The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
"College officials have cultivated a nice image for themselves—scholarly people who care deeply about providing the best possible education for their students. The reality, however, is often very different. They can be petty, self-serving, and ideological, sometimes sacrificing educational quality in favor of other objectives.
"Occasionally, faculty members become inconvenient to the leadership and must be eliminated. Two recent cases show college leadership at its worst.
"Consider Professor Dennis Gouws of Springfield College in Massachusetts. Peter Wood explains in this Federalist article that on March 27, Springfield’s dean of arts and sciences, Anne Herzog, sent Professor Gouws a letter informing him that he had been placed on “Official Warning Status.” That sounds ominous—what had he done?
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| Cartoon added by TD |
"His story begins in 2005, when Gouws was asked by the Springfield English department to teach a course entitled “Men in Literature.” It turned out to be a rather popular course and Gouws, who holds tenure, taught it eight times between 2005 and 2015. But in 2015 a student lodged a complaint against the course with school leaders. It wasn’t that Professor Gouws had mistreated her, but simply that the course content, focused only on men, bothered her.
"In a sensible era, officials would have said, “Well, then take something else if you’re offended,” but “progressive” academics seem incapable of insisting on common sense from students these days, especially if they’re in one of our supposedly oppressed groups. At Springfield, the result of the student’s gripe was to trigger what Wood terms “a feminist jihad” against a veteran, highly capable faculty member." . . .
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