BY JOHN K. WILSON
The firing of Garrett Felber by the University of Mississippi keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.
Earlier this month, I criticized the reasons offered for his dismissal. And Henry Reichman (who, unlike me, can officially speak for the AAUP) also expressed many concerns.
However, now University of Mississippi officials have suggested some additional explanations for why they fired Felber, so I want to follow up with some details about the research grant that triggered this dismissal.
On Oct. 28, Felber wrote a tweet, criticizing history department chair Noell Wilson: “My chair just *rejected* a $42,000 grant from a major foundation we were awarded to support @study__struggle, a political education project on mass incarceration and immigrant detention, saying it’s a ‘political’ not ‘historical’ project, and could jeopardize department funding.”
If Felber is correct, and Wilson rejected the grant because she didn’t like his “political” views and feared retaliation to the history department from racist donors, it is a serious violation of academic freedom and should be reversed.
In response to this rejection of the grant, Felber was leery of speaking again with Wilson, and while he was on leave, Felber three times declined to have another meeting with Wilson about the grant, suggesting instead that she contact him via email. That’s why this tenure-track professor was fired.
Provost Noel Wilkin, in a Jan. 7 letter to the American Historical Association, lays out several deeply misguided defenses of this firing. First, Wilkin says that Felber was not fired: “Dr. Felber was not fired or dismissed prior to his contract term.” Since all faculty have their contracts formally renewed at least annually, by Wilkin’s logic any professor could be dismissed and it wouldn’t be a firing, but merely a nonrenewal.
Second, according to Wilkin, “faculty clearly have a role in assessing the teaching, research, and service of their colleagues and that responsibility is well-articulated in our policies. However, this decision had nothing to do with teaching, research, or service. Therefore, faculty were not consulted regarding Dr. Wilson’s recommendation of non-renewal.” Wilkin is completely wrong here. One of the fundamental tenets of the AAUP, and higher education for the past century, is that faculty have a central role in judging the misbehavior of other faculty. The reasons for that are 1) faculty are the best ones to decide what counts are unprofessional behavior justifying punishment; and 2) any dismissal of a professor under AAUP guidelines must include an assessment of the professor’s entire record, including their teaching, research, and service.
Wilkin has thus confessed that Felber was not fired for any failings in his academic work, but instead was fired (or nonrenewed) for cause due to his misbehavior, but without any of the due process normally associated with firing a professor for misbehavior, and for doing something (asking to communicate via email rather than a Zoom meeting with the chair while he was on leave about a grant that had already been rejected) that clearly isn’t even close to professional misconduct.
Wilson claimed that she had to fire Felber because a) his refusal three times to talk to her in a Zoom meeting while he was on leave about the research grant made her unable to evaluate his future tenure case; and b) his refusal to talk to her about the research grant because she rejected it made her unable to evaluate the research grant that she had already rejected.
Prof. Wilson claimed, “Over time, I grew increasingly concerned that Dr. Felber’s actions could endanger the ability of the History Department to receive future grants if I greenlighted his grants without knowing the specifics of his grant proposals.”
This is a bizarre assertion to make. No one has ever suggested that Wilson should greenlight a grant without knowing about it. If Wilson wanted to know the specifics of the grant proposal, she could, perhaps, simply read it. Or ask Felber some questions. And no one has ever suggested that Wilson was obligated to accept the grant proposal arranged by Felber. So how could this possibly “endanger the ability of the History Department to receive future grants” unless Felber was correct in stating that Wilson feared the reaction of racist donors? Even if Wilson had approved the grant, there would be no imaginable danger to the ability of the Department to receive future grants, and there was no requirement that she accept the grant. Finally, it must be repeatedly noted that Wilson rejected the grant, which means that whatever imaginary danger Wilson foresaw was no longer an issue.
