Collegiality
By
Leonard Zwelling
This was sent to me by one of my blog readers. I am grateful for the heads-up.
In The Wall Street Journal on May 9, Ohio Northern University law professor Scott Gerber described his experience at being cancelled for a lack of “collegiality.”
Mr. Gerber goes on to delineate his being escorted out of his classroom on April 14 by armed police and being led to the Dean’s office. There he was told that he would be “barred from teaching, banished from campus, and told that if I didn’t sign a separation agreement and release of claims by April 21, ONU would commence dismissal proceedings against” him. No specifics were given. Just—a lack of collegiality.
Mr. Gerber believes that the reasons for this action by the university are his opposition to the diversity, equity and inclusion policy of ONU. He wants diversity to include “viewpoint diversity” because a lack of viewpoint diversity “would lead to illegal discrimination in employment and admissions.”
In essence, Mr. Gerber would not drink the DEI Kool-Aid.
Now I don’t agree with all of Mr. Gerber’s opinions like his writing that Justice Clarence Thomas has a “right to have friends.” The judge can have as many friends as he likes. After all, that’s not the beef with Justice Thomas. It is the judge’s taking of huge gifts without reporting them. Gerber has also complained on television that ”DEI programs…discriminate against white men in the name of ‘racial and social justice’ and for being indifferent to the type of diversity higher education should value.”
Gerber goes on to say that he was a very popular teacher, but that he was investigated by the university anyway for undisclosed reasons.
Here’s the thing. Like “professionalism,” collegiality is in the eye of the beholder and it should not be determined by the whims of a Dean or medical center President.
If the faculties of major universities and academic medical centers do not resist the attempts to cleanse the faculty of people with whom the leadership does not agree, academic freedom, tenure, and true diversity will be lost. That is true at Ohio Northern University and it is true at MD Anderson where a few of my friends have been purged from the faculty upon the word of President Pisters and his vice presidents. The full weight of the human resources and legal apparatus of the cancer center was leveraged to exile excellent clinicians for silly reasons, but after all, the leadership of MD Anderson is silly.
Many faculty members think this cannot happen to them. They are wrong. It can and all it takes is a slip of the tongue or the expression of a non-mainstream opinion. This is just wrong.
This cannot end soon enough. The climate in academia is becoming one-sided—very leftist. This is bad for everyone. If the I in DEI means inclusion, then all viewpoints must be heard, not just the ones with which the leaders agree.
Dr. Zwelling’s new novel, Conflict of Interest: Money Drives Medicine and People Die is available at:
barnesandnoble.com,
on amazon if you search using the title and subtitle,
and
directly from the publisher Dorrance at: https://bookstore.dorrancepublishing.com/conflict-of-interest-money-drives-medicine-and-people-die-pb/m
