlike with Casey, we have a clear motive and a weapon, and we have the body. Your theory in defense of the faculty seems to boil down to “we don’t know what they know, and what they know may explain their actions.”
I can’t think of anything they do know that we don’t that wouldn’t mean something is wrong enough that they should speak up, and I can’t think of anything they don’t know that they wouldn’t have an obligation to find out when their institution is being accused of abandoning fairness and a commitment to academic freedom.
I’m glad you were willing to take on the unenviable task of defending them, but a there’s just too much there to reasonably rebut the conclusion that they aren’t protecting their contracts, and the school, the students and Connell be damned.