Posted on 10/13/2023 7:28:52 AM PDT by karpov
What is “collegiality,” and what do universities need to do to establish it? Radical academics and administrators in higher education are now using “lack of collegiality” as a pretext to abrogate academic freedom or fire professors, regardless of tenure. The latest examples include Matthew Garrett at Bakersfield College, Scott Gerber at Ohio Northern University, Stephen Porter at North Carolina State University, and Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania.
National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood writes that, in each of these four cases, “the university tried (sometimes successfully) to rid itself of a faculty member not for any academic shortcoming or for violating any law, but for espousing opinions that the administration disagreed with. […] All four cases had to do with a university’s determination to bulldoze faculty and students into compliance with a particular view of race, and how higher education should handle racial disparities.”
Collegiality should not be used simply as a pretext by the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) regime to abrogate academic freedom. But to say that brings up further questions—what precisely is collegiality, if not just an excuse to fire? How has it come to be that a seemingly harmless academic standard is susceptible to such abuse? Finally, what does collegiality really call for from an institution of higher education?
Collegiality originally referred to “the sharing of authority among colleagues.” The archetypal reference is to the structure of the Catholic Church, built upon elements such as the College of Cardinals. Collegial structure was extended early to university governance, since universities began as outposts of the Church; hence a university possessed colleges which shared the governance of the university as a whole.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
As always, their new definition means “disagreeing with liberals”
Academia has finally caught up with television: it is a vast wasteland.
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