Was This Professor Dangerous?

Alex Williamson for The Chronicle

Michael Jay Shively was rigorous — on that much, everyone agrees.

Over his 26-year career at Utah Valley University, the biology professor took pride in the anatomy courses he built and the hard work they required.

Students who made it through often credited Shively with their successful medical careers. He prepared them for the demands of urgent care or of the emergency room. Other students were less charmed by his deadly multiple-choice exams. The workload, they felt, was beyond reasonable.

He also butted heads with colleagues, including a junior faculty member in the department, who saw him as an imposing micromanager.

For a while, frustrations with Shively stayed dormant. Last year, they erupted. On March 25, 2019, Shively received a single-page letter from the president that listed six types of misconduct. The letter accused him of arbitrary and capricious course requirements and grading, and of violating the academic freedom of colleagues. The letter also accused him of intimidating and threatening students and employees.

That day, he was suspended and escorted from campus.

An investigation ensued. According to his family, Shively grew anxious and depressed. He felt investigators were withholding details that would enable him to defend himself.

Nearly five months after he was suspended, before a decision was announced, Shively died by suicide. He was 73. This February, his widow sued Utah Valley, claiming the investigation had caused Shively to suffer “a spiraling decline.” Utah Valley denies any responsibility for Shively’s death.

It’s impossible to know for sure why Shively took his own life. Mental-health experts stress that suicide never has a single cause. But the events preceding his death, and people’s differing interpretations of them, expose the gap between academic ideals and academic practice.

At Utah Valley, Shively’s case became a Rorschach test. With little detail into the initial allegations, a group of faculty members saw the shape of something that seemed wrong: a protracted investigation of a tenured professor without due process. They questioned why suspension was warranted and why Shively’s classroom practices were under scrutiny.

Academic freedom is an ideal treasured by professors, and universities vow to protect it. The classroom is the instructor’s domain. But that freedom doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Instead, it’s exercised by people with different amounts of power, who don’t always see things the same way. And it’s bound by the university’s ultimate goal: to keep its community safe.

Is a professor challenging students or abusing them?

Is he mentoring a junior colleague or bullying her?

Is he rigorous or unreasonable?

The answers depend on your vantage point. At Utah Valley, no one seems to have the full picture.

Shively was traditional. For years, he taught the same way, from the same textbook and from the same question bank. Politically conservative, he was opinionated and outspoken, with a broad smile and lively sense of humor. In class, he often strummed funny songs that he had composed on his guitar.

He regularly competed in the Texas Water Safari, a canoe race that touts itself as the toughest in the world, and he liked to see toughness in his students, too. Years ago, he offered what was known as his I’ll-Do-Anything-for-A-Few-More-Points Canoe Race, a 62-mile, extra-credit opportunity, with more points awarded the farther and faster students paddled, according to a Salt Lake Tribune article. By the end of the semester, students were typically itching for extra credit.

“If I scattered broken glass on the floor and said, ‘Walk across that and I’ll give you one more point,’ I’ve got students who would do it,” Shively told the paper.

But in 2004, bad weather agitated the Green River. Several boats capsized, sweeping peanut-butter sandwiches and dry clothes downstream, the Tribune reported. Federal river rangers had to rescue the wet, hungry students. More than one got hypothermia. Parents panicked. Shively told the paper he’d never do it again. (Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and paid $1,185.79 to cover the costs of the rescue, court records show.)

Shively had little tolerance for students who didn’t try, recalled Sam Rushforth, former dean of the School of Science and Health. While Rushforth was dean, between 2000 and 2014, he’d get the occasional student complaint about Shively’s course being too difficult. He said he would tell the student to talk to Shively about it. On Shively’s student evaluations, stress and a towering workload were constant themes. “If you can’t handle stress well, or can’t devote at least 25 hours a week to this class,” one student wrote in 2014, “I would highly recommend taking it somewhere else.”

