November 24, 2008
In Lawsuit, New England College Says Its Poetry Program Was Stolen
New England College has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the former director of its master’s-degree program in poetry stole faculty members and students from the New Hampshire institution and re-created the program at Drew University, in New Jersey, The Concord Monitor reported.
In the lawsuit, which names both the former director, Anne Marie Macari, and Drew as defendants, New England is seeking compensation for lost tuition, which it estimates at “six figures” for this year alone, and the $33,000 salary it paid Ms. Macari in her last year at the college.
An employment lawyer in Concord, N.H., who is not part of the case told the newspaper that the strength of New England’s claim would rest on whether Ms. Macari was still working for the New Hampshire institution while planning Drew’s program.
Ms. Macari declined to comment about the case, but in an affidavit filed with the U.S. District Court in Corcord, she asserted that no one from Drew had contacted her while she was “physically” at New England College.
A lawyer for Drew would not comment, but the university has asked the court to dismiss the case or move it to a federal court in New Jersey to cut down on the expense of traveling to New Hampshire for hearings. The court has not ruled on that request.
Ms. Macari joined New England College as an adjunct faculty member in 2002, the Concord newspaper reported. In March 2007, she was named the poetry program’s interim director. About three months later, the lawsuit alleges, she began neglecting her duties to recruit and enroll students at New England.
It was then, the complaint contends, that she began “secretly developing” a virtually identical program for Drew. In February 2008, it says, she told New England College she was quitting to take another job. All eight of the Drew program’s faculty members are or were affiliated with New England, the lawsuit says.
By Charles Huckabee | Posted on Monday November 24, 2008 | PermalinkComments
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Very interesting. If Ms. Macari is indeed guilty, I do hope New England College thinks twice before hiring adjuncts who have little reason to be loyal to the college. I think this would have been far less likely to have happened if Ms. Macari were in a tenure-track position. As an adjunct, Ms. Macari had only herself to look out for and, arguably, did the best thing for her career by planning her move, with other faculty in tow, to Drew.
— Catherine Nov 24, 01:20 PM #
What nonsense. No one can “steal” a faculty member or a student. Clearly they went someplace where they were better treated and happier. What’s next, retention belts for students and faculty who promiscuously enroll elsewhere?
— Brevo Nov 24, 05:13 PM #
Wow, the people at New England College are complete jerks. They lost some faculty members to a University that pays better, that is a better school overall, and that is in a much better location 30 minutes from midtown Manhattan. These were adjuncts, not tenure track employees, with no contracts. The last time I checked, at-will employees are not slaves. As for her “plotting in secret,” give me a friggin break. It is not illegal to look for another job while you are employed. Americans do it every day. Also, who is NEC kidding? They did not invent the low residency program. I live nearby, and I can attest to the fact that NEC is just a disfunctional, broken institution from top to bottom. It doesn’t help that it’s run by right wing lunatics.
— John Marston Nov 24, 08:09 PM #
Suing an adjunct who was being paid $33,000 when she found a better job for herself and others? Not classy, not classy….
— h.c. Nov 24, 08:43 PM #
“The last time I checked, at-will employees are not slaves.”
As Stanley Fish would say, “think again.”
— Constance Lavender Nov 25, 03:29 AM #
It is a free market! We too may change our employer and recruit our former colleagues.
— Mark Nov 25, 08:23 AM #
So if the faculty member had tenure, would they have grounds for a lawsuit? Whether on finite or infinite contract, is the principle the same?
— rodney whatley Nov 25, 10:40 AM #
Bravo to the adjunct for sticking it out until she found a full-time job! She deserves a medal for dedication and perseverance. New England College should be sued for exploitative labor practices: $33,000? People who pick up garbage make more, and they don’t have mega student loans from ten or more years as a poverty-level student.
— Lisa Nov 25, 12:09 PM #
I hope NE College persists in this folly, because the resulting court decisions are very likely to benefit adjuncts everywhere. Paying people by the hour does not give you dominion over all their ideas or the keys to their future — if it did, wouldn’t college presidents be paid that way?
