Academic Freedom and Tenure: Collin College (Texas)

However, Vice President Jenkins’s statement did not cite examples of the “measures outside of shared governance . . . and normal communication channels” that formed the basis for her nonrenewal recommendation. Instead, she mentioned “one significant example” she discovered after she had made the recommendation, namely, a Facebook post Professor Jones had made on January 18, 2021, the day before the commencement of the spring semester. “In the post she ask[ed] readers to ‘consider emailing the college president Dr. Ma[t]kin, and asking for a simple solution, teachers that can go online until the vaccine is rolled out should go online.’”

Vice President Jenkins also took issue with Professor Jones’s assertion, in the same Facebook post, that the administration was “requiring many teachers and students to come back to class face to face.” Dr. Jenkins contended that this claim was false: that the administration was not forcing students and teachers to return; that administrators had not forced students to take face-to-face classes; that the college had a variety of in-person, online, and hybrid options; and that faculty members could request permission to teach online for health reasons. She noted that “over 90 full-time faculty members taught online in the fall 2020 and spring 2021 semesters.” Based on these representations, Dr. Jenkins averred, using bold font for emphasis, that “Professor Jones continued to engage in conduct that is misrepresentative, outside of the shared governance model, outside of normal channels of communication, and aimed at overriding the Board’s decisions and the college’s operational efforts designed to meet its vision and mission.”

On March 30, 2021, the RRP heard Professor Jones’s complaint, allocating forty-five minutes to the proceeding. On April 27, it issued a brief report that found her complaint “not substantiated.” Professor Jones’s long service at Collin College ended on May 14. Her attorney at the time appeared at the May 25 public meeting of the Collin board of trustees to ask that body to reconsider Professor Jones’s nonrenewal. It declined to do so.

On September 22, 2021, Professor Jones filed a federal lawsuit against Collin College, President Matkin, and Vice President Jenkins. On November 3, 2022, the parties reached a settlement agreement awarding Professor Jones’s legal counsel $145,000 and reinstating her to a two-year, fully online faculty instructor appointment beginning January 1, 2023. Upon its expiration, she will be ineligible for reappointment or reinstatement. Under the terms of settlement, Professor Jones is forbidden from serving on committees and from attending Faculty Council meetings. She will teach a reduced load of two or three classes a term and be paid $115,000 per year; she may elect to resign the position before the two years expire and be paid the remainder of her salary in a lump sum.

III. The Case of Professor Lora Burnett

Professor Burnett earned a PhD in humanities, with a concentration in the history of ideas, at the University of Texas at Dallas. After serving part time at Collin College from 2015 to 2017, she began a full-time appointment in fall 2019 in the history department at the Spring Creek and Wylie campuses. On February 25, 2021, in her second year of full-time service, Professor Burnett received a letter from Vice President Jenkins notifying her that her appointment would not be renewed for the upcoming academic year. The letter contained the following explanation:

Collin College expects its employees to conduct themselves in a professional manner in accordance with delineated standards of conduct, including those contained in both our Employee Standards of Conduct under Board Policy DH (Exhibit) and the Faculty Statement of Professional Ethics. As an employer, the college has a particular interest in maintaining a harmonious or disruptive-free [sic] working environment that does not include the type of conduct that you have chosen to engage in, such as insubordination, making private personnel issues public that impair the college’s operations, and personal criticisms of co-workers, supervisors, and/or those who merely disagree with you. As only one example, under the Faculty Statement of Professional Ethics, our faculty “should refrain from personal vilification; threatening and intimidating, or abusive language, . . .” and yet you failed to adhere to such a standard in attacking others. The college also has the right and interest to expect its employees to work cooperatively with the college’s administration and to follow directives or standards, particularly those intended to counsel or to help you continue in your employment at the college. You chose not to take advantage of those established procedures or resources. As a result, the recommendation for the non-renewal of your contract is based on our determination that you have failed to meet our delineated standards of conduct for employees and adherence to board policies.¹³

Vice President Jenkins’s letter does not identify the events that formed the basis for the administration’s decision. But the record of the administration’s disciplinary actions against Professor Burnett and the administration’s responses to her RRP complaint regarding the nonrenewal, filed on March 5, do provide that information.

A. Social Media Posts about the US Vice-Presidential Debate

On the evening of October 7, 2020, Professor Burnett posted commentary on Twitter during the vice-presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris. She was using her personal Twitter account, which included this disclaimer: “Tweets do not rep[resent] my employer.” One tweet recounted a conversation in which her spouse called Mr. Pence a “demon.” A few minutes later, Professor Burnett tweeted that “the moderator needs to talk over Mike Pence until he shuts his little demon mouth up.”¹⁴ She also retweeted a post that described the vice president as a “scumbag lying sonofabitch.” These posts received a great deal of attention both on- and offline, and over the next several days they were featured prominently on right-wing outlets, beginning with the conservative website Campus Reform and spreading, by Friday, October 9, to Fox News. In an article published a week after the debate, Professor Burnett described the torrent of threatening messages she had received, some of which were sent to her Collin email account. She responded to some of these messages from that account, copying President Matkin so that he could “see for himself the bilious vitriol that was flooding [her] work inbox.”¹⁵

Media coverage also prompted complaints to the Collin College administration. In an October 12 campus-wide email, President Matkin lamented the negative attention the college was receiving because “one of our faculty members chose to post some political and other statements on her social-media accounts.” He reported that he had received “contacts and calls from legislators,” and that while “a handful” of email messages urged him “to uphold ‘academic freedom’ and ‘free speech,’” most called for the faculty member’s dismissal. President Matkin’s message also shared a press release, presented here in its entirety:

Collin College is aware of the hateful, vile, andill-considered Twitter posts by one of its faculty members. As a community, we cannot and will not ignore them. We deeply apologize for the offense her comments have created. The faculty member’s expressed views are not consistent with the values of Collin College, particularly our Core Values of dignity and respect. Further, the views were not conveyed in any manner we wish members of our faculty and staff to express themselves.

Free expression is a cherished right guaranteed by our Constitution, but that does not lessen our individual responsibility to protect such rights through our own care and consideration. At the very least, in our free exercise of expression, professionalism should dictate decorum rather than resorting to profanity.

While this instance of unfortunate speech may be protected, incendiary comments such as these do not best serve our community, nor do they advance any positive solution. Hate and profanity are never welcome, especially during this time when we, as Americans, are searching for the best path forward for our Nation. Such comments make it that much more difficult for all who hold diverse views to come together, as our country so desperately needs. Notably, these comments are a setback to the hard work and dedication of our campus community and all that Collin College has achieved this year.

Faculty members, as representatives of their profession and of our distinguished institution, have a special obligation to remember that their public statements reflect on their unique roles both in educating students and modeling behavior, as well as on the college that provides them with the opportunity to educate. Hateful and profane speech expressed in any forum is not how we should strive to conduct ourselves.

In this challenging period, Collin College urges all to express themselves with grace, civility, and respect for others in a manner worthy of this Nation and the core values we share.¹⁶

Professor Burnett replied to President Matkin on the same mailing list nine minutes later: “Dear Dr. Matkin, It would have been kind, or at least professional, to have communicated with me first before publicly calling any of my writing ‘vile and ill-considered.’ Though you disavowed the intent to do so in this email—an email with scare-quotes around the ideas of academic freedom and free speech—by posting that statement you are, in effect, executing personnel policies in public. I don’t appreciate that, and it speaks more poorly of Collin College’s reputation than anything on my Twitter feed.” Five minutes later, President Matkin replied, only to Professor Burnett, “I will keep that in mind as we continue to receive negative publicity due to your continued actions. I will not be communicating with you further on this issue.”

The next day the administration issued Professor Burnett an “Employee Coaching Form.” Instructions on the form warn that, while its issuance is “not considered a level of formal discipline,” “failure to meet and sustain acceptable performance or behavior may result in formal disciplinary action.” In responding to Professor Burnett’s March 5 RRP complaint, both Ms. Daphne Babcock, associate dean for academic affairs and workforce development at the Wylie campus, and President Matkin characterized the actions described in that form as contributing to the decision not to renew her appointment.

The “constructive feedback” on the form centered not on Professor Burnett’s social media posts but on her use of her institutional email account:

This is to serve as acknowledgement that you areentitled to your views and may freely post these views on your personal social media. This is also to clearly communicate that you are not to use Collin College systems or resources to engage in private or personal conversations. If you are contacted through your Collin.edu account, you are not to respond from the college email system. You should use your personal email account [for] any and all personal communication. In addition, please refrain from copying what appears to be private or personal communications to others via their Collin.edu email accounts. The Collin.edu system is for professional communications and those related to the educational mission of the college.¹⁷

Although the coaching form does not specify which email messages prompted its issuance, President Matkin’s response to Professor Burnett’s RRP complaint, described in the next section of this report, makes it even more obvious that the message described above was the catalyst for his response.

