In a letter to the Tidewater paper, Daily Press (February 13, 2008) Gene Nichol relates some of the details of his ouster:
I was informed by the Rector on Sunday that my contract will not be renewed in July. Serving the College in the wake of such a decision is beyond my imagining. Accordingly, I announce, effective immediately, my resignation as president of the College of William & Mary. I return to the faculty of the school of law to resume teaching and writing.
This is the culmination of a long assault on Nichol by religious zealots and other politically motivated alumni. This is, in my mind, a return to the McCarthyism of the 1950s and echos some of the controversey around the Hutchins Presidency at the University of Chicago in those dark days. Look below the fold to see what has happened.
In an editorial the same issue columnist Tamera Dietrich wrote:
As the e-mail went out across campus, the mood Tuesday morning at William and Mary turned funereal.
Gene Nichol, the massively popular yet embattled president of the historic Williamsburg institution, had abruptly resigned.
"You would think somebody has died on our campus," said Justin Reid, head of the campus branch of the NAACP.
"(Students) are very distraught. People are missing class. Several faculty members have canceled class, or they're devoting class time to talking to students about what happened."
What lively discussions those must have been. Angry, too.
I'm not even a W&M grad, and I was blistered at the news.
What were the things this man did to cause so ugly an event to stike the University? Here are comments from alumni as Dietrich relates them:
• "Nichol has been an unmitigated disaster for W&M. ... For Nichol, political correctness will always trump First Amendment rights."
• "He has created an environment that has caused more dissension among all with his liberal agenda than other academics I know of. ... His track record in raising funds for the university is no less abysmal."
• "The University doesn't need a Constitutional scholar and civil rights agitator. ... We need a leader who can raise our academic reputation and endowment. Period."
• "As jaded as it might seem to you, money still controls decisions in Corporate America. And that is how the real world works ..."
• "In case you haven't noticed his title its the 'University President' who's primary role is fund raising and PR he's not the captain of the 'love boat.'"
Sounds like he did some terrible things, doesn't it? Well, one of the most conroversial was that he I altered the way a Christian cross was displayed in a public facility, on a public university campus, in a chapel used regularly for secular College events. Not that this needs justification, but his action was aimed at helping religious minorities feel more meaningfully included as members of the broad community that is the University. In his words:
We are charged, as state actors, to respect and accommodate all religions, and to endorse none. The decision did no more.
He also, on two occaisons, refused to stop a program program funded by the student-fee-based, and student-governed, speaker series. To stop the production because he found it offensive, or unappealing, would have violated both the First Amendment and the traditions of openness and inquiry that sustain great universities. Then to add to these he introduced an aggressive Gateway scholarship program for Virginians demonstrating the strongest financial need. Gateway has increased the University's Pell-eligible students by 20% in the past two years. But these students are not as well off as those who pay their own way. Then he even went further by insuring that the last two entering classes have been the most diverse in the College's history. The University has more than doubled the number of faculty members of color, and they have more effectively integrated the administrative leadership of William & Mary. Here are a few more quotes from Dietrich's column.
"The board's action was an absolutely cowardly act," says Larry Wiseman, W&M professor emeritus and chairman of the biology department for 18 years. Wiseman e-mailed me from Colorado State, where he's a visiting professor.
"Most of the thrust of the uncivil comments about President Nichol," Wiseman writes, "remind me of something Joe Klein once wrote: '... moral pomposity is almost always a camouflage for baser fears and desires.'"
Board Rector Michael Powell says in a public statement that the decision "was not in any way based on ideology or any single public controversy," but you'd be hard-pressed to convince anyone of that outside the board.
According to Nichol's statement, board members offered him and his wife "substantial economic incentives if we would agree 'not to characterize (the nonrenewal decision) as based on ideological grounds' or make any other statement about my departure without their approval."
Nichol refused. "The values of the University," Nichol wrote, "are not for sale. Neither are ours."
It is hard for me to believe that this is happening 1n 2008. I was part of the "silent generation" and saw what politics could do to ruin lives and careers in the McCarthy era. I came to Virginia Commonwealth University in 1973 and was rather amazed at the feeling of stepping back in time after being at Universities like Chicago, Harvard, and SUNY at Buffalo during the turmoil of the sixties and seventies. Things have gotten better with time. At least they seemed to be. Virginia has a faction within its politically powerful who remind me of the worst thing I have seen. As the Commonwealth agonizingly is rising out of its dark political past one can expect some turmoil. The success of the viscous attack on Nichol has no defense and takes away from any idea that progress is being made.
This episode raises a larger question. The budgets of schools in Virginia are always under assault. Too many citizens see taxes to support education as a luxury that can be done away with. As a result, really quality education depends more and more on private funds. It has gone so far that William and Mary and the University of Virginia have, in effect, become semi-private institutions. Here we see one result of this kind of politics. By holding back on donations, ideology can be introduced into the governance of what were once fine public institutions. We are in big trouble!