U. of Idaho Publicly Accuses a Professor of ‘Meth Use’ and Access to Guns. Her Colleagues Want Answers.

Steven A. Smith was teaching a media-ethics class on Wednesday when his students’ phones chimed in unison.

The University of Idaho administration had sent a text alert instructing students, faculty, and staff to call 911 if they saw Denise Bennett, an associate professor of journalism, on the campus.

Bennett, who a week earlier had been placed on indefinite administrative leave, was now barred from the university, the message said. Sandwiched between those assertions was a sordid allegation: Bennett’s “recent admittance to police of meth use and access to firearms.”

To Smith’s students, the alert suggested that a “meth-addict professor with firearms posed an imminent threat” to the campus, said Smith, a clinical associate professor of journalism.

“My students started getting phone calls from their parents,” he said. Parents asked them, “‘Are you OK? Are you in trouble?’”

Smith, like many of his colleagues, wanted more information. But the more that trickled out, the stranger things got. What the administration called Bennett’s “recent admittance” had been drawn from a months-old police report that had never prompted any criminal charges. And what was the logic behind mentioning “access to firearms” if, as a university spokeswoman later said, there was no immediate threat to the campus?

The university’s leaders have defended the message, but some faculty members don’t buy it. At best, they say, the administration bungled the alert by oversharing and overstepping. And at worst, it was an intentional attempt to chill the speech of an outspoken faculty member and her revved-up students.

‘Unconscionable and Unnecessarily Cruel’

Smith and like-minded colleagues see two major problems with the university’s message. First, the alert shared personal and harmful information about a respected professor — and a vocal critic of the administration — with thousands of people. And second, sending an alert shortly before a planned student protest in support of Bennett seemed like a bid to snuff out free speech.

Since he joined the Idaho faculty, in 2010, Smith said he’d “never seen anything like this — ever.” The alert was an “unconscionable and unnecessarily cruel and manipulative step” by the administration, he said.

It seems, Smith said, that the alert had been sent so that the university could “seize the narrative” on the dispute between Bennett and the administration, which, until then, Bennett had controlled. It was also a “fairly bald-faced effort to tamp down the student protest,” Smith added, citing a specific event students had planned for the day. The alert was sent at 10:51 a.m., and the protest was planned for noon on the campus, in Moscow, Idaho.

Administrators had sent the alert, in part, because of Bennett’s “public conduct in recent days,” Chuck A. Staben, the university’s president, and John M. Wiencek, the university’s provost, wrote on Thursday in an email to the campus.

Students also planned to protest Bennett’s placement on leave, and there was “uncertainty about Ms. Bennett’s whereabouts or whether she would attend,” the email said. That situation “increased the seriousness of these concerns to a level which gave rise to the alert.” (Staben, whose contract ends in June, was not made available for an interview on Friday.)

The campuswide alert about Bennett stunned, then angered, Rebecca J. (Becky) Tallent, an associate professor of journalism and a longtime friend of Bennett’s. The alert carried far more information than it should have, Tallent said, and it was “incredibly unfair” to characterize Bennett in that way.

Tallent canceled her class that day. “I was so angry,” she said, “I couldn’t teach.” Since then, Tallent said, the administration had not talked closely with faculty members, which had also been frustrating. Because nobody’s talking to us, Tallent said, “we don’t know what to do or say or think.”

Kenton Bird, an associate professor of mass media, said he had been similarly stunned by the alert. When he saw it, Bird said, he was “shocked, and dismayed,” because he knew Bennett was not on the campus at the time. She was in downtown Moscow, talking to her lawyer, Bird said. If anyone involved in sending the alert had asked Bird or any of his colleagues, he said, they would have said that Bennett had no intention of coming to the campus during the protest.

For professors lower in the academic hierarchy, Wednesday’s message seemed like a warning. “The alert has everyone on edge,” said an associate professor in the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences who asked for anonymity out of a fear of retribution. “Especially the idea that if you speak up against this administration, they’re going to publicly air your dirty laundry in the guise of a public-safety threat.”

‘Not Protected Speech’

Tension between Bennett and administrators had been building for some time.

On January 22 she emailed a self-described manifesto to various administrators. She brought up several issues, including unspent grant money for one of her projects, as well as the “UNDER-MAINTAINED SHIT-HOLE OF A FACILITY CALLED THE RTV CENTER,” in which her students learn.

The email, laden with capital letters and curse words, highlighted a longstanding grievance for Bennett and her students: the quality of their facilities. She posted photos on Facebook of old equipment and a dirty mop. In general, the facilities are “falling apart,” said Bailey O’Bryant, a senior and one of Bennett’s students.

The day after Bennett sent the email, O’Bryant said, he and the professor met with an administrative assistant in the School of Journalism and Mass Media about something else: problems with a grant O’Bryant had received to create a short film.

Bennett was shepherding the grant, O’Bryant said. Because the professor had run into some administrative barriers to her own grant funding in the past, the student said, she wanted to make sure that O’Bryant got all the money he was entitled to.

During the meeting, tensions escalated. Bennett got “very upset,” O’Bryant said, and the assistant “plugged her ears, turned toward the wall,” and refused to talk.

The following day, Bennett was placed on indefinite administrative leave.

Students began planning a demonstration in support of Bennett. Then, on Tuesday afternoon, Bennett recited what she said were the conditions of her administrative leave on a YouTube live-stream video, and continued to criticize the “fascist” administration.

Around the same time, Staben, the president, and Wiencek, the provost, sent an email to the campus. It didn’t mention Bennett by name, but addressed recent “concerning behavior” at the university. “Behavior that endangers safety or that interferes with the working environment (i.e., belittling, insulting, yelling, and other forms of aggression), no matter the context, is not protected speech,” the email says.

Meanwhile, a Moscow police officer was watching Bennett’s live-stream. The officer recognized Bennett from a domestic dispute he’d responded to in November, Capt. Tyson Berrett told The Argonaut, the student newspaper.

That incident, which occurred on November 4, went like this: Someone called the police because Bennett and her husband were fighting, according to a police report. When officers arrived, the couple told the police that their marital issues were related to Bennett’s “recent methamphetamine usage,” the report says. Bennett’s husband had guns in their home, the document says, but they weren’t a factor in the argument.

No charges were filed.

University administrators seemed to have learned of the police report sometime between Tuesday afternoon, when Bennett’s live-stream began, and late Wednesday morning, when the alert was sent out. (Captain Berrett did not respond to a voicemail message seeking comment.)

In a previous interview with The Chronicle by text message, Bennett called the university’s claims in the alert “lies” and “defamation.”

“I am not a threat to campus,” she said. “I don’t own a gun. There are no guns in my home.” Bennett directed additional questions to her lawyer.

On Thursday, Staben and Wiencek sent the email to faculty, staff, and students that explained the alert and acknowledged that it had contained what “may have seemed an unusual level of detail for such a communication.”

A group of “university experts” convened to decide what to do, the top administrators said. In this case, the email said, the group recommended communicating “very specifically and directly,” a move that Staben supported.

Bennett’s students are still advocating for her reinstatement. They marched in protest. There’s a Facebook group and an online petition dedicated to the effort. And they’ve started pushing, said O’Bryant, for more funding for equipment and journalism projects, a key cause of Bennett’s.

“We don’t just want Denise back,” he said. They want to propel her message forward.

And in the absence of specifics, faculty members are asking the basics: How, exactly, was the decision made to send out that particular alert?

“I would love,” said Smith, the clinical associate professor, “to have understood the conversation at the table.”

In essence, he said, “What were they thinking?”

Dan Bauman contributed to this article.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.