On October 27, Professor Burnett emailed the board of trustees requesting that the board take down the president’s October 12 statement and issue a vigorous defense of her First Amendment rights. She received no response, and no such actions were taken.

Based on the president’s having asserted in his October 12 email message to the faculty that he had received “contacts and calls” from legislators, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a public records request for communications between state officials and President Matkin, which unearthed only one item: an exchange of ominous text messages between Dr. Matkin and state representative Jeff Leach of Allen, Texas, the location of a Collin campus.

LEACH: LD Burnet [sic] is paid with taxpayer dollars, correct?

MATKIN: I’m aware of the situation, Jeff, and will deal with it. Already on my radar before the current issue. She is definitely paid with taxpayer dollars.

LEACH: Ok, cool. I’m getting calls from folks. Not a ton . . . but a few . . . as it is starting to percolate on social media.

MATKIN: My inbox and the board is [sic] getting the same. Appreciate you. Good luck in November, friend. 

B. Tweets about Collin College's Response to COVID-19

On January 19, 2021, Associate Dean Babcock sent Professor Burnett a “Level 1” disciplinary warning.¹⁸ The warning came in response to another tweet from her personal account, posted six days earlier, in which she wrote, “Another @collincollege professor has died of COVID.”¹⁹ Her tweet linked to the online obituary for Mr. Ralph Gregory Hendrickson, which reported that Mr. Hendrickson had “worked for various colleges, including Hill College, Eastfield College in Mesquite, and Collin County Community College.”²⁰ Professor Burnett posted her tweet after seeing notice of Professor Hendrickson’s death on the Twitter account @FacesofCovid, noting the Collin reference in his obituary, looking up his RateMyProfessors.com page, and finding a rating for him from a Collin student from fall 2020.²¹

However, Professor Hendrickson had not taught at Collin College for several years prior to his death, a fact that the administration noted in its disciplinary warning. The warning stated that the obituary “did not indicate that [Mr. Hendrickson] was, in fact, a current professor at the college or that he died as a result of COVID.” It continued, “Had you first verified the accuracy of the information, you would have learned that Mr. Hendrickson is not a Collin College professor and, in fact, has not taught at the college for several years.” The warning urged Professor Burnett to “verify objective facts included in [her] publicly posted statements,” citing a provision of the Collin policy on employee rights and privileges that states that faculty members should “strive for accuracy when speaking or writing as private citizens.”

Shortly before receiving her February 25 nonrenewal notice, Professor Burnett had exchanged tweets with state representative Jeff Leach, the politician who had exchanged text messages with President Matkin the previous fall. After Professor Burnett replied to one of Mr. Leach’s tweets, he responded: “The fact that you are no longer paid and your maniacal, obscene rhetoric [is] no longer supported with Collin County taxpayer dollars is a win! A BIG WIN!” When Professor Burnett informed him on Twitter that she was in fact still employed at Collin College, Mr. Leach tweeted an image of a ticking clock. Burnett received her nonrenewal notice a week later.²²

On March 5, Professor Burnett filed a complaint contesting the level 1 disciplinary warning and the nonreappointment decision, alleging that both actions were “[in] retaliation for [her] speech as a private citizen.” Her complaint, like that of Professor Jones, was reviewed by an RRP.

In her written response to Professor Burnett’s complaint, Associate Dean Babcock, citing the two incidents described above, stated that she had based the nonrenewal decision on Professor Burnett’s alleged failure to meet the “employee standards of conduct” set out in Collin College’s “Code of Professional Ethics” and “Faculty Statement of Professional Ethics.” She also noted that Professor Burnett had twice declined to meet with her without an attorney and that Professor Burnett had posted to Twitter about the administration’s actions against her “even though they were a private personnel matter.”

In his submission, President Matkin wrote that he had accepted Vice President Jenkins’s nonrenewal recommendation because “Professor Burnett chose to engage in conduct that was insubordinate and . . . did not meet the standards of conduct expected of our Collin employees as provided in Board policy.” He offered the following explanation:

In one instance, for example, Professor Burnett was insubordinate when on October 12, 2020, she chose to respond to an email I sent to the college, which did not specifically name her, in an attempt to quell the external demands for her termination from the college. In responding to me directly, Professor Burnett also purposely included eight college email distribution lists. I replied to her and stated that I would no longer be communicating with her directly on that issue. From then on, Professor Burnett chose not to engage internally with her Dean or Campus Provost. Instead, Professor Burnett aired her private personnel concerns in public, rather than attempting to address or redress them internally. I also recall that Professor Burnett copied me on personal communications she chose to send over the college’s email system related to her Twitter posts. She copied me on some of those emails or encouraged other individuals to contact me directly about her posts. Overall, I reflected on the type of personal attacks and threats that Professor Burnett directed at individuals, including members of our Board of Trustees.²³ That kind of behavior does not align with the college’s standards of employee conduct or expectations of professional or ethical conduct by our faculty. 

On April 21, 2021, the RRP determined that Professor Burnett’s complaint was “not substantiated,” and her appointment at Collin College expired on May 14, 2021.

In October 2021, Professor Burnett filed a federal complaint against Collin College and several of its administrative officers. In January 2022, Professor Burnett accepted an “offer of judgment” from the administration that included payment of $70,000 plus attorneys’ fees and court costs.

IV. The Case of Professor Michael Phillips²⁴

Dr. Phillips earned a master’s degree at the University of California at Riverside and a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, both in history. His research focuses on the history of race relations in Texas, and his first book, White Metropolis, which in 2007 won the Texas Historical Commission’s T. R. Fehrenbach Award, describes the history of racism in Dallas. In fall 2007, he was appointed professor of history at Collin College’s Plano campus. When Professor Jones’s nonrenewal in May 2021 created a need for new leadership in the Collin chapter of the Texas Faculty Association, Professor Phillips assumed the vice presidency.

On January 28, 2022, in his fourteenth year of full-time service and the final year of a three-year appointment, Professor Phillips received notice of nonrenewal. Although the notice letter provided no reasons for the decision, the previous August Dr. Kristen Streater, dean of academic affairs and workforce development, and Dr. Michaelle O’Quin, associate dean of academic affairs, had recommended against his reappointment. In a “Recommendation for Faculty Contract Extension” dated August 31, 2021, they had cited two bases for their negative recommendation: (1) Professor Phillips’s “ongoing failure to use the internal communication processes to address concerns he has with the organization’s policies and protocols after multiple discussions and coaching”—a phrase that echoes the reasons repeatedly cited in the previous two cases; and (2) “student complaints related to [students’] perception of bias by Dr. Phillips’s expression of his personal views in the learning environment, as evidenced by student evaluation comments and complaints.”

Professor Phillips reported to the AAUP’s staff that, at an August 31 meeting to discuss their recommendation, the two deans informed him that under Collin’s policies he could appeal to an RRP and separately submit an application for a multiyear contract to the Council on Excellence (COE), an elected faculty body authorized to make recommendations concerning three-year contracts for Collin faculty members who have held three consecutive one-year appointments. They also informed him that they would develop a performance improvement plan before the senior administration made its final decision in January. On October 27, Associate Dean O’Quin provided Professor Phillips with that plan, which directed him to use “internal communication processes” for conveying his concerns about institutional policy and to “explore . . . resources on teaching strategies” for creating “a comfortable space for controversial discussions.”

On September 14, 2021, Professor Phillips filed a complaint with an RRP concerning the deans’ nonrenewal recommendation, alleging that the grounds for the action violated his First Amendment rights as well as Collin College policies on academic freedom. He also successfully petitioned the COE to recommend a new multiyear contract. However, under Collin’s policies, COE recommendations, like those of the dean and associate dean, are forwarded to the vice president and provost, who make their own recommendations to the president. The senior administrators rejected the COE’s recommendation.

It is evident, based on our interviews and review of the documents available to us, that the following events led to the administration’s decision not to renew Professor Phillips’s appointment.

A. Confederate Monuments Letter, Redux

As mentioned in the discussion of Professor Jones's case, on August 4, 2017, the Dallas Morning News published “Dallas’ Confederate Memorials Scream ‘White Supremacy,’” a letter authored by Professor Phillips and Mr. Edward H. Sebesta (an independent scholar who writes about the neo-Confederate movement). The letter called for the removal of Confederate monuments in the Dallas–Fort Worth area and for their replacement with representations of figures from US history who fought against racial injustice. Professor Phillips noted in his legal complaint that, in an August 22 meeting, Dr. Mary McRae, vice president and provost of the Wylie campus, and Dr. Millie Black, the then dean, gave him the same warning that administrators would relay to Professor Jones two days later: including his Collin College affiliation and his college email address in the published letter violated board policy because it created the impression that he was speaking on behalf of the college. Professor Phillips further noted that administrators told him, as they would Professor Jones, that the letter “made the college look bad” in the eyes of those who disagreed with the letter’s recommendations.²⁵ He was shown a memorandum about faculty members’ stating their institutional affiliations and was asked to add his initials to acknowledge having read it.

