Penn State Altoona is trying to fire a tenured professor because her outspoken criticism of the institution has angered and inconvenienced her colleagues and at least one donor. Nona Gerard, a lesbian feminist theater professor who has no difficulty speaking her mind, is as popular among her students--who appreciate her ability to make them work hard while making that work fun--as she is reviled by the administrators and colleagues she has offended over the years. No one contends that Gerard is a poor teacher or scholar. But after years of asking, encouraging, and finally ordering Gerard to tone it down, PSA is seeking to fire her on charges of grave misconduct and failure to perform.

Gerard is accused of creating a hostile working environment for her peers--largely, it seems, because she does not pull her punches. (The article gives as an example her description of a junior colleague as "talentless" and "cold as a fish.") The charges of failure to perform center on Gerard's opposition to PSA's new "Integrative Arts" degree, which she has vociferously opposed for being inadequately supported and poorly conceived--there were not enough course offerings to justify the degree, she said; nor were there adequate faculty or facilities for it. When Gerard received a letter from a dean ordering her to stop her putatively "disrespectful and unprofessional behavior toward her colleagues" and compelling her to "work within the divisional structure on campus" (the paper's wording), she responded by announcing that she would no longer direct campus stage productions. Things seem to have unravelled from there.

The article makes it sound like Gerard was not as tactful as she might have been in criticizing her colleagues and in opposing the program. But tactlessness is not a crime, not even when it hurts a colleague's feelings. Moreover, misplaced tact can be self-defeating when one is advocating an unpopular point of view. How else but passionately should Gerard have made her case against the IA degree? Gerard believed the degree was going to do students a profound disservice. Should she have sat silently by while it was implemented? It rather sounds, from the paper's report, as if PSA administrators think that yes, both Gerard's professional integrity and the integrity of the IA degree would have been best served if Gerard had simply suppressed her objections and quietly played along.

That's a bit of a leap. But the faint sense that PSA admins are more interested in maintaining the appearance of smooth operations than in actually running the best educational system they possibly can grows stronger when one considers that one reason Gerard is in trouble is that her work--not her opinions, but her actual pedagogical work--has offended a PSA donor. In 2002, Gerard staged a student production of David Mamet's play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago. The donor in question didn't see it, but did take exception to the information that the play contains graphic sexual talk and partial nudity. It is disturbing, to say the least, that this episode has found its way into the list of complaints against Gerard. Mamet is hardly a disreputable playwright; the play in question won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977. It's legitimate artistic work that deserves a place on the college stage. PSA's willingness to allow a donor's aesthetic and ideological preferences to outweigh its commitment to free inquiry for faculty and students tells a terrible story about where the school's priorities lie.

Add it all up and what do you get? A difficult professor who has rubbed too many people the wrong way, and an academic institution that has trumped up reasons to terminate a professor who is seen to be more trouble than she's worth. Never mind Gerard's First Amendment rights as a professor teaching at a state school. Never mind the argument--made by the AAUP itself--that sometimes true collegiality shows itself not through genial, Babbitt-like behavior, but by taking on the difficult and uncomfortable role of institutional contrarian. Gerard is most certainly that. And it may cost her her career.

Read more about Gerard and her situation at Penn State Altoona here.

Many thanks to Maurice Black for bringing this case to my attention and for sending assorted links.