{"id":44040,"date":"2022-12-12T07:15:10","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T15:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.timesandseasons.org\/?p=44040"},"modified":"2022-12-12T07:36:51","modified_gmt":"2022-12-12T15:36:51","slug":"firing-faculty-some-educated-guesses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2022\/12\/firing-faculty-some-educated-guesses\/","title":{"rendered":"Firing faculty: some educated guesses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like most media outlets, Inside Higher Ed<\/em> isn\u2019t well equipped to report stories about BYU-Idaho<\/a> \u2013 it doesn\u2019t entirely understand that BYU and BYU-Idaho are two different schools, for example. But if I had to read between the lines and make an educated guess, this is what I think is happening.<\/p>\n

The [Ecclesiastical Clearance Office], commonly called the ECO, was created in\u00a02020.\u00a0Penrod, the church spokesperson, has said\u00a0its role is to help ensure that \u201cemployees in the Church Educational System commit to maintain gospel standards as part of their employment, including an annual ecclesiastical endorsement from their local bishop.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So the CES administration has a centralized office for handling employee ecclesiastical endorsements. Whatever your outlook on the current situation, you can probably imagine situations where this would be a good idea for a large, multi-campus educational system for secondary and university students. In some cases, if someone shouldn\u2019t be working at BYU, you wouldn\u2019t want them teaching seminary, either. A centralized office also offers additional benefits, some you might like, some you might not. It would offer a way to standardize criteria so approval doesn\u2019t come down to the whims of a local bishop or a particular college administrator. Also, it probably collects information in addition to the bishop\u2019s endorsement and other church records. I assume that would include relevant online activities or social media posts and relevant student or parental complaints.\u00a0 You might not like the potential use of that information, but having a central collection point isn’t in itself a bad idea.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

BYU Idaho did not respond to a request for comment about the\u00a0nonrenewals. BYU in Utah referred questions to Idaho. [\u2026]<\/p>\n

Lindsay Larson Call\u2014herself a member of the LDS church\u2014received a call from a\u00a0BYU Idaho employee she didn\u2019t know who told that her years working as an online instructor of family studies and as an instructor evaluation specialist had come to an end. The caller reportedly said he had nothing to do the with the decision and that he\u2019d been given a list of names of employees who failed to obtain \u201cecclesiastical clearance\u201d from the church\u2019s Ecclesiastical Clearance Office.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My educated guess is that somewhere in that inscrutable level of BYU-Idaho administration above the college deans and below the president, someone isn\u2019t doing his job. Reading between the lines a bit, this sounds like Salt Lake saying All we can do is provide information, but we can\u2019t and won\u2019t make decisions about academic hiring<\/em>, and Provo saying Do whatever you want up there in\u2026Idaho Falls or wherever, but leave us out of it<\/em>. A low-level staffer can be pressed into being the bearer of bad news, but can\u2019t take responsibility for a decision made at the VP level.<\/p>\n

The problem isn\u2019t that someone has made a decision not to rehire some adjunct faculty members, because making personnel decisions is unavoidable. Over at BCC, Sam Brunson points out that firing adjuncts harms employees<\/a>, but every personnel decision harms someone. Hiring one person means not hiring someone else. The problem isn\u2019t entirely that the decisions are opaque (although that\u2019s definitely not good), because even murky edge cases require you to make a decision. And the problem isn\u2019t even that an administrator may have made a mistake in these particular cases, although that\u2019s certainly possible. People and institutions invariably make mistakes, but the necessity of making a decision persists even when you have incomplete information.<\/p>\n

The problem is that forcing a low-level staff member to be the bearer of bad news lets control over the message slip away and creates the system-wide uncertainty that\u2019s a much bigger problem than any hiring decision, and now Inside Higher Ed<\/em> has some questions. Someone with one of the nicer offices in the Kimball building makes these decisions, and that person needs to own them. It may not be easy to convey just the right message to the affected staff member and if necessary to the press, but BYU-Idaho has some first-rate people in communications and they could probably come up with something workable. Sam\u2019s absolutely correct that cryptic standards are a problem, which is why the administrator with the nice office needs to say something like The church\u2019s teachings about family and gender are mission critical for us and we need absolute confidence in how our faculty approach them, and so in a few cases we\u2019ve decided to take new directions in who we use in teaching roles despite the excellent service of these wonderful individuals; we acknowledge that we don\u2019t have perfect information, and so we\u2019d be happy to re-examine a decision when it comes to hiring in future semesters<\/em>. For things that are this important, follow the example of the Gatekeeper at the gate: he employeth no servant there<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Taylor\u00a0Petrey, chair of religion studies at Kalamazoo College, who studies Mormonism, told\u00a0Inside Higher Ed<\/em>\u00a0that the recent \u201cfirings are extremely concerning for Latter-day Saint educators and put the reputation of BYU in significant risk.\u201d Not since the American Association of University Professors censured BYU in the late 1990s \u201chas the institution faced such a significant threat to academic freedom and its standing as a legitimate institution of higher education,\u201d he added.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Counterpoint: no, they aren\u2019t, and no, they don\u2019t. Taylor is a wonderful person and a great teacher and scholar, but he has only second-hand experience of BYU, while BYU-Idaho is a more exotic species altogether. It would be fair to say that the firings are extremely concerning to the Latter-day Saint educators that Taylor knows<\/em>, while the reactions at BYU-Idaho will span the range from \u201cThis is a disaster\u201d to \u201cInteresting, but none of my business\u201d to \u201cIt\u2019s about time.\u201d \u201cUniversity fires adjuncts\u201d isn\u2019t going to get clicks. Even \u201cMormon university fires Mormon adjuncts\u201d isn\u2019t going to raise many eyebrows. The implications of firing adjuncts for academic freedom are minimal. The thing about adjuncts is that we\u2019re easily replaceable. The fired adjuncts will be replaced, and life will go on.<\/p>\n

