A majority of the English faculty at the Virginia Military Institute has quit following a complaint in which professors accused the department’s leaders of creating a hostile environment by establishing unreasonable performance goals and then retaliating against them when they voiced objections.
Six professors left this spring or early this summer, and another says he plans to resign in the next two weeks. Yet another left last year.
The departures have decimated the department, leaving just two professors (aside from the one who has also announced his intention to resign) who are not also administrators. Of the seven who have left, five were tenured and two were on the tenure track. The one who plans to leave soon is tenured and, like most of the others who have departed, has worked at VMI for more than a dozen years.
The institute, in Lexington, Va., has hired six tenure-track professors who are due to begin work in the English department this fall. They will join the two remaining professors plus three others who are also administrators, including the department head and the writing director, who are at the center of the controversy. Such a large turnover in a department in a single year is unusual.
A spokesman for the institute said the faculty members who complained were at least partly responsible for problematic relationships that developed between them and leaders of the department. “When there are decisions that are made you don’t agree with,” said Stewart D. MacInnis, a VMI spokesman, “you can accept those decisions and work under those decisions, or you can make a decision to leave.”
The American Association of University Professors sent a letter last month to Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, VMI’s superintendent, outlining a list of ways in which the group said the institute may have violated the principles of faculty governance and academic freedom.
The association objected to how it said the administration announced a major shift in the English curriculum last year with little faculty input. The association also said it was bothered by professors’ allegations of “unchecked authority of department heads” and the “intolerance and distrust” VMI administrators had shown to anyone who questioned the administration’s actions.
‘Inconsistent’ and ‘Arbitrary’
The trouble at VMI began three years ago, professors say, after top administrators gave Christina R. McDonald, the institute’s director of writing, the power to evaluate English faculty members in a joint process with the department’s longtime head, Emily Miller. A majority of the professors who left say that, after years of earning good marks, they were suddenly criticized in their 2010 evaluations and told they did not meet expectations.
After the same thing happened the following year, seven English faculty members filed a formal complaint with the institute’s inspector general. The complaint, filed in October 2011, called new performance goals established by Ms. McDonald “inconsistent” and “arbitrary,” and said that when professors asked her for guidance on how to improve, they were consistently rebuffed. Further, if they offered opinions that clashed with those of Ms. Miller or Ms. McDonald, the complaint said, the administration labeled them “disgruntled or recalcitrant.” Ms. McDonald and Ms. Miller declined to speak to The Chronicle.
Two months after the faculty members filed their complaint, the institute’s dean of the faculty, Brig. Gen. R. Wane Schneiter, met with the English department’s tenured professors and told them any further complaints about department leaders would constitute a cause for dismissal, several professors told The Chronicle.
In January of last year, General Peay appointed a five-person committee to investigate the faculty members’ complaint. Last June the superintendent informed the seven professors of the committee’s findings. In a memorandum he told the professors that the committee had rejected all of their allegations.
While General Peay never released the committee’s actual report to professors, he said in the memo that the panel had found that any “unhealthy and hostile environment” had been created not by the department’s leaders but by the faculty members themselves. No leadership style will work, he said the committee had found, if “the subordinates are incorrigibly unwilling followers.”
“It is clear to me,” he added, “that the essence of this problem is some faculty simply do not want to follow the directives of their department head. ... There are some faculty who have not gotten their way and have banded together to undermine and polarize a department head. That absolutely, unequivocally, must stop immediately.”
Curriculum Changes
Of the seven professors who filed the 2011 complaint, two retired this spring, earlier than they had originally planned, both at the age of 62. They refused to speak to The Chronicle about the complaint because, they said, their retirement agreements prohibit them from saying anything negative about VMI. Four of the others who signed the complaint left for other jobs in academe. One of them did not return telephone calls and the others requested anonymity regarding their remarks, saying they feared that the institute might retaliate against them and attempt to poison the atmosphere for them at their new institutions.
Only one of the seven faculty members who signed the 2011 complaint agreed to talk on the record to The Chronicle: Kurt J. Ayau, who said he planned to notify the institute in the next couple of weeks that he would be leaving the English department after 24 years. He does not yet have another job. He said that after faculty members received negative evaluations in 2010 and 2011, they believed the administration was attempting to establish a case to eventually fire them.
Mr. Ayau also said that the significant changes the institute made in the English department’s curriculum last year had given it another tool for pushing out faculty members. In April 2012, the institute announced it was changing the focus of the department from literature to rhetoric. The institute said it wanted to bolster student interest in English, which had fewer than 50 majors, by de-emphasizing the study of literature and focusing instead on the development of students’ writing, speaking, and general rhetorical skills.
But the faculty members who issued the 2011 complaint said professors had no role in the decision to shift the department’s focus. All of the courses the administration requested that the professors design to fit the new curriculum were rejected this past academic year, said Mr. Ayau. He said professors believed the administration planned to use the rejections as just one more tool to justify getting rid of them.
Some of the professors who left told The Chronicle that even though Ms. McDonald, the writing director, had repeatedly told them in their performance evaluations that they had not met expectations in teaching, she refused to give them any guidance to help them improve. They said that she cited deficiencies in teaching that were factually inaccurate, but that even after they provided what they said was documentation that her allegations were false, the VMI administration brushed aside the discrepancies.
One professor said his performance evaluation contended he had not taught from a certain section of a textbook and that his students did not perform well on an end-of-year assessment. Both statements, he said, were false. “The previous year I had gotten the highest possible performance rating,” said the former VMI professor, who asked to remain anonymous. “The next year, with hardly any changes to my syllabi, I was suddenly given the lowest possible rating.”
In his memo on the complaint, General Peay backed Ms. McDonald and Ms. Miller in their evaluations of faculty members. He said they used evaluation methods outlined in VMI’s faculty handbook.
Maj. Mary Beth Pennington is among the seven professors who have already left VMI, although she did not sign the 2011 complaint. She gave up her tenure-track job at the institute this spring after three years to become a lecturer in English at Old Dominion University, in Norfolk, Va., primarily because her husband works nearby.
“My interactions with my department head and the writing director were great, I got everything I wanted, and I had a voice,” she said. But she was concerned by the inequitable way she saw those department leaders treat more-established faculty members.
“It was a really terrible environment,” said Major Pennington. “There were good people there, but they didn’t feel they could as a whole trust the administration to do what was right by us and give us a say in the future.”