The drumbeat of bad news continues at Virginia Commonwealth University. The latest is that four top officials have resigned as part of the controversy over former Richmond Police Chief Rodney D. Monroe’s improperly awarded VCU undergraduate degree.
According to news accounts, one of the reasons for one of the resignations was that when VCU officials investigated the Monroe degree, threats may have been made that tenured professors might lose their tenure.
Wow, that’s pretty strong stuff that stabs at the heart of academic freedom.
But I can believe it. When I spoke with dozens folks in the VCU community for my reporting on another scandal, the erroneously secretive research contracts VCU entered into with Philip Morris USA, I constantly heard of the neo-Stalinist atmosphere at VCU. Faculty were afraid their e-mails were monitored and used their cell phones, instead of university lines, to communicate. After all the contracts that VCU’s vice president for research now says are flawed stipulated that any discussion or inquiry of the two research deals had to be reported to Philip Morris (Big Brother) immediately.
So, I keep asking myself, where’s the outrage? At least the outrage on my outrage-meter that goes as high as that involving Gene R. Nichol, the former president of another state school, William & Mary, who ran afoul of Virginia’s right wing thought police and was hounded out of office.
Nichol was a highly regarded legal scholar who had taught at law schools in Colorado and North Carolina. He also was a liberal and an activist with the American Civil Liberties Union. Nichol did a lot of good at W&M by upgrading the school’s financial aid program to reach more minority and poor students and had to deal with demands by the NCAA that W&M drop the feathers from its logo because they might offend Native Americans.
Then, Nichol really stepped in it by having a cross removed from W&M’s chapel with orders to display it when Christian-related activities were taking place in the structure. That set off howls of rage from the “Christians” in Virginia’s right wing community even though there are Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc., who attend the state-funded school and might find the implied religious bias of the crucifix offensive. (And please, dear readers don’t come after me for not understanding your version of “Christianity.” I am a former altar boy who had it all drilled into him by the Jesuits and whose greatly-respected uncle was a Catholic priest who spent his life working with the poor.)
The cross thing really brought out the yahoos. One was Jim McGlothlin, an alumnus who made his zillions ripping coal out of the ground. Miffed at Nichol, he withdrew a $12 million donation.
Now back in my day, my school would have told McGlothlin where to stick it. But not W&M. They whimpered and scampered and howled. The right wing thought police went on alert and the ouster began. It wasn’t helped when Nichol, correctly pointing to academic freedom, did not force out a sex worker exhibit at the school. After all, this isn’t Liberty University or even Georgetown where one might not expect such as show.
It was enough, however, to do Nichol, in. He resigned and left, leaving W&M for the worse.
Move on over to VCU. Now there you have a far more serious situation where academic freedom seems to be getting trampled again and again. Rules were bent to allow Police Chief Monroe to win a degree in ways not permitted to your ordinary 21-year-old. But then, Monroe was tight with Richmond Mayor Doug Wilder and, by extension, with VCU President Eugene Trani. Ditto tobacco research. After weeks of dodging the issue, abetted by Richmond’s local rag of a newspaper, Trani’s junta finally admitted that the secrecy aspects the tobacco contracts were wrong.
What about this reign of fear that wafts over VCU’s two campuses? There’s an awful lot of smoke. And this is serious stuff, not some parlor debate about a crucifix in a public school. But then, Nichol had “liberal” tendencies and he had to be targeted and smeared and ousted as if it were the days of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.
Peter Galuszka