No disciplinary action was taken against Professor Phillips at that time, and his appointment was renewed for another three-year term in 2019. But an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education recounts an ominous discussion with President Matkin that took place shortly afterward:

Phillips said he later had a conversation with Matkin about Confederate statues, and the president also expressed concerns that the professor’s outspokenness could backfire.

Phillips said the discussion had an ominous tone.

“He just kind of smirked, and that’s when he said, ‘I just want to make sure you can keep doing your job.’”

In a written response [to questions from the Chronicle], Matkin stated that he did not recall “this purported conversation from 2017” and that he had never threatened the man. Despite Phillips’s “recurring ad hominem campaigns,” Matkin said he had approved renewals of the professor’s faculty contracts.²⁶

B. Washington Post Interview

On August 3, 2019, Patrick Wood Crusius was arrested for carrying out a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. He had killed twenty-three people and injured twenty-three others in what has been widely characterized as an act of domestic terrorism and the deadliest attack on Hispanic people in modern American history. Mr. Crusius had been a Collin College student for the two academic years preceding the attack. On the day of the shooting, President Matkin issued a statement acknowledging Mr. Crusius’s matriculation at Collin, noting that the Collin community was “saddened and horrified by the news” and professing “heartfelt concern for the victims of the shooting and their loved ones.” The following day the president emailed the statement to the Collin College community, directing recipients to “refer all press inquiries” to the president’s office or public relations.

Shortly thereafter, Professor Phillips agreed to an interview with a Washington Post reporter interested in Professor Phillips’s comments on the racial environment out of which Mr. Crusius had emerged. The story, published on August 9, contained the following paragraph: “Michael Phillips, a Collin College professor and historian of race relations in the Dallas–Fort Worth region, said some residents . . . espouse[d] racist sentiments. Shortly after the 2016 election, a flier in a Collin County town warned ‘Muslims, Indians, Blacks, and Jews’ to leave Texas and ‘go back to where [they] came from’ or face ‘torture starting now.’ While Crusius was a student at Collin College, fliers appeared on campus and in mailboxes around the county that spoke of dangers posed by immigrants, arguing that they are crime-prone and a threat to white women. Other fliers warned of harm from interracial dating, Phillips recalled.”²⁷ 

On August 14, Dr. Kirsten Streater, then associate dean for academic and workforce development on the Plano campus, met with Professor Phillips to discuss the interview. In an email exchange later the same day memorializing their conversation, Professor Phillips acknowledged that he had spoken with the reporter, but he also told the dean that he had asked that the reporter not identify him as a Collin College professor but only as “an author and scholar on race relations.”

Dr. Streater advised Professor Phillips that, “going forward, if any member of the media contacts you about an event or incident related to the college, you are to direct them to contact the Collin College Public Relations Office and the President’s Office. Regarding the current incident, you should have followed President Matkin’s email directive. . . . I will be briefing [Provost] Barnes-Tilley about our conversation this afternoon.”

Professor Phillips replied, “My interpretation of the email sent by Dr. Matkin was that we were not supposed to talk about the shooting itself or the student. I did not interpret that to mean that I could not respond to questions pertaining to my area of expertise. I did not believe that my comments were in violation of that directive, but I now understand that this view is not shared by the administration, and I will [act] according to my understanding based on today’s conversation.” He continued, “Upon reflection, however, I am concerned that the [administration’s] response to the Washington Post story has a chilling effect on the faculty’s free speech and is anomalous at institutions of higher learning. My concerns aside, I will follow the directive.”

Several weeks later, on September 3, the administration issued Professor Phillips an “Employee Coaching Form” documenting the meeting with Associate Dean Streater and stating, “Expectations moving forward are [for you] to follow the President’s directives when approached by the media.” At the end of the academic year, Associate Dean Streater raised the incident in Professor Phillips’s annual performance review: “As the fall semester began, he was interviewed by the Washington Post in spite of a directive by the college president’s office to all Collin personnel to not speak to the press following the mass shooting in El Paso.”

C. Social Media Posts about the College's COVID-19 Policies

In his complaint to the RRP, Professor Phillips reported having met with Dr. Barnes-Tilley in June 2020, at her request, to discuss two posts he had made on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. According to Professor Phillips, neither of these social media accounts listed his Collin College affiliation. In his complaint, Professor Phillips summarized the first post as follows: “I described a nightmare I had in which I was at the college (unidentified in the post) and students were unmasked, leaning into each other’s faces, and walking shoulder-to-shoulder. In that post, since deleted because of the intimidation I felt from the administration, I concluded, ‘I’m afraid this is what is going to happen at my college this fall.’” He described the second as merely stating, “That feeling when your employer doesn’t care about your health and safety.”

Although the administration did not discipline Professor Phillips for these posts at that time, Dr. Streater referred to both in Professor Phillips’s 2019–20 performance review. She wrote, “As the COVID shut down occurred and the college’s re-opening plans were being discussed, Dr. Phillips published inaccurate information on his public Facebook page.”

But he was disciplined for two posts he made a year later. At an August 11, 2021, meeting of Professor Phillips’s division, Dr. O’Quin, who had succeeded Dr. Streater as associate dean following the latter’s promotion to dean, gave a presentation regarding the college’s COVID-19 policies. One of her PowerPoint slides stated that, because of an executive order from Texas governor Greg Abbott, Collin College “cannot have any written language (signs, syllabus) anywhere requesting/requiring/recommending (verb choice doesn’t matter) masks” and that “we also cannot encourage folks to wear them in person.” Professor Phillips posted a photograph of this slide on Facebook, commenting that the college’s policy was based on a misinterpretation of the governor’s order.

In another Facebook entry about the same presentation, posted a week later, Phillips wrote, “Faculty were told to not encourage mask use or talk about [its] importance. Faculty were told the state could fine the college if they mentioned masks. Simply having information on a website that masks are available or having them in the room is not the same thing as having role models encourage potentially life-saving behavior. Faculty believe they could get in trouble if they encourage masks. Nothing was ever said by the college administration to contradict this impression.” In an August 20, 2021, Facebook post, Professor Phillips wrote, “Because of my childhood diabetes and the medication I’m taking that lowers immunity, I was eligible for a third Moderna shot. I’ll need it this fall. I’ve been assigned to teach two classes with 36 students, one with 29, one with 18, and one with 17. Before the pandemic the college usually capped enrollment at 30 students.”

In response to these posts, Dean Streater and Associate Dean O’Quin issued Professor Phillips a “Level 1 Disciplinary Warning” on August 27, four days before they recommended against the renewal of his appointment. After noting the informal meeting Professor Phillips had had with Dr. Barnes-Tilley in June 2020, the warning stated, “This continued conduct of ignoring requests by supervisors constitutes insubordination as defined by Board policy [on termination of appointments]. . . . Additionally, this conduct also violates Collin College’s Code of Professional Ethics, . . . specifically the items listed below.” The document then listed the following two standards: “The Professional Educator shall work to enhance cooperation and collegiality among students, faculty, administrators, and other personnel,” and “The Professional Educator shall observe the stated policies and procedures of the College District, reserving the right to seek revision in a judicious and appropriate manner.”

In her statement to the RRP, Dean Streater emphasized the necessity of private rather than public communication: “The way to solve concerns at the College is not to raise them on public social media outlets. The way to solve concerns at the College is to raise them through the College’s internal communication channels, procedures, and protocols so that they can be addressed by those administrators who can create solutions. I have asked Dr. Phillips repeatedly to do this, and he has not done so. It was because of this repeated pattern of conduct that I felt a contract extension was not warranted for Dr. Phillips.”

D. Alleged Bias in Teaching

By all accounts, Professor Phillips’s record as a classroom instructor was strong. In the 2020–21 annual evaluation that immediately preceded his nonrenewal, Associate Dean O’Quin assigned a rating of “Meets the Expected Level of Performance”—the higher of the two ratings available—on every assessment item, including those related to instruction. However, as noted previously, Dean Streater and Associate Dean O’Quin’s August 31, 2021, nonrenewal recommendation cited student complaints about Professor Phillips’s allegedly biased “expression of his personal views.” In the performance improvement plan presented to Professor Phillips on October 27, Associate Dean O’Quin stated that “student evaluations reveal Dr. Phillips demonstrated a pattern of classroom bias on controversial issues as discussed in his 2020–2021 Annual Appraisal.” Dr. O’Quin was apparently referring to her comments on Professor Phillips’s student evaluations in the “Areas for Development” section of that evaluation: “While a number of Dr. Phillips’s students were appreciative of his content delivery and his engaging lectures, student comments reflect that Professor Phillips struggled with presenting content in a manner that could be perceived as objective and unbiased.” Dr. O’Quin then quoted three complaints selected from his student evaluations: 

• “I censored my writing and work due to fear of retaliation of my rights and beliefs due to his strong views that were clearly expressed in his video lectures.”