When he first reported the grant denial, Felber noted, “My chair closed the call by suggesting that I start a nonprofit.” This confirms that if Felber rejected Wilson’s demands for a call, it only happened after the grant was denied (and was in response to it and limited to that subject). Thus, it makes no sense for Wilson to claim that she was unable to evaluate the grant because Felber refused to speak with her, since that only happened after she rejected the grant. Felber explained: “Since Dr. Wilson was clear that the decision to reject the October grant was made on behalf of the entire department, I made repeated requests that a written explanation for the grant rejection be given to all faculty before agreeing to meet with Dr. Wilson about this matter.” This was an entirely reasonable reaction from Felber, and cannot possibly justify the dismissal of a tenure-track professor.
Wilkin offered another (but equally ridiculous) explanation for why Felber was fired by Wilson, one that involves Felber’s application for the research grant: “In making this decision she was doing exactly what all universities expect their chairs to do – ensure that faculty members are willing and able to follow the rules and processes involved in securing external funding that commit the institution to a financial agreement.”
The University of Mississippi does have a terrible policy that says all grants must be submitted by the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs.
However, there is no provision for punishing anyone who fails to do this, let alone firing them. There are 712 listed policies at the University of Mississippi, and if Felber violated one by, say, selling a doughnut from a bakery at a bake sale (that’s an actual policy violation), It would not justify his immediate firing without a hearing.
More importantly, the Faculty Handbook (which is a contractual obligation upon the administration) explicitly contradicts this policy and does not require faculty to go through the ORSP.The Faculty Handbook states, “It is important for faculty to work with the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP) because only ORSP has the authority to commit the university to a sponsored activity.” This is an entirely reasonable statement. It is also clearly not a requirement for grant submissions, and certainly not a requirement that justifies dismissal if it is not followed.
The Faculty Handbook goes on to say, “Faculty should submit their funding proposals to ORSP for approval.” That’s a very important “should” there, not a “must” and certainly not “or face the penalty of dismissal.” In fact, to clarify that this is not a requirement, the Faculty Handbook seeks to persuade faculty to consult the ORSP: “ORSP can help you identify possible sponsors for your work, help you develop your proposal, help you submit your proposal on time, provide internal funding for small projects and travel, and help keep you informed of research regulations.” In other words, ORSP “serves faculty and staff,” and the Faculty Handbook is quite clear that submitting grants to the ORSP is not a requirement for the faculty. Wilkin needs to explain exactly how Felber, by following the Faculty Handbook, was violating the rules of the institution.
Even if a university has some dumb rule requiring the central administration to control faculty applications to research grants (which is both wastefully bureaucratic and potentially dangerous to academic freedom if staffers decide they don’t want to allow a grant application), that doesn’t mean you can impose it on faculty, especially when the Faculty Handbook says otherwise.
If the Faculty Handbook says that faculty don’t have to get permission to submit grant applications, then that means faculty don’t have to get permission to apply for grants. More importantly, it means you cannot punish faculty in any way for failing to get permission for applying to get a grant.
Universities put enormous pressure on faculty to obtain grants, often to the point of valuing the economic value of professors over their academic merit. A university, upon finding out that a professor like Felber has obtained a second grant from a foundation without needing to waste any staff time on it, would normally celebrate and appreciate this hard work. In rare cases, a university might have to reject a grant, but only if the substance of the grant is shown to have violated some important principles and only if the grantmaker is unwilling to make any changes (neither of which, suspiciously, it appears that the University of Mississippi tried to do). But even then, no sane person imagines that firing a professor without any due process is an appropriate response to him obtaining a perfectly good grant in a perfectly normal way.
If Felber was fired because of his political views, it is a clear violation of academic freedom. If Felber was fired because administrators feared that a hostile reaction to his views would hurt funding for the university from donors or legislators, it is a clear violation of academic freedom. If Felber was fired in retaliation for his public criticism of the rejection of a research grant, it is a clear violation of academic freedom. These appear to be the only plausible reasons why Felber was fired, considering that every explanation given by the administration after the fact is both completely lacking in evidence and completely insufficient to justify a dismissal or even the smallest formal reprimand. Felber did absolutely nothing wrong, and he was fired with zero due process with no opportunity to defend himself in direct violation of AAUP guidelines and the Faculty Handbook. The University of Mississippi needs to make the easy decision to retract this unjust firing of Garrett Felber, and then it must begin the hard work of fixing its policies and its practices to ensure that this violation of academic freedom never happens again.
