Posts

Showing posts from May, 2020

Thoughts after the Chronicle Piece on Mike Shively and UVU

When serious complaints are made, the following four basic requirements will allow us to work together as respected colleagues at UVU: First— Any member of the faculty, student, or staff member who alleges they have been harassed, discriminated against, threatened, or deprived of academic freedom, should be taken seriously. Second— The claim should be investigated carefully by impartial investigators, a team including faculty peers if the accused is a member of the faculty. Third— The accused person must be given a chance to respond to the allegations, knowing who is making them and what the specifics are, before a decision is made to suspend. Fourth—During a suspension, the investigation should proceed with all due speed. As The   Chronicle of Higher Education (May 13) points out, the accuser in this case was taken seriously.  As I noted in a previous post (A Report on the Report), the investigators were not impartial nor did they include members of the faculty.  And as

Was This Professor Dangerous?

A journalist for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Emma Pettit, published a piece today about Mike Shively and his suspension. It's fairly thorough and informative and even-handed. You can find it HERE What she doesn't note is the distressing quality of the final UVU Report on the case. See my previous post for comments on that. While the family seeks legal recourse, we're left at UVU to sort out how faculty and administrators can go forward in the context of this case and earlier ones that leave many faculty distrustful and even fearful.  For instance: One allegation the investigators made against Mike Shively was that he didn't use Canvas. When two of my students wrote on their SRIs this semester that I hadn't used Canvas and they wished I had, I thought about the investigation that noted exactly how few minutes Mike had been on Canvas. Can my pedagogical choice be used against me? I wondered. Of course not. But the fact that the question came to mind