A prominent faculty member at the University of Mississippi found himself at the center of a firestorm this week, after news of his unexpected termination spread on social media.
Garrett Felber, an assistant professor in his fourth year at the institution, got a letter from his department chair on December 10, informing him that she had recommended he be terminated. The reason that Noell Howell Wilson gave was that Felber had failed to properly communicate with her and had refused to meet by phone or Zoom, according to a copy of his termination letter obtained by The Chronicle. But to Felber and a growing list of supporters, that rationale rings hollow — and is, they say, unprecedented.
Felber has a history of activism and has been an outspoken critic of the administration at Mississippi, a background that has led supporters to conclude that something deeper motivated the decision. “It would be naïve and ahistorical to think this termination is about emails or a meeting,” Felber told The Chronicle.
A Rejected Grant
The tension between Felber and Wilson began in late October, when Felber tweeted that his chair had rejected a $42,000 grant he’d recently been awarded to support Study and Struggle, a project focused on incarceration in Mississippi. Months earlier, Felber wrote, another grant for the same project had been accepted, and promoted, by the university.
The reason Wilson gave for rejecting the grant, Felber tweeted at the time, was that Study and Struggle is a political project, not a historical one. “The real issue,” he wrote, was that Mississippi “prioritizes racist donors over all else. So it’s not some mythic politics v. history binary, but that this antiracist program threatens racist donor money. And racism is the brand. It’s in the name.” (The university has long grappled with its nickname, “Ole Miss,” which was the term enslaved people used to refer to the wife of their owner.)
Wilson, in her letter informing Felber of his termination, suggested that a breakdown in communication had followed the grant rejection. “You have refused to speak to me,” she wrote, detailing several attempts she’d made to schedule phone and Zoom calls with him. Rather than respond directly to those invitations, she wrote, Felber had insisted that information about grants “should be communicated to me in writing.”
“Respectfully, your effort to dictate or restrict the means by which I communicate with you is untenable,” Wilson told Felber. “Your repeated refusal to talk with me makes it impossible for me to maintain a productive working relationship with you or supervise your faculty responsibilities.” That’s why Felber would be receiving a one-year notice that his contract at Mississippi wouldn’t be renewed, she explained. “Your employment with the university will end on December 31, 2021, and your employment contract will not be renewed after that date.”
In a Tuesday email to his colleagues explaining the circumstances that led to his firing, Felber wrote that Wilson had told him that the grant had been rejected on behalf of the entire history department. As such, he wrote, “I made repeated requests that a written explanation for the grant rejection be given to all faculty before agreeing to meet with Dr. Wilson about this matter. I do not think this was unreasonable.”
And, Felber told his colleagues, he’d been in regular communication with Wilson, having sent her an email about another topic on December 7, just three days before receiving word that he was being terminated. In fact, he wrote, he’d been more reachable than might be expected, given that he was on approved research leave for a fellowship at Harvard.
“The idea that one should be recommended for termination simply because a department chair has been unable to schedule a phone call or videoconference with a faculty member on approved research leave during a roughly two-week period is deeply troubling,” Felber wrote to his colleagues. “I gather that Dr. Wilson’s decision to recommend my termination was taken unilaterally, without consulting tenured faculty, or perhaps any other faculty at all.”
In a statement to The Chronicle, Noel E. Wilkin, Mississippi’s provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs, confirmed that Wilson had recommended Felber be given a 12-month nonrenewal notice. “She sent her recommendation to Dr. Felber in a letter that he subsequently disclosed to dozens of members of the university community. In the letter, Dr. Wilson described multiple instances where Dr. Felber refused to speak to her, and how that refusal made it impossible to maintain a productive working relationship necessary to supervise his faculty responsibilities,” Wilkin said. “Dr. Wilson’s recommendations for a 12-month notice of nonrenewal is consistent with AAUP standards and university policy for untenured faculty.”
Wilson referred a request for comment to the university’s communications department, which provided Wilkin’s statement. And Felber himself declined to comment on the record to The Chronicle, beyond his statement that it would be naïve to believe his firing stemmed from bad communication.
Anne Twitty, an associate professor in the history department, confirmed that Felber’s email was the first his colleagues had heard of his termination. None of them had been consulted about the decision, she said. As a result, “all of us are feeling completely blindsided by this.” Nor, she added, had Wilson communicated with the department about the decision to reject Felber’s grant in October, which Wilson said had been made on behalf of the faculty.
“Acting as though her decisions are our decisions, I think, really flies in the face of all of the shared-governance norms that I have known since I’ve been a member of the history department at UM,” Twitty said.
