It's the ideas

This was a response I wrote, posted on the alumni FB page, to a former colleague who seems to think I should have drank the Kool-Aid when it was offered and taken a job with the newly rebranded "Unity Environmental University." (Names have been removed.)

"...if you worked for twelve years to get a qualification that certified you to research and/or teach a specific topic or related set of topics that you were fascinated by or passionate about and had spent half a lifetime learning, would you take a job pushing paper? 

"Or, for that matter, if you were committed to experiential education and hands-on learning and the pedagogy of Kurt Hahn ("rescue service!"), would you take a job teaching online? 

"Or, if you were committed to academic freedom, freedom of expression, the value of independent, critical thought, and the responsibility of faculty to control the curriculum, would you take a job with a college that undermined these accreditation requirements at every step? 

"Or, if you were committed to an ethical worldview and Right Livelihood, would you take a job working for someone you found unethical? 

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. I'm sorry you're so muddled and conflicted by this, and I don't believe you deserve all the flack you've gotten, nor that you and others getting so much flack is healthy for the Unity community, but you don't seem to understand that there are important ideas at stake here. 

"The faculty who were forced out or left of their own accord to take their lives and thoughts elsewhere are not the ones that have let you down. We stood up for what we believed in, and when it didn't work out, we took our licks, thought it through, and adapted. Most of the faculty who left that were young enough to continue their careers have stayed in that line of work. We were committed to the ideas, see, not the place, nor even the people, and certainly not the leadership. And some of those ideas are about governance, ethics, and freedom. That's why we were forced to leave. Most of us would have been forced to leave eventually in any case, had matters continued as they were, only without the excuse of Covid. 

"Our ideas, perfectly in keeping with a small liberal arts college using Hahnian pedagogy, were and are at odds with what the place has become. It does a disservice to those ideas to try to pretend it could have otherwise."