There have been a handful of incidents in the past few years in which a college administration has sought to punish faculty members for exercising their free speech rights with regards to academic governance.  None, however, have been as brazen as the administration at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, who, this past January, fired a long-time professor who had the temerity to challenge the corporatization of his workplace.

Moore College has embarked on a trajectory all too common these days in higher education: the erosion of job security (in this instance, the jettisoning of tenure), the evisceration of health care benefits, and the denial of a real voice in faculty governance.  Over the last 18 years, the faculty of Moore College has been transformed from one primarily consisting of full-time tenured to professors to one with 31 full-time instructors on contract and 70 adjunct professors to serve a student body of some 500 students.  The Moore Federation of Teachers - the union representing Moore College faculty - has seen a contract stealthily negotiated in the dead of summer, then imposed through a questionable ratification process in 2004. It has watched as the AFT has had to throw out a union election and ensure neutrality by securing a third party to run a new election.  Finally, after faculty revolted against both the college administration and the MFT leadership, in 2005, Steve Sherman, a popular art instructor for 20 years at Moore, was elected as that union's president. 

And that's where the current troubles began.

continued after the jump...

In 2007, Sherman received a "final warning" of reprimand for communicating with a member of the college's governing board on matters of academic governance.  Not incidentally, the board member was a person with whom Sherman served on a committee. In January, based on a student complaint about Sherman's classroom management style and the previous "final warning," the college dismissed him from his teaching appointment.

Fortunately, a third-party labor arbitrator (the final authority in the contractually guaranteed grievance process which provides for due process in workplace discipline issues) found that Moore College had drastically overreached in disciplining Sherman for having the gall to speak out about faculty governance. In his decision, the arbitrator wrote:

I find no evidence that Mr. Sherman acted in any other fashion that would justify a disciplinary "final warning," including no evidence that he acted "unprofessionally."  Although his approach to the issue in question was pugnacious and his language inflammatory, the policing of diction that is short of slander or ethnically pejorative, or the penalizing of a demeanor that is short of threatening or assaultive constitutes a censorship that is incompatible with the robust free-speech environment of a collegiate institution.

Since the reason for his dismissal was predicated on the previous disciplinary action, another grievance has been filed contesting Sherman's firing.  In the meantime, however, Sherman is still the president of his union, but must be escorted to on-campus union meetings by security guards, who wait outside the doors of the meeting rooms with walkie-talkies.  This heavy-handed treatment has the additional effect of further chilling faculty members' willingness to participate in union activities or speak out against the college administration.

There are obviously a number of issues which are of concern here: the corporatization and vocationalization of higher education, the erosion of faculty governance rights, and the long-term trends in academic staffing to name a few.  But overarching all of these other issues is the matter of free speech.  College is perhaps the one chance in many people's lifetime to have vigorous and open debates about the issues and institutions which impact their lives.  What message does it send when the faculty members whose role it is to foster these interactions are denied the opportunity to practice what they teach with regards to their own workplace - a workplace which ostensibly values the free exchange of ideas?