— eo Nov 25, 02:17 PM #
Check out the strange reasoning in some of the comments from a previous posting on a Chronicle blog. That those of who teach should have the audacity to take a better paying job seriously offended some people! (As if the fact it was a part time job makes a difference.) For everyone involved, lets hope NEC comes to their senses and drops this lawsuit, which is now only serving to make a little-known college an outsize object of ridicule and scorn. I mean do they seriously think they invented, and can patent, the very concept of a distance learning program?
http://chronicle.com/news/article/5550/in-lawsuit-new-england-college-says-its-poetry-program-was-stolen
— A Professor (not an indentured servant) Nov 25, 04:30 PM #
Thought it good to post my opinion on this message board as well.
Obviously, the publication of this article is an undisguised attempt by NEC administration to slander and defame Ms. Macari. It’s unpardonable that an institution would reduce itself to spreading these baseless accusations in the “rumor mill” in hopes of gaining support for their petty cause. Shouldn’t NEC focus on something more positive and useful like how to salvage their crumbling program? I’d be curious to hear from other poets, who chose to terminate their association with NEC. I guarantee there’s probably more of a story to be had in that. I also vaguely recall a rumor that all the MFA faculty resigned a couple of years ago; does anyone remember what happened there?
— louis Nov 25, 04:40 PM #
Aren’t the students and teachers free to go where they want. Doesn’t seem like something you could actually steal.
Logan Lamech
www.eloquentbooks.com/LingeringPoets.html
— Logan Lamech Nov 25, 07:06 PM #
It’s also an attempt to hit Ms. Macari in the wallet. They probably have a full-time lawyer, while she will have to hire one. I hope that the judge tosses it out and makes them pay her legal costs.
— brevo Nov 26, 02:08 PM #
Maybe we’re all reading this wrong. Maybe Ms. Macari stole a semi, forced these 8 faculty members and an undisclosed number of students into it at gunpoint, and drove to New Jersey where they were unpacked and shackled to grimy desks in poorly lit, unheated offices and forced to play on Chinese-style World of Warcraft gold farms. And maybe NEC is just a bunch of vindictive control freaks.
Seriously, it’s interesting that the suit doesn’t seem to mention any (non-human) properties, such as alleging that she used NEC resources (fax, library, whatever) to design Drew’s program. In which case it could have been argued that NEC was entitled to some compensation. Sounds to me like a purely frivolous suit (frivolous in the legal sense— I don’t mean to discount what this is likely to cost Ms. Macari).
— Tiel Aisha Ansari Nov 27, 11:29 AM #
Is this Drew program on of those long-distance creative writing gigs that charge huge amounts to students for very little instruction in order to make the school lots of $$$?
If so, why should anyone care about either of these schools. They’re exploiting students, and that includes all the faculty who work there. I have no sympathy for anyone involved in this mess.
— No one wins Nov 29, 06:53 PM #
This law suit sounds like a bunch of sour grapes on the part of NEC. Who was the director before Ms. Macari took over as intrim director? It sounds like it was falling apart before and she saved it.
— Diane Dec 9, 12:12 PM #
A faculty response to the New England College lawsuit article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
As faculty at the upcoming low-residency MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation at Drew University who formerly taught for the MFA program in poetry at New England College, we feel the need to comment on NEC’s lawsuit against Anne Marie Macari and Drew University. Ms. Macari’s actions have been misrepresented in published stories that repeat NEC claims––stories with headlines accusing Macari of “pilfering” and of “stealing” the program at New England College. In fact, there were ongoing disputes between the (rapidly changing) administration of NEC and the faculty of the MFA program, as a result of which several of the latter chose to leave what we considered an inhospitable institution. Here are some further facts to consider.
