A few thoughts to tie together my recent postings on the cases of Robert Day at Cumberland College and Nona Gerard at Penn State Altoona. Day lost his job as an assistant professor of social work after posting a website that called for administrative, spiritual, and fiscal reform at his school. Gerard is suing to keep her job as a tenured associate professor of theater after being charged with grave misconduct and failure to perform. Both have been thorns in the sides of their institutions; both have raised entirely reasonable objections to certain questionable practices at their schools. Cumberland College, for instance, has no faculty senate and no system for ensuring financial or administrative accountability. PSA, which recently became a four-year degree-granting institution, has created at least one major that it may not be able to responsibly staff.

Yes, as some readers have pointed out, Day and Gerard have each made potentially fatal mistakes--Day in criticizing his institution from a position of zero job security, Gerard in allowing her criticisms of colleagues to take the occasional form of ad hominem comment and in recusing herself for ethical reasons from professional duties that the school considers to be part of her job description. But it does not follow that Day and Gerard had it coming, as some readers have argued, nor does it follow, as others have argued, that to defend them is to argue that academics should be held to lower standards of civility and professionalism than other working adults.

I'll try to explain my thinking on this, as cases like Day's and Gerard's hit close to home for me. First, consider Day's case. Yes, he erred in thinking he could level reasonable criticism at Cumberland's administration without losing his job. But that does not mean that on a moral or ethical level he is the one in the wrong. He didn't libel anyone, or make any false accusations, or behave in a criminal or indecent manner. He spoke his mind, and he said things that clearly needed to be said. He spoke because no one else was willing to--not even his colleagues with tenure. Critics of academe comment endlessly on the institutionalized spinelessness of the tenure system. They point out that what the tenure system does is select out anyone who can think for himself and has the courage of his convictions, and that it selects for those without convictions, those who conform for a living, who readily bend, in unctuous, Uriah Heep-like manner, in whatever direction the fashionable wind is blowing.

Those who suggest that Day somehow doesn't deserve at least the benefit of public outcry--who sniff at him for wanting to see his school adhere more closely to its Christian mission, or who scoff at him for not grasping the punitive ways of employers--seem to me to have badly missed the point. The Robert Days of the academy are refusing to be the guppies their job insecurity tells them to be. We should applaud them, and defend them--even if it isn't practical, and even if what they stand up for is not what we ourselves believe.

I have similar feelings about Nona Gerard. Yes, it sounds from the paper as though Gerard has made comments about colleagues that went beyond the bounds of strict professionalism; Gerard has hurt feelings and said mean things. And yes, in refusing to participate in the newly implemented Integrative Arts major, Gerard technically declared that there were parts of her job she was not willing to do. But I question seriously those who would argue that the only right way to look at these facts is the way her school administration looks at them.

The fact of the matter is that academic culture is, even on its good days, little better than a sandbox when it comes to interpersonal civility. If every academic who ever made an out-of-order comment about another academic were to be fired for creating a hostile environment, there would be no academe (this in itself might be a good thing--but that's another blog). I have a little experience, unhappily gained but highly instructive, in just what one colleague can say with impunity about another, and I am here to say that at least in this part of Pennsylvania, Nona Gerard's reported comments are mild in the extreme. To my knowledge she has never, for example, tried to sabotage a colleague's course by telling the students enrolled in it that the teacher is a "monster." Nor, to my knowledge, does she advise students against working with particular teachers because they are "crazy" or a "bitch." I know of schools where that sort of thing--where that exact thing--is not only tolerated, but practically condoned. All of this is to say that when I see PSA singling Nona Gerard out as an uncollegial meanie, I get a big red DOUBLE STANDARD sign blinking inside my head (think about it: does any of us imagine that no one at PSA says mean things about Nona Gerard, or that she is not herself having to work in a highly hostile environment?).

As for the part about recusing herself from professional duties, that, too, reads to me like so much fabrication--academic duties are notoriously and deliberately flexible. There are many, many ways for individual faculty members to fulfill their obligations to teaching, scholarship, and service. Moreover, college teachers--particularly those with the protection of tenure-- have a moral responsibility to speak out if they feel that their school is instituting unworkable or unethical curricular reforms. That's what academic freedom--that horribly baggy concept--ostensibly protects, and that's what Gerard did. She was not refusing to do her job, or trying to get away with doing less work. She was refusing to allow her job to be configured so as to compel her to devote herself to work she found wasteful and intellectually dishonest. Instead of trying to fire Gerard, PSA could have found an alternative teaching assignment for her--one she could believe in and devote herself to.

It's all too easy for readers to regard people like Day and Gerard as caricatures of a corrupt and immature professoriate, and to argue that the real answer here is to let them fry while we all get on with more pressing matters. But I hope those readers who are inclined in that direction will give more thought to their position. Yes, academia needs serious reform. Yes, the professoriate needs to be more publicly accountable in its comportment, its pedagogy, and its scholarship. Yes, the tenure system is a disaster. But that does not mean that there are not times when genuine injustices occur (KC Johnson's tenure case is a great example), and when concerned members of the public and the academy should kick and scream and write and reason until those injustices are redressed.