BY HANK REICHMAN

When early last month the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees (IHL) appointed Glenn Boyce as the new Chancellor of the University of Mississippi, faculty and students were outraged.  Boyce had been hired as a consultant to the search committee for the new chancellor and was never formally submitted as a candidate.  His name was not one of eight candidates publicly presented.  Bypassing the formal selection process, the twelve-member board, all appointed by the current Republican governor, voted unanimously to place him in the position. Boyce previously served as commissioner of higher education and associate commissioner for academic and student affairs for IHL.

Boyce replaced Interim Chancellor Larry Sparks, who stepped in last January after Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter resigned. Vitter’s own appointment followed the controversial ousting of Dan Jones in 2015, whom many believe was too progressive for IHL’s taste. Boyce became commissioner of the IHL in April 2015, immediately after the board replaced Jones, but retired from that post in June 2018.

Inside Higher Ed quoted history professor Anne Twitty, who first heard about the appointment via a text from a colleague, who heard about it from rumors on Twitter. “One of the things we have all found so frustrating about so much of what has taken place is that it feels like not only was this an incredibly secretive process, and a process that didn’t even accord to the schedule the IHL had laid out, but also we were having to find out about what was happening at our own university through social media and from the media rather than from the university or IHL,” she said.

“I went through an extended period of disbelief that these initial reports were true,” Twitty added. “When this news came out, I was really under the impression there was certainly another month if not two months left to go in this process, and that Dr. Boyce was not among those being seriously considered for the job.”

“We were so adamant in the listening sessions — which we all thought were fraudulent to begin with, but we dutifully went to these listening sessions and we said what mattered to us — and the thing that mattered the most was transparency,” Garrett Felber, another historian, added.  “Transparency doesn’t even begin to actually tell the story of political corruption at work here.  It’s a flagrant disregard of our community on campus, and it’s an assertion by political powers that be in the state to run [the university] the way they see fit.”

The announced candidates, who spoke anonymously to Mississippi Today, said that they felt misled by Boyce at one-on-one meetings during the search, because Boyce did not tell them he was a potential candidate for the job. The rejected candidates said they believe Boyce used information they divulged during the interviews about their plans for the university if given the job.

On October 18, the Faculty Senate of the University of Mississippi passed a resolution declaring “no confidence” in the IHL’s search process and no confidence in IHL itself “by reason of its conduct in connection with that search process.”

But if the process could be seen as an especially flagrant violation of principles of shared governance, it soon became clear that even more was at stake. It is possible that Boyce’s appointment stemmed at least in part from a 2018 academic freedom controversy and that the new Chancellor may well pose a significant threat to that freedom at the university.

On October 6, 2018 Mississippi sociology professor James Thomas took to Twitter during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Responding to a post by NBC’s Joe Scarborough encouraging Americans to, “Don’t yell at senators, don’t shout at people in restaurants, don’t rage on about past votes,” Thomas wrote this: “Don’t just interrupt a Senator’s meal, y’all. Put your whole damn fingers in their salads. Take their apps and distribute them to the other diners. Bring boxes and take their food home with you on the way out. They don’t deserve your civility.”

Then-Chancellor Vitter quickly condemned the post on Facebook. In a statement that did not identify Thomas by name, he wrote that the tweet “did not reflect the values articulated by the university, such as respect for the dignity of each individual and civility and fairness. While I passionately support free speech, I condemn statements that encourage acts of aggression. I urge all members of the Ole Miss community to demonstrate civility and respect for others and to honor the ideal of diversity of thought that is a foundational element of the academy.”

Thomas responded, “I support the Chancellor’s right to free speech and to express himself through his social media. The free exchange of ideas is a hallmark of higher education.” But he soon concluded that Vitter’s post was actually “the catalyst” for a barrage of harassment and hate. Here’s how the Jackson Free Press describes what happened: 

“You better watch your back. I’m coming for you,” a voice growled through the receiver. The caller then hung up, leaving Dr. James Thomas alone in his University of Mississippi office with the anodyne tones of his phone’s voicemail.

“You have eighty-nine unread messages,” it said.

The man who promised to hunt Thomas down wasn’t the only one to threaten his life, just the only one the FBI treated as a credible threat. The bureau traced the call back to Florida, then dropped the matter after a brief investigation. The emails came in at a quicker clip, hundreds by the end of the month.

“Dear fascist twink,” began one, departing into a bizarre rant that referenced Thomas’ “spindly quadroon fingers,” his “gang of black thugs” and compared him to Trayvon Martin, the boy carrying only Skittles when a neighborhood watchman killed him in Florida in 2012.  (Thomas is white.) “I hope someone tortures you to death,” another email spat.

Eventually, Thomas stopped checking. A colleague swept the threats and bile into a separate folder, where they still remain. . . .

Commenters pilloried Vitter and UM for not firing Thomas on the spot. Anonymous stalkers sent pictures of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology’s doors, reminding the faculty inside that they waited and watched outside. The university assigned a security officer to the department, but the outrage melted away in time, likely to some new target of the campus-watching crowd’s ire.

Sadly, there’s nothing all that unusual in this. In The Future of Academic Freedom I recount numerous similar incidents.  But this story may not be over. Early this year Faculty Senate Chair Brice Noonan, a biologist, met with Boyce, then still a paid consultant to the search. He told the Free Press that Boyce fixated on the issue of “academic freedom,” puzzling over the meaning of the principle that had so dominated the conversation on campus in the past year. The issue defined Noonan’s conversations with Boyce, he said, and it seemed likely to him that Thomas’s case was behind Boyce’s interest in the topic.

The Free Press account continues:

Thomas and other academic sources told the Jackson Free Press that the danger to academic freedom was about more than Vitter’s public condemnation. It was about what they saw as the total abandonment of faculty in the face of bilious outrage.

“If a complaint comes to the university president or chancellor about a professor,” Thomas explained, referencing the American Association of University Professors’ guidelines, “they should follow the chain of command from the provost down the department chair itself. That didn’t happen here. The chancellor rushed to condemn the remarks without understanding their context.”

The backlash rippled across the university, most notably in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.  Academic staff confided to the Jackson Free Press that they felt unsafe in the wake of the threats. Some found it difficult to remain on campus.

Moreover, Vitter’s remarks about Thomas’ tweets were hard for some to separate from his op-ed in the campus paper The Daily Mississippian, when he seemed to downplay results of the UM Race Diary Project, which chronicled microaggressions toward marginalized groups on campus.

“Since the data in the report are anonymized,” Vitter wrote, “we have no way to reach out to those affected by these incidents.”

Thomas was one of four co-authors on that project.

Faculty members believe the targeting of Thomas began with his involvement in the Race Diary Project, after which conservative media outlets started trawling his Twitter feed.

Since Boyce’s installation on October 13 there have been no statements by the administration on the issue. In an interview with Mississippi Today, however, Boyce claimed to support for free speech, while broadly rejecting what he described as “manners that are disrespectful or meant to intimidate.” But when asked if he thought Boyce and the IHL were sincere about this, Thomas laughed. “I don’t think the IHL even knows what academic freedom is,” he said.