Identify the problem

It's always important when trying to use reason to unpack any difficult and complex situation to clearly identify the purpose of the inquiry. A problem statement is the usual technique. Problem statements in academia are generally short, but that's deceiving. The work of trying to identify and narrow down specifics for a research proposal or a dissertation can take weeks, months, even years. But this is a primary means by which we use reason to solve societal problems. Medicine, policy, engineering, all require succinct and well-thought out problem statements.

In this case I've had several weeks since the lay-offs, and several months since the Covid closure, and I'm getting to a point where I begin to feel I can be objective. I'll never be completely so, of course. But for example in one obvious source of bias, I'm not angling for my job back. I'm a good deal happier in my current employment of rental house fixer-upper than I was working at the college for at least the last decade. I'm losing weight, sleeping well, and content in my labour. I particularly appreciate that I can more consistently use reason and my own Quaker-ish version of Zen in my daily work. This is largely because I now work alone, for the most part, without so many other egos to feed, students, administrators, other faculty. But the problems I work on have solutions and you can see the results, which is gratifying. Life is more complete and I can enjoy the cooling fall air and the changing leaves.

Neither do I think that, just because one small environmental college is going south, others can't fill the gap. There are lots of other providers of similar services with good ideas and decent planning and leadership that will. I know this from first hand because I worked for some of them before I came to Unity.

My concern is primarily for the particular usefulness of the institution we used to call Unity College.

So, first up, what has happened? The college has shifted primarily to online programming and closed its main residential campus. This is primarily because of the Covid 19 pandemic, but the specific response is a choice. There were other choices, including options that would not have entailed the harms detailed below. So for instance, plans could have been made to furlough faculty and staff and reopen campus in Fall 2021. This is just one example of a different path. There are probably many others.

Various promises have been made that this is temporary, that there will, one day in the future when the pandemic has abated, again be face-to-face classes, albeit within the "hybrid" model and most likely not on the main campus, which the Board has authorized for sale. If these  undertakings pan out, they potentially modify or reduce the harm. It's not, however, reasonable to take them completely into account because they may not pan out. These are contingencies whose likelihood is dependent on events and probabilistic and must be discussed as such.

So what specific harm has been done?