• “The bias is strong with this one. I have heard plenty of jabs at President Trump and America. No matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on, you shouldn’t let you’re [sic] political bias show in a HISTORY class!”

• “The instructor also acts as if America is as bad as it was in the history lessons. Is there still racism? of course. But America has made vast improvements to end racism since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To act as if America will always be racist and is as bad as it was in the past is very disingenuous and is teaching a pretty morbid lessen [sic] to young students.”

Dr. O’Quin concluded, “Dr. Phillips is expected to present content in his courses in a manner that provides a safe environment where students’ perspectives can be considered and in a manner that cannot easily be perceived as biased.”²⁸

Professor Phillips told the investigating committee that, in response to the administration’s directive prohibiting faculty members from encouraging students to wear masks, he decided that on the first day of the fall 2021 semester he would approach the topic obliquely. In all five of his classes, he discussed historical responses to previous pandemics, including the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. He discussed antimasking movements from the second decade of the twentieth century, including the effects those efforts had had on attempts to mitigate the pandemic, and he encouraged students to learn from these historical examples.

Associate Dean O’Quin was evidently aware of Professor Phillips’s strategy before she decided to recommend against renewing his appointment, although she does not specifically mention his promasking efforts in her August 31 nonrenewal recommendation. On September 17, Dr. O’Quin met again with Professor Phillips to discuss his conduct on the first day of classes. Less than two weeks later, on September 29, she issued Professor Phillips another disciplinary warning. This one does discuss his indirect attempts to encourage his students to wear masks:

On August 24, 2021, [I] learned that some of Dr. Phillips’s students were upset and confused about Collin’s mask policy based on what they reported Dr. Phillips said in class. Students also complained of comments Dr. Phillips made of those who identify as Conservative. The students reported that they felt targeted by the statements Dr. Phillips made on the first day of class.

[I] investigated these concerns and students confirmed the statements were made. One student indicated Dr. Phillips mentioned that students should be wearing masks and made a comment about those who chose not to wear them. That comment made the students feel degraded, embarrassed, singled out, bullied, and shamed. . . . One student reported that they contemplated dropping the class. Additionally, students reported that Dr. Phillips made a statement about Conservatives being racists which made them uncomfortable. Based on what has been reported, it is clear that several students felt targeted on the first day of class.²⁹

Associate Dean O’Quin charged that this conduct violated “Collin’s Core Values, including dignity and respect,” as defined in board policy. When interviewed by this investigating committee, Professor Phillips sharply disputed these allegations: he had not, he said, suggested that political conservatives were racist, and he had assured students that they would not be penalized for not wearing masks.

As previously noted, Professor Phillips filed a complaint with an RRP on September 14, alleging that his deans’ recommendation against renewal of his appointment violated his academic freedom and his First Amendment rights. The panel heard his case on October 6 and on October 27 found his allegations “not substantiated.” He appealed that decision to Vice President and Provost McRae, who on December 17 affirmed the RRP’s finding. Unlike Professors Jones and Burnett, Professor Phillips did not file a complaint regarding the final nonrenewal decision issued in January 2022, believing that doing so would be an exercise in futility. His appointment expired in May 2022.

In a remarkable development related to Professor Phillips’s case, the AAUP’s staff was contacted on May 26, 2022, by Professor Benjamin H. Johnson, president of the AAUP chapter at Loyola University Chicago (LUC). In an effort to support Professor Phillips, Professor Johnson had sent Collin’s regional accrediting body a petition, signed by eighty-one historians who held appointments at Texas institutions or who studied the history of Texas, asking it to investigate the Collin administration’s “questionable” record on academic freedom. Professor Johnson reported to the AAUP’s staff that President Matkin had contacted Dr. Jo Ann Rooney, LUC’s president, to ask whether Professor Johnson, in his communications regarding Collin College was speaking as a representative of Loyola University.³⁰ Professor Johnson also informed the staff that, at President Rooney’s behest, two LUC deans had met with him and had asked him to clarify that he was acting in his individual capacity, which he did in a brief email message. 

V. The Association's Involvement

Professor Burnett contacted the AAUP's staff in July 2020 for advice about the Collin administration’s plans for reopening during the pandemic. Her message mentioned the Faculty Council’s COVID-19 resolution and general faculty concerns about the state of shared governance. The staff replied with an explanation of Association-supported standards on academic governance and a link to AAUP resources on pandemic-related issues. Professor Burnett contacted the staff again on October 12, following the turbulent weekend when conservative outlets’ negative coverage of her tweets concerning the vice-presidential debate provoked a torrent of harassment. She wrote that she feared that the administration planned to take severe disciplinary action against her, perhaps terminating her appointment. The next day she notified the AAUP’s staff that she had received the “Employee Coaching Form” mentioned above, and she asked for advice concerning AAUP-supported procedural standards for dismissal. The staff advised her accordingly and sent her AAUP resources on targeted harassment.

Professor Jones contacted the staff on January 28, 2021, the day she received notice of nonrenewal. On February 18, Professor Audra Heaslip, like Professor Jones a full-time faculty member whose length of service had exceeded the Association-recommended seven-year maximum probationary period, contacted the staff to discuss the administration’s termination of her services for stated reasons similar to those given Professor Jones. On March 2, the staff wrote President Matkin, copying the chair of the board of trustees and others, to convey the Association’s concern that the administration’s actions in both cases appeared to be dismissals of postprobationary faculty members without affordance of academic due process and for reasons that seemed to violate their academic freedom.

Shortly thereafter, on March 17, Professor Burnett informed the staff that she had received notice of nonreappointment. On March 20, while still awaiting a reply to its first letter concerning Professors Heaslip and Jones, the staff sent President Matkin a follow-up letter reiterating the AAUP’s concerns in those cases and conveying additional concerns about Professor Burnett’s case.

With no reply evidently forthcoming, the staff sent a third letter to President Matkin on April 16, advising him that “absent a resolution or substantive response” to the Association’s concerns, the staff would recommend to the AAUP’s executive director that she authorize an investigation into the three cases. On May 12, the staff notified the Collin administration that an investigation had been authorized.

On May 18, President Matkin sent his first reply to the staff. His letter emphasized that Collin College has no formal tenure system, that the college was under no legal obligation to comply with AAUP-supported standards, and that the college’s regulations recognized faculty members’ academic freedom. He characterized the staff’s communication with the administration as “nothing more than an attempt to exert undue influence” on the college and its trustees, and he directed the staff to send all future correspondence to the college’s general counsel “and not to any Board member or employee of the College.”

Shortly before the investigation was announced, Professor Heaslip suspended her participation on the advice of her attorney. She suggested that she might be able to rejoin later in the summer, but on June 30, she informed the staff that “due to the legal agreements [she had] made with the college, [she would not] be able to participate in any way in the AAUP investigation.” On June 14, as interviews with the investigating committee were being scheduled, Professor Jones informed the staff that she was also suspending her participation in the investigation, on the advice of the same attorney.

As a result of Professor Heaslip’s and Professor Jones’s withdrawal, the AAUP’s executive director suspended the investigation in July 2021 pending further developments.

In early February 2022, the staff became aware of Professor Phillips’s case from media reports. When the staff contacted him to ascertain whether he wished to seek the Association’s assistance, he responded affirmatively and agreed to participate in the investigation if it were reactivated. Having also learned from press accounts that Professor Jones had changed attorneys, the staff emailed her to inquire whether she would be willing to resume her participation. She readily assented. When the staff reached out to Professor Burnett with the same question, she confirmed that she, too, was interested in renewing her participation.

On March 28, the staff wrote Collin’s general counsel to convey the Association’s concern that the administration’s action against Professor Phillips had been effected in apparent violation of Association-supported procedural standards and principles of academic freedom. The letter also informed the Collin administration that, with the renewed participation of Professors Jones and Burnett, the investigation had resumed.

The general counsel’s May 3 reply reiterated the points President Matkin had made in his earlier letter and stated that the administration would decline to participate in the investigation: “The College will defend [itself against] the allegations in court and not before the AAUP.”

The undersigned investigating committee convened in June 2022 and conducted a series of virtual interviews with six former and current Collin College faculty members, including the three subject faculty members, in July 2022. This report is based on those interviews, press reports, and examination of the extensive documentation.³¹

A. Procedural Concerns

All three cases directly implicate core AAUP-supported procedural standards.

