(Alex Morey, )
“I got fired for what they called ‘sexual harassment,’” Buchanan said of her 2015 termination, but there were no allegations she “harassed” anyone, sexually or otherwise. Rather, LSU took action because of some of the language Buchanan used in course instruction with her adult students. “Everything that they accused me of had to do with things that I had said as part of my teaching methods,” said Buchanan, noting that no student ever accused her of sexually harassing them. Rather, her approach was designed to enable new teachers cope with teaching in the real world, and doing so at some times involved the use of harsh language. (Alex Morey, "Teresa Buchanan Uncensored: How an Innovative Educator Created Top Teachers and Got Fired for It, Fire," Jan. 22, 2016 )
The modern university has tended to become a safe space--but not in the way that term is commonly understood. The safety of the university space is ensured through emerging programs of compliance driven in turn by the socialization of a riskless environment. And cultures of risk negating behaviors include not merely forbidding hiking clubs to hike (
here) or researchers to explore (
here) but it seems it now also includes constraining teaching and teaching innovation through the broadened use of social control mechanisms, including, in most interesting ways, the otherwise important and necessary regulatory architecture for the suppression of sex harassment on campus. Increasingly, this policing of risk, in the form of compliance, has begun to affect the shape and scope of tenure and academic freedom (
here).
It is at the intersection of these trends that one finds Teresa Buchanan, a faculty member at LSU who was terminated after the university determined that her teaching methods constituted harassment ("LSU said in a statement released Thursday through spokesman Ernie Ballard that the university is confident the action it took against Buchanan was appropriate. “We take our responsibility to protect students from abusive behavior very seriously, and we will vigorously defend our students’ rights to a harassment-free educational environment,” the statement added."
here). And yet it was those very methods that appeared to have made her teaching a success judged by the standards of the university. An interesting conundrum appears as a consequence, one situated at the intersection of ancient values and now apparently of zero sum dignity considerations.
This month [June 2015], Louisiana State University fired—outright fired—a tenured professor of education, Teresa Buchanan, ostensibly for creating a “hostile work environment” via sexual harassment. Her infraction? Allowing profanities to pass from her tenured lips, and unleashing a single ill-advised bon mot about sexual intercourse. . . . For all this, after an 11-hour hearing, a committee of Buchanan’s peers concluded that she be officially censured (which is not the same as “censored,” except in this case it is), and never use “potentially offensive language” in the classroom again. But the LSU administration found that already-Draconian punishment insufficient. Buchanan actually got fired. (Rebecca Shuman, "Academia’s P.C. Brigade Has Started Policing the F-Word. That’s Taking It Too Effing Far," Slate June 2015)
The LSU Faculty Senate condemned the action (
here for the resolution of the LSU Senate seeking the censure of senior administrators and the reversal of the decision). The AAUP censured LSU (
here). Buchanan sued (complaint
here) and lost in the lower courts (see here). To the delight of the LSU Administration the case was dismissed in January 2018 (report
here). The case is currently on appeal before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
This post includes links to the brief filed by AAUP in support of Professor Buchanan's appeal. The issues touch on a core area of transformation of the university and its relationship both to the production of knowledge and toward its producers within a regulatory and institutional environment that tends to prefer performance to the average and a homogenized product that can be sold without substantial risk or pain. One can't blame the university--they believe they are in the business of producing individuals qualified for insertion into wage labor markets. Yet, the university might still be condemned for the choices that led them to those beliefs and practices. Teaching professionals also believe they are engaged in producing individuals better suited to live lives that maximize their value to society and to the student. To that end a bit of experimentation and risk taking may be necessary. Where one draws the lines is now one of the more important issue framing the way in whcih one understands tenure and academic freedom in the contemporary university.
