Report to WVU Faculty Senate of an Unofficial Poll of Faculty Opinion

May 4, 2008, Matthew Vester, History Department, West Virginia University

Introduction

A public statement by one WVU faculty member on April 28, 2008 and subsequent press reports left the impression that WVU faculty opinion was divided about whether President Garrison should resign for the good of the institution. Since this impression did not correspond at all to what I had heard from faculty, I decided to try to come up with a rough measure of faculty opinion on this question. I am an historian of the Renaissance – since (ironically) I work mainly with dead people, I do not have experience polling live ones. I can see that there are a variety of flaws in this poll, but I did the best I could, given various constraints, and have arrived at a provisional result that can be reasonably accepted as the best rough approximation of true faculty opinion on this issue. The burden of proof to show that significant division does in fact exist within faculty opinion has now been shifted to those who might criticize this poll. If someone wants to devise a more ‘scientific’ poll and carry it out, I will be cheering them on! But in the absence of more persuasive evidence, it would be irresponsible to reject these findings.

Poll method

1. Signatures were not solicited for a petition (in contrast to what was printed in press reports about the letter signed by 20-some HSC professors last week). The poll was simply publicized, along with an indication that those who publicly supported President Garrison’s resignation would be placed together on a petition. Many of those who went public felt like they were incurring some risk.

2. The poll / petition was distributed in four ways:

a. First, on Tuesday, April 29, I sent out an email (see text below) to as many personal acquaintances as I could think of in different departments. These people were asked to distribute it to their department listserves, and to ask acquaintances to distribute it further.

b. On Wednesday, April 30, he text was sent to the Daily Athenaeum and to the Dominion Post, which were asked to publicize it.

c. The text was also on several different blogs and websites, including two that are critical of President Garrison, the President’s own blog, and the Chronicle of Higher Education blog.

d. Finally, on Thursday-Friday (May 1-2) I sent mass emails to individuals listed in the Groupwise address book as faculty (including instructors, lecturers, adjuncts, and emeritus professors), whose last names begin with the letters A, C, F, K, P, U, V, X, Y, and Z (I would have chosen more letters randomly but ran out of time). If I knew that the departments of individuals had already received the message via departmental listserves, I didn’t resend the message. If individuals were listed as program directors or administrators but not professors, I did not send it to them (because I did not have time to verify whether such people were also faculty).

3. If faculty responded and told me that they wanted to sign the petition but did not explicitly indicate that they were willing for their names to be made public, I did not include their names on the petition.

4. 210 faculty responded by the deadline, which means that the sample size was roughly 10% of the entire full-time and part-time faculty community at WVU.

5. I did include on the petition the names of six faculty members who contacted me after 6:00 PM on Saturday, May 3, but their votes were not counted in the tally described below.

Poll results

• As of 6:00 PM on Saturday, May 3, the numbers were 200 in favor of resignation and 10 opposed to resignation.
• Thus, according to this rough poll, 95% of faculty think that Garrison should resign, and 5% think that he should not.
• Of the 200 who support Garrison’s resignation, 104 are willing to have their names made public, and are identified on the attached petition. These people members of the following colleges: ECAS, B&E, AF&CS, HSC, Journalism, Law, Pharmacy, CEMR, and CCA. They include several department chairs and named chairs (but I didn’t do a rigorous count of all of these).

Worth noting:

• Over half of the faculty who responded did not want to make a public statement because of fear of recrimination. These faculty include not only untenured tenure-track faculty and those on renewable contracts, but also full professors with programmatic responsibilities. This climate of fear is tragic, and seemed most intense among HSC faculty, some of whom did not even want to provide their names to me (in which case I did not count their votes). My guess is that had I had time to structure a truly anonymous poll, much higher numbers of HSC faculty, and faculty in general, would have responded.
• 32 HSC faculty indicated their conviction that Garrison should resign; 3 indicated their view that he should not.
• 107 ECAS faculty (the largest college in the university) voted for Garrison’s resignation; in absolute terms, this is over 20% of all full- and part-time instructors in the college.
• 10 GTAs responded, but I did not count them among the faculty. Of these, 9 supported resignation and 1 did not.
• Of the 10 who oppose Garrison’s resignation, only half expressed an explicit willingness for their names to be made public: the concern for confidentiality among them is roughly the same as for those who favor resignation, indicating that this climate of fear extends both ways.
  
  

Text of the poll / petition announcement

Dear Faculty Colleagues (apologies if you’ve received this, and thanks for forwarding it if you see fit),

Given the current state of affairs on our campus, it seems important to me to assess the views of WVU faculty (and not just faculty senators) regarding the calls for President Garrison’s resignation.

On Monday, April 28, Kevin Leyden (Political Science) claimed that “most people believe Michael Garrison has performed his duties beyond expectations” (as cited in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 29, 2008 – Leyden’s actual words were somewhat different). This notion requires verification. If evidence can be shown to prove that most faculty believe Garrison’s resignation to be unnecessary, I for one will pledge not to speak another word about it. The last thing that I hope to do is to make an already terrible situation worse, against the wishes of most members of the faculty community.

But if most WVU faculty believe that the restoration of university’s integrity requires Garrison’s resignation (at a minimum), then the Faculty Senate, the BOG, and the President’s Office must be made aware of this fact. For that I reason I am willing to compile a list of faculty members who support the proposed Faculty Senate resolution calling upon President Garrison to resign, and those who do not.

If you email me, I will tabulate the results and have them verified by someone whose views on this matter are contrary to my own. For those who support the resignation resolution, I would be happy to add your name to what would in effect become a petition that could be distributed to members of the Faculty Senate prior to Monday’s meeting. I realize that this is a methodologically imperfect procedure, but at least it should provide a somewhat more accurate sense of faculty views concerning this issue that so closely affects our collective reputation. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO REGISTER YOUR OPINION WHILE REMAINING ANONYMOUS, ANSWER “FALSE” TO QUESTION #2.

If you’re so inclined, please send me an e-mail (matt.vester@mail.wvu.edu) by Saturday, May 3, at 6:00 PM, with true or false answers to the following statements:

1. I support Garrison’s resignation (T/F).

2. I am willing for my name to be made public (T/F).

Thanks for your help with this modest research project. Yours, Matt Vester (History Department, WVU)