1. Summary Dismissals of Professors Jones and Phillips

As previously noted, Collin College does not grant indefinite tenure; instead, all faculty members serve on renewable term appointments. However, under the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, jointly formulated by the AAUP and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), all faculty members “should have permanent or continuous tenure” following “the expiration of a probationary period,” which the statement sets at seven years. Thus, as Regulation 1b of the AAUP’s derivative Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure states, “With the exception of special appointments clearly limited to a brief association with the institution, all full-time faculty appointments are of two kinds: (1) probationary appointments; (2) appointments with continuous tenure.” Hence, full-time faculty members reappointed beyond the maximum probationary period have de facto tenure, regardless of whether their institutions regard them as tenured. As the AAUP’s staff emphasized in its communications with President Matkin, the AAUP accordingly considers Professor Jones, with almost nine years of full-time service at the time of her “nonrenewal,” and Professor Phillips, with nearly fourteen at the time of his, as having attained tenured status. Since the AAUP understands tenure to be an indefinite appointment terminable only for cause, or under extraordinary circumstances because of a bona fide financial exigency or program discontinuance, a tenured appointment is not subject to renewal or nonrenewal. It can only be terminated. If the basis for termination is related to professional fitness, as is it was in these two cases, the termination must be preceded by a dismissal-for-cause hearing.

AAUP-recommended procedural standards governing such a hearing are set forth in Regulation 5 of the Recommended Institutional Regulations. They entail an adjudicative hearing of record before an elected faculty body, in which the burden of demonstrating adequate cause for dismissal rests with the administration. Such cause must be “directly and substantially” related to faculty members’ fitness in their “professional capacities as teachers or researchers,” as established by a standard of “clear and convincing evidence in the record considered as a whole.”

As the college does not grant tenure, no Collin College faculty member is entitled under the college’s regulations to such a procedure prior to involuntary separation from service. As a result, Professors Jones and Phillips availed themselves of the only recourse available—the dubious opportunity to file a grievance against the administration with an administrative body, the Resolution Review Panel, and to attempt to persuade that body, on the narrow grounds of “violation of college policy,” that the administration had acted improperly, a difficult, if not impossible, bar to surpass.

This investigating committee therefore concludes that the administration’s actions to terminate the services of Professors Jones and Phillips by nonrenewing their appointments were summary dismissals effected in violation of the joint 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

2. Terminal Notive or Severance Salary

Regulation 8 (“Terminal Salary or Notice”) of the Recommended Institutional Regulations provides that, unless “there has been a finding that the conduct which justified dismissal involved moral turpitude,” tenured faculty members whose appointments are terminated for cause are entitled to one year of notice or severance salary. Moreover, “on the recommendation of the faculty hearing committee or the president, the governing board, in determining what, if any, payments will be made beyond the effective date of dismissal, may take into account the length and quality of service of the faculty member.” Both Professor Jones, in her ninth year of service, and Professor Phillips, in his fourteenth, were notified in January that their appointments would end in May, and neither received any severance pay. The stated reasons for dismissing them, moreover, did not even approach moral turpitude, which the AAUP defines as “behavior that goes beyond warranting discharge and is so utterly blameworthy as to make it inappropriate to require the offering of a year’s teaching or pay.”³² This committee accordingly finds that, in the cases of Professors Jones and Phillips, the Collin administration violated AAUP-supported standards on notice or severance salary.

3. Nonrenewal of Professor Burnett's Appointment³³ 

At the time she received notice of nonrenewal, Professor Burnett was serving the second of two one-year renewable term appointments as a full-time faculty member. Hence, under Association-supported standards, her appointment was probationary for tenure, regardless of how her institution classified it, and any nonrenewal was accordingly governed by Regulations 2, “Probationary Appointments,” and 10, “Complaints of Violation of Academic Freedom or of Discrimination in Nonreappointment,” of the Recommended Institutional Regulations. Under these regulations, full-time faculty members whose term appointments are not renewed are entitled to (1) timely written notice of their nonrenewal decision (Regulation 2c): three months for faculty members in their first year of service, six months for faculty members in their second year, and twelve months for faculty members in their third year of service and beyond; (2) a statement of reasons for the nonrenewal, in writing if so requested (Regulation 2e); and (3) the opportunity to petition an appropriate elected faculty committee to review their allegations that the decision was based upon inadequate consideration, was discriminatory, or violated their academic freedom (Regulations 2g and 10). Under Regulation 10, if the faculty member makes a prima facie argument that the adverse decision was the result of considerations that violated the faculty member’s academic freedom, the faculty review committee may hold a formal hearing on the issue in which the administration will bear the burden of proof.

Collin College regulations governing nonrenewal fall far short of these standards. (1) At Collin, the schedule for notice of nonrenewal is determined not by the length of faculty members’ service but by the length of their current appointment: notice is owed by January 31 (four months of notice) for full-time faculty members serving on three-year appointments and by March 1 (three months) for those serving on oneyear appointments, even for those who have served for decades. (2) There is no requirement that the faculty member be provided with reasons for nonrenewal, much less in writing. (3) Collin faculty members who wish to appeal a nonrenewal decision are not entitled to petition an elected faculty committee for review, but, as evident in all three cases under discussion, have recourse only to Collin’s general complaint policy, under which faculty members’ complaints are heard by an RRP consisting of three administrative officers.³⁴

Professor Burnett did receive written reasons for her nonrenewal. However, the February 25 notice of nonrenewal she received was more than two months past the AAUP’s December 15 deadline for full-time faculty members in their second year of service. Moreover, Professor Burnett was not afforded the opportunity to petition an elected faculty committee to review her allegations that the administration based its nonrenewal decision on considerations that violated her academic freedom. This committee finds that, by not affording Professor Burnett timely notice of nonrenewal and, even more egregiously, by denying her the opportunity to ask a body of professional peers to assess her academic freedom claim, the Collin College administration disregarded the 1940 Statement of Principles and Regulations 2 and 10 of the derivative Recommended Institutional Regulations. 

B. Academic Freedom

Under the 1940 Statement, faculty members are entitled “to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results”; “to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject”; and to freedom “from institutional censorship or discipline when they speak or write as citizens” (that is, freedom of extramural speech or utterance). As the AAUP’s Protecting an Independent Faculty Voice: Academic Freedom after Garcetti v. Ceballos (2009) notes, faculty members’ intramural speech—that is, speech concerning “any matter of institutional policy or action”—also falls under the protection of academic freedom.

Like the 1940 Statement, the Collin College statement on “employee expression and academic freedom” bases its justification of academic freedom on promoting the common good. And, like the 1940 Statement, the language of which it echoes, it calls for faculty members to be protected in their capacities as teachers, researchers, and citizens, though not to the same extent as the 1940 Statement, nor does the Collin statement acknowledge that faculty members’ intramural speech is protected. In the classroom, faculty members “have the freedom to discuss any controversial matter and to voice opinions within areas of their professional competence. At the same time, they have an obligation to acquaint students with other scholarly opinions on the subject” (the 1940 Statement does not limit faculty members’ classroom speech to “areas of professional competence” or require them to “acquaint students with other scholarly opinions on the subject”). Regarding extramural speech, Collin’s policy states (in language similar to that of the 1940 Statement), “Outside the classroom, faculty members are free from institutional censorship or discipline for exercising their rights as private citizens to express themselves freely on matters of public concern, to associate with persons or groups as they so choose, and to participate in political or other kinds of activities.”

1. Extramural Speech

In the cases under investigation, the subject faculty members found themselves in trouble in part because of speech exercised in their capacity as citizens and thus, under the 1940 Statement, protected under principles of academic freedom. The administration had taken Professor Jones to task for including her institutional affiliation with her signature on the Confederate monuments letter, an instance of extramural expression acknowledged by Vice President Jenkins to have been one basis for the nonrenewal. Another was the alleged failure of Professor Jones, as an officer of the Texas Faculty Association, to heed administrators’ warnings against allowing Collin College to be named in any connection with the TFA. In the case of Professor Burnett, what President Matkin characterized as her “hateful, vile, and ill-considered Twitter posts” during the US vice-presidential debate sparked the chain of events leading to her nonrenewal. The administration’s stated basis for the nonreappointment of Professor Phillips did not include his coauthorship of the Confederate monuments letter (though we find it odd that the administration cited Professor Jones’s mere endorsement of the letter as a basis for her nonrenewal) or his granting the Washington Post interview. Nevertheless, he was warned—formally with regard to the interview—not to repeat these alleged offenses.

