I just received the following email, in response to my post about the efforts of certain Saginaw Valley State University professors to intimidate students into taking down their controversial website, SVSUTruth:

Saginaw Valley State University wishes to inform you that Dr. Janice Wolff's personal comments were not made in an official capacity nor on behalf of the University. The University does not contemplate any legal action in the matter of the student website SVSUTruth.

Carlos Ramet, Ph.D.
Executive Assistant to the President
Saginaw Valley State University

Now the question is: Does the University contemplate any action in the matter of the threats, misrepresentations, and abuse of authority perpetrated by Dr. Janice Wolff?

Read all about recent events at SVSU here.

John Lombardi, former President of the University of Florida, currently Chancellor of the
University of Massachsetts at Amherst, and an academic specialist in university management, has published some of the most systematic and honest appraisals of current university governance (a little bit of Googling will turn up some good ones on the web). He pretty much says that the president in a public university is a gofer for the faculty -- his job is to secure the faculty's needs from the funding authority.

As a result, I strongly suspect the SVSU administration will not "manage down" in this case unless pressure is brought on it, either by very strong public reaction, or by the legislature.

A possible parallel was the suspension-with-pay of the adjunct professor at Citrus College in California for giving extra credit only for letters to Bush that opposed the Iraq war. Nothing was done until there was an intervention by FIRE, and that one was easy because the prof involved was an adjunct. I suspect a department chair is a different matter; consider all the other department chairs at SVSU are likely to circle the wagons if there is any attempt to do anything here.