An Escalating Tenure Fight Catches Students in the Crossfire

Slowking via Wikimedia Commons under license

By most accounts, it started with an email.

In January, Wang Ping, an English professor at Macalester College, planned to invite a Native American spiritual leader to her creative-writing course, to lead students in a drum-making workshop.

“I’m teaching a new course, ‘Migration, Immigration, and Home,’ and the major theme is to bring the indigenous value of the land, water, and earth to the students,” Wang wrote to Proud Indigenous People for Education, a student group at the Minnesota college, describing the drum-making workshop. “I’d like to invite you to be a part of it, if you’re interested.”

For a week, there was no response. Then a student replied from the group’s account. She also copied eight other people, including college officials overseeing multicultural life and Wang’s department.

The student wrote that she had read the course description and syllabus, and she thought the course’s attempt to cover Native ceremonies and practices was not appropriate for a non-Native instructor to teach to non-Native students. “These are cultural practices,” she wrote, “and I am personally livid about this whole situation.”

In lengthy emails the student and Wang said they should talk in person to settle the matter. “Let’s unite and connect, not divide,” Wang wrote. But according to Wang, that meeting never happened. (The student did not respond to a request for comment. The Chronicle has withheld students’ names in this article, given allegations in the dispute that concern student privacy.)

Wang was uneasy that the student had somehow gained access to her course materials. To “prevent rumors and hearsay,” she said, and to discuss the matter during a class session already devoted to cultural appropriation, she forwarded the email exchange to her students. Fearful of more accusations, she said, she stripped all Native American content from her syllabus.

What has followed is an escalating battle involving charges of racism, pleas to protect academic freedom, threats to Wang’s tenure, and a public campaign to protect her job — with much of it catching students in the crossfire.

According to emails, an audio recording, and documents obtained by The Chronicle, officials at Macalester, a small, private liberal-arts college in St. Paul, allege that Wang has embroiled students in her broader disputes with the institution, improperly disclosed student information, and mishandled parts of a faculty-search process. Wang denies any wrongdoing, saying the college is continuing a yearslong pattern of retaliation, trumped-up allegations, and discrimination against her.

A Rocky History

Wang is a prominent poet and scholar, and by many accounts a celebrated teacher who forms close relationships with her students. After graduating from Peking University, in the mid-1980s, she immigrated to the United States for graduate study, and has worked at Macalester since 1999. She has published more than a dozen books on subjects such as race, gender, and immigration, and has collected accolades and grants, including from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Wang has pointed to positive teaching and tenure evaluations, and former students’ letters, to describe her contributions to Macalester and good relationships with students.

The relationship between the college and the professor has been thorny for many years. In past complaints, Wang has alleged a pattern of retaliation and discrimination, including that the college promoted less-qualified white colleagues before her. (An Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint was dismissed, and in 2013 Wang and Macalester resolved a lawsuit through mediation.) Wang has said that the college is now retaliating again and that she has filed another EEOC complaint.

The dispute has grown more serious as students have become ensnared in it. According to documents exchanged by Wang’s and the college’s lawyers, obtained by The Chronicle, Macalester says that some students have reported feeling pressured by Wang to defend her in her dispute with administrators and the student who objected to her drum-making workshop. Administrators also say that students have reported that Wang said she would consider race as a part of her recommendations in a faculty-hiring process.

In an interview Wang said that it was administrators who had pressured students to make false allegations against her, a charge the college denies.

Meanwhile, Wang has taken her case public. She has updated her thousands of followers about it, with varying degrees of detail, over months on Facebook and Twitter. Hundreds of professors, artists, and poets have signed two recent petitions supporting Wang. The most recent petition, published last month at change.org, includes a list of documents, emails, and articles narrating her battle with the college.

Part of the petition says students have advocated against the administration on Wang’s behalf. But that sentence initially linked to a document with end-of-course reflections by students who took her courses in the fall and spring.

Students in the reflections, whose full names were at first included, praise Wang’s teaching. Several also refer to their own “traumas,” family members, and sexual identity.

“Ping is perhaps the only professor at Macalester who has actually pushed me intellectually,” one student wrote. “I don’t know why I just referred to you in third person, you’re the only one who’s going to read this.”

In a lawyer’s letter, the college said some of those materials violated the privacy of “students, faculty, staff, and third parties” — an assertion that compounded its claims that Wang has ignored student-privacy rights since forwarding her exchange with the student in January to her class. (Wang said she considers the January emails public because the student had copied people on and off campus.)