Some students enjoyed the intensity. Over the years, many of them sang his praises. “Yes, your class was one of the most difficult I’ve ever taken, but you taught us so much because of that,” one former student wrote in a letter to Shively after he died, which was provided to The Chronicle by the Shively family. “You made me believe in myself for the first time, and you gave me a passion I didn’t know I had.”

When Mary Slawson took Shively’s final exam in anatomy, she and a classmate sat in a Chili’s restaurant afterward and bawled, assuming they’d failed. Their waiter, who’d also once taken a course with Shively, brought them dessert first, Slawson said. She ended up getting a perfect score, and spent the next nine years as a teaching assistant for Shively, typing up and discussing his test questions and editing his writing.

“He was known for being very, very demanding,” Slawson said. “But he got the best out of you, because he was.”

For years, Shively taught Utah Valley’s anatomy courses with Don Homan, a teaching lab manager in the department. Though they lectured separately, they co-wrote common tests for human-anatomy students.

In 2015, the biology department hired Sara J. Flood, a forensic odontology expert who was working as an assistant professor at the University of Western Australia. She moved to Utah and began contributing to Shively and Homan’s tests. Over time, that arrangement produced tension between her and Shively.

From Shively’s perspective, Flood was a willing collaborator. Every semester, he later told investigators, he asked if she wanted to continue testing together. She always said yes. Sometimes she seemed too busy to write questions. It’s possible his and Homan’s questions ended up on the test more often than hers did, but “we’ve been doing this a long time and she was just starting out,” he said. Flood graded on her own and set her own curve.

But from Flood’s perspective, the understanding was anything but mutual. She worried that Shively would be offended if she wrote her own test, she told investigators, and that he could somehow interfere with her job security. For a while, Flood didn’t have tenure, and her immigration status was up in the air. She’d propose questions to Shively, but he rewrote them, she told investigators. She thought Shively’s questions were too hard, but she eventually gave up on helping write the tests.

(Flood declined to comment. But the investigative report into Shively’s case, along with public records and documents obtained by The Chronicle and interviews conducted by The Chronicle, reveal that Flood may have felt controlled by Shively, and she would sometimes share her frustration with her students.)

Shively could make Flood feel stupid, said Marshall Walker, a former Utah Valley student. Walker, who graduated in 2018, took a course from Shively and later became Flood’s teaching assistant. According to Walker, Shively would sometimes welcome input from Flood, then reverse course, saying, “We’re going to do it my way.” There were never raised voices, Walker said. But it could feel at times like Flood was walking on eggshells.

When students asked Flood about difficult questions, she’d tell them that they were Shively’s, not hers. She’d say things like, “No one in the world does this, but Shively does,” and, “Shively will try to trick you on every test question,” one student would later tell investigators. She’d tell her students that she wasn’t allowed to write her own tests. Flood acknowledged to investigators that the finger-pointing “caused problems” for Shively.

Tension between the two was apparent in Flood’s student evaluations. Her students often vented about Shively and “his” tests. They consistently commented on departmental politics, insisting that Shively be ousted and that Flood, instead, should run the program:

“Dr. SHIVLEY [sic] NEEDS TO BE KICKED OUT!!!! He has unrealistic expectations for a FIRST year anatomy class. I am very disappointed in this program and if something doesn’t change I will get other programs involved and shut the program down. I don’t understand how this has been excepted [sic] for so long. This course is ridiculous and is UNETHICAL.”

“Give Dr Flood more control over her class. It seems like she is forced to teach the subject another teachers way. She’s a peacock! you gotta let her fly!!!!!”

“CHANGE A LOT. FIRE DR. SHIVLEY [sic]!!! He is a power hungry jerk. He claims everything is straight forward and out of the book, which is a lie. His answers on the test are very vague. Dr. Flood is amazing. Give her Dr Shivley’s job.”

One student’s evaluation of Flood offered a suggestion for improvement: “Dont [sic] put down Dr. Shivley [sic] so much.”