The Association’s foundational pronouncement on extramural expression is the Committee A Statement on Extramural Utterances (1964). It articulates the following “controlling principle”: “A faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position. Extramural utterances rarely bear upon the faculty member’s fitness for the position. Moreover, a final decision should take into account the faculty member’s entire record as a teacher and scholar.” Protecting an Independent Faculty Voice goes further, asserting that freedom of extramural speech should exempt professors from any “institutional discipline or restraint, save in response to fundamental violations of professional ethics or statements that suggest disciplinary incompetence.” In other words, under principles of academic freedom, faculty members should be sanctioned for their extramural speech only when that speech demonstrates professional unfitness. For this reason, Association-supported procedural standards accord faculty peers, rather than administrative officers, the primary role in reviewing disciplinary actions against faculty members. As Collin’s policies, regrettably, do not accord the faculty that role, the administration reviewed its own disciplinary actions against the three faculty members.

Had the Collin administration followed AAUP-supported procedural standards, its charges against Professors Jones and Phillips would have been heard by an elected faculty committee, with the administration’s having to bear the burden of demonstrating that these instances of extramural speech warranted dismissal. Had such a procedure been afforded them, this committee ventures to say that no duly constituted body of faculty peers would have found “by clear and convincing evidence in the record considered as a whole” that these instances of extramural speech constituted such a gross violation of professional ethics as to justify dismissing these two long-serving faculty members from the Collin College faculty. In this committee’s judgment, while some of their utterances may have involved minor unintentional errors, none of them constituted “fundamental violations of professional ethics or . . . suggest[ed] disciplinary incompetence.”

Had the administration observed AAUP-supported standards in the case of Professor Burnett, it would have afforded her the opportunity to ask an elected faculty committee for review. Under those standards, as previously explained, if she were able to make the case that the nonreappointment was based on considerations that violated her academic freedom, the burden of proof would have shifted to the administration to provide sufficient evidence for the decision. Some of her extramural expressions may have been profane, confrontational, or offensive; as with her colleagues, some may have involved unintentional errors. Nevertheless, this committee is not persuaded—nor does it believe that the general academic community would be so persuaded—that her extramural statements demonstrated professional unfitness.

This committee, furthermore, finds implausible the administration’s denial that its actions were based on the political or controversial nature of the faculty members’ extramural speech. This denial is difficult to take seriously when viewed in a wider context that includes Dr. Collins’s diatribe against “ultraliberal, anticapitalism, socialistic professors”; administrators’ expressions of concern that faculty members’ remarks about Confederate memorials would “make the college look bad”; the administration’s eagerness not to be associated with an organization (the TFA) “whose mission and goals are focused on protecting employees’ rights, advancing the tenure system, [and] advancing fair and equitable compensation”; and President Matkin’s remarks about Professor Burnett’s vice-presidential debate tweets, including his conveying to a state legislator that he was “aware” of the situation, that Professor Burnett was “already on his radar,” and that he would “deal with it.”

In all three cases, the failure to afford the due process required under normative academic standards means that a critical allegation made by Professors Jones, Burnett, and Phillips—that the Collin College administration’s actions against them violated their academic freedom relating to extramural speech—stands unrebutted.

2. Extramural Speech and Institutional Affiliation

An unusual feature of the cases that led to this investigation, especially the case of Professor Jones, is the administration’s insistence that faculty members take extreme measures to disassociate their appointing institution from any organizations or undertakings of which the administration disapproves. As this report has described, one of the grounds for the action against Professor Jones was that she had “misused the college’s name” by allowing her institutional affiliation to be included with her signature on the Confederate monuments letter and by failing to expunge every mention of Collin College from the TFA website and Facebook page.

The rule cited by Collin administrators in justifying their action in this regard was the following (from the college’s academic freedom policy): “When faculty and support staff speak or write as private citizens, however, they must bear in mind that their actions will inevitably be judged by the public and reflect upon their profession and institution. Therefore, faculty and support staff will . . . indicate clearly that they are not an official spokesperson for the College District” (emphasis added). Neither Professor Burnett nor Professor Phillips was explicitly sanctioned for violating this rule, but Professor Burnett, as noted above, took pains to disassociate her social media accounts from the college, and, as also noted earlier, administrators did upbraid Professor Phillips for allowing himself to be identified as a Collin College faculty member in both the Confederate monuments letter and in his Washington Post interview.

Ironically, this policy that faculty members, when speaking extramurally, will clarify that they are not an official spokesperson for Collin College derives from the 1940 Statement of Principles, as indeed does the entire Collin College policy on academic freedom. The third paragraph of the 1940 Statement contains the “admonitions” attaching certain responsibilities to extramural speech.³⁵ The last of these admonitions is that faculty members speaking extramurally “should make every effort to indicate they are not speaking for the institution.”

The AAUP’s position on this admonition, however, is not identical with the one Collin administrators used against Professors Jones and Phillips. The Association has for many years recognized that in the many contexts in which faculty members typically list their institutional affiliations for identification purposes, the relationship between a faculty member’s views and those of his or her institution will be so obvious as to require no clarification. The AAUP first articulated this position as long ago as 1949, in its investigative report on the case of Professor George F. Parker at Evansville College (now the University of Evansville). The college’s president had summarily dismissed Professor Parker for speaking at an election rally for presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace while having allegedly failed to observe the admonition, articulated in college policy, to “make every effort to indicate that he is not an institutional spokesman.” Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which conducted the investigation, cited a hypothetical example to illustrate the ludicrousness of this ground for dismissal: “As to the necessity of a formal disavowal of institutional spokesmanship, the circumstances should determine the matter. For example, it would be unnecessary, when speaking in support of a Boy Scout drive, to announce: ‘my sentiments on this occasion are not necessarily those of Blank College.’ The rule of reason would be to clarify the relationship if it is not already clear.” The 2003 report of the investigating committee in the case of University of South Florida faculty member Sami Al-Arian also addressed this topic. The USF administration summarily suspended Professor Al-Arian for, among other things, supposedly disregarding the institution’s rule that a professor should “indicate when appropriate that one is not an institutional representative” during an appearance on the O’Reilly Factor, a Fox News Channel program. The investigating committee found that, while the host had identified Professor Al-Arian as a USF faculty member, the committee could “find no basis . . . for concluding that Professor Al-Arian disregarded the expected norm of professional conduct with respect to separating his activities as an individual engaging in public discourse from instances in which he spoke . . . ‘institutionally,’ on behalf of his institution as such.” And the committee further observed, “Professor Al-Arian obviously did not preface each of his off-campus interviews or appearances with a disclaimer—for example, ‘None of my remarks should be misunderstood to represent the views of the University of South Florida, or any division, department, or group associated with the university, its alumni, its administration, or its board of trustees’—but the investigating committee can find no reasonable warrant for such an extraordinary and gratuitous disclaimer.”

In contrast to the AAUP’s position that, normally, it will be so evident that a faculty member is not speaking for his or her appointing institution that no disclaimer is necessary, the Collin administration takes the extreme—and, with respect to academic freedom, impermissible—position that indicating “clearly that they are not an official spokesperson for the College District” means that faculty members engaging in extramural activity cannot allow the college’s name to be associated with any ideas or organizations of which the administration might disapprove. In the case of Professor Jones, this prohibition forced her not only to delete any reference to her appointing institution in her TFA officer listing but to expunge any reference to Collin College on the TFA’s website and Facebook page, even though the chapter consisted only of Collin College faculty members. In his October 9, 2020, email to Professor Jones, Dean Evans wrote that associating the college’s name with the college’s TFA chapter “may also be considered misleading if the [administration] has not in some way approved of the chapter” and that the administration would therefore “need to provide some level of approval for the chapter to utilize the college name.” In her response to Professor Jones’s RRP complaint, Vice President Jenkins asserted, “Faculty are encouraged to be involved in professional development organizations and their involvement is a source of pride for the college [that is, the administration].” But some organizations are apparently not a “source of pride.” Quite the contrary. She continued, “The TFA is a union whose mission and goals are focused on protecting employees’ rights, advancing the tenure system, advancing fair and equitable compensation, etc.” The AAUP could be described in similar terms. Such organizations, in the words of Dr. Jenkins, are not “recognized and supported” by the college administration, and therefore faculty members who belong to these organizations must take pains not to publicly associate the name of Collin College with them. According to President Matkin and Vice President Jenkins, failure to do so is a “misuse of the college’s name,” which is also the offense they charged Professor Jones with committing when she signed the letter calling for the removal of Confederate monuments, making, they said, the college “look bad.”

It is difficult to imagine that any reasonable person would assume that a faculty member who engaged in any of these extramural activities was acting “as an official spokesperson for the College District,” and in fact, with respect to Professors Jones, Burnett, and Phillips, the Collin administration never insisted that such confusion was likely to result. Of course, President Matkin did take the extraordinary step of contacting Loyola University Chicago president Rooney to ask the plainly ridiculous question whether LUC professor Johnson, in encouraging fellow historians to write Collin’s accreditor to protest Professor Phillips’s dismissal, was speaking as a representative of Loyola Chicago. Because it is difficult to imagine that President Matkin actually believed that Professor Johnson was speaking as an official representative of his university, we can only assume that President Matkin’s contacting President Rooney was merely an attempt—in which, sadly, President Rooney seems all too readily to have assisted—to intimidate Professor Johnson from exercising his right to extramural speech.

