The near-departure of School of Education Dean Douglas Sears earlier this month revealed a deep and longstanding rift among the school’s faculty, with many members quietly expressing their discontent with his leadership. The potential move also brought to light another issue – some critics of Sears refuse to come forward for fear of retribution from the school’s highest ranks, according to several faculty members who said they spoke for a significant portion of their colleagues.
One SED faculty member, who requested anonymity so as not to put himself “in jeopardy,” said Sears’s attempt to leave was a direct snub of the faculty, which had just drafted its latest short- and long-term institutional strategic plan around Feb. 17, the day The Daily Free Press broke the news about Sears’s desire to leave.
The faculty member called it “unsettling” for him and his colleagues, asking “how invested could [Sears] be in a plan that he potentially would not be around to implement?”
Professor Leonard Zaichkowsky, SED’s representative to the university’s Faculty Council, corroborated these concerns.
“There’s no good time for a person to leave,” the sports psychologist said. “But this one is particularly sensitive, maybe more unsettling for some faculty members than for others.” Zaichkowsky said that there is “a consensus” among his colleagues that the strategic plan was unsatisfactory in its first draft and that Sears’s attempt to leave may have contributed to the poor quality. The plan was later redrafted.
BU spokesman Colin Riley said Dean Sears took the plan “very seriously,” but he declined to comment further. Sears has repeatedly declined comment about his application for the presidency North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College, which he praised as a school that “blithely ignores marketing conventions,” in his letter of application, which the college released online. Sears withdrew from the applicant pool just days before the school announced its final decision.
Asked why more faculty members did not voice their discontent, the anonymous SED source said, “The possibility of retribution is very real.”
The problem began, the source said, not when Sears tried to leave BU and assume the presidency of North Carolina’s rural Warren Wilson College, but when he was appointed dean under former BU president John Silber in 2001, on an interim basis at first.
“What professional faculty would have hoped for was a national search for a professional educator with deep experience and competence in education,” he said. “That just didn’t happen.”
Zaichkowsky, the only former or current staff member who would speak on the record, agreed.
“You can’t throw a surgeon in an operating room who can’t do surgery,” he said, also comparing Sears to a coach with no knowledge of a sport.
Still, Zaichkowsky said, it is the job of the president of the university to make judgments about someone’s fitness to be dean.
“What’s most important is what [BU President] Bob Brown thinks of this,” Zaichkowsky said.
Sears served as an assistant to Silber for seven years — and then as the head of the beleaguered, BU-managed Chelsea Public School System – before accepting the deanship of SED. His relationship with Silber, faculty members from across the university said, was the reason for the appointment.
Zaichkowsky agreed that under Silber, dissent was stamped out, but he said that BU is in a new era now and that Brown is “capable of making decisions about deans” if he feels they are not acting properly.
“In the Silber era, the degrees of freedom were minimal,” he said. “I don’t think that’s there any more.”
SILBER AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM
This is not the first time chancellor and President Emeritus John Silber has been accused of fostering an environment of fear and vengeance, sometimes making faculty members pay — literally, from their salaries — for voicing criticism. In 1993, The Boston Globe, reported a verbal spat between Silber and BU professor, James Iffland, now serving his 33rd year on the faculty. Iffland, who at the time was the head of the Faculty Council, had begun researching alleged abuses of academic freedom.
Silber decried Iffland’s use of anonymous accusations, but Iffland and other faculty members maintained that these accusations were not attributed because professors feared for their jobs and might have faced loss of promotions, pay hikes and sabbaticals.
The dispute stemmed from remarks Silber made to the Board of Trustees months earlier, promising to steer the university away from so-called “politically correct” theories, hiring quotas, fringe schools of thought and condom distribution. A number of faculty members interpreted his remarks as veiled warnings to avoid certain styles of teaching, amounting to what they called “a chilling effect” on what professors could broach in the classroom.
When the Faculty Council released a report in 1996 detailing more than 20 instances of alleged repression of academic freedom, BU effectively rebutted the claims, saying that any actions taken by administrators were done not to limit academic freedom but instead to resist “ideologies which employ circular logic,” according to Feb. 3, 1996’s Globe.
At the time, the Globe pointed out that unlike Harvard University and Boston College, BU administrators had taken an interest in graduate student dissertations, reviewing — and occasionally vetoing — students’ work, although it had been approved by various levels of faculty members. “Deans of several institutions were mystified that any one person could feel qualified to assess dissertations across a university spectrum of fields,” the article reported.