In 2018, Shively led a national talent search for a job described as the one Flood held. Flood believed that he undertook the effort because he wanted to replace her, she later told investigators. But she was mistaken. The search was required by immigration laws that applied to Flood’s continued employment.

She said that during the search, Shively would comment about the many great candidates he was interviewing, making her worry that she would lose her position.

In Shively’s telling, he didn’t offer to run the search but had been told to do so. He’d been relieved when the search was over and Flood was found to be the best candidate. He voted to keep her in the job.

In early 2019, a group of students who’d been privately swapping concerns about Shively decided to speak up. A couple began collecting stories and eventually sent complaints through EthicsPoint, the university’s anonymous reporting portal, as well as emailing administrators directly.

On January 4, a visually impaired student filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that Shively had failed to accommodate him in a timely manner. (The case was closed in July after the office found insufficient evidence to support the discrimination claim.)

The next day, Steve Baker, a recent Utah Valley graduate and former department assistant, filed a complaint through EthicsPoint.

Baker told The Chronicle that Shively was very personable. But after observing how the professor interacted with others in the department, Baker didn’t think Shively was supporting students the way he should. He told the university that Shively could not “objectively justify grades,” and that he was financially benefiting from assigning his own textbook. (In 2017, university policy changed so that professors could no longer keep the profits from assigning their own material, except to reimburse out-of-pocket costs. Shively told university officials that he changed his book contract once he realized he was out of compliance, but a university audit concluded that he received royalties until January of 2019 and “did not appear to be forthright” when disclosing the compensation.)

Baker also wrote that Shively “actively uses his tenured status” to intimidate employees, creating a hostile work environment “incongruent with student success.” He’d threatened retaliation against those who voiced concerns, Baker wrote.

In February Flood told Walker, the former student, she had a meeting with “one of the heads of UVU” and needed more information about how students had been affected emotionally and physically by Shively, the report says. So Walker emailed some students, telling them that it was a “great opportunity” to share how anatomy and Shively’s “ridiculous tests” had affected their lives. Walker got lots of responses, including from a student who said the stress caused by Shively’s anatomy class had exacerbated the student’s severe anxiety and depression, eventually contributing to a suicide attempt. Around that time, Flood met with Astrid S. Tuminez, the university president.

Meanwhile, a student enrolled in Flood’s anatomy course, and whose name is redacted in the report, also began emailing and meeting with higher-ups, describing himself as an unofficial spokesman for disaffected students. He complained about Shively’s tests and the department’s bureaucratic aversion to change. “Any complaint is met with a ‘Here we go again … ’ exasperation,” he wrote to Jim Price, Shively’s department chair. (Price declined to comment.) The student also complained that a passage on hormones in Shively’s textbook contained transphobic language.

Courtesy of the Shively family

By this point, the floodgates were open. Three anonymous EthicsPoint complaints were filed on March 5. One of the students wrote: “Mother’s [sic] taking the class go days without seeing their children.”

The university parceled out the investigation. Accusations of textbook misconduct went to the university’s internal auditors. Gender discrimination was referred to the Title IX office. And on March 8, Utah Valley authorized what officials called an independent investigation into the anonymous complaints. An outside lawyer, Spencer Phillips, was hired to assist Kathren Brown, then the associate vice president for academic administration.

On March 25, the university suspended Shively with pay. The suspension letter from Tuminez listed six types of alleged misconduct: “Requiring course books and receiving royalties” in violation of university policy; “intimidation and threat towards students and employees, causing significant mental distress to some;” “arbitrary and capricious course requirements and grading;” “violation of the academic freedom of colleagues;” “failure to follow disability accommodation policies and failure to cooperate in a timely manner with Accessibility Services;” and “discrimination and harassment on the basis of protected class.”

The suspension would remain in effect, the letter said, “until such a time that you are acquitted, resign, or are dismissed.”