3. Intramural Speech

The Association’s understanding of academic freedom encompasses the right of faculty members to engage in speech or conduct as “officers of an educational institution,” that is, as participants in institutional governance. As the AAUP statement On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom (1994) asserts, “The academic freedom of faculty members includes the freedom to express their views . . . on matters having to do with their institution and its policies, . . . and to do so even if their views are in conflict with one or another received wisdom.” Although the AAUP’s principles of shared governance affirm that an institution should have recognized agencies and structures through which the faculty may present its views, those principles do not suggest that the right of faculty members to comment on institutional policies must be restricted to those official channels. As previously noted, the Collin College academic freedom statement does not address intramural speech and expression.

The Collin administration sanctioned all three subject faculty members for expressing views critical of the administration’s policies and actions, especially those related to COVID-19. One rationale for Professor Jones’s nonrenewal cited her January 2021 Facebook post in which she asked her readers to email President Matkin and urge him to allow faculty members able to teach online to do so until a vaccine became available. Vice President Jenkins characterized the post as Professor Jones’s use of “external pressure” to “undermine decisions” undertaken by the board instead of employing “normal communication channels,” that is, by sharing any concerns privately with her associate dean, dean, and provost. President Matkin concurred in the decision not to renew Professor Jones’s appointment “because,” he wrote, “she chose to operate outside of the college’s shared governance, lines of communication, and resources.” The administration disciplined Professor Burnett, according to Dr. Matkin, for “air[ing] her private personnel concerns in public, rather than attempting to address or redress them internally,” when she confronted him about his critique of her vice-presidentialdebate tweets on “eight college email distribution lists.” The administration based its action against Professor Phillips, in part, on his alleged “ongoing failure to use the internal communication processes to address concerns he has with the organization’s [COVID-19] policies and protocols after multiple discussions and coaching,” and his opting instead to publish his criticisms on social media.

In justifying its actions, the administration cited the provision in the college’s code of professional ethics encouraging faculty members to “seek revision” of institutional policies “in a judicious and appropriate manner.”³⁶ The administration also cited the following sentences from the college policy on employee rights and privileges: “Faculty members will recognize their responsibility to adhere to the policies and procedures of the institution. Therefore, faculty members who have differences of opinion with existing or proposed policies or procedures will express these views through the standing committee structure of the College District or their supervising administrators.” This second regulation implies that institutional policy requires faculty members to convey disagreement either through existing governance bodies or directly to their administrative superiors. But neither regulation states that faculty members who disagree with institutional decisions must express dissenting views only through institutional channels. Unfortunately, the latter seems to be the administration’s official policy.

Beyond insisting that faculty members convey any dissenting views only through administratively approved means and never publicly, the Collin administration evidently takes the position that once the administration and governing board have made a decision, faculty members must accept it and offer no further criticism—public or private. Vice President Jenkins put it clearly in her response to Professor Jones’s RRP complaint: “Shared governance allows for diverse opinions to be considered,” but, she continued, “everyone will not get what they want. . . . [O]nce strategic or operational decisions are made,” faculty members must accept, support, and implement them. Regarding Professor Jones, the vice president opined, “it [was] my expectation that, as an employee, [she] would have supported those decisions and worked collaboratively to achieve agreed upon outcomes.” The committee notes that the subject faculty members did convey their views through the limited governance structures available to them, such as the Collin Faculty Council, of which Professor Jones was an elected representative, and the COVID-19 reopening task force. Regrettably, as the preceding discussion illustrates, the position of the Collin administration is that faculty speech critical of the administration and its policies is not only restricted to administratively approved internal means of communication but essentially prohibited once institutional authorities have reached a decision. This position seems to approximate an almost total ban on public dissent and criticism. It should go without saying that such a stance is utterly incompatible with AAUP-supported principles on academic freedom.

4. Electronic Communications

Since all of the expression for which the Collin administration punished the three subject faculty members was conveyed through electronic means, this committee would be remiss if it did not cite the standards articulated in the AAUP’s Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications, a report first published in 1997 and revised in 2004 and 2013. It begins by stating the fundamental principle that “academic freedom, free inquiry, and freedom of expression within the academic community may be limited to no greater extent in electronic format than they are in print.” Regarding extramural speech and social media, the report quotes the Committee A Statement on Extramural Utterances and then notes, “Obviously, the literal distinction between ‘extramural’ and ‘intramural’ speech—speech outside or inside the university’s walls—has little meaning in the world of cyberspace. But the fundamental meaning of extramural speech, as a shorthand for speech in the public sphere . . . fully applies in the realm of electronic communications, including social media.” On the issue of disclaiming institutional representation, the report concludes, “Disclaimers may be useful, though their value is often exaggerated. However, the nature of electronic communication itself tends to decontextualize meaning and attribution, and faculty members cannot be held responsible for always indicating that they are speaking as individuals and not in the name of their institution, especially if doing so will place an undue burden on the faculty member’s ability to express views in electronic media.” And with respect to intramural speech, the report notes, “The AAUP has upheld the right of faculty members to speak freely about internal college or university affairs as a fundamental principle of academic freedom that applies as much to electronic communications as it does to written and oral ones. This includes the right of faculty members to communicate with one another about their conditions of employment and to organize on their own behalf.”

5. Freedom in the Classroom

The case of Professor Phillips, in contrast to those of Professors Jones and Burnett, directly implicates academic freedom in the classroom. In addition to an alleged “ongoing failure to use internal communication processes to address [his] concerns,” his January 2022 nonrenewal notice cites “student complaints related to their perception of bias by Dr. Phillips’s expression of his personal views in the learning environment, as evidenced by student evaluation comments and complaints.”

The 1940 Statement affirms that faculty members are “entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject,” while cautioning that they “should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.”³⁷ An “interpretive comment” added by the AAUP and AAC&U in 1970, however, clarifies that “the intent of this statement is not to discourage what is ‘controversial.’ Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.”

The Collin College administration did not allege that Professor Phillips persistently raised irrelevant topics. Instead, it contended that he presented his own views on the controversial historical and political topics under discussion; that several students reported perceiving him as “biased,” especially on issues of conservative politics and race; that at least one student reported “censoring” himself in his coursework out of fear of retaliation for his own views; and that one student reported feeling that Professor Phillips’s remarks on the first day of classes in August 2022 had “targeted” conservatives for their views on race and COVID-19.

It is not uncommon for students to complain of “bias” or “targeting” when faculty members express their personal views on a controversial issue in their subject areas. However, as the staff observed in the AAUP’s March 28, 2022, letter to the administration about Professor Phillips’s case, academic freedom in teaching “extends to the presentation of the instructor’s own judgments on these matters.” The letter went on to quote from the AAUP’s Freedom in the Classroom (2007): “If an instructor has formed an opinion on a controversial question in adherence to scholarly standards of professional care, it is as much an exercise of academic freedom to test those opinions before students as it is to present them to the public at large.”

Freedom in the Classroom also distinguishes between disrespecting or harassing students for their views and challenging or scrutinizing those views:

An instructor may not harass a student nor act on an invidiously discriminatory ground toward a student, in class or elsewhere. It is a breach of professional ethics for an instructor to hold a student up to obloquy or ridicule in class for advancing an idea grounded in religion, whether it is creationism or the geocentric theory of the solar system. It would be equally improper for an instructor to hold a student up to obloquy or ridicule for an idea grounded in politics, or anything else.

But the current application of the idea of a “hostile learning environment” to the pedagogical context of higher education presupposes much more than blatant disrespect or harassment. It assumes that students have a right not to have their most cherished beliefs challenged. This assumption contradicts the central purpose of higher education, which is to challenge students to think hard about their own perspectives, whatever those might be. It is neither harassment nor discriminatory treatment of a student to hold up to close criticism an idea or viewpoint the student has posited or advanced. Ideas that are germane to a subject under discussion in a classroom cannot be censored because a student with particular religious or political beliefs might be offended. 

This passage ends with observations that seem particularly relevant to Professor Phillips’s case: “Instruction cannot proceed in the atmosphere of fear that would be produced were a teacher to become subject to administrative sanction based upon the idiosyncratic reaction of one or more students. This would create a classroom environment inimical to the free and vigorous exchange of ideas necessary for teaching and learning in higher education.”