1. The mission has been set aside. Of all the mistakes a non-profit entity can make, this is the most problematic. Here is the current mission statement: "Through the framework of sustainability science, Unity College provides a liberal arts education that emphasizes the environment and natural resources. Through experiential and collaborative learning, our graduates emerge as responsible citizens, environmental stewards, and visionary leaders." The administration must now explain how they plan to provide "experiential and collaborative learning" to train citizens, stewards and leaders without a specific environmental place and in the absence of functional community. The first is key to the college's heritage. The environmental movement is about how humans relate to the planet and their place on it, and without a specific location, the context is lost. Environmentalism depends on attachment to place. This may be a spiritual, romantic, or pre-analytical attachment, but without it the motivation to conserve is less. Community is also very important. One reason the alumni are so anguished about the situation is that the college modeled functioning, diverse, inclusive community for many decades. Not every alumni experienced this, it's true. But many if not most did, and you can see clear evidence for this in their posts to the alumni Facebook page. The community we made was an extension of the mission, not the mission itself, it's true. But it made the mission work and provided the college with a unique niche. It wasn't perfect, but then no community ever is. If you don't believe me, you should talk to some of the disabled, gay, trans, or PoC among our alumni. But clear evidence is available through the alumni FaceBook page and in news reporting.
2. Current residential students will not receive the education they transacted for. A contract has been broken. They signed up for an experiential curriculum offered under a certain catalog year and calendar, and that curriculum and calendar is no longer available. Key essential equipment and even the campus setting are now being prepared for sale, suggesting finality. They are offered instead different classes via a different teaching modality with different faculty, often less qualified or unqualified to teach the classes they have been assigned, and under a different calendar, all impositions that many prior residential students will clearly not prefer. Their parents are also concerned. The evidence for this is in comments to various social media, but including the college's official FaceBook page, and the Linked-In pages. This would be tolerable and meet accreditation standards if it were temporary, but the closure of the main campus and ongoing sale of the assets shows that it will not be. 
3. The college community has been divided. A loosely integrated but strong community of Unity students, alumni, faculty, workers, local community members, and other friends nation- and world-wide provided moral and material support for the college and its mission. It is very unlikely that the alumni community and most faculty and other workers who experienced the institution prior to the "fall" will support it to the same degree and with the same passion in its new modality. The community is now clearly divided between this for the changes and those against, and likely broken or lost. Again, evidence is present in social media and news reporting. 
4. The local community has been negated and abandoned. Norms of community behavior have been broken. Good faith and integrity have been set aside in favor of short-term strategy and short term gain. Owners of local business feel especially concerned. Evidence is available in social media, news reporting, and probably some law suits that will shortly be filed.
5. Collegiate norms of shared governance and collective decision making have been abandoned. The college used to teach about how to be a community by being a community, with opportunity for every student, faculty, or staff member to have a voice through their respective deliberative bodies. Faculty in particular are supposed to be in charge of the curriculum, not administrators, nor even the Board of Trustees. NECHE standard 3.15 makes this abundantly clear. Faculty were allowed to attend the online Covid19 planning response meetings, but no formal faculty meetings were held using proper procedure to vote on the Fall 2020 curriculum changes, which are considerable. Our tradition has always been to use parliamentary procedure and Roberts Rules to vote catalog measure up or down or and them. This system allows each person to have their say. The new curriculum has thus not been approved. It is also being taught, in many cases, by part-time faculty, or even full-time ones not qualified for the classes they are assigned. The evidence for this is in the college's LMS and Registrar's records and not available for public view, but trustees should be able to demand to see it. Parliamentary procedure has been incrementally set aside in the last several years in favor of hierarchical or corporate leadership. Faculty were not able to voice their disagreement to these changes without fear of retaliation, nor we we told we would be laid off until the actual day, August 3rd.

Why has this happened? Because at some level a decision was made that the gains from the online modality would offset the loss of the traditional program. This could only be true if you discounted the value of the intangible losses: community, integrity, attachment to place.

Who is responsible for these five clear harms? The Board of Trustees of the college is responsible. It delegates this responsibility to the President, but remains the primary authority. All of the college's material and social capital (or goodwill, if you prefer), built up over fifty years of striving by the alumni, faculty and staff, is in their hands. They must choose how to use that collective capital and goodwill to meet the mission. In this case they have chosen to abandon a large portion of both material and social capital, to sell it off or trade it at low bid, including the beloved campus setting, in exchange for vague promises of the superiority and accessibility of the online modality. This has been posited to them as an either/or option, when it was not. The social capital in particular has been marked down in value, when it should have been husbanded and tended. This is what the alumni and community members and parents are telling us. But the campus won't get high bid either. A recent campus auction for a similar college, a competitor, netted about twenty percent of the appraisal.

So this is a clear mistake. First and foremost it's a moral error, but it's also a business error, and a failure of leadership, of trustees not interrogating facts and asking hard questions. 

What happened and why -- a beginning

Regular readers and most students and former students will already know that Aimee and I were among a large group of Unity College faculty who were laid off August 3rd 2020 because of low enrollment due to the Covid19 pandemic. A little later that same week a local news article reported that the college campus would perhaps be sold.

Since then neither of us has said much about this. Aimee has been occasionally active on the Unity College Alumni Community FaceBook page, while I've been essentially silent. The reason for this is that we were waiting on our severance contracts to be fulfilled.

