Jeffrey Nielsen, an adjunct philosophy professor at Brigham Young University, will not be welcomed back this fall because of a recent op-ed piece he wrote for the Salt Lake Tribune. In his editorial criticizing the much-ado-about-nothing that has become the push for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, Nielsen advocated that the Mormon Church's position on the matter is fundamentally flawed:
As a member, I sustain the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles as LDS general authorities; however, I reject the premise that they are thereby immune from thoughtful questioning or benevolent criticism. A perfect God does not require blind obedience, nor does He need unthinking loyalty. Freedom of conscience is a divine blessing, and our privilege to express it is a moral imperative.
Furthermore, Nielsen calls upon the church and his fellow members to acknowledge Mormonism's deeply-conflicted history on issues of marriage, doctrine, and telling the truth:
…God is not the author of incoherence or injustice, but we humans often are. We in the LDS Church must be more honest about our history, including the past and future practice of polygamy in our official doctrine. This will be difficult, for it will reveal that we have been less than truthful in our public relations, and it will show our inconsistency with current statements opposing gay marriage.
We can no longer afford to teach only what is useful and hope people won't discover what is true. In this day of easy Internet access, a person can find more real history of the LDS Church in 30 minutes online than the same person would in a lifetime studying approved church materials.
Since BYU is owned and controlled by the LDS church, the university's philosophy department chair Daniel Graham sent Nielsen a letter last week, informing him that his adjunct gig at the U is now over:
"In accordance with the order of the church, we do not consider it our responsibility to correct, contradict or dismiss official pronouncements of the church," Graham wrote. "Since you have chosen to contradict and oppose the church in an area of great concern to church leaders, and to do so in a public forum, we will not rehire you after the current term is over."
This, of course, should come as no surprise to anyone even remotely familiar with the hiring and promotion/tenure policies at Mormon colleges and universities, and it's something I've posted on occasionally from time to time because of my personal and professional interests. BYU is Mormondom's flagship institution of "higher" education, and as such, it has kept a vigilant watch over its faculty's research and publication endeavors. The U has a long history of purging its faculty, and spent most of the 1990s conducting witchhunts against the likes of Hebrew scholar David P. Wright, feminist Cecilia Konchar Farr, historian D. Michael Quinn, and fiction writer Brian Evenson (you can read a bit more about this in a review I wrote a couple of years ago on Evenson's The Wavering Knife). Any academic interviewing for a position at BYU knows this history (or should), so Nielsen's de facto firing is perfectly consistent in that regard.
What troubles me most about Nielsen's situation is how his tenuous situation as an adjunct makes him even more vulnerable to dismissal. Quinn, Evenson and the others swept away in the 1990s purges were tenure-track faculty. And granted: with such a notorious history, tenure means something very different at BYU than it does in other colleges and universities. Tenured faculty have a firmer position to advocate for their academic freedom, and it's worth noting that Quinn and Evenson put up pretty good fights before they left, and–at the very least–highlighted the selective application and tortured rhetoric of BYU's "academic freedom" policy.
But Nielsen's case is much different because he's an adjunct, which makes him an at-will employee of his department. No matter his effectiveness in the classroom, student evaluations, or scholarly interests, he serves solely at the discretion and pleasure of the department chair. And clearly, Nielsen no longer pleases his department chair, so he's finished at the U. If Nielsen's contract reads anything like the ones I've signed over the past 10 years, he has little to no legal recourse. End of story.
It would be tempting to continue bagging on BYU for this situation, but this particular university didn't create the adjunct model; rather, it is merely using it to make the purges a little cleaner. And that's a big reason why colleges and universities have steadfastly moved away from promotion/tenure in the first place. Forget for a moment that it's much cheaper to hire a fleet of part-time instructors or graduate assistants than it is to build a cadre of full-time, tenured faculty (which, of course, is the primary reason the adjunct model is so prevalent). If the bulk of instructors are at-will employees, they are much less likely to do or say something that jeopardizes their positions, and they are much more likely to take what is offered.
The fact of the matter is that dismissals like Nielsen's are probably much more common than we think. The decision as to whether an adjunct is granted an extension or simply disappears is probably one of the most arbitrary and potentially capricious of all employment practices. I am quick to give Nielsen his props for standing up and calling his community out; the current debate over gay marriage is the reddest of red herrings, and it's clearly a stunt (ala the 2004 elections…) to ensure a very specific minority of voters turns out in November.
But as much as I admire Nielsen here, I also am awfully in awe here of Graham, who is so entrenched in the executive power of his position that he relishes the opportunity to demonstrate the extent of said power. I have that scene from Star Wars looping in my mind right now, the one where Grand Mof Tarkin orders the destruction of Princess Leia's home planet, not because Alderaan is a threat, but for no better reason than taking the Death Star out for a spin. It would be just the same for Graham to let Nielsen dangle over the summer and then not ask him back because of a lack of available sections to teach. But he doesn't do that. No: Graham Mof Tarkin takes obvious pleasure in penning Nielsen's pink slip because this is, essentially, an eye-for-an-eye situation straight out of the Old Testament. This is about moral equivocation, and by gum if a university philosophy department stands for nothing else, it's surely gotta stand for enforcing the administration's edicts.
In other words: looks like Paul de Man has some company.
[hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan]
UPDATE: J. Todd Ormsbee has posted a copy of Nielsen's letter/retort to Graham Mof Tarkin over here
