POSTED BY JOHN K. WILSON
The following open letter in support of Prof. Garrett Felber, to University of Mississippi Chancellor Boyce and the chair of the history department, was written in response to the news that Felber has been fired as an assistant professor of history. Although this open letter has no connection to the AAUP, it is posted here because it may interest the readers of AcademeBlog.
Dear Chancellor Boyce and Chair Wilson:
We write to express our shock and dismay at the firing of Professor Garrett Felber from the History Department at the University of Mississippi, which has every appearance of being both politically motivated and retaliatory. Garrett Felber is a highly respected scholar and educator. His monograph, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, The Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), is widely praised as a definitive political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam during the Civil Rights Era. In the few months since its release, the book has already been shortlisted for a national book award from the Museum of African American History. He is a public figure active in prison abolition and carceral studies, and a cofounder of the Study & Struggle project, a political education project on mass incarceration and immigrant detention, for which Felber garnered a significant grant that university administrators forbade him to accept. We construe his firing as a chilling example of the university’s attempt to suppress academic freedom.
In her letter of December 10, History Department Chair Wilson implied, although she did not directly state, that Professor Felber was being fired because he refused to meet with her in-person (on-line) on three separate occasions, and instead demanded that she communicate with him in writing. There is no evidence provided in the letter that Professor Felber failed to properly fulfill the responsibilities of his position, to teach his classes and conduct his research. Indeed, Professor Felber was on leave as a 2020-2021 Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center when Professor Wilson was insisting on meeting with him over Zoom.
Simply put, the stated reasons for Professor Felber’s firing are both arbitrary and nonsensical.
According to Professor Felber, the precipitating cause of his conflict with Professor Wilson was her refusal to allow him to accept a grant he had received to fund a prison education program based at the university (cf. Twitter thread). Given the climate of mistrust between the faculty and administration prevailing at the university as well as the documented influence of overtly racist donors in setting the terms under which the university administration operates, it seems only reasonable for Professor Felber to have requested that any discussion with his Chair about the withdrawal of support for his grant be in writing.
Indeed, the only publicly available reason provided for the firing beyond Professor Wilson’s assertion that she was unable to properly “supervise” his work (while he was on leave from the university), is the statement by the university’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Jim Zook that Felber “did not follow the appropriate process for seeking external funding” in seeking funding for the prison education program. Felber’s mistake, according to the university itself, was running afoul of the development office in seeking to raise money to educate some of the state’s most vulnerable and immiserated citizens.
In the absence of a fuller account of the actual circumstances of Professor Felber’s firing, we understand the firing as an attack on Professor Felber’s commitment to anti-racist political organizing as well as his well-documented history of demanding accountability from the university administration and wealthy donors.
We further note that there is every reason to suspect that Professor Felber’s firing is retaliatory, given his forthright and public criticism of both of the university and its prominent donors.
We, the undersigned scholars, demand a full and transparent account of the circumstances leading up to Professor Felber’s firing, including:
- A full and transparent account of the university administration and development office’s response to Felber’s decision to move the Making and Unmaking of Mass Incarceration conference from the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics on the grounds that the center’s titular donor was a member of the board of Core Civic, a private prison company.
- A full and transparent account of the university administration and development office’s response to Felber’s effort to house the Study and Struggle prison education grant in the History Department, including the substance of the “consultation [among] the relevant campus offices” mentioned by university spokesperson Jim Zook.
- A full and transparent account of the consultation between the university administration, the development office, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and the Chair of the History Department leading up to the firing of Professor Felber.
We finally demand that, unless the university can fully demonstrate that Professor Felber’s conduct in any of these matters was, in the words of the university’s policies and procedures governing the dismissal of untenured faculty, “contumacious” (that is, wilfully resistant), rather than reasonable, rightful, and anti-racist, we finally demand that:
4. Professor Felber’s immediate reinstatement as Assistant Professor of History be assured.
We collectively pledge to refuse all invitations to speak at, conduct professional service for, or otherwise be associated with the University of Mississippi until this egregious assault on academic freedom is reversed.
For a full list of signatures, see HERE.
If you wish to add your name to the letter, you may do so HERE.
In the 2nd line of the “open letter” there is a link — the word “fired” to a much fuller article about this in the Mississippi Free Press. I was thinking of adding my name to this letter too. Then I read the MFP article.
Note that the letter signatories and crafters are most of them in no position to “demand” anything. As to their presence on the list of pledges to refuse all invitations, that might turn out to be like the little list of Koko, Lord High Executioner of Titipu:
“They’ll none of ’em be missed; they’ll none of them be missed.”
Correction and my apologies: The link to the Mississippi Free Press article is in the second line of John Wilson’s introduction and not the letter itself.
That was Trump and his Tribalist approach . This a response to J Foster ‘ s snub Attitude
David Davidson
I would like to pose a question about gender relations, not race relations. Would Felber have met with the chair if she had been a man? My hunch is that he would have shown more respect to the chair by meeting with her if she had been male. He still could require written documentation in a meeting, and Zoom could even record the conversation. I am not one necessarily to come to the defense of administration at UM. But the truth is, as Felber knows, UM is a conservative campus. His negativity is probably hurting racial equity there more than helping. UM values community and yes, courtesy. There are initiatives in place there for advocating for racial equality. Felber could support them. Another issue here is what is a worthy project in an academic department, and if that project is more “activist” than “research-oriented,” is it supportable by a department like History? Even some interdisciplinary programs, like women’s and gender studies, have to walk a fine line between “activism” and perceived academic rigor. I believe UM has an appeal process for tenure-track professors whose contracts are not renewed; Felber should use this process rather than making his nonrenewal so public and creating drama–which will not help him reform prisons in Mississippi.
I think it’s both ridiculous and insulting to simply assume, without any evidence at all, that Felber is sexist. Nor do I agree that racial equity is best pursued by avoiding all negativity (such as discussing racism). Nor do I agree that “activism” and “research” are contradictory. As for this great love for courtesy and avoiding drama, I can think of nothing more rude and dramatic than firing a professor in retaliation.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said I had a hunch he would have met with a male chair. But I did want to pose the question about gender relations. As an anti-racist feminist, I believe that those of us committed to justice should try to maintain an intersectional understanding of the different kinds of power and oppression. Likely, Felber, possibly advised by a lawyer, wanted to extract written documentation from the chair by not agreeing to meet with her. It didn’t work because it was perceived as a refusal to communicate or insubordination. As I mentioned, he should, instead, submit his grievance to the Academic Freedom & Faculty Responsibility committee, or before he does that, request a meeting with his lawyer and the chair and university attorney. At this point, these might be more productive channels than social media, which are causing a stranger like me to reflect on Felber’s career!! Let me clarify my points about “courtesy” and “activism/academics .” I was being realistic about navigating the culture at UM. (I spent 7 years there and had my own challenges.) I do not see “discussing racism” and “courtesy” as mutually exclusive. Have you heard of the William Winter Institute at UM? It is a racial reconciliation center, one of the initiatives I referred to. I do not necessarily subscribe to the activism or politics vs. academics binary, but realistically, many research universities make this distinction. Based on what I have read about Felber’s challenge, this distinction was the reason given for the chair’s not supporting his second grant.
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