Outraged by Brown’s threats of discipline over protests, some professors call for reform

It’s been more than two weeks since student protesters at Brown University struck a deal with school administrators, packed up their tents, and peacefully ended a pro-Palestinian encampment that had lasted nearly a week. But some faculty members at Brown say they are unwilling to move on and forget about a series of ominous letters the school sent to at least five professors who’d visited the student-run encampment.

“You were present at the protest,” Dean of Faculty Leah Van Wey wrote in some of the letters. “Your alleged participation in this unauthorized event would be a violation of policy.”

“Should you be observed violating policies again,” continued Van Wey, “I will review the situation and consider imposing disciplinary action.”

The school’s provost later sent out an email clarifying what constituted a policy violation. Then the president of Brown, Christina Paxson, issued a retraction and apology, and invited faculty to meet with her for a “full and candid discussion.”

The Public’s Radio spoke with more than a dozen Brown University faculty members for this story, including several who were not sent the disciplinary letters. The episode, some professors say, struck them as capricious, contradictory and confusing, and they walked away from their meeting with Paxson with their concerns still largely unaddressed, they said.

“Even though the university has apologized for these transgressions, we should not minimize them,” said Gerhard Richter, a professor of German at the school. “And even though one might say that this only affected a few professors who got these threat letters from the administration. An attack on some of us, is an attack on the entire Brown faculty, because it is an attack on the very core principles of what makes us a university that is concerned with education, and openness.”

Some professors say the school’s overall response to the ongoing pro-Palestinian protests on campus and the specific reaction to professors who visited the encampment typify a university, like others around the country, that has become more autocratic and top-heavy with administrators in recent years, is losing sight of its founding principles of free speech and education, and is overly concerned with marketing the school’s academics, when it should be focused on upholding academic freedom.

“I think it’s being turned slowly but surely into a corporation that is like Apple or McDonald’s or any other corporation,” said Richter.

They say the experience underscores the need for reforms at the 260-year-old university to give faculty a greater say in how the school is governed.

Brown University’s encampment popped up on the school’s Main Green on April 24 with about 75 campers and grew to 120 within a few days. The campers were joined by dozens, sometimes hundreds, of additional protesters during the day.

Within hours of the encampment being started, the university began conducting regular “ID checks” where students, staff and faculty members who came to the encampment had their identification cards swiped and recorded by public safety officers and athletic department employees.

Administrators said they wanted to make sure everyone within the encampment was affiliated with Brown University and clock how long people were there in order to calculate how severe their punishments should be.

In his clarifying email, Provost Francis J. Doyle III said the school considered professors who taught their classes at the encampment, or were involved in organizing the protest in some way, to be in violation of school policy.

Richter and Kristina Mendicino, president of the Brown University chapter of the American Association of University Professors, AAUP, and chair of the German Department, said that trying to prevent professors from bringing classes to a protest the school hasn’t authorized is a limit on academic freedom because it restricts where professors can use their expertise.

“How do you draw the line? Is someone who is drawing upon a body of expertise, communicating with students and teaching, is that in violation of a policy when it happens to take place in the midst of what has become a student encampment?” said Mendicino.

In his email, the provost told professors that even if all students said they were willing to have class in the encampment, “it creates a risk that these students could be mistakenly identified as participants in the unauthorized activity. We have heard that some students have been made to feel very uncomfortable being asked to have class in or alongside the encampment.”

Professors also responded negatively after Provost Doyle reminded them in his clarification letter that surveillance cameras were installed on the main green. They questioned whether his letter was meant to intimidate them and raised concerns the school was unfairly surveilling them to use the footage against them. Many professors involved in the AAUP fear that these types of actions will expand if universities like Brown continue to defer to administrators and, as they claim, limit the autonomy of professors and their ability to influence school policy.

The Brown University chapter of the American Association of University Professors has been the primary collective voice of professors speaking out against the administration’s response to pro-Palestinian activism on campus.

The AAUP is a national organization that aims to defend tenure, faculty rights, and academic freedom at around 500 campuses across the United States. At some public institutions, it also serves as a union for professors. Brown’s AAUP chapter came into existence because of a specific clash between some teachers and their school’s leaders three years ago.

