Thriving

 

I occasionally get emails and FB messages from students and former students asking how Aimee and I are doing, given the recent hostile takeover of the college and the loss of our jobs. 

This very useful chart came across my FB feed today and I studied it carefully. It's quite relevant.

The short answer to the question is in my title: "Thriving." 

Why? When we just lost our jobs?

As responsible, diligent, and ethical faculty members of the real Unity College, we had been in conflict with the administration since the early 2010s. Our Peace Church background didn't help much. Neither of us ever feels the need to lie or kow-tow to those in power. It's literally "against our religion." And so, by "speaking truth to power," we made sure that the last two Unity College administrations understood that two of their highly qualified and experienced senior faculty disagreed with their strategy for the college.

Their two strategies differed greatly, by the way. Dr. Mulkey wanted to focus the college on climate change education and research. He was quite saddened to discover that he was instead directed by the board to raise money from rich people and find ways to grow the college by teaching more of the usual kinds of students, who present as primarily interested in bachelors degrees that qualify them for positions as game wardens or wildlife technicians, not as climate scientists. Setting the students' priorities first never seemed to come to mind. One response he adopted, for lack of any other, was to lecture them, over and over and over again about climate change. I still have several of his slideshows. They are quite good. But our students, the majority of whom had a tenth-grade reading level, found them hard to comprehend and boring, and eventually just laughed at him or complained to his face. I felt a little sorry for him, because even if his methods were wrong, prioritizing climate change was correct. Experienced UC faculty, like myself, had ways of teaching climate change that didn't involve as much lecture, and so had more success. 

But he wouldn't listen to any of us when we tried to tell him any of this. So we disagreed.

The students (or their parents) are paying. They need education that meets them where they are. That is what they pay for. This is a moral imperative. You have to teach the students in front of you. That's the job. And most of those students at that time, by far the majority, perhaps 99.5%, were never going to be climate scientists.

Had he been less volatile, there was room for compromise. We could have shown him how to raise money for climate education while also properly teaching the students in front of him. But he decided, before he ever really bothered to get to know us, that we didn't come up to his standards, and planned to replace us with "proper" researchers.

Dr. Khoury, for his part, wanted to put his dissertation into action, and create an online, for-profit college in which the price of faculty labor was bid down to the lowest possible level (making sure you were left with the least capable and least experienced faculty), and in which student engagement and experiential learning )post-recruitment) was an afterthought. Eventually he got his wish. 

But this will be the death of the institution as we knew it. Unity College was founded as a peace protest against the Vietnam War. It became an environmental school in the 1970s and 1980s when such a thing was essentially unheard of and likely to be unpopular. It became famous during the 2000s because of its place-based, Kurt Hahn-style experiential education. Giving up on experiential place-based environmental education is giving up on the soul of the college. 

It also had a reputation for being led by its faculty, for including faculty and staff in decision-making, and for being the best place to work in Waldo County.

My wife and I were among the faculty who earned that reputation. 

So Aimee and I fought both the Mulkey and Khoury programs tooth and nail, voting down initiatives in faculty meetings, designing better ones, bolstering faculty morale, making sure students were not sidelined. We won against Dr. Mulkey in the end. His violent temper and frustration at our unwillingness to give up on teaching the students in front of us using experiential approaches, to instead spending our time and students' money planning and implementing his egotistical program, which we felt impractical, led to outburst after outburst, and eventually they became, in the jargon of HR professionals, "documented" and "actionable." He quit after a particularly loud one was witnessed by unimpeachable observers.

Dr. Khoury, who keeps his shouting for behind closed doors, seems to think he's won, but I tend to think the whole despicable scheme he's created is fragile enough to one day collapse around his ears. There's a difference between being a striver and being a schemer. You sow what you reap.

All this took a toll. For most of this decade 2011-2020, my working life was carried on in the space between the red and orange zones above. Quakers are supposed to struggle against dishonesty, unfairness, and greed, so we didn't really question whether or not we had to do it. We didn't give ourselves the option. We never seriously thought about applying for other jobs. But we know that one day we might have to quit or be fired and so we made careful plans, socking money away against that day, and planning out a new business for me to run in retirement (while I write my book). 

This planning allowed us the freedom to continue to oppose the administration's plans. Other faculty were forced by financial circumstance to be more circumspect -- although in retrospect, with 20-20 hindsight, they might now realize they were going to lose their jobs anyway and so should have perhaps been more vociferous while they had the chance.

The the pandemic struck and provided an opportunity for Melik to rid himself of his "turbulent priests."

Our business is now bringing in revenue, if not yet profit, and the day when it will be profitable is not far off. The process of making the business was about a six-month daily physical workout, which despite some pulled muscles, was cathartic and likely to extend my life.

So I'm happy to report that now I'm in the green zone of the chart. In my newfound and only somewhat unexpected semi-retirement, I sleep well, get exercise, play with my kid more, and am generally more content. I "chop wood and carry water." I can't ask for much more from life. I miss teaching, but I expect I'll teach again after Covid is over. There are other colleges in Maine.

Aimee, for her part, has a new job where she is constantly amazed at how well they treat her.

Most importantly, and relevant to the chart, our consciences are clear.