The Red Queen Prevails
The Red Queen Prevails
Shively v. Utah Valley University, Astrid S. Tuminez, Karen Clemes, and Sara J. Flood
This is a follow-up to my original article, which you can read here.
In an opinion that should warm the hearts of autocratic academic bureaucrats everywhere, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a Utah District Court’s decision in Ann Shively v. Utah Valley University, Astrid S. Tuminez, Karen Clemes, and Sara J. Flood. The 10th Circuit Court argued that Shively’s suspension with pay did not raise due process concerns and went on to conclude that the Governmental Immunity Act of Utah “barred wrongful-death and negligent-infliction-of emotional-distress claims against UVU and its employees.” In her 2022 state of the university address, President Tuminez said “hope is a superpower. Hope is saying that your efforts are worth something.” Sadly, this hope does not extend to many of the members of her university’s faculty.
“Shortly after the current president (Astrid Tuminez) was inaugurated in 2019, the university started to make changes to increase its graduation rate by watering down the curriculum and lowering standards,” wrote psychologist Russell Warne, in a letter explaining why he resigned from his tenured position at UVU. The professor complained that “UVU, students are being treated more like customers who must be mollified and coddled. The respect that the administration shows towards the faculty has decreased proportionately. Unlike a decade ago, I no longer felt respected as a scholar in my area of expertise. Instead, I feel like a replaceable employee, and the disrespect and indignities that I saw inflicted on me and my colleagues was demoralizing. At one point, the university even violated my constitutional rights (and I have the letter from FIRE to prove it).”
In September 2021, UVU’s chapters of the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors spoke out against the university’s overreliance on student evaluations to determine faculty success and promotions. “The incentives are all pointing in the wrong direction for faculty,” said UVU Behavioral Science professor Alex Simon, “Dumb the curriculum down if you really just want to keep your job.” The AFT and AAUP’s letter charged that peer reviews and tenure “have taken a backseat to students’ comfort with and enjoyment of a particular class.” Simon described the loss of academic standards as “a case of fraud” and explained, “Parents, students, they think their kids are getting a decent education that will allow them to ascend into the middle class and contribute to society. And if these courses are less rigorous than many high school courses — and in some cases they certainly are — we’re really violating the duties that this public institution has to the community.”
Legal guilt and moral guilt are not the same thing, and one important question remains unanswered. Was the still unnamed “Student 1,” whose email to the university’s Associate Vice President of Academic Administration started the Shively investigation, the nephew of Astrid Tuminez? Although “Student 1” called himself “the spokesperson for disaffected students” and charged Shively with making “unfair demands” on students, he had never been Michael Shively’s student. So far, only one member of the UVU faculty, biology professor Jim Harris, has been willing to go on the record and allege that “the ringleader,” Student 1, “happened to be a nephew of the president of the institution.”
Over the past two decades, I have witnessed a seismic, anti-Socratic shift in American education. Put simply, many universities cannot afford to upset their students. Academia’s managerial elite have successfully installed a profit maximization model that has made students’ perceived “comfort” and “safety” a higher priority than their education. Sadly, under this new academic regime, professors, as the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in Ann Shively v. Utah Valley University, Astrid S. Tuminez, Karen Clemes, and Sara J. Flood, are now afforded neither.