As condition for, essentially, "going quietly," the college offered us a severance package. As a consequence, we agreed not to take part in any lawsuit against the college. Contrary to rumors, there is no non-disclosure agreement or NDA. There is only the agreement that we not sue the college. We remained silent for so long because we didn't want to stir up any trouble that might hinder the severance contract being fulfilled by the college. There's a lot of bad feeling and some definite paranoia and we felt that stirring up this hornets' nest might just perhaps work out badly. At least we didn't want to take a chance.

We agreed to all this because, of course, we are parents. Our teaching jobs were likely forfeit in any case, and we have a kid to look after whose school has been delayed and, once it finally starts, will be be less than half time, two days a week. One of us at least has to look after the kid, and so cannot work a normal full-time job, even if the other one might. The severance offers a lifeline for the next few months while the pandemic continues or possibly worsens into fall.

The contract is now fulfilled, meaning that Aimee and I and possibly other faculty members in the same situation may now discuss the college's situation with less fear. (It would be fairly difficult for the college to find a way to take the money back now that it's safely in our accounts.)

I choose to hold this discussion on my blog, not the alumni page or other social media. This blog is mine and always has been. It dates to 2007, prior to the time when the college had easily-accessible facilities to host faculty web pages or social media. It contains a record of nearly fourteen years of my twenty years teaching at Unity College. I was told a long time ago, long before the current administration, to get rid of it, because it wasn't part of a centrally-controlled college PR program, but didn't. I did begin to use it less, and so skated "under the radar" with it. But I never completely stopped using it, and still control it under my own passwords and encryption.

So, despite a long association with my work at Unity College, the blog is mine, privately owned by me, and not easy to hack. Blog commentary is under my control. I can enforce a certain decorum, and, what is more important to me, employ reason rather than emotion in deconstructing what has happened. This is of course an emotional situation, but adding fuel to those flames doesn't help us repair the damage.

First up, there's a limit to how useful any of this can be. We are not going to bring back the old Unity College. It's probably gone for ever. But those of you that know anything about the Quaker tradition will have heard of the idea of "bearing witness." That's what I want to do here, bear witness to the injustice and wrong-headedness of what has happened, and lay out the poor consequences.

Second up, Covid 19 was primarily responsible for the closure of the traditional academic programs of the college and the close of the residential campus. I'm content to stipulate to that. Doing so was a provision of the severance, and I agreed to it, but I wouldn't have agreed to it if it wasn't true. But it was never the only explanation and never could be. The background is complex and lengthy. Most readers won't have patience for it. But I tend to lay it out, or as much of it as I can do, right here for posterity. Not exhaustively, but comprehensively. It will take a good while to document it all.

That's all I have for today. I have work to do. I may not be employed by the college any more, but I am still employed, rebuilding a fixer-upper house that Aimee and I bought this spring to use as a rental.

You'll need to keep coming back.

RSA animation on climate

Knowledge

This is about half of my Spring 2020 Firefox bookmark list, where I saved materials to pass on to students or use in class. These lists were always rebooted at the start of each new semester or they'd get too long. This was one way of collating and curating them, especially the most up-to-date material not found in textbooks.

Notice the last item.

There are two things I grieve for right now. One is my students. I hear their confusion and pain in their FaceBook and other social media posts. More or less powerless to help, all we can do is offer counsel and bear witness.

The other is knowledge. I spent a lifetime learning to process and manipulate the ideas in this particular branch of reason. I will spend the next few months learning again how to use those skills in new settings.

From Pirsig, on current events

A useful quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by R.Pirsig, 1977, chapter 13.

(In context, the Narrator (Pirsig) is explaining an episode of McCarthyism at Montana State in the '50s in which his younger, mentally-ill self was involved as a faculty member.

Just FYI, and in case you were worried, I used reason all day today, fixing up an old house for a family investment, and getting generators ready for tonight's storm. I'm grieving, as is Aimee, but "fetch wood, carry water".)

"The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.

"In addition to this state of mind, "reason," there’s a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.

"But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist. "Confusion continually occurs in people who fail to see this difference, he said, and think that control of the church buildings implies control of the church. They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations."