Two tenured professors at different universities are in hot water after participating in the Scholar Strike, a national action meant to call awareness to police brutality against Black people.
At the University of Mississippi, the state auditor, Shad White, told the university to pursue terminating James M. Thomas after the associate professor of sociology engaged, according to White, in an illegal work stoppage. White’s targeting of Thomas — first reported by the Clarion Ledger — has been criticized by other scholars as intimidation and an attempt to score political points in a red state. (White did not respond to a request for comment but said on Twitter that people want him to “give this professor a pass” because they agree with the professor’s politics. “No,” he concluded.)
And at Texas A&M University, the dean reported Wendy Leo Moore, an associate professor of sociology, to the provost after Moore indicated she would participate in a work stoppage. For several days, Moore told The Chronicle, she thought she was going to lose her job.
Both Moore and Thomas say their decisions were well within their rights under academic freedom, and believe they shouldn’t face professional consequences for what were pedagogical decisions. And they fear the moves will intimidate their colleagues, including those who don’t have the security of tenure.
Teach-Ins About Racial Justice
Two scholars, Kevin Gannon and Anthea Butler, came up with the Scholar Strike in the wake of this summer’s protests against racism and police brutality. Universities are not immune to these problems, Gannon, a professor of history at Grand View University, who writes regularly for The Chronicle, and Butler, an associate professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an essay explaining the movement. So for two days, on September 8 and 9, professors, students, and staff members would “step away from their regular duties and classes to engage in teach-ins about racial injustice in America, policing, and racism in America,” they wrote.
Some instructors, including those sympathetic to protests and labor movements, criticized the action. It’s the wrong tactic, commented one professor on the American Association of University Professors’s blog, because it negatively affects students who were already anxious about this semester.
Some scholarly organizations, including the American Sociological Association, put out statements in support. The American Political Science Association said it “recognizes and respects the academic freedom of political scientists who participate.”
ASA’s statement is partly what swayed Moore. During the pandemic, Moore said she’s tried to be more available than ever to her students, so she thought hard about what it would mean to be inaccessible for two days. But ultimately, she felt a responsibility — as a white, tenured professor — to engage in a work stoppage, not a teach-in, because it was in her power to do so.
On the morning of September 7, Moore explained her reasoning to her students. For two weeks after George Floyd’s death, she and her children had worked at pop-up food banks and participated in protests in St. Paul and Minneapolis, she wrote in an email. She saw the Scholar Strike as an extension of those social-justice activities. She included links to learn more about the strike and about police violence and racial inequality.
She canceled her Tuesday office hours and told students who normally had a Zoom class that day that they could drop in on Thursday’s class if they wanted to.
Moore also offered to stay on Thursday’s Zoom meeting an extra hour to answer any questions about class materials, the strike, or issues of racism and police brutality. She’d hold office hours later that day and would be available for meetings that Friday and over the weekend, she told them.
Later that morning, Moore got a Facebook message from her interim department head, Pat Rubio Goldsmith, asking her to give him a call. According to Moore, he told her that the upper administration wanted her to walk back the work stoppage by sending another email to her students, saying she’d do a different sort of action, like a teach-in. He told her, “I don’t want to lose you.” The impression she got, Moore said, was that she could be fired.
Reached for comment, Goldsmith confirmed he spoke with Moore about her initial email but declined to comment further.
That afternoon, Moore’s dean, Pamela R. Matthews, circulated a memo about the Scholar Strike written by the university system’s chief legal officer.
In the memo, Ray Bonilla said that he’d been advised there was a national effort to organize a strike or temporary work stoppage among faculty members. “I do not have information on the details of this effort,” he wrote. “Even so, it is important for you to know that any A&M System employees participating in such a strike or walkout will be violating Texas law.”
Citing a state law, Bonilla said that any employee who violates the statute “forfeits all civil-service rights, re-employment rights, and any other rights, benefits, and privileges the employee enjoys as a result of public employment.” So the consequences are “significant,” Bonilla wrote.
Matthews sent Bonilla’s memo to department heads. “If you anticipate that it is necessary or even simply helpful,” the dean wrote, “feel free to communicate with faculty and staff so that they are aware of the very serious potential consequences.” Moore’s department chair disseminated the memo to all sociology faculty members, graduate students, and staff members.
By that point, Moore says she was hysterical over the possibility of being fired. She had a conversation with her adult children about what to do, and they supported her sticking to her ideals. She’d also gotten a couple of positive emails from her students, who said they were grateful for her action.
And Moore, who is also an attorney, read over Bonilla’s memo, and she disagreed with his interpretation of Texas law. That evening, she emailed Goldsmith and Matthews, telling them why.
First, her decision, which was in “solidarity with national social-movement activities,” was not part of an organized work stoppage against the university or the state of Texas itself, she wrote. Secondly, the subsection of the law that Bonilla cites is part of a larger body of legislation that concerns work strikes “in conjunction with organized labor for the purpose of influencing labor negotiations,” Moore wrote. Whereas the Scholar Strike, while it includes work stoppages, is not related to labor negotiations.
“As I hope you can see, my decision to express my support of Black Lives Matter, the #ScholarStrike, and racial justice through participation in a work stoppage was taken with thought and care,” Moore wrote. “I informed students that I was balancing participation in this important social movement with their needs in this already difficult time.”
Matthews, the dean, wrote back, telling Moore she appreciated and respected Moore’s position, but was obligated to notify the provost and the general counsel’s office. The next morning, she emailed the provost to say that Moore was participating and had been “informed of the potentially serious consequences of her decision.”
Moore says she asked her department head to forward the email she’d written explaining her rationale and her legal interpretation to the provost. Then, she waited.
Meanwhile, word spread about Moore’s decision among students and their parents. “I’m not paying for them to take a day off,” wrote one parent on a Facebook thread about Moore’s email. “The best part of waking up isn’t Folgers in my cup — it’s getting the ability to get rid of horrible professors who broke the law and lost all of their employee rights, including tenure,” commented another user.
On Monday, September 14, Moore says she met with the university’s chief risk, ethics, and compliance officer. According to Moore, the questions he asked did not seem geared toward a decision of termination. She said he told her he’d be writing up a report and sharing it with the dean of faculties.
At this point, Moore says she’s not sure what’s going to happen. (The university communications office did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Matthews, Bonilla, or Kevin McGinnis, the chief compliance officer.)
Moore said she’s less afraid of losing her job than she was a week ago. She thinks she’s on solid legal ground. But the ordeal has cost her, she said. She lost a week of work. She had to turn off her camera during a faculty meeting to keep her colleagues from seeing her cry.
The university’s decisions “infringed upon my freedom of expression and freedom of participation in this national movement in support of Black lives,” Moore said. She worries about those in less secure positions than her, who were already scared to stand up for what they believed in.
‘Within the Bounds of My Job Roles’
Thomas, too, sees his case as something that could have a lasting, chilling effect on others at the university. “I was entirely within the bounds of my job roles and responsibilities,” he said in a statement sent to The Chronicle. “That my university hasn’t affirmed that yet should worry every single one of my colleagues.”
Thomas declined to comment further but provided a memo he wrote about the incident that explained his reasoning for participating in the Scholar Strike.
He’s a sociologist who studies, among other things, race and racism in the United States. The national action was a chance, he wrote, to connect the content of his courses with what was going on in the real world.
Before the strike began, Thomas talked about the action on Twitter, saying that “if you have tenure, your #ScholarStrike activity needs to be a work stoppage. Tell your students you’re not working.”
He emailed his students to say that for the next two days, he wouldn’t be responding to emails or holding Zoom meetings, including office hours, or providing course-related instruction. He encouraged them to learn more about the history of police violence in the U.S. and sent a link to resources. He shared some of those resources on Twitter.
On Monday, September 14, White, the state auditor, cited the email Thomas sent to his students and posts he’d made on social media in his letter to Glenn Boyce, the chancellor of the University of Mississippi. Strikes, or any concerted work stoppage, are illegal in Mississippi, White wrote. And the penalties are clear. If an employee has engaged in a strike, a court shall order “the termination of his or her employment.”
White requested that the university withhold Thomas’s pay and also that the university “proceed to court to hear the matter of Prof. Thomas’s termination.”
When news broke about White’s letter, some observers criticized the Republican’s decision as a political maneuver to target Thomas, who has drawn ire from state Republicans before. In 2018, he faced backlash for encouraging people on Twitter to harass senators in public. He later clarified his comment wasn’t meant to be taken literally, the Clarion Ledger reported.
A colleague of Thomas’s wrote an open letter, saying that White’s action was an attempt to score “some cheap political points” and use “intimidation tactics in an attempt to silence faculty.”
For his part, Thomas strongly disputes White’s claim that he engaged in a work stoppage. “The irony of Mr. White’s accusations against me is that to prepare my course materials and engage my students in the pedagogy related to #ScholarStrike required extra effort, and extra work time, on my part,” he wrote in his memo. “Time neither he nor the armed agents he sent to my home considered.” (White confirmed to the Clarion Ledger that his office sent two agents to Thomas’ home before he sent the letter to Boyce. White said that Thomas “wasn’t interested” in talking to them.)
On the days of the Scholar Strike, Thomas says he shifted his focus away from his administrative work onto the “pedagogical and creative activities” related to the Scholar Strike. He worked on a manuscript and submitted it for consideration in an edited volume, and he answered several emails.
“My choice to provide this opportunity for my students is fundamentally grounded in my academic freedom,” Thomas wrote, “the bedrock of everything we do at this university and others like it.” White’s characterization of his activities demonstrates “his clear misunderstanding of the role and responsibilities of faculty members in institutions of higher education.”
It’s unclear where Thomas’s case now stands. The scholar wants a strong rebuke of White’s claims from the university administration — something he hasn’t gotten yet.
A spokesman for the university declined to comment on what he called a personnel matter.