Sam mentions potential harm to students caused by inability to hire qualified instructors put off by uncertainty about the stability of a job. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s much risk of that, as the pool of people for whom working at a BYU campus is better than their current position is probably larger than you\u2019d think. If it is an issue, there\u2019s a proven solution: pay people a wage premium to compensate for the value of lessened long-term stability.<\/p>\n

One area where I specifically disagree with Sam is his argument that students \u201cwon\u2019t get the faith mentorship that they so desperately need.\u201d It\u2019s simply incorrect that the only people who \u201cconsider the wellbeing of the LGBTQ community\u201d are people who disagree with or have doubts about the church\u2019s teachings. I would say instead that fully accepting the church\u2019s teachings on gender and family requires us to approach LGBTQ people with sympathy and understanding and concern for their wellbeing.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Both the BYU-Idaho faculty members named in the article taught online, and my educated guess \u2013 as an adjunct who teaches primarily online \u2013 is that it isn\u2019t a coincidence. You may have noticed a general anxiety on a national level over the last few years about remote work. Employers are confronting the new reality with alarm, wondering what people are doing all day, and with no real way of monitoring their employees. At my thoroughly secular university, the levels of bureaucracy that must be navigated to get an online course approved are orders of magnitude greater than a traditional classroom course.<\/p>\n

The other thing you have to understand is that BYU-Idaho is a large university staffed by a small town. People know their neighbors. This is often a good thing. Nowhere else has my dean been as accessible to me as when I was a temporary faculty member at BYU-Idaho. I rarely had any interaction with that inscrutable layer above the dean, but even they were members of someone\u2019s brother\u2019s ward. And like most small towns, people avoid conflict with their neighbors. When university employees of any type get fired, it generates a host of personal problems: key ward callings need to be filled, someone\u2019s child\u2019s best friend moves away, a spouse\u2019s mission companion no longer lives down the road. Not so with remote online instructors, who are mostly faceless and far away. It\u2019s quite possible for years to go by between my visits to my current campus, but I try to stop by at least a couple times a semester anyway to remind my colleagues who I am. With heightened anxiety about online work and dramatically reduced costs from letting someone go, any issue related to hiring is likely to affect online adjuncts first.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Where do online instructors formerly employed by BYU-Idaho go from here? As someone formerly employed there, I have some educated guesses.<\/p>\n

The bad news is that you may never again find work as personally meaningful as teaching for BYU-Idaho. I hope you do, but I haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The good news is that it\u2019s much easier to find a livable work-life balance with less meaningful work. You can look at it as merely losing a big client, which isn\u2019t fun, but you can find new clients and even earn more than before without the siren call of meaningful work making disproportionate demands on your time. The job market is still strong and as an online adjunct, you have real skills that are relatively straightforward to monetize. Financially, I suspect everyone in the story will be okay.<\/p>\n

Personally, there can be challenges. It can be difficult to have the church say, \u201cYou are not who we want teaching at our university right now.\u201d In my case, it was \u201cOur university would be better off without you, the program you spent a few years building, and the discipline you teach.\u201d I still think that was the wrong call, and I certainly don\u2019t want to prove to whoever made that decision that it was the right choice after all. I also still care about my former students, and it\u2019s important to me that they weren\u2019t taught by the guy who only showed up to church as long as he was getting paid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like most media outlets, Inside Higher Ed isn\u2019t well equipped to report stories about BYU-Idaho \u2013 it doesn\u2019t entirely understand that BYU and BYU-Idaho are two different schools, for example. But if I had to read between the lines and make an educated guess, this is what I think is happening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44040"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44042,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44040\/revisions\/44042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}