BY JENNIFER RUTH
When I was a junior faculty member, one of my senior colleagues invited me to a regular happy hour he attended with Portland State’s top administrators. The man who was the provost at the time was there, as well as a head HR person, a legal affairs person, the director of facilities, and a few others. All men. That day, the student newspaper ran a story about female undergraduates working at Portland strip clubs to pay for tuition. One of the men hoisted the paper above his head and said, “Can’t we just do trades?”
I thought about the culture that makes moments like that one fifteen years ago possible when I read about the sordid saga at Linfield University. The saga begins with a board of trustees member groping an undergraduate student under a table and ends with the university president Miles Davis, the provost, and the board of trustees closing ranks to fire a tenured professor who spoke out about the harassments by not one but four trustees. The president himself is among one of the four trustees alleged with sexual misconduct. There are many twists and turns and I link to some of the stories on the situation but the bottom line is that Linfield is a university with a president and a provost who both have so little regard for due process, academic freedom, and shared governance that they unilaterally fired a distinguished full professor to shut him up and to scare other faculty into staying quiet. The faculty have not been quiet. In fact, they issued votes of no confidence. Twice. First, no confidence in the board chair David Baca and then later no confidence in President Miles Davis and the Board chair. But they are scared. After all, as one faculty member said to me, “If the golden boy can be fired without due process, what does that say about the rest of us?”
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner was a highly respected and beloved teacher, scholar, and colleague who had an unimpeachable record at Linfield University. (Pollack-Pelzner now teaches at Portland State University as a visiting faculty member but I do not know him personally.) With a PhD in English literature from Harvard, Pollack-Pelzner joined Linfield in 2010, earned tenure and was named an endowed chair in Shakespeare studies in 2016, and became a full professor in 2020. He received the Graves award for outstanding teaching in the humanities from the American Council of Learned Societies and, in 2019, Linfield awarded him the Samuel H. Graf Faculty Achievement award for demonstrating outstanding performance beyond regular duties.
Given the esteem with which the university community held him, it is not surprising that Pollack-Pelzner was chosen to serve as the faculty representative on the board of trustees. In this role, he was the natural go-to person for faculty and students who experienced conflicts with the Board in particular or university governance in general. Thus he was privy to information other faculty were not. He brought that information to university leaders and when they repeatedly failed to act meaningfully, he kept up the pressure. Last year, Inside Higher Ed reported:
Linfield has acknowledged that its board had a sexual misconduct problem — in the form of one longtime trustee, David Jubb, who resigned over what he called health concerns in 2019, amid allegations that he preyed on students at social events. His accusers total four students, including one who said Jubb groped her and her friends in a car in 2017, after Linfield’s former president asked her to drive Jubb home because he’d been drinking at a university event. The same student has also said that Linfield broke its promise to her to keep Jubb away from events with students and alcohol, enabling him to grope another student under her skirt following a trustee dinner in 2019. Last year, Jubb was indicted in Oregon on seven counts of third-degree sexual abuse and one count of first-degree sexual abuse.
In October, The Oregonian reported that Jubb pleaded no contest and was given probation. Had the board chair David Baca and the university president Miles Davis acted swiftly on the information Pollack-Pelzner and the students themselves had given them, perhaps Linfield would not be in the position it finds itself in today: the subject of a scathing investigation by the AAUP, the likelihood of being placed on the AAUP censure list when the organization votes at its June meetings, and the defendant in a whistle-blower suit in Oregon court.
After firing Pollack-Pelzner, Linfield’s administration has now shifted its target. This time it is another English department faculty member who is known to have spoken out in defense of Pollack-Pelzner. Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt who holds the Edith Green Distinguished Faculty position now finds herself under investigation for some benign tweets championing English majors and poking fun at the business department. It seems highly unlikely that these tweets are the real cause, however. Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt is a well-known voice in higher education. The author of The Post-Colonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant (2010), co-editor of the book Civility, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in Higher Education (2021), and the editor of Inside Higher Ed‘s “Conditionally Accepted” column, Dutt-Ballerstadt has more ability than most to draw attention to abuses of power in higher education. She wrote “An Extraordinary Firing” about Pollack-Pelzner’s dismissal and other similar cases for Inside Higher Ed and also spoke about the culture of fear at Linfield on the popular Oregon Public Broadcasting program “Think out loud.” Given this administration’s handling of whistle-blower Pollack-Pelzner, it does not stretch the imagination to wonder whether putting Dutt-Ballerstadt under investigation is an act of intimidation designed to silence her right after the AAUP report appears and right before Linfield University is visited by its accreditation agency. Yes, Linfield is due to be visited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities this month.
In a recent piece for The Chronicle of Higher Ed, professor of ethnic studies at Bowling Green State University Timothy Messer-Kruse reported that Ohio’s House Bill 327 prohibiting so-called divisive concepts “screeched to a halt” when “legislators received a letter opposing the bill from the Inter-University Council of Ohio (IUC), the lobbying arm of the state’s 14 public colleges and universities.” The letter explicitly stipulated that laws that violate academic freedom risk costing universities their accreditation and warned that unaccredited degrees have little value. Messer-Kruse explained that the Higher Learning Commission’s “published accreditation criteria include Standard 2.D, which requires that an institution remain ‘committed to academic freedom and freedom of expression in the pursuit of truth in teaching and learning.'”
By painstakingly developing a kind of common law of academic freedom principles and policies, the AAUP has built protections for faculty, students, and taxpayers from the arbitrary power of old boys’ clubs. Institutions deserving of trust strive to follow the best practices set out by the AAUP. They do not close ranks at the very top and attempt to scare everyone else into submission. One of the ironies here is that Linfield University in fact had adopted AAUP principles. As “Unacceptable Conditions for Academic Freedom and Tenure at Linfield University.” the AAUP statement on its investigatory report, explains:
The report finds that Linfield’s administration violated the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the institution’s own regulations, which incorporate AAUP dismissal standards, when it dismissed Pollack-Pelzner without demonstrating adequate cause for its action before an elected faculty hearing body. The investigating committee also found that the administration violated Pollack-Pelzner’s academic freedom to participate in institutional governance without retaliation. General conditions for academic freedom and shared governance at Linfield University, the report states, are ‘deplorable.’
One of the students in the case against the now ex-board member read a statement in court: “Something I would like the judge to take into consideration,” she said, “are the patterns revealed by this case. Its abuse of power and abuse of people. I believe that it is important that the people who perpetuate these abuses should face consequences for their actions.” I hope that when the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities decides whether Linfield University deserves accreditation it takes into consideration the patterns revealed by Pollack-Pelzner’s case — patterns of violating academic freedom and abusing power and people.
Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. She is the author of three books, the most recent being It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), co-authored with Michael Bérubé. An essay adapted from the book was recently featured in The New Republic.
