The president of Dickinson State University on Monday abruptly announced his resignation after his cost-cutting and workload policies sparked backlash, particularly the resignation of the entire full-time nursing faculty.
“I did not come here to keep things the way they were, because at that time DSU was on a path to financial disaster that threatened the future of the university,” Stephen D. Easton said in a lengthy and defiant statement announcing his departure from the 1,473-student public institution in North Dakota. “As the faculty will attest, I did not come here to make life comfortable for faculty, though I have tried to support them as much as possible.”
Over a week in early July, all seven members of Dickinson State’s full-time nursing faculty decided independently to resign over a new workload policy that Easton implemented in February. New credit-hour production requirements and an increase in the minimum number of students who can enroll in a class, set to take effect this fall, prompted widespread criticism among instructors at Dickinson State. But nursing faculty members took particular issue with the new policy, saying it would not only be logistically impossible to comply with but would also violate accreditation standards and the need for smaller student-to-faculty ratios in clinical settings.
In response to their resignations — which occurred just over a month before the start of the fall semester — Easton initially doubled down on the policy, telling The Dickinson Press that he refused to create “a special set of rules for an entire program that allows that program to produce less credits and to work less hard than the faculty in other programs.”
The episode caps a long history of friction between Easton and faculty members at Dickinson State, with one former faculty member pointing to a “pattern of missteps” by Easton since he took office in 2020. A lawyer and legal scholar, Easton served as interim president for several months before being named to the post permanently. He’s talked often about his personal connections to the institution, as an alumnus whose grandfather, father, and son also attended Dickinson State.
“I took this job to defend DSU, and especially its students, against all threats, including financial threats,” Easton said. While focusing much of his statement on the controversy surrounding the nursing program, Easton also acknowledged a collapse in support from other constituents. “I have also been advised that some who have supported DSU, financially and otherwise, might not do so if I continue as president,” he said. “So it is time for me to leave.”
‘Special Treatment’
The nursing professors’ resignation came in response to a policy overhaul Easton oversaw in February, which included upping Dickinson State’s minimum class size and imposing requirements on how much contact professors must have with students.
“We started raising concerns the minute those policies came out,” Teresa Bren, then-president of the Faculty Senate, told The Chronicle on Friday, before Easton’s resignation. “The administrative team simply couldn’t understand why we were concerned.” Bren, who is also among the nursing faculty members who resigned, declined to comment further on Monday.
The policy requires faculty members to teach 24 credit hours and 320 modified credit production hours (representing the number of student credit hours taught by a faculty member) in the 2024-25 academic year. Bren said last week that it would be mathematically impossible for most of her colleagues to meet that requirement, given that the North Dakota Board of Nursing imposes a one-to-eight faculty-student ratio for clinical courses, and some of the clinical agencies Dickinson State works with use a one-to-six ratio. But administrators wouldn’t adjust the policy, despite the nursing faculty members’ objections, said Bren, a Dickinson State alumna who’d taught there for 11 years.
Meanwhile, Easton’s statement painted the nursing faculty members’ complaints as demands for “special treatment not given to other DSU faculty members.”
Easton’s departure was precipitated when he wrote to the North Dakota Board of Nursing last week that he was posting job listings to fill the vacancies and working with other institutions in the state’s higher-education system to forge partnerships.
Not so fast, the board wrote back. Easton’s letter “provides evidence of noncompliance” with its standards, which require a nursing-program administrator to oversee the hiring process. (The previous administrator was one of the seven faculty members who resigned.)
If I cannot do whatever I can for students, including looking for faculty members so they can continue their education, I cannot do my job.
Easton recounted that exchange in Monday’s statement, saying that the board was acting to “block all possibilities for us to rebuild a nursing faculty other than rehiring” the professors who resigned. Easton said he was “stepping aside to allow the re-hiring of the former nursing faculty, if other officials at DSU decide that it is in the best interests of DSU’s students to do so,” adding that he would leave “after a short and orderly transition.”
