“To me, the governance structure has begun to emulate the church hierarchy -- this is what the men say, and that’s what you do,” said James Beard, a professor of communication arts at Mount Saint Mary College. “I’ve been here 34 years and I entered a very warm, welcoming, nurturing place, and this is now a hostile place.”
Beard’s retiring this year -- happily, in his words -- but said he still feels “a lot of responsibility for the young faculty members recently brought onto this campus for what they’re inheriting. I don’t want to see this happen.”
Faculty members have lots of complaints about the college’s current administration, particularly the growing role of its Board of Trustees in everyday affairs -- affairs that on most campuses are primarily the domain of the faculty. The board has overturned the recommendations of several recent promotion and tenure committee decisions, and trustees have sat on a faculty search committee. Most recently, this month, faculty members say, Albert J. Gruner, board chair, confronted James Phillips, an associate professor of theater, in his office to ask him why he’d posted what Gruner called “slanderous” comments about the college on his personal Facebook page. The encounter was heated, according to various faculty accounts, and violated an explicit college policy that the faculty communicate with the board through the college president. (The president, Anne Carson Daly, accompanied the board chair to the faculty member’s office, faculty members say, but then left.)
Phillips declined to comment on the matter. But other faculty members say the skirmish was over Phillips’s comments regarding the social media account of a new trustee, Andrew Bournos, who was introduced to the faculty this fall as a “social media guru.” Perhaps naturally, various faculty members visited his social media accounts -- and found some questionable posts.
