In Defense of Cranky Professors
29th July 2023
Thanks to a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, firing faculty members for “lack of collegiality” is suddenly a bright prospect for college administrators eager to rid themselves of gadflies, diversiphobes, conservatives and other riffraff. The case involved Stephen Porter, a tenured professor in the school of education at North Carolina State University, who had had the bad grace to object to various forms of mandatory diversity saluting. Some details to follow, but let’s first roll around in the hay of “collegiality.”
The two members (out of three) on the Fourth Circuit who invoked the term were not entirely breaking new ground. The woker sort of faculty and college administrators have been fondling the idea for a while. They like it because it suggests an easy way to win arguments without the bother of actually arguing or producing evidence. It comes down to: we cannot work with Professor Von Grimstone because he is mean. He makes us feel bad about ourselves. He harms our students by failing to affirm them. His lack of “collegiality” makes him unfit for our happy community.
If collegiality were gauged on a scale of one (low) to ten (high), I have known several faculty members who would probably rate in the negative numbers. I’d give a minus three to the faculty member who knowingly spread false stories about a colleague he envied; a minus five to the faculty member who blackballed a highly qualified candidate over a quibble about the proper interpretation of one word in a text; and a minus ten to the professor who made a sport of seeing if could derail the careers of young untenured faculty members with whom he had no personal dealings at all.