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A Christian University’s Unchristian Treatment of a Tenured Philosophy Professor

A tenured associate professor of philosophy who had received ratings of “excellent” in her annual reviews each year for the past decade, whose classes are always full or overloaded, who teaches extra courses, and who gets great student reviews in those courses, has been fired. The professor is Leigh Johnson, who up to just recently was associate professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Christian Brothers University (CBU), a Catholic university in Memphis, Tennessee. – Her case serves as a warning to faculty at small universities and colleges: extreme measures to address financial problems at your school may come out of the blue; in the panic that ensues, procedures may not be followed; it may be the case that financial exigency is used as a cover to make changes that would otherwise be noticed as objectionable; and the financial hardship threatened by a faculty member’s job loss may be used to pressure them into hiding what has happened—even at a Christian university based on the ideas of someone they approvingly quote as saying, “God desires all of us to come to the knowledge of the truth.” In September 2023, David Archer, the then-President of the University*, declared a “condition of financial exigency” and began the process of terminating tenured faculty. (There is some question as to whether this was done properly. According to the Faculty Handbook at CBU, one may not simply declare financial exigency. The administration is first required to establish “a condition of financial difficulty” which involves various procedures and steps to be taken before “financial exigency” can be invoked, and, according to a source at CBU, it is not clear that these procedures were followed.) CBU’s accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges had placed CBU on “monitoring” for the past two years, and at the beginning of December placed the school on probation, “the most serious public sanction imposed by the SACSCOC Board of Trustees short of loss of accreditation.” According to SACSCOC, CBU failed to demonstrate compliance with the Principles of Accreditation, namely, Core Requirement 4.1 (Governing board characteristics) and Standard 13.3 (Financial responsibility)… These standards expect an institution (1) to have a governing board that… exercises fiduciary oversight..
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/05/30/a-universitys-poor-treatment-of-a-tenured-philosophy-professor/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/05/30/a-universitys-poor-treatment-of-a-tenured-philosophy-professor/