Weekly Briefing

This college president went after his critics online

Chris Jackson for The Chronicle

It’s common enough for college presidents and faculty members to clash on campus. What’s uncommon is a president who’s unapologetic about his policy changes and bashing his faculty critics online.

Enter Robin C. Capehart (above), president of Bluefield State University, in West Virginia, who fought his faculty through his public Substack newsletter (the public posts were recently deleted). Capehart took over Bluefield, a financially struggling historically Black college, in 2019. He’s made several controversial changes over faculty objections, like overhauling the post-tenure-review process and adding new learning objectives for students. Meanwhile, the university’s governing board replaced the Faculty Senate with an assembly that’s subject to new rules and more oversight from the president.

In a universitywide email, Capehart named specific faculty members who had written Bluefield State’s accreditor to complain about what they considered a disregard for academic freedom and shared governance. The president subsequently questioned in his newsletter whether some of these faculty members — whom he did not identify by name this time — had committed what he called “academic dishonesty” in their letter to the accreditor.

Meanwhile, Capehart’s criticism has drawn disapproval from academic-freedom advocates. For example, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told Capehart that he may be in violation of professors’ free-speech rights and asked him to retract some of his statements.

Capehart is standing firm, and for now, Bluefield State’s Board of Governors is standing behind him.

Bluefield State needs new policies to adapt to students’ needs and keep faculty accountable, Capehart says. The faculty members who oppose the changes are not only undermining the institution’s progress, he added, but are partly to blame for the financial situation Capehart inherited.

One state report, published in 2021, examined the four years before Capehart’s appointment and called the institution’s finances “unintelligible and unauditable.”

Changes in academic objectives

To help turn the university’s finances around, the president made standard changes like bringing back the football program. But he’s also made controversial plans, like an attempt to establish a branch campus in Wheeling. College leaders in the area weren’t pleased, worried that the university would compete with their offerings. The West Virginia Council for Community and Technical College Education later rejected the proposal.

Capehart’s tension with faculty members started early in his tenure. In November 2020, the board introduced draft “academic objectives” that the president had written without input from faculty members or the provost, according to a letter to the board from seven faculty members in the university’s social-sciences department.

The university wrote in response to questions from The Chronicle that the objectives were “a collaborative effort of various professionals at Bluefield State, including the Office of the Provost, and with the opportunity for all faculty to make comments and to discuss the proposal with the Board of Governors.”

The provost at the time did not respond to several requests for comment from The Chronicle.

Some of the changes included replacing the eight learning outcomes in the university’s catalog, which included literacy in information, science, technology, culture, and the arts, as well as in critical and ethical reasoning, and wellness. The proposed policy also required that the president report to the board on the “real results that relate to acquiring knowledge and skills and not traditional academic seat-time measures of compliance, such as graduation rates, retention rates, progress toward graduation, number of hours, or other time-related assessments.”

Faculty members were given a month to comment after the draft objectives were shared. Some were upset that the people who actually teach the students hadn’t been consulted.

Other faculty members were surprised by the content of the proposed objectives. For example, to be a “knowledgeable member of American society,” students would be expected to understand the “political, economic, philosophical, and societal foundations for our country including the history of the United States and western civilization,” and “the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and the free-market economic system and a comparison to other major economic systems.”

Some critics said that the objectives could be interpreted as supporting nationalist ideology with little attention to diversity, Black history, and cultures outside the United States.

Despite objections, the board approved the policy in January 2021.

In 2022, Capehart started his newsletter to explain his nontraditional approach to campus management. Soon it also chronicled his fight with the faculty.

Read what happened next in our Eric Kelderman’s full story about the tensions between the faculty and the president.

Lagniappe

• Read. I loved this essay about learning to lose your vision. (The New Yorker)
• Listen. I recently learned about Soukous, Congolese dance music. Here’s a radio show devoted to the genre. (NTS Radio)
• Watch. Last weekend I saw Barbie in the theater. It’s campy and fun and interesting; I’m going back for a second time this weekend. Don’t worry, my first viewing of Oppenheimer is on the agenda too. (The New York Times)

—Fernanda