“Theft” of the Program:
The concept of the low-residency MFA in writing program is neither the idea nor the property of New England College. The model of short residencies followed by a term of individual work with a faculty member is the pattern that most low-residency MFA programs have adopted. It dates from 1963, when Goddard College organized its Adult Degree Program, the prototype of its Intensive Residency model. The MFA in writing program was founded in 1976 at Goddard by poet Ellen Bryant Voigt and eventually relocated to Warren Wilson College; when Voigt left Goddard, most of the then MFA in writing faculty followed her. Vermont College’s low-residency MFA in writing program began in 1981, also an offshoot of the Goddard program, and Goddard itself currently offers two low-residency MFA in writing programs, on the East and West Coasts. Publications such as “Poets & Writers Magazine“ and “The AWP Chronicle“ now regularly advertise literally dozens of MFA in writing programs, many of them new low-residency programs, virtually all of them offering degrees in poetry writing. Although its concentration on poetry was a shared idea of the founders, the structure of the NEC program is in other respects typical of most low-residency MFA programs.
“Theft” of the Faculty:
Claims of theft suggest the existence of a permanent faculty whose members broke faith with the college that housed the program. In fact, the entire faculty of the New England College program served part-time, with no benefits, job security, possibility of tenure, or advance assurance of the number of advisees on which pay was based. Semester-long contracts were offered at the last minute, sometimes not until a residency had already begun. At some point, instead of “faculty” or “core faculty,” the word “adjunct” began to be included in NEC’s contracts, emphasizing the temporary, ad hoc nature of the work. Adjunct faculty in most educational institutions have no benefits, rights, or contractual commitments lasting more than the semester for which they are hired; graduate students and others who serve as adjunct faculty typically work at two or three colleges at the same time.
The distinguished poets NEC relegated to adjunct status but now claim as stolen faculty include the recipients of numerous major awards. Gerald Stern, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets who has published 18 books and has received the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award, was one of the founders of the MFA poetry program and was instrumental in bringing it to New England College in 2002 and attracting major poets to serve in the program.
The entire faculty resigned from NEC in 2007, as the result of serious conflict with the administration about the leadership and conduct of the program, and agreed to return only when the administration agreed to accept Macari as interim director of the program.
The faculty unanimously chose Macari, who agreed to take on the job for a limited period of time, until a permanent director could be chosen. Macari made clear to colleagues and administrators that she was not in contention for that job.
“Neglect” of the work of directing the program:
Macari, as Acting Director of the NEC program, held no other job, nor did she accept a contract from Drew until after she had left New England College. She did not ever neglect her work. On the contrary, she dedicated herself to restoring morale and order after the crisis the community had gone through, bringing energy, spirit, and care to keeping a program alive that had been in disarray. She devoted more time to students and colleagues than the job required—indeed, she literally saved the program. She did her work with integrity, thoroughness, and diligence.
It should be noted that anyone –– from an unskilled laborer to a college president –– has the right to apply for one job while holding another. It should also be noted that, traditionally, one may both be the director of a low-residency program and also hold a full-time position elsewhere. Directing a low-residency program, like teaching in one, is generally conceived as a part-time position. Indeed, unlike Ms. Macari, the former director of the MFA program at New England College held a full-time job at another college, with the full knowledge and approval of the NEC administration, while the current NEC director is both the director of the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop and a professor in the English Department at West Virginia University. Macari held only the NEC position.
The claim of poached students:
Neither Macari nor anyone else teaching at NEC encouraged students to transfer to Drew. A few NEC students, when Drew advertised their new program, made that decision on their own, without encouragement or enticement.
The claim of nine stolen faculty:
The program at Drew indeed has a total of nine members, if one counts the director and distinguished poets in residence. However, some never served as faculty at NEC. NEC misleadingly claims, as former faculty, poets who came to NEC just once, to give a single half-hour poetry reading. To count one-time speakers as among “poached faculty” is simply false. Other Drew faculty include one poet who taught at NEC for one semester a year and has not taught at NEC since 2006. NEC was given ample time to hire replacements; there is no shortage of poets and writers of national reputation seeking part-time teaching work.
Ross Gay
Joan Larkin
Alicia Ostriker
Ira Sadoff
Michael Waters
— Lawrence Biemiller Jan 2, 06:50 PM #