The disagreement began when administrators attempted to house six different language departments under one roof along with the Comparative Literature department. According to many within the departments, this would have created a “mega-department” and hurt the ability of the individual departments to plan their own curricula and events.

The professors believe the change would have led to budget cuts, departments being pitted against each other, and limited their options for preparing students for their chosen disciplines.

“It’s largely a question of reducing resources. Because then suddenly, when graduate student recruitment comes along, there might only be a certain number of students that the mega department can take,” said Mendicino. “There’s competition among the various units to be able to just do their basic research.”

After the professors formed their chapter of the AAUP, the school abandoned the plans for forming the consolidated department.

AAUP has more recently spoken out against academic sanctions against one of its members, Naoko Shibusawa. In June of 2022, Shibusawa released a peer-reviewed article with an unflattering anecdote about a colleague at Brown University, which administrators said did not adequately shield the co-worker’s identity.

The school responded by banning Shibusawa from departmental meetings and some larger faculty meetings. Shibusawa says the initial decision to sanction her was made unilaterally by administrators. Shibusawa was given the option to appear before a grievance committee, but only after the sanctions were already issued by administrators. By that time, Shibusawa and many of her colleagues felt her appearance before the committee was too late.

“It’s really unfair not to be able to have your say in front of peers or to even be asked, ‘What happened?’ ” Shibusawa said.

There is a body made up of 10 elected professors at Brown who do have some say in the way the university addresses some issues. It’s called the Faculty Executive Committee, although it does not have nearly as much influence over academic issues as the AAUP would prefer. Recently, the committee brought forward a motion on sanctions to the full faculty body that was approved. Now, if there are future allegations against a professor, a jury of their colleagues will need to look at the allegations and hear a defense from the professor before sanctions can be instated.

The Brown AAUP also contends the school is spending its money in a way that prioritizes administrative positions, and that is contributing to what they see as an existential threat to their academic freedom. In Spring 2023, the group commissioned a report from independent analyst Howard Bunsis, who is also a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University.

In his report, Bunsis painted a picture of a university that’s fiscally healthy but over-funding its administration. He wrote that, between 2018 and 2022, by percentage, administrative expenditures increased more than spending for any other area. According to Bunsis, administrative costs went up 62.9% during that time period, while instruction and research costs went up only by 12.5%.

Bunsis found that senior administrators usually make at minimum two times as much as full professors, and in some cases, more than four times the amount.

Brian Clark, a spokesperson for Brown University, did not respond to questions about the Bunsis report. However, he told the Brown Daily Herald in 2023 that Bunsis “did not properly contextualize why revenues and expenses changed so dramatically.”

Faculty members at Brown who are raising objections about their administration say they are interested in a shared faculty governance model called an academic senate. Under a senate, faculty are responsible for what Richter calls “the educational mission of the university.”

“So anything pertaining to academics, course of study, hirings, tenure decisions,” Richter said, arguing that a senate structure would allow professors and their students to work without fear of limitations on their research and instruction.

Brown AAUP leaders say an academic senate runs counter to Brown’s committees, which are often filled with members who are not elected and are instead picked by the president. In many cases, they also include administrators and the president often has the authority to veto decisions made by these committees.

Regardless of whether or not a senate system is adopted, many professors say they would, at the very least, like to be consulted on decisions they see as having the potential to curb their academic freedom. Additionally, some would like to have a degree of oversight on matters they see as affecting their quality of life or campus culture, such as bringing in outside police forces to arrest students.

“There is a broader question of meaningful faculty consultation when it comes to major decisions,” Mendicino said. “And I think that this is a larger structural question that could be resolved.”

Clark, the spokesperson for Brown, did not directly address the claims made by AAUP members in this story. He said the university does not discuss concerns faculty have with the administration with “news media,” and that most of their concerns are “mischaracterized claims shared by an individual or small group and not aligned with larger sentiments on campus.”

This story was originally published by The Public's Radio. It was republished as part of a partnership between The Public's Radio and WBUR.