What Students Experienced

When Shively got home, his wife, Ann Shively, could see he was stunned. But for the first couple weeks, she said, he was up for the fight. He was hopeful that the situation would work out.

One allegation struck him as something he’d known about: the textbook-royalty issue, which he thought he’d resolved. The rest seemed vague, without names, dates, or details.

Leaders from the university’s American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teacher chapters didn’t like what they were hearing. (The university doesn’t recognize a union.) Scott Abbott, vice president of the AAUP chapter and a professor of philosophy, humanities, and integrated studies, questioned why some of the allegations dealt with how Shively taught or what work he assigned. For the administration to investigate a faculty member’s teaching practices clearly breached the principle of academic freedom, in Abbott’s view.

To suspend Shively before giving him an opportunity to respond violated the professor’s rights, wrote Alexander Simon, the AFT chapter president and a sociology professor, in an April letter to Tuminez.

Days later, Abbott tried to accompany Shively to his second meeting with the investigators, but was turned away. According to Abbott, Brown, the associate vice president for academic administration, told them that Shively could not have anyone with him. (Brown declined to comment.) That frustrated Abbott, who says that a faculty support person has been allowed in previous cases.

Rumors spread about why Shively had been suspended so abruptly. That decision seemed to contradict the university’s faculty-discipline policy, which states that “in all disciplinary, suspension, or termination proceedings,” the faculty member will be given a “concise statement of the facts, conduct, or circumstances” including the names of the people making the charges. Why no names? Abbott asked. Why no facts?

He and other faculty leaders put their questions to Karen M. Clemes, general counsel for the university.

Clemes told them she would not comment on a specific case. But if a faculty member is charged with “a serious offense affecting the public interest,” she wrote in response, the president may suspend the faculty member with pay with a written notice. That type of suspension isn’t considered disciplinary action.

In those cases, university decision makers have concluded that the alleged actions constitute “a risk to public harm,” Clemes wrote.

That claim, especially, baffled Shively’s supporters. How did this longtime Utah Valley professor pose a threat to the public? Faculty members interrogated Clemes’s response. They found it troubling that a professor could be suspended without being able to respond to the accusations.

As Shively’s peers asked questions, the investigation continued. Shively was banned from campus and also barred from professional duties and from talking “in an official capacity” with his colleagues, staff, and from communicating with his students, his suspension letter said. His peers got the message, and many didn’t reach out to him.

Between late March and early May, investigators questioned Shively a total of eight times, in person and by phone. He began to lose weight, according to his wife, and he wasn’t sleeping well. Price, Shively’s department chair, visited Shively at his home and told investigators he was worried about his friend.

Shively told investigators that he didn’t think the anonymous complaints were coming from his students. Rather, Flood was unfairly portraying him to her students as “dishonest” and “deceitful,” he wrote in a note. “It is my sincere belief that nearly all of the complaints about me and my testing will dissipate if I test with less rigor (write easier tests).”

Aside from Shively, Phillips and Brown interviewed 14 current and former students; Flood; Homan, the teaching-lab manager; and several other professors in the department. On May 30, Clemes told Shively’s lawyer that the investigation report was being finalized and would be done ideally within the next week

Weeks passed. Shively waited.

A frustrated Abbott wrote to Clemes, the president, and the provost to express his mounting concern. It’s “unconscionable” to keep Shively in suspense for this long, with no communication, he wrote.

On July 11, about 15 weeks after he’d been suspended, Shively was allowed to read the report before it was finalized. Inside a conference room on campus, he was given two hours and sent home to write his response. He could not take a copy of the report with him.

Ultimately, investigators, who used a preponderance-of-evidence standard, concluded that Shively’s grading and course requirements were inappropriate. His practices caused or contributed to “severe emotional distress” in students. He’d once told students their performance on an exam was “pathetic.” And he’d bump up grades depending on how much he “liked” his students, which violates university policy.