“The University of Mississippi does have a terrible policy that says all grants must be submitted by the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs.”
Ummm… This is a very strange comment by Dr. Wilson. There is nothing “terrible” about this policy. It is standard practice in academia, and is even generally mandated by funding agencies. This is because research grants are almost NEVER awarded to individuals (in the legal sense). They are awarded to institutions who have the ultimate responsibility to ensure that the money is spent appropriately and that the research is completed within all regulatory guidelines (animal research, human subjects protections, chemical safety etc). The faculty member submitting a grant is doing so as an agent of the university and the university is mandated under federal law (for federal grants) and usually via granting foundations as responsible for any policy violations. Universities also are obligated to make sure that the infrastructure is around for the project, and that the work that the university is obligated to provide upon receiving the grant can actually be completed.
One can argue about whether a university can or should decide what type of research its faculty members should pursue, but the reality that the legal grantee is the university, NOT the submitting faculty member, in most cases is established.
One puzzle here… I do question why the university hired someone whose scholarship is focused on progressive policy if they knew (as they must have) that such work would not be considered acceptable by those who fund this department (whether it be state legislators or donors)…..
I don’t see what’s so strange about my approach. Sure, if a granting foundation requires institutions to submit applications, then that is what must happen. But if the granter doesn’t require that (or even encourages faculty to apply), why should there be a universal ban? This is an example of the administrative takeover of higher education, where things that faculty can do (and often are best qualified to do) are taken over by an expensive layer of bureaucracy that can hamper the process. I haven’t studied the issue to determine whether a ban on grant applications by faculty is “standard practice,” but standard practice can still be terrible. In this case, Felber got a small grant to follow up on another small grant from the same foundation that was already approved by the administration. Why shouldn’t the university accept it, if it follows all the required rules? Why is this reasonable way of doing things forbidden and punished?
As for your second point, you argue that a university should ban the hiring of leftist faculty because their ideas might someday offend big donors or legislators. This is pretty much the most fundamental tenet of academic freedom: Universities cannot fire, or refuse to hire, faculty because their views offend powerful interests. That is the essence of academic freedom, and if it puzzles you, I encourage you to read more about the topic and consider whether any faculty could ever express controversial ideas if they had to meet a standard where their views upset no donors (left or right) and no legislators (left or right).
Well, I first will address faculty hiring. EVERY search committee takes a look at the scholarship that a candidate is expected to undertake and decides whether it “fits” into the department’s mission and is considered rigorous in the field. I am a STEM faculty member. We decide all of the time whether to hire creationists for biology positions, or climate change deniers for positions in environmental science. While I agree that a healthy sociology or political science department should have a balance between folks across the political spectrum including those of progressive and conservative views, the reality is that who is hired on that spectrum depends very much upon which set of beliefs predominate a department at the time of hire. It is the rare progressive who pushes for a conservative hire and the converse is also true… I was surprised that there is such a mismatch in department culture and the focus of this faculty member’s scholarship….
Second, I will address the role of a research office in faculty grants. The vast majority of research grants (and certainly the major amount of total dollars) is from grantee organizations which make the grant to the university, not the faculty member. While we all (myself included) walk around saying that an award is “my grant” that is not the legal reality of the relationship. The legal obligation for the research to be done is on the university, not the faculty member as far as compliance with regulatory rules. This is particularly important for things like the grant ” @study__struggle, a political education project on mass incarceration and immigrant detention” where the award is proposing a project that affects the general public/humans as human subject protections come into play (yes even for a sociology or politics project).
