Bad days at Northern State

I live a block away from Northern State where I taught for 20 years. (Before that I taught at Augustana in Rock Island, lll.) On campus, this time in August involves preparations for the upcoming fall term, which will begin in a couple of weeks.  Summer school ended during the first week of August, so there are two weeks or so before the start of the fall semester when no classes are in session.  The campus is a quiet place as the staff prepares for the fall influx of students.  But this year a sense of turmoil pervades the quiet.  

The quiet is actually the stunned silence left by an act of violence.  In this case, the violence is not the physical attack of one person on another.  It is the abrupt and unexplained departure of a college president.  The apparently forced resignation of Dr. Timothy Downs leaves the campus and the community with the unanswered question of just what happened. And why.

The regents moved rather quickly to replace Dr. Downs.  They hired Dr. Neal Schnoor who had been chief of staff for the president at California State at Long Beach.   The college will focus on the new academic year beginning with a new president.   But, the minds of many on and off campus will linger on the sudden departure of Dr. Downs. 

I never met Dr. Downs.  Usually emeritus faculty are invited to social functions involving the faculty and meet the college officials.  Such an occasion never occurred during Dr. Downs' tenure at Northern, so I really know nothing about him other than the fact that he served as president for about five years.  But I do know what the sudden departure of a college official signals about the stability of a college's programs and its administration.  The abrupt firing of Dr. Downs indicates there was something wrong with Dr. Downs or the regents or both.  As  the regents are politically appointed and tend to reflect the people who appoint them, the probability is that the firing of Downs was a political matter, not an academic one.  News reports state that legislators were issuing a letter to Dr. Downs to desist from a program he was working on to deal with diversity or resign.  He apparently chose the latter course of action.  The political intrusion into the administration of a university signals severe problems with academic freedom and quality.  Northern racks up another demerit for the way an academic institution conducts business. It puts the public on notice that Northern State is governed for political purposes and is not a valid academic institution that meets the standards of academic freedom.  The fact that the state passed a law in 2020 banning collective bargaining by state colleges and the firing of Dr. Downs are evidence of the totalitarian politics that govern Northern.

The one saving grace is that faculty who hold legitimate degrees will perform their jobs according to the traditions of integrity and academic freedom of their profession.  But there appears to be no pressure by the faculty to bring the  college administration in line with the generally accepted standards of academic governance.  A faculty which does not assert itself on matters of governance is complicit with administrations that regard a college as just another bureaucracy to be run for political ends.  Northern State for many years was under censure by the American Association of University Professors  for not meeting the governance standards of the profession.  It appears to qualify for censure again. 

The South Dakota regental system has been recognized as the worst in the nation.  If the reputation of Northern is to be saved, it will have to be done by the faculty.  That seems unlikely.