Shively’s impression that some of the recent student complaints were being driven by Flood is “correct, but incomplete,” the report says, because complaints about Shively stretched back at least a decade, but were not dealt with by his department chairs. “I don’t have to tell” Shively “every little complaint that comes to me,” Price told investigators. They concluded that it was appropriate for Flood to encourage students to take their complaints to the highest level of the administration.

The investigation also found problems with Shively’s textbook, co-written with Homan. An outside reviewer, Trent D. Stephens, an emeritus professor of anatomy and embryology at Idaho State University, was asked to review the textbook and three of Shively’s exams. He was “appalled” by the level of error in the textbook. As for the exams, “there are numerous questions that I, as an anatomist with 40 years of experience, couldn’t answer because there was no correct answer,” he told The Chronicle.

One of the exams was the most “sadistic” he’d ever seen, he wrote in his report.

And the university’s internal audit concluded that Shively had not complied with university policy about receiving royalties. Sanctions were recommended.

The report’s conclusions about Shively’s treatment of colleagues are less clear cut.

Two female professors described being bullied or intimidated by Shively. One of them, Heather Wilson-Ashworth, told investigators that Shively was aggressive and controlling, and that he backed down only when she pushed back and stood up for herself. (Wilson-Ashworth did not respond to a request for comment.)

Flood told investigators, “When he comes into my office, he makes sure he’s in control. He’s nice about it, but he’s very stern. He talks to me like I’m a 5-year old. He’s angry at me all the time.”

“I don’t know what he’s capable of. No one knows, it may be nothing,” she said. “But he instills fear in people.”

Flood admitted Shively hadn’t made any threats, verbal or implied, of physical harm. And she said Shively told her that it was “totally her choice” what textbooks or materials she used. He had said, “This is your course.” and, “This is your class.” Wilson-Ashworth told investigators that she had encouraged Flood to share her concerns with Price but Flood refused, saying, “things are fine,” and that Shively was helping her with her visa.

Investigators concluded that Flood, as a new, untenured employee with an uncertain immigration status, had felt the need to give in to Shively’s expectations.

“These admissions suggest that Dr. Shively gave Dr. Flood autonomy in how she carried out her duties as a professor,” the report says. But Flood’s “sincere personal reservations and fears kept her from accepting these invitations and opportunities.”

He seemed to assume she would exercise her academic freedom. She seems to have felt that she couldn’t.

In Shively’s response, he strongly disagreed that he had infringed on Flood’s academic freedom, or that he had ever threatened her. Her testimony about their relationship vastly differed from his own perception, he wrote. “I made it clear from the beginning that she could use any references she wanted,” he said. “And every semester she reconfirmed to me that she wanted to use my book.”

Shively maintained that over the last 20 years his department chairs and deans had never expressed concerns about the difficulty of his tests. He curved his grades to protect his students, he said.

“I want to make it clear that I am always willing to re-evaluate my methods and improve them,” he wrote. “I am open to new ideas and will incorporate changes required by UVU as soon as I learn what they are.”

By this point, Shively had been suspended for nearly four months.

He had lost 25 to 30 pounds. His family says he became fixated on the idea that something was medically wrong with him. He seemed convinced he was dying, said Jim Pye, his stepson, and convinced he was going to be fired.

On August 19, Shively died by suicide.

The final report had been signed by Phillips and Brown a few weeks earlier, on July 31 and August 2, respectively.

A disciplinary decision had been delayed, according to the university, because Shively’s dean had requested that the professor be given more time to submit his response to the report

The Shively family’s lawyer insists it was submitted on July 18. But according to the university, no one ever got it.

Shively’s death let loose a torrent of speculation and grievance. What some faculty members saw was a beloved tenured professor who’d been abruptly severed from the university to which he was devoted. A small group took their frustrations public.

On the blog that he writes for the AAUP chapter, Abbott wrote that a “mismatched set of allegations” had been assembled to make a case for termination. Simon, the AFT chapter president, circulated an open letter, asserting that although Shively was not a threat to others, his suspension and the lengthy investigation had made him a threat to himself. Thirteen faculty members signed on.

