The controversy at Mount St. Mary’s goes national after professors are fired

By Susan Svrluga February 9 at 6:48 PM

Professors from universities across the country — from Stanford to North Carolina Central to the University of Nebraska to Harvard — signed a petition Tuesday calling on the Mount St. Mary’s University administration to reinstate professors who had been fired.

Within hours of being posted, the petition had more than 2,400 digital signatures, a symbol of the outrage from some in the campus community as well as in broader academic circles who viewed the terminations as retribution against faculty who had opposed the president. They also said the decisions threaten the academic freedom at the private Catholic university in Maryland and violate the school’s core principles.

Alumni wrote letters to the university’s board, parents emailed the Archdiocese, and students planned a day of fasting and prayer for the campus on Ash Wednesday.

The controversy began months ago, when the provost and some professors had raised concerns when the president asked for a list of students unlikely to succeed in college several weeks into the school year; one said it was too early to separate those who would do well from those likely to drop out. Simon Newman, the president, told professors, “there will be some collateral damage.”

Newman also said, as first reported by the student newspaper the Mountain Echo and independently confirmed by The Washington Post, that “this is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

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