According to numerous local new sources in the North Texas area, two Collin College faculty members, Suzanne Jones and Audra Heaslip, who dared to speak up against their administration’s plans to re-open classrooms in the fall of 2020, have recently been told their contracts will not be renewed. Collin College, a community college, is located north of Dallas and serves over 50,000 students at nine different campuses. To give you an idea of the political climate, Collin county is currently a Republican stronghold, unlike most of Dallas county, which tends to be Democratic. It is home to Attorney General of Texas Ken Paxton and his wife Texas State Senator Angela Paxton. Also from Collin is Representative Matt Shaheen, a member of the Texas Freedom Caucus, which represents the most right-wing positions in the Texas House of Representatives. In addition, several politicians from the area pressured Governor Abbott to reopen businesses back in late April. Given the conservative nature of Collin county, it appears that the college administration put politics in front of the health and safety of its employees, students, and the community when it decided to reopen for the fall semester.
The concerns from faculty began when they were told in a district-wide email that campuses were going to open for in person classes in the fall. Faculty had not been consulted when this decision was made. Neil Matkin, the president of Collin College, seemed cavalier about their initial worries, saying in emails to the faculty and staff that media reports of the pandemic had been overblown. Having not had a chance to weigh in on this decision that would affect their lives, the lives of students, staff, and the wider community, the faculty, through its faculty council, asked the administration to change course. Despite the stated anxieties of faculty, the college went forward with opening campuses for the fall. And, unlike many other colleges and universities in the area, Collin College refused until recently to have a public dashboard of case numbers.
The two professors used their positions as members of the college’s faculty council to bring their concerns to the upper administration about the college’s reopening plans. Over the summer, one of the targeted faculty, Audra Heaslip created a fact-based document that was signed by 130 of the college’s faculty. The purpose of the document was to let upper administration know why faculty were worried about going back to teaching in person and what could be done to reduce the amount of faculty teaching in person. It did not call for fully online courses, but it did question why many courses could not be taught online rather than in person and why faculty had not been consulted on the best teaching modalities to use during the pandemic.
Audra Heaslip is a professor of humanities and has taught at the college for more than ten years and Suzanne Jones is a professor of education who has taught as a full time and a part time faculty member at the college for twenty years. Both had their contracts ready to be renewed when they were told by administrators at the end of January that they were not going to be renewed in May because they were not collaborating with the college. Neither have had any student complaints or disciplinary notices.
In an interview with Bill Zeeble from KERA radio in DFW, Heaslip said ““Usually if there’s a problem with a contract, they give someone a couple different ways to provide a portfolio. Even a one-year contract is considered kind of the minimum. But in my case, they said ‘continue through May and after that you’re done.’”
In November, members of the college were told in a Thanksgiving email from President Matkin that another faculty member had died of COVID-19. This tragic information was buried in the 22nd paragraph of the email. The email did not give the name of person who had died. Seventy-year-old Iris Meda had left retirement to help teach nursing students as an adjunct and contracted the virus while teaching in person in October. Originally, Meda thought she could teach online.
Another reason these two faculty members believe they are being targeted is that they are leaders of the newly created Collin chapter of the Texas Faculty Association. In the same interview with Bill Zeeble from KERA, Jones, a long-time member of TFA, said “Out of our three local Collin officers, two of us were fired. So, it clearly seems to be about TFA. We have our first meetup to recruit new members so that also seems like they’re sending a message.” Texas is famously anti-union, and although the Texas Faculty Association is not a union, it does provide legal counsel for faculty who are feeling threatened.
Both Jones and Heaslip feel like they are being retaliated against for speaking to the media and trying to create a local chapter of the TFA. Jones was also criticized by the college for including her Collin credentials when she signed a public statement in 2017 demanding the removal of Confederate statues. It is telling that this issue is being brought up now, over three years later. In the desire to terminate these faculty, the college has revealed that it has been keeping tabs on the speech of all its faculty who stray from certain conservative norms. And, based on what others have said in news reports, it seems that many faculty members have been reluctant to voice their concerns out of fear of retaliation. The culture of fear is palpable.
From the website Afflict the Comfortable (The Mind of Bob Buzzanco), Bob Buzzanco writes in a post related to the firing of the two faculty members about the background of President Matkin:
He has a degree from Ambassador College, a school run by the Worldwide Church of God, founded by Herbert W. Armstrong, one of the first televangelists to get a national following in the 1960s and 1970s. So his ideological foundation is pretty obvious. There’s nothing remarkable, to be charitable, about his background. While his political connections are not clear, he does seem fond of having his photo taken with Texas’s right-wing governor Greg Abbott, whose COVID non-responses have created a humanitarian disaster throughout the state. And as faculty concerns over COVID rose, Matkin’s response, like Abbot’s, became more harsh and retributive.
Jones and Heaslip are not the first professors to be threatened by the institution for exercising their free speech. In October of 2020, President Matkin publicly reprimanded another Collin professor Lora Burnett, who teaches history, when she tweeted that then Vice-President Pence “should shut his little demon mouth” because he was speaking over Vice-President Harris during their debate. Burnett received threatening responses, and she reported these to the college. Most likely pressured by conservative leaders in his area, Matkin emailed the entire college about Burnett’s tweet, referring to it as “hateful, vile, and ill-considered.” The college also put up a public notice to the same effect on their website. Burnett had not been consulted before these two actions.
Since then, Burnett has received numerous Level 1 disciplinary warnings from the college for tweeting about the death of Iris Meda and other COVID-19 based issues. Level 1 disciplinary warnings are precursors to being fired. Fortunately, for all three professor there has been push back from the TFA, the local media, and from FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), which is providing attorneys to the three.
At an emergency board of trustees meeting on Friday, February 5, members of the community, former students, and educators spoke out to reinstate the contracts of Jones and Heaslip. Here is professor of history Michael Phillips speaking on the behalf of his colleagues about freedom of speech.
Whether the support of others will help these faculty remains to be seen. In the meantime, some of the eyes of Texas are upon Collin College.