Save for a statement, Utah Valley administrators stayed quiet. The university denied public-records requests to release the investigative report. Internally, Daniel Horns, interim dean of the College of Science, defended the decision. It’s being done to protect Shively’s reputation, he wrote in a November email to faculty leaders.

Then, in February, Ann Shively sued Utah Valley, Tuminez, Clemes, and Flood. The lawsuit alleges that Shively faced false accusations alone without legal representation, resolution, or due process. Ann Shively believes her husband was taken away from her.

Her family has hung together through grief, she told The Chronicle, but the loss is heavy. “He’s in every corner, in every room, on every wall.”

In March court filings, the university vigorously defended its process. The 33-page investigative report and its dozens of pages of appendices were made public.

Placing him on paid suspension ensured the integrity of the investigation, the safety of the campus community, and prevented Shively from retaliating or from hearing “prying” comments, argued Alain C. Balmanno, the lead lawyer from the Utah attorney general’s office, who is representing Utah Valley, Tuminez, Clemes, and Flood.

“What’s the alternative? Well, the alternative is that you conduct an investigation when everybody is there, talking about it, and you don’t really get a good investigation,” Balmanno told The Chronicle. In court filings, Balmanno denied that Flood held any vendetta against Shively. Rather, it was Shively who disrupted the relationship with Flood. It was Shively who harassed Flood. Flood might have said she had academic freedom. But, Balmanno argued, that was only “lip service.”

The investigation lasted months because of the number of allegations and witnesses, and to ensure it was thorough. Shively was informed of the details of the allegations and evidence, the filing says, and he was able to provide extensive responses in person and in writing. Also, “there is no right to due process during an investigation.”

The plaintiffs are arguing that once the investigation was all said and done, it was obvious that Shively posed no serious threat to the public, Balmanno said.

“That’s nice to say sort of after the fact,” he said. But “if you’re a university, you can’t take that chance.”

By the time the investigative report was made public, lines in the sand were already drawn. After reading the report, Abbott and Simon still saw a wronged professor, railroaded by the system. “I could probably write 30 pages on the problems with this report that’s about 30 pages,” Simon said. “It’s pretty disturbing.”

So much of the investigation, to Abbott, seemed trivial. Zeroing in on whether Shively used the word “pathetic” one time. Evaluating his textbook, which, in Abbott’s view, was not relevant to his suspension.

“I think his course was too hard,” Abbott said, and “personal issues” perhaps made Shively a less effective teacher than he might have been. But while students’ complaints raised some red flags, he said, they didn’t indicate a level of threat that required suspending a tenured professor immediately.

Abbott imagined how everything could have gone differently, if the university hadn’t — in his view — overstepped. If administrators hadn’t exercised power they didn’t, or shouldn’t, have.

Power is complicated, though — often visible to the least of us and obscure to those on top.

In November 2019, before the lawsuit was filed, before the investigative report was made public, a Utah Valley faculty member who’d been observing the fracas from the sidelines emailed Anne Arendt, president of the faculty senate. The writer, whom Arendt didn’t identify, was concerned that Shively’s supporters appeared to be taking sides against students and faculty members “who may have experienced harassment.”

Two things can be true simultaneously, the faculty member cautioned:

That the university grossly mismanaged the investigation, and that the complainants raised legitimate and serious concerns.

That someone can be a good friend to some, the faculty member wrote, while quietly abusing others.

What looks like guidance to a senior colleague can feel like control to the more junior. A professor’s high expectations can feel like impossible ones to students.

And what looks like discretion during an investigation can feel like isolation to the person under the microscope. Allegations can feel like an avalanche.

You might not see the damage. You might not have meant to do it. But it’s done.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers free and confidential support for people in distress, and for those who need to help someone else. To reach the hotline, call 1-800-273-8255. More information can be found at suicidepreventionlifeline.org.