Sabinson's Salvo

Friday, January 20, 2006

The news that Prof. Mara Sabinson of the theater department has filed suit against Dartmouth College in federal district court (see page six) is shocking, to say the least. Tales of academics acting eccentrically are nothing new in these pages, but a tenured professor suing the College on the grounds of sexism and anti-Semitism reaches new heights. At the same time, though, the case demonstrates incontrovertibly that the very worst administrative excesses that the Review has chronicled for decades are still very present and more hypocritical than ever. Of course, the College has been loath to bring the story of the Sabinson lawsuit into the press—and for good reason. The actions of theater department faculty and senior College administrators betray a deep arrogance and hypocrisy, one that is intensely cavalier behind closed doors but shrivels away under the light of public scrutiny.

Regardless of how the College’s very capable General Counsel, Robert Donin, tries to spin its outcome, the Sabinson case represents a remarkable step away from the ideals of academic freedom that the College claims to profess. During the confrontations between music professor Bill Cole and Dartmouth Review staffers in the 1980s, the administration staunchly supported Cole’s freedom as a tenured professor to conduct his class in his own personal modus operandi , irrespective of his teaching ability or the admittedly marginal academic value of his race-baiting rants.

Now, a professor who enervated several key administration factotums is being run out of town, supposedly for what she taught in her classes. Surely, whatever off-kilter comments Mara Sabinson might have made in her acting classes cannot be demonstrably more harmful to the classroom than Bill Cole’s bombastic diatribes. While Cole’s comments were clearly inappropriate, the College backed him in court against the Review . Just last year, President Wright grabbed headlines when he announced Dartmouth would join a Ford Foundation program designed to promote a “free and open community” by ensuring that “our faculties have the opportunities for open discourse that is absolutely unimpeded by political constraints.” Those constraints must not have included intra-campus politics.

All of the administration’s stated reasons for taking away her classes and trying to force her into early retirement—student complaints about her, her acrimonious relationship with her colleagues in the theater department, her unwillingness to cooperate with administrators—could be said about a number of tenured professors here at Dartmouth. But because Dean Folt, Dean Grenoble, and Provost Scherr have a problem with Mara Sabinson, her tenure becomes invalidated. Academic freedom should not be absolute—after all, there need to be some restraints on true lunatics like the University of Colorado’s Ward Churchill, who called the victims of the September 11 th attacks “little Eichmanns”—but the fact remains that even as much as many conservatives dislike absolute academic freedom, it is a principle that the liberal establishment at Dartmouth has regarded as sacrosanct. Now, it turns out that their supposedly universal academic freedom comes with conditions: if you’re a black music professor whose lectures consist of a stream of obscenities and imprecations against whites, the College will defend your academic freedom tooth and nail. If you’re a Jewish theater professor who has a poor relationship with the Dean of the Faculty’s office…well, too bad for you.

Perhaps most stunning, however, is the disdain that both Prof. Sabinson and the administration share for the First-Year Writing Program. Sabinson, who herself is the first to admit that “I am not an expository writer and cannot competently teach the First-Year Writing Seminars,” was forced in 2005 to accept a course-load of three writing seminars for this academic year. Sabinson regards the writing seminars as “harassment” that were designed to “humiliate” her—hardly the way one would expect a member of the faculty to approach one of Dartmouth’s most important tasks, that of teaching undergraduates basic writing skills. Moreover, she is by no means the only one with such an opinion. More grave, though, is the fact that writing seminar assignments are fobbed off on professors who adamantly maintain that they are not capable of teaching them. The administration’s action towards Mara Sabinson shows nothing less than a callous disregard for the writing program, furthering the already-existing impression among many faculty members: that writing classes are a pain to teach and detrimental to professional advancement.

And at the same time that Parkhurst is playing politics with First-Year Writing seminars, the Departmental Editing Program has fallen by the wayside. Created by the always-querulous Joe Asch ’79 in 2002, the DEP provided a common-sense solution to Dartmouth’s writing program: hiring professionals (mainly former high school English teachers) for each department who have knowledge of its unique needs and writing style and are solely dedicated to improving student prose. Asch himself funded the editors as a pilot program for four years, to rave reviews from students and faculty alike. But now the administration has told him thanks, but no thanks—they have no desire to fund the editors themselves; they’ve got the Student Center for Research Writing, and Information Technology (RWiT) already. Never mind that RWiT’s method of student writing tutors suffered a “scathing” outside review by professors from other Ivy League professors in 2002. The administration’s writing program policy thus boils down to forcing professors who don’t know writing to teach it, while turning away talented editors who do want to teach writing. And they wonder why student prose is so tortuous?

The root problem of much of the Sabinson case, as it is for so many other problems at the College (chief among them the recent budget imbroglios), is the administration’s culture of secrecy. A certain amount of secrecy obviously needs to be preserved in the administration’s decisions—tenure decisions, for instance, are best kept under wraps. But simple matters like student complaints about professors, dissatisfaction with teaching styles, and the determination of how writing at the College will be taught can and should be made in the open. If administrators spent a little more time explaining their decision-making processes to the public, they might save themselves a lot of future embarrassment and lawsuits.

Sabinson's Salvo

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