In the view of this committee, presenting historical examples of current issues, offering professional opinions, challenging students’ views, and calling upon students to consider how the past informs the present are sound pedagogical strategies, regardless of whether some students might feel uncomfortable. As Freedom in the Classroom observes, there is a difference between harassing students because of their beliefs and challenging them to think about those beliefs, which some would argue is a central purpose of higher education. In our judgment, the Collin administration, instead of attempting to distinguish between Professor Phillips’s duty to challenge students intellectually and the validity of student reports of harassment, seems to have been principally concerned with providing students with “a safe environment” and a “comfortable space for controversial discussions,” to use the operative phrase from Professor Phillips’s performance improvement plan.

The committee does recognize that the administration’s allegations about Professor Phillips’s classroom conduct on the first day of classes of the fall 2021 semester include the charge that he “made the students feel degraded, embarrassed, singled out, bullied, and shamed,” actions that, if substantiated, would indeed have constituted harassment. But, as noted above, the investigation into these allegations appears to have been cursory and to have rested only upon aggrieved students’ reports (or one aggrieved student’s report) from a single class meeting. The administration does not explicitly state that the students’ reactions were reasonable and proportionate or that Professor Phillips’s alleged remarks constituted what most members of the academic community would regard as harassment. At most, the allegations used to justify terminating Professor Phillips’s service warranted further investigation. The committee thus again laments the fact that the Collin administration declined to afford Professor Phillips the opportunity to contest these charges in a hearing before an elected body of faculty peers.

For the foregoing reasons, this committee finds compelling the claim Professor Phillips made in his RRP complaint that, in terminating his service, the Collin administration violated the college’s regulation affirming that “in the classroom, teaching faculty members have the freedom to discuss any controversial matter and to voice opinions within areas of their professional competence,” a regulation derived from the 1940 Statement. Absent the opportunity of a faculty hearing, Professor Phillips’s contention that the administration’s action against him violated his academic freedom as a teacher stands unrebutted. 

C. Academic Governance

This investigation primarily concerns issues of academic freedom. However, on most campuses, the exercise of academic freedom is inextricably related to the health of shared governance and vice versa, as the cases discussed in this report amply illustrate. Given the absence of tenure protections, faculty vulnerability to retaliation for speaking out on institutional matters has corroded shared governance at Collin College, and the administration’s failure to respect basic principles of shared governance has undermined academic freedom.

The Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, the joint formulation of the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, holds that the faculty has “primary responsibility” for matters central to the educational mission of the institution, including “curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research,” and “faculty status,” which includes “appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure, and dismissal.” The administration should overturn faculty decisions in these areas only “in rare instances and for compelling reasons which should be stated in detail.” Despite Dr. Collins’s concerns about “self-promoting faculty,” these principles are intended to ensure that decisions in these areas are normally left to the independent professional judgment of those with the requisite expertise. As the Statement on Government notes, “The primary responsibility of the faculty for such matters is based upon the fact that its judgment is central to general educational policy.”

On the college’s many campuses, decisions about faculty status appear to be almost exclusively in the hands of an extensive academic administration, with its numerous provosts, deans, and associate deans. The faculty plays no role in the dismissal of faculty members prior to the expiration of their terms or in the imposition of major sanctions, nor does it play any role in evaluating appeals of adverse administrative decisions concerning reappointment, minor sanctions, or other actions. No faculty grievance process exists. Evaluations of faculty performance rest almost entirely in the hands of administrative officers: faculty members informed the investigating committee that this problem was compounded by the administration’s unilateral action in 2017 to replace academic department chairs with associate deans.

According to faculty sources, the primary faculty governance body, the Collin Faculty Council, has little influence over governance issues. This is no surprise, given that the Collin administration’s top-down conception of faculty governance, as articulated in many statements by administrators recounted above, restricts the faculty’s voice to appropriate “channels, procedures, and protocols,” where its concerns may be “addressed by those administrators who can create solutions.” Once those administrators have “created solutions,” faculty members are expected to fall in line, work “collaboratively” with the administration, and not to “undermine decisions” by questioning them. Interviewed faculty members also stated that CFC members, when they are outspoken, have been subject to retaliation. As one put it, “Being on Faculty Council is a good way to get fired,” an assessment the events documented in this report clearly support. Furthermore, as noted in our discussion of Professor Burnett’s case, at least one state legislator, Mr. Jeff Leach, appears to have been unduly involved in faculty personnel matters through both public channels and private text messages to President Matkin. President Matkin’s response to this latter instance of interference was to assure Mr. Leach that he would “deal with” the Professor Burnett “situation” and to wish him well in his upcoming election.

In short, based on the evidence available to us, this committee finds that shared governance, as practiced at most reputable institutions of higher education, seems barely to exist at Collin College.

D. Conditions for Academic Freedom

Media reports, the extensive documentation available to the committee, and faculty correspondence with the AAUP’s staff all indicate that the widely publicized actions against Professors Jones, Heaslip, Burnett, and Phillips not only deepened faculty members’ fears and insecurities but further debased a climate already inhospitable to academic freedom. 

The committee’s interviews confirmed this impression. While only a small number of Collin faculty members agreed to speak with us, those who did testified to a “climate of fear and intimidation.” That President Matkin felt it necessary publicly to disavow seeking retaliation suggests these fears are widely felt. And we doubt that his promise to “actively seek an explanation from those who continue[d] to promote [the retaliation] narrative” did much to assuage those fears. Several interviewees noted that the administration’s actions “shocked the college,” deepening doubts about the adequacy of the college’s protections for academic freedom. As a result, others added, some faculty members are now so leery of attracting supervisory disapproval of their teaching that they self-censor, an understandable precaution for those hoping to avoid Professor Phillips’s fate. One interviewee reported that faculty members are now “thinking twice about what they want to say and what they want to do.” Several confessed to worrying that their administrative superiors would target them for their political or professional associations, to be expected when colleagues have lost their appointments for associating the college’s name with groups or causes of which the administration disapproves. According to several interviewees, they and their colleagues now avoid making campaign contributions to Democrats, fearing that, should those contributions become known, the administration might seek their dismissal, a reasonable concern at an institution whose most prominent trustee has gone on record inveighing against “ultraliberal, anticapitalism, socialistic professors.”

As the events described in this report clearly demonstrate, faculty members at Collin College reasonably fear losing their livelihood if the administration, the governing board, elected officials, or the public at large disfavors their research, teaching, or intramural or extramural speech. The committee is thus compelled to find that general conditions for academic freedom at Collin College are severely degraded.

VII. Conclusions

1. The Collin College administration summarily dismissed Professor Suzanne Jones and Professor Michael Phillips in violation of the basic tenets of the joint 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Since both faculty members had attained de facto tenure through length of service, they were entitled, under the 1940 Statement, to a pretermination hearing before an elected faculty body in which the burden of demonstrating adequate cause for dismissal would rest with the administration.

2. In violation of the 1940 Statement and Regulation 8 of the derivative Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the Collin College administration failed to provide Professors Jones and Phillips with either twelve months of notice (a terminal year) or at least one year of severance salary.

3. In disregard of Regulations 2 and 10 of the Recommended Institutional Regulations, the Collin College administration failed to afford Professor Burnett timely notice of her nonreappointment and the opportunity to petition an elected committee of her peers to review her allegation that the decision violated her academic freedom.

4. The stated grounds for the Collin College administration’s actions in these cases entailed egregious violations of the subject faculty members’ academic freedom in extramural and intramural speech. In the case of Professor Phillips, the administration’s stated reason for its action against him violated his academic freedom in teaching.

5. Academic governance at Collin College bears little resemblance to the principles set out in the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. The Collin administration denies the faculty the right to exercise its primary responsibilities, and faculty members reasonably fear that their governance efforts will make them targets for administrative reprisals.

6. The climate for academic freedom at Collin College is grossly inadequate, as might be expected at an institution at which a chair of the board of trustees publicly boasts that the absence of a tenure system facilitates the removal of political undesirables.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chair

CARISSA FROYUM (Sociology)
University of Northern Iowa

JAMES KLEIN (History)
Del Mar College

Investigating Committee

Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure has by vote authorized publication of this report on the AAUP website and in the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors.

Chair: CHARLES TOOMBS (Africana Studies), San Diego State University

Members: NICHOLAS FLEISHER (Linguistics), University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; EMILY M. S. HOUH (Law), University of Cincinnati; RANA JALEEL (Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies), University of California, Davis; MARK S. JAMES (English), Molloy University; VALERIE C. JOHNSON (Political Science), DePaul University; ANIL KALHAN (Law), Drexel University; MICHAEL MERANZE (History), University of California, Los Angeles; DERRYN MOTEN (History and Political Science), Alabama State University; PATRICIA C. NAVARRA (English), Hofstra University; JENNIFER H. RUTH (Film Studies), Portland State University; RISA L. LIEBERWITZ (Law), Cornell University, ex officio; IRENE T. MULVEY (Mathematics), Fairfield University, ex officio; JULIE M. SCHMID (English), AAUP Washington Office, ex officio