Now, it does sound like politics may be involved here, which does affect academic freedom to an extent. However, there is also the potential issue where grants obligate a percentage of a faculty member’s time to be spent on an activity (ie effort reporting). As an example that just affected me. My job sets out particular percentages of my time that need to be spend on research, teaching and service. These percentages are set by the chair with the backdrop of the AAUP contract, faculty handbook to provide guidance on equity. If my workload states that I need to spend 50% of my time on teaching, I can not just write or accept a grant that obligates me to spend 75% of my time on public outreach without approval from my chair as the university is the one PAYING me to teach. If they need my time in the classroom, they have every right as my employer to have me teach and have me turn down the grant award. Now, a good department chair will work with the faculty member for mutual benefit, but I can not unilaterally decide to work on that service activity THAT I WAS NOT HIRED TO DO while blowing off my teaching either… I can also not decide to unilaterally shift to studying insect ecology if I was hired to work as a physical chemist, particularly as an assistant professor who was hired to fill a particular need for departmental scholarship.
Re.: ” I was surprised that there is such a mismatch in department culture and the focus of this faculty member’s scholarship….” Thus far, we are getting second- nd third-hand accounts of the grant proposal and its alleged political content or spin. Maybe I’m jut skeptical by nature, but I like to see PRIMARY documents rather than someone else’s account of what transpired, especially if there are conflicting opinions.
Hi John, It is my understanding that this is standard practice and for the good reasons “concerned professor” states.
I agree with your other point regarding the lack of due process. Do we know if there are any appeals processes in their governance documents for NTT or TT-but-not-tenured faculty when a decision like this is made?
I don’t think that’s true, but I’d love to see more data. For example, Northwestern University has a policy that distinguishes between sponsored projects and gifts without deliverables, and I think the Felber grant would be considered a gift under that policy. However, even sponsored projects “should” but are not required to be submitted by the research office.
https://osr.northwestern.edu/gifts-vs-grants-criteria/
It has always been my understanding that some kind of ‘sponsored programs’ or ‘sponsored research’ office manages external grant funding at research universities. As “concerned professor” notes, the university is normally the official recipient of such a grant, and has legal and institutional reasons for playing that role. Nonetheless, in my now many years at R1s, it is fairly common for individual faculty members to apply for relatively small “grants” from private foundations independently, and though this is a violation of university policy, it is easily corrected, and the faculty member in question simply gets a friendly note from our V-P for Research to the effect that the faculty member should go through the appropriate channels next time. I have never heard of a faculty member being terminated — or not renewed — over such a minor issue. Surely an R1 such as the University of Kentucky deals with this issue frequently, without such dire outcomes. I’m left wondering if other issue were more important here.
The policies described by Barbara Piper are exactly what I have encountered at several institutions. However, if one violated the protocols, you did not receive a polite note; you could be demoted or even fired if untenured.
At one university, the Music dean got a $15 million grant from a major corporation to renovate an abandoned movie theater and convert it into a multi-purpose concert hall. Once the work was completed, the dean was relieved of his deanship (he went elsewhere, with a great line on his vita). “No good deed goes unpunished.”
The sin was that the Research Office did not get its cut. Plus they said that they had been planning to approach the corporation for a much bigger award. Yeah, for literally 80 years they’d been planning and never managed to make the “ask.”
Dr. Tomasulo’s anecdote illustrates the old wisdom that anything in sufficient quantity is impressive! The fees — and possibly the indirects — on a $15 million grant might be worth the bureaucratic hassle of terminating a dean, while a $42,000 grant is chump change. But the music example illustrates another organizational issue that complicates this: the several universities with which I have been affiliated over the years have two offices, both of which handle grants: the sponsored programs office manages and oversees grants with overhead, indirects, etc — the typical NSF or NIH grant — while the “Development Office” handles relationships with private foundations and businesses, including grants. I’ve had a number of grants from private foundations, including Kaiser and MacArthur, and my development office has always been concerned that its work with those foundations does not conflict with individual faculty member’s rogue applications, or vice-versa. One of the former directors of our development office, who I came to know quite well, commented that she did not like to get frustrated phone calls from major private foundations asking who the heck Prof. Smith is, and why is Prof. Smith undercutting the university’s working relationship with the foundation?
None of this might be relevant to the Kentucky case, of course, though I am still left wondering if a small misjudgment on a faculty member’s part is sufficient for non-renewal. Just as I am puzzled by the example of a $15 million grant that supposedly got a dean fired — I find no references to any such a case in a quick interwebz search, but that may just be my failure. But if the grant committed the university to working on a non-university facility — “an abandoned movie theater” — I can understand why the university would be …. concerned.