Twitty sent Wilson an email on the afternoon of December 15, requesting a meeting. Fourteen of her colleagues, she said, had done the same. They didn’t hear from Wilson until December 16, in the evening.
“I realize that many of you were shocked and surprised by the recent email from Garrett and may have questions about my decision not to renew his contract,” Wilson wrote, in an email Twitty provided to The Chronicle. “However, given that this is a personnel matter, I am not at liberty to provide further information even as I know this silence is frustrating to colleagues. I look forward to sharing additional details when I am able to provide them.”
‘A Reckoning’
News of his termination, Felber wrote in the email to his colleagues, had been “shocking.” In April, Wilson had written in an evaluation that he had had “a successful year” for both teaching and research and “a phenomenal year of service for a junior faculty member.” And in August, in a press release announcing Felber’s yearlong fellowship at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Wilson had called him “an indefatigable researcher and community builder” with a “national profile in the field of African American history.”
All of that was what the university had been looking for when it hired Felber, Twitty said. One faculty member had said during the search process that the department “needed a change-maker.” In Felber, Twitty said, “that’s who we hired.”
“It’s not just that Garrett is some bomb-thrower from the outside whose first instinct is to take to Twitter,” Twitty said. In fact, Felber has worked to gain institutional support for his scholarly projects, she said. And while Felber has routinely “applied pressure to university administrators and been outspoken about the problems at the University of Mississippi,” Twitty said, his actions have never been cause for concern. “It’s not as if, when asked to meet and talk about Garrett’s progress, the tenured faculty got in a meeting and said, ‘We’re really concerned about how outspoken Garrett is.’”
To Twitty, “Garrett’s tenure should have been a slam-dunk in our department.” Instead, she said, his termination is creating a chilling effect for junior faculty members. “It’s hard to overlook the kind of fear that this instills, that you can receive an evaluation in April from the chair that says everything looks great, and by December you can be unilaterally fired.”
The news has rippled throughout academic circles, too, with many coming to Felber’s defense on Twitter. The Yale philosopher Jason Stanley called Felber’s case “as clear-cut a case of a violation of academic freedom as one could envisage,” and several others tweeted that they wouldn’t speak at Mississippi until Felber was reinstated.
More than 4,000 academics made the same pledge in an open letter to Wilson and the university’s chancellor, Glenn Boyce. Felber’s termination, they wrote, “has every appearance of being both politically motivated and retaliatory.” The reasons the university had provided for his firing look “arbitrary and nonsensical,” according to the letter, whose signatories include the philosopher Cornel West, the critical-race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the American-studies scholar Hazel V. Carby.
Walter Johnson, a professor of history and African American studies at Harvard who was among the letter’s drafters, first worked with Felber when Felber was a faculty fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center. He thinks highly of Felber as a scholar and organizer.
“He is a very eloquent and forthright political activist. I think that he is threatening to some of the standing order in Mississippi and in the nation more generally,” Johnson said. “The point of the letter is to say, ‘There’s really an appearance of malfeasance here.’ Because the action is so extraordinary, there are a lot of us who are concerned, not just for him, but for his colleagues at the University of Mississippi.”
Johnson sees Felber’s predicament as indicative of a larger movement at Mississippi, which has endured a tumultuous year. James M. Thomas, a sociologist, was ordered by the state auditor to pay nearly $2,000 for participating in a nationwide Scholar Strike to protest racial inequity. Administrators backed away from plans to install headstones at a Confederate cemetery on campus. This week, the university placed its ombudsman on administrative leave after he sued to stop the university from forcing him to share confidential information about people who have privately communicated with his office. Two years ago, Mississippi’s appointment of Boyce drew widespread criticism, including from Felber, who told The Chronicle at the time that he’d been forcibly removed from a news conference announcing Boyce’s appointment.
“They’re in the midst of a reckoning,” Johnson said. “There are a lot of energetic, critical activists, students and faculty on that campus, who are trying to hold the university to a different standard than that which it’s been held to before.”
Caleb Smith, a professor of English and American studies at Yale University who signed the open letter, and who shares Felber’s scholarly interest in carceral reform, said Felber had made important contributions to the field. He, like Johnson, sees broader implications in Felber’s case.
“I worry that a case like this will be used to escalate a culture war that is being waged in bad faith. The popular depiction of academics as dangerous radicals serves as a pretext for delegitimating and defunding our institutions,” Smith wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Even by protesting the university’s decision in this case, I’m afraid, we risk falling into this political trap, but the reported facts are so troubling, we at least have to ask some questions.”
