BY DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

In the past several years, Linfield University in Oregon has gained a reputation for creating a hostile work environment. One reason is that it has displayed a willingness to harass and even fire tenured faculty who are willing to point out its failures in key areas like sexual harassment, faculty governance, and academic freedom. Linfield has drawn the attention of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and the AAUP, which this week published the results of its investigation of Linfield.

Like many smaller US colleges, Linfield has fallen on hard times. By 2018, enrollments had dropped from 1,700 students in 2015–16 to 1,376 in 2016–17, creating a 10 percent loss of tuition income. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, in 2018 Linfield had “frozen salaries, increased tuition and sold off property. Faculty layoffs were on the table.”

Indeed, by 2020–21, Linfield had become one of the most expensive colleges in the country.  According to one report: “Tuition for Linfield College McMinnville Campus is $44,450 for the 2020/2021 academic year. This is 49 percent more expensive than the national average private non-profit four year college tuition of $29,812. The cost is 71 percent more expensive than the average Oregon tuition of $26,066 for four-year colleges.”

With the threat of job losses, the mood on campus was captured well by Inside Higher Education.  On the one hand, one professor of the humanities said, “There is a financial crisis in the sense that the budget is unbalanced. But it is going to be balanced by sending twenty-five tenured and tenure-track faculty to the chopping block?” At the end, the President hand-picked thirteen faculty members, including a few untenured faculty members and offered them voluntary separations and early retirement packages. Majority of these faculty members were from the arts and humanities.

On the other hand, President Miles Davis a former business dean, drew attention to “the underlying shift in enrollment patterns at Linfield College. We now find ourselves at a point where we must both meet present challenges and position Linfield for growth.”

Here, I wish to look more closely at how Linfield seems to be addressing both. Let’s return to the work environment. Last year, Linfield made the pages on the New York Times, but not for anything good. It had decided to fire a tenured full professor who had raised concerns about sexual harassment, including cases of sexual harassment by trustees. President Davis and three other board members were accused of engaging in “various forms of misconduct with female professors and students. The female faculty member who accused both President Davis and his friend on the board, Norm Nixon, was a member of the English department (as we will see, a number of those targeted by the administration are humanists and members of the English department).

One of those trustees resigned in 2019 and has been charged with sexual abuse. The controversies have played out for months in a federal lawsuit filed by a student, through public statements from faculty members and leaders, student protests, and votes of no confidence.” One of those making public statements was Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a Shakespearean scholar and tenured professor of English. Students, alumni, and members of the community protested vigorously, and over a thousand professors from around the world signed a letter of protest. It seemed a clear case of firing the whistleblower.

The recently published AAUP report on Linfield collects in one authoritative document a number of egregious practices—the firing of tenured faculty without due process, a lack of shared governance, unaddressed sexual assault scandals and charges of antisemitism, and a “culture of abuse.” The report is scathing in its indictment. I include simply a few passages to give a sense of the document:

[Regarding the fact that Pollack-Pelzner was fired in the midst of finals week], a parent of a current Linfield student was quoted as having said, “Doing this in finals week is unconscionable, with graduation on Sunday, and now students cannot contact DPP (Pollack-Pelzner) as they have already dismantled his email.” Parents of alumni were outraged as well. A parent of a 2014 Linfield graduate was quoted as saying that she “will no longer be bequeathing any sum of money to Linfield University. Due to the recent firing and the attempt at silencing Professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner I cannot in good conscience leave money to Linfield.”

In fall 2020, the administration and governing board imposed a new faculty governance structure without adequately consulting the faculty.¹² On November 14, President Davis sent an email message notifying the faculty that the faculty assembly and all its committees had been dissolved that day. Five days later the provost followed up with an email informing the faculty that a faculty senate would be formed as the board of trustees had directed. It is no wonder, then, that when the investigating committee inquired about the state of shared governance at the institution, individuals described it as extremely poor to the point of nonexistence. Or, as one faculty member succinctly put it, “Shared governance at Linfield is dead.”

Other statements are brief and to the point—“General conditions for academic freedom and shared governance at Linfield University are deplorable,” “While many institutions grapple with issues of campus culture, we must emphasize that the Linfield administration’s disregard for academic freedom and shared governance has abetted multiple systemic inequities and made a mockery of what makes a campus ’just.’”

Most recently, another critic of the administration, Professor Reshimi Dutt-Ballerstadt, also a tenured professor and member of the English department, has been told she is the subject of an investigation. As reported by Inside Higher Education, a complaint was filed against Dutt-Ballerstadt by another member of the faculty for an alleged “pattern of unprofessional behavior.” Dutt-Ballerstadt contends that the complaint regards social media posts she made poking fun at business majors (the Business School is taking over a building that houses the English department) and pointing out that famous figures in the financial world such as Henry Paulson, former chair and CEO of Goldman Sachs, and former Disney chief Michael Eisner had both been English majors. It took nearly a month for Linfield to Dutt-Ballerstadt’s request to know the exact nature of the complaint against her, including what evidence Linfield was using in its investigation. The result was a terse, Kafkaesque email of exactly five short sentences. It addressed the member of the professoriate by her first name (while the signatory included her own title); thanked her for her patience; and told her that “an outside investigator investigated these complaints and found an interview will not be necessary.” No further action is required by you or the university and there were no findings.” It is not clear which algorithm was used to generate that word salad, but one can assume the bot had no training in the English language, or logic. A letter of protest has been circulated widely, objecting to the ways Linfield is trampling on its faculty’s rights and itself generating a hostile work environment.

Indeed, there is something more than incompetence at work here. While threatening to fire up to two dozen tenured faculty due to budget cuts, Linfield has found the wherewithal to sink more money into its professional schools (Linfield offers masters programs in nursing, business, sports management and analytics). At the same moment it is firing faculty, Linfield has purchased a twenty-acre new campus in Portland for its nursing program at the tune of $14.5 million. This action parallels the salary freezes on regular faculty that take place at the same time those hired in the professional schools are paid “the market rate.” Whatever revenue gained by such ventures is surely not going to be used to hire back regular faculty, but will most likely be used to further invest in money-making professional schools.

The fact that Linfield has turned its back on investigations by the AAUP shows more than pure arrogance—it indicates that Linfield may in fact be nonchalant about censure and even loss of accreditation as a liberal arts college, because it no longer wishes to be one. Whereas most reputable and serious liberal arts institutions of higher education would hasten to correct errors, rebuild trust, and acknowledge its role in created a hostile learning environment, Linfield’s attention seems elsewhere.

Considering all that is happening at Linfield, one might well consider it an instance of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, wherein catastrophes provide cover for institutions to do things during periods of chaos and instability.  Indeed, a recent AAUP report found there were numerous cases of “opportunistic exploitations of catastrophic events. Some institutional leaders seem to have taken the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to turbocharge the corporate model that has been spreading in higher education over the past few decades, allowing them to close programs and lay off faculty members as expeditiously as if colleges and universities were businesses whose CEOs suddenly decided to stop making widgets or shut down the steelworks.” This is precisely why what is happening at Linfield sends such an important warning to everyone in higher education.

In this respect, it is not too much of a stretch to think that Linfield is actually creating catastrophes, both as a distraction from its financial state and its inability to work with its faculty. At the very least, there should be an outside audit of the books, and there should be a freeze on terminations, program closures, and the selling and buying of property. One would hope that the accreditation of Linfield would be reassessed, and associations with oversight of nursing and business programs would want to know more about what is going on at Linfield. After all, fish rot from the head.

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor at Stanford University. He is the author, most recently, of Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back (Haymarket, 2021).