Barbara Piper: The situation I described really happened, although for the sake of confidentiality I did not name the Dean, institution, or donor, a private foundation. I also may have gotten the exact amount wrong; maybe it was $14 million or $16 million, but it was in that range. Like you, I’ve also received many external grants myself but I always worked with the Development Office — albeit sometimes when I had already put everything in place on my own.
Oddly, or maybe not so unusually, I have been looking to donate part of my “estate” — such as it is — to one of the several universities that I’ve been affiliated with. I also wanted to work closely with a department chair or dean to determine the best purposes such a bequest might be used for: scholarships, an endowed chair or faculty line, equipment, facilities, etc. Almost all the institutions I contacted — through the administrative ranks — have IMMEDIATELY referred me to the Development Office and refused to discuss the matter with me. Even my three alma maters have been unwilling to talk to me unless the Development or Alumni Office was first consulted. This was even true of some professional organizations I belong to.
Prof. Tomasulo — I’m sure the situation you described did in fact happen; I was curious about details and did not see a case that resembled your description. That’s not too surprising, I think, since it sounds like this was an internal issue. But I did want to underscore that the sheer size of the grant you mentioned, whether $14 or $16 million, may well have caused the problem: imagine a university suddenly learning that it is now responsible for managing a $15 million project that I had never heard of before. I could see that university signing on, after the fact, to a $1500 grant, or even a $15,000 grant — but $15 million is a major institutional commitment for a dean to make without fairly extensive consultation. Can a dean be that naive? I suppose so.
Barbara Piper: You have a point about the Music dean’s blindsiding of the Research Office, although I think that the funds went directly into the coffers of the Music School and not to the university’s account. I think that the Music School handled all the paperwork in administering the donation, but I may be mistaken on that point.
I learned from that dean’s experience (getting demoted and leaving) when I later obtained a very large grant from the state legislature. I worked through university channels and the Research Office took a 15% (?) cut.
Well, from the reporting I have seen, the actual grant was a minor issue. The firing (or non-renewal so to speak) was because this assistant professor undertook direct insubordination to his department chair when he would not meet about the issue. Now, the assistant professor claimed that he wanted a “paper trail” of everything that was said because of prior issues with tone of communication.
However, I am not sure what choice this department chair had. The assistant professor refused to meet with his supervisor over a job related issue, when the assistant professor was ALREADY granted a leave of absence to work on scholarship (not sure if the university was paying salary during that research leave or not). In any workplace I can think of, that would be sufficient grounds in itself for firing. I am not sure why folks in the role of college professors think that they should be exempt from basic work expectations……
I can scarcely imagine any workplace where someone on leave can be fired for refusing to attend an unnecessary one-on-one work meeting while they are on leave when they generously offer to respond via email. We can debate what the rules on grants should be, but if the Faculty Handbook allows faculty to submit their own grants, then you can’t punish faculty for following the rules given to them.
As usual, without more first-hand information I cannot decide whether John Wilson’s arguments are good, bad, or ugly. I am especially concerned when ANYBODY uses big “IFs” to make a case; “IF Felber is correct, and Wilson rejected the grant because she didn’t like his “political” views and feared retaliation to the history department from racist donors, it is a serious violation of academic freedom and should be reversed.”
Well, what if John W’s mind-reading ability is NOT 100% accurate (I know that MINE isn’t), and the grant was turned down because it was indeed “political” (an ideological screed) rather than scholarly (i.e., thoroughly researched facts, not just opinions). I have seen such proposals and usually advise the authors to substantiate their ideological claims with relevant citations, concrete examples, and logical argumentation. Since I have not seen the grant application in question, I have no idea whether it will be a valuable contribution to the discipline — or just another “P.C.” rehash of perceived and actual grievances.
As Jesus Christ said (albeit not speaking of academic grant proposals(, “Many are called but few are chosen.”
Sorry! Above, I meant to say FELBER’s mind-reading abilities. I’m sure that John W’s telepathy is just fine. 🙂