Although Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Assistant Director of Africana Studies Andrea Baldwin turned down two offers to extend her visiting contract by another year, and Dean of the Faculty Abby Van Slyck has confirmed Baldwin’s last day of employment at Connecticut College to be June 30, 2018, students are still working hard to convince the administration that they need to make more of an effort to retain Baldwin. On March 28, students launched a petition in response to the conversation that has surrounded Baldwin’s employment over the past few months. The petition outlines students’ demands to the administration, but it includes some factual inaccuracies.
The petition appears online, verbatim, as follows:
We demand that the administration of Connecticut College:
1) Make a public apology to Dr. Andrea Baldwin through an email to all students, faculty, staff, and trustees
2) Make a clear outline of what is going to happen to Africana studies students during the next academic year (2018-2019) as to how students will be able to progress and/or finish their major/minor. As Dr. Andrea Baldwin will no longer be teaching at Connecticut College next year and a majority of the professors who have courses that fulfill requirements and/or electives in the degree are going on sabbatical next year, leaving only a few professors left to help students progress and/or finish their major/minor is insufficient for the Africana Studies Program to continue educating students.
3) Make a clear outline of the 5-year plan for making Africana studies into a department.
This includes:
- The number of tenured positions
- The number of tenure-track positions
- The number of non-tenure/tenure-track positions
- A financial plan supporting the department
4) That SABs work directly under Dean of Faculty Abigail Van Slyck and who’s work directly connects to hiring, as this will make the hiring process far more democratic and gives students a more influential voice.
5) Offer Baldwin a secured tenure-track position once her three-year visiting professor term is up.
6) The resignation of Professor and chair of the Gender and Women’s studies department: Danielle Egan, because she is the one who has made the decision to not keep Dr. Baldwin at Connecticut college and is a perfect example an opportunity hire being given to a white cisgender woman, rather than a woman of color.*
Three students, Zaiden Sowle ’21, Hope Cooper ’19, and Sam Weisenthal ’18, have been named as being primarily responsible for the writing of the petition but seem to disagree on their individual levels of involvement. Sowle is the listed author of the petition on petitions.moveon.org and told the Voice that she did write the petition, but that Cooper and a “larger group” were involved in determining its demands. Cooper, however, wrote in an email, “I didn’t really do too much with this petition actually I mostly edited as did Sam Weisenthal. But it was mostly Zaiden who composed it I just want to make that super clear.” Weisenthal, for her part, said that she did have access to the petition before its publication, but that she did not edit it.
According to the College staffing plan, the position that the petition seeks to grant Baldwin will not become available until AY 2019-20, and granting the position to Baldwin without doing an outside search would require an extreme measure, like an “opportunity hire.” An opportunity hire is the procedure used to offer a position to an existing faculty member without conducting an outside search and was used to hire Associate Professor Ariella Rotramel, not Egan as the petition implies. Van Slyck has said that opportunity hires generally only occur in instances of extreme and pressing need, and as such, there is no precedent for guaranteeing an opportunity hire ahead of time. Van Slyck, Egan, and Dean of Institutional Equity and Inclusion John McKnight have all maintained that they had wished for Baldwin to remain at Connecticut College, and that is why she was offered a visiting contract extension.
The background of the petition expands on the question of opportunity hires, as it states: “what is most obvious and disgraceful, is that the GWS department has now twice in the past five years created possibilities for exceptional ‘opportunity hires.’ Both professors who were lucky enough to benefit from these opportunity hires are white cisgendered professors, who were both granted tenure.” However, Egan was indeed hired after a national search yielded her and three other finalists who interviewed on campus. When asked about this inaccuracy in the petition, Sowle said, “I understand that Egan was not an opportunity hire, but that term was initially in a demand that we did not include in our final version, and accidentally got grouped in with Professor Egan. We are deeply sorry to Professor Egan for this mistake.”
According to Sowle, Baldwin “felt blindsided by [the] notice [of her last day of employment] and had no recollection of ever officially turning down the offer,” which is in direct contrast to what administrators have stated publicly and on the record on several occasions. Baldwin was not able to corroborate this statement, as she did not reply to the Voice’s request for comment. McKnight, however, recognized this as a misunderstanding between the administration and the students in his comment to the Voice. “I hope we can get to a point of greater clarity about this situation and that we’ll keep working on our communication as a campus,” McKnight said, first stating that he “support[s] the right of students to organize and to share their concerns with the administration.”
The petition includes two specific demands regarding the Africana Studies Program. Ever since it was announced by Egan and later Van Slyck that Baldwin would not be returning for AY 2018-19, many students raised concerns over the future of Africana Studies. With many key professors in the program going on sabbatical next year and the departure of Baldwin, Africana Studies majors and minors are deeply concerned over how they will be able to complete their program requirements, which may not be possible for them if Baldwin does indeed leave Connecticut College at the end of this year. Cooper added in her comments to the Voice: “the administration seemed to be unappreciative of how much work Baldwin has done for the program.”
When asked why the petition seeks Egan’s resignation, Sowle corrected some of the petition’s wording. She said “that it was our understanding that Egan was the one who ultimately decided how to proceed with Dr. Baldwin because in the conversations we have had, we were told different stories by different people. This led to some great confusion on our part and are sorry for inaccuracies that may have resulted.” Despite the lack of certainty as to the final decision-maker regarding Baldwin’s hiring, Sowle still wishes for Egan to resign “because she, at the very least, has not fought to keep Dr. Baldwin at Conn and is a perfect representation of the whiteness of the Gender, Sexuality, and intersectionality Department.” The Voice reached out to Egan for comment, but received no response by the time this article was printed.
At the time of this printing, the petition had 86 signees. One of the undersigned, Emma Race ’18, explained why she is supportive of the initiative, stating: “my stance on the petition is that I’m really proud of my fellow students for standing for something they believe in, and I want to support that effort. I think that what happened with Professor Baldwin is a symptom of something that happens really frequently on this campus, so I think that taking an aggressive stance around this issue with help the situation generally.” When asked if she supports each specific demand, Race said, “to be honest, because I’m not a GWS major, for me it’s more about the trust that I have in the people that are organizing that.”
Clearly, Baldwin is an important figure for her students, and as Race indicated above, Baldwin’s case speaks to a larger, systemic issue of undervaluing professors of color in higher education. More detailed reporting on this issue can be found in a previous Voice article. However, the petition’s significant factual flaws make it clear that that the administration and the involved students are not yet on the same page, complicating discussions of a resolution to this issue.
*Editor’s note: The