Attempts to reach several students named in the reflections document were not successful. A student in Wang’s spring course, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, did not recall that Wang had pressured students as the college alleges, and was not aware that students’ reflections had been publicly posted until seeing them in the petition. (Following questions from The Chronicle, Wang said the students’ names had been included by mistake, and they have now been removed from the document.)

Threats to Tenure and Salary

In the past several months, the dispute has involved the Faculty Personnel Committee, an independently elected body at Macalester that conducted an inquiry into Wang’s case, and the Minnesota chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

In a statement to The Chronicle on Tuesday, Macalester said in part: “This past year, serious concerns were raised by students about Professor Wang.” The college said it had followed accepted practices on shared governance, had “repeatedly” affirmed her academic freedom, and remained committed “to a work and learning environment free from unlawful discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.”

For now, according to Macalester, Wang remains a tenured professor. The college said it had not imposed financial penalties on Wang or docked her salary, and, per a lawyer’s letter, would not do so until making a determination after a formal disciplinary process, probably not for several weeks.

Wang and her lawyer, Peter J. Nickitas, believe her rights and her pay have been under threat since at least June, when a lawyer for the college, Kathlyn E. Noecker, told Nickitas by email that Wang would not be receiving the standard “appointment letter” that informs faculty members of their salary before each academic year.

Wang saw this as an act of retaliation, and enlisted the help of the Minnesota AAUP chapter, which wrote a letter to the college last month.

In the letter, which was posted on the public petition without the group’s permission and has since been removed, David T. Schmit, the chapter’s president, urged Macalester to respect academic freedom and due process. Schmit and his vice president called the charges “complex and confusing,” and recommended that the college differentiate them so that Wang could better defend herself.

Based on materials provided by Wang, the AAUP officials said withholding her salary letter was “a violation of a tenure right and a punishment without due process.”

The college replied that “any suggestion that Professor Wang’s employment or salary are in immediate jeopardy is simply false — the process is, and has been, on hold.” Macalester said it would follow its own Faculty Handbook and AAUP guidelines for due process if it moved to formally discipline Wang.

“Their response was encouraging to us,” Schmit told The Chronicle. He said the chapter had meant to keep its letter private, and had not investigated or taken a position on the allegations.

‘Not Moving Forward’

Wang and Macalester told The Chronicle they could not agree on Wang’s conditions to drop the college’s allegations against her before beginning mediation, a step that the college said in its statement would “disclaim the legitimacy of all student complaints.”

Last week Macalester broke the impasse. In a message sent on July 31, Noecker told Nickitas that “now that it is clear mediation is not moving forward, Macalester will resume the disciplinary process in accordance with the Faculty Handbook.”

In its message, Macalester attached a memo, dated May 15, that outlined the findings of the Faculty Personnel Committee. Wang provided the memo to The Chronicle but disputed its claims.

Committee members were struck by the “seemingly bimodal nature” of Wang’s relationships with students, they wrote. “Some students clearly love working with her, and feel very close to her,” the memo reads. “Others feel that they are not Professor Wang’s preferred students, sometimes because they perceive that Prof. Wang deems them to be ‘disloyal’ to her in her continuously contentious relationship with her department and the college administration.”

“Some students feel that they have fallen out of favor,” the committee wrote, in Wang’s “inner circle at one moment, then excluded the next.”

A student in Wang’s spring course, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, described a similar dynamic. The student said that Wang’s anxieties about the dispute had affected the class, as Wang asked them repeatedly who was sharing course materials.

Students who spoke with The Chronicle said they believed Wang had the best intentions for her students, but could understand that other class members could perceive her teaching style differently.

While close relationships are needed to teach poetry, the committee wrote, some of the ones students described having with Wang were “tantamount to emotional manipulation.”

Committee members could not explain why Wang’s relationships with colleagues and the college had deteriorated, but “we feel that rebuilding these relationships is no longer possible.” The panel recommended that Macalester and Wang negotiate her separation — and if negotiations fail, remove her from teaching, department activities, committees, and contact with students. (William D. Hart, a professor of religious studies and the committee’s chair, declined to comment, citing confidential deliberations.)

Wang said the recommendations did not match what she remembered from a “very lively, amicable” meeting with the committee this past spring, in which “everyone was nodding and agreeing with me.” She added that the recommendations violated academic freedom and due process. She and her defenders have pointed to her recognized record of good teaching, and a lengthy history of antiracist activism, to deny that she had manipulated students or improperly considered race in hiring.

The dispute, Wang said, had left her physically and mentally exhausted. “I always encourage, encourage, encourage,” Wang said. “I’ve never disparaged any student. I’ve never ignored or neglected any student. It’s not in my DNA.”

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.