Document 3

The words and actions of the Provost over the past year have undermined confidence in his role as the chief academic officer of the university and as a leader of the university in the following manner:

A. Repeated verbal intimidation of those who disagree with him (see 1-3 below). Such intimidation has discouraged the exercise of academic freedom in the communication of facts to the university community, as well as in the expression of thoughtful opinion on these facts. As a result, it has rendered more and more difficult productive dialogue on changes in the university structure:

1. After the October AAUP newsletter, which called for faculty vigilance in the face of a number of coming events, including "the provost’s proposed changes in the ASPT guidelines," the Provost berated me for 10 minutes at the conclusion of a Senate meeting. He repeatedly called our reference to his coming revision of the ASPT guidelines a "cheap shot" and repeatedly demanded an apology. He made no attempt to ask what the AAUP meant by the statement and he rejected my attempts to discuss our intentions.

2. The Provost’s Newsletter of August 1997 makes unsubstantiated and incorrect charges against faculty, specifically "those whose motives are uncertain and whose rhetoric is distorted." To these false charges he added what appeared to many to be a threat: that "faculty must" hold their colleagues "accountable" for "spreading false rumors" or communicating "without appropriate courtesy and civility." The Provost made no attempt to substantiate his charges and thus to distinguish them from mere rumor.

3. Other examples of intimidation as presented by other professors.

B. The initiation or toleration of misrepresentations to the Board and the University community of faculty opinion and of the Board’s and the Provost’s actions:

1. At the July 1997 Board meeting, Trustee Nancy Froelich incorrectly charged the ISU AAUP with gross misrepresentations of the Board’s actions. These charges were based on information that came to Trustee Froelich through the Provost’s office or that the Provost should have corrected. They include the Trustee’s statements that:

a. The faculty fully supported the process of preparing the Board’s governance document and the final product.

In fact, the Provost was at the April 1997 general faculty meeting and knew that there was substantial faculty dissatisfaction with the process of preparing the Governance Document as well as with the document itself.

b. The statement that the Senate participated in the setting of a deadline for the preparation of new ASPT guidelines.

In fact, Paul Walker has stated that Betty Chapman, who reports to the Provost, informed him of the ASPT deadline, but gave him no choice. The Senate was not consulted.

c. The statement that the communications of the ISU AAUP President, Jim Reid, to faculty during the summer contained repeated misrepresentations of the October deadline for the Constitution as an Information Item at the Board meeting.

In fact, Reid had only once mistakenly said that the Constitution had to be completed by the October Board meeting. A memo from the Provost to Margaret Haefner dated July 23, 1997 shows that he was collecting Reid's communications and finding them, as he wrote to Haefner, "really…helpful," only a week before Trustee Froehlich incorrectly stated that reid had "continually" misrepresented the October deadline and that this was representative of a general pattern of misrepresentation.

The Provost’s memo to Margaret Haefner, by the way, motivated several people to express fears that the Provost would use their contributions to ISUTEACH against them.

If the Provost is not the source of Trustee Froelich’s misstatements about faculty opinion, the ASPT deadline, and Reid's communications, then the Provost should have corrected them, once he heard the Trustee make them, in order to insure full communication between faculty and Board.

Even as the Provost has initiated or tolerated false charges of misrepresentation by the AAUP, he has misrepresented his own support for the elimination of written guarantees of shared governance in the Board’s Governing document, the University Constitution, and the Guidelines for Administrative Search and Evaluation, by stating, in his Provost’s Newsletter of August 1997, that the only threat to shared governance comes from the faculty. By denying his own and the Board’s attempts to limit the role of faculty in shared governance, the Provost has made even more difficult any discussion of their actions.

3. The Provost falsely stated in the Provost’s Newsletter of October 1997 that the Chair’s council had endorsed the changes in the status of chairs, when no such endorsement was ever made.

Given the Provost’s pattern of discouraging the exercise of academic freedom and of misrepresenting (or allowing the misrepresentation of) his own acts and those of the faculty, it is impossible to have confidence that he will in the future: 1) encourage rather than discourage full and open debate within the university, both among faculty (as on ISUTEACH), and between faculty and administrators; 2) facilitate rather than hinder communication between the university community and the Board.