“If I cannot do whatever I can for students, including looking for faculty members so they can continue their education, I cannot do my job, because fighting for students is my job,” Easton said in a video the university posted on YouTube. A university spokeswoman declined further comment and did not respond to a question from The Chronicle about plans for fall classes. The university on Monday posted statements from the North Dakota University system chancellor, state board of higher education president, and a state representative that were complimentary of Easton’s work.
‘Multiple Shortcomings’
The board, Easton’s statement said, had not interviewed him in its investigation of Dickinson State and “has prohibited me, and the other administrators at DSU, from even trying to find new faculty members.” The board in its own statement disputed that characterization, saying that it “DID NOT force Stephen Easton’s resignation, nor did it disallow the hiring of a nurse administrator or faculty” at Dickinson State.
Instead, the board wrote, it issued on Friday a standard notice to Dickinson State of “multiple nursing program shortcomings for review,” related to the professors’ resignations and to previous survey results “detailing significant discord between Mr. Easton, administration, and the nursing faculty.”
It’s unclear what impact Dickinson State’s potential noncompliance with the state nursing board’s standards could have on, for example, graduates’ ability to work in the field. In April, the national Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing placed Dickinson State on “good cause” probation for 18 months, citing “a lack of evidence that the nurse administrator has sufficient time for the assigned role responsibilities,” according to a document posted on its website. (The commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The nursing board said it would work with Dickinson State to “restore its nursing-education program following Mr. Easton’s resignation and continue the education of the more than 111 students left in the lurch.”
Also unclear is the immediate future of Dickinson State’s nursing program, which Bren said currently has 111 students. The university employs between six and eight part-time nursing faculty members, not all of whom are qualified to teach certain classes. The program did see enrollment declines during the pandemic, but this fall it was slated to admit the largest class of Bren’s tenure. In challenging the policy, “we’re really hanging our hat on our accreditation risk,” through both the state board and the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing, Bren said on Friday.
The nursing board, for its part, said it would work with Dickinson State to “restore its nursing-education program following Mr. Easton’s resignation and continue the education of the more than 111 students left in the lurch due to the conflict between administration and faculty which resulted in this crisis at the institution.”
Post-Tenure Review
Tensions between Easton and the faculty predate this month’s events. In 2023, the president threw his weight behind a statewide proposal that would give college presidents the power to sign off on tenured professors’ performance evaluations. Doing so, he told a North Dakota legislative committee at the time, was a matter of accountability. “We have elevated the rights of nonproductive tenured faculty members over students who pay their salaries through tuition, [and] we have elevated their rights over taxpayers who pay a significant portion of their salaries,” Easton said during his testimony. “Something needs to be done.”
While several other states have toyed with reforming post-tenure review processes, Easton’s involvement in writing and promoting the North Dakota bill — which was opposed by the North Dakota Council of College Faculties — made it an unusual case. The bill was narrowly voted down in the state Senate, but the chancellor of the North Dakota University system recently indicated that an even more sweeping version could be in the works, Inside Higher Ed reported.
Last fall, Easton announced plans to cut seven academic programs and eight tenured positions, citing a $1 million budget deficit. But some saw that as a thinly veiled attempt to retaliate against those who had been critical of his work on the tenure-reform bill. “None of this,” the president of the North Dakota United union wrote in a statement, “is about anything more than a university president wanting to rid himself of dissenting voices on his campus.”
Eric Grabowsky, a former associate professor of communication who left Dickinson State in May, described the 2023 bill in a letter to the editor in The Chronicle as “an onward march through and over” whistle-blowing efforts by faculty members in the state. He’s long been a vocal opponent of Easton, and left the university because the communications major, in which Grabowsky taught, was among those scheduled for elimination.
On Monday, Grabowsky criticized Easton for “an excessively narrow focus on what was a questionable vision” throughout his tenure. “I think a number of people who have had to experience Dickinson State management from 2020 forward are celebrating” Easton’s resignation, “but with caution. The question is, what are the next steps the State Board of Higher Education and the university system are going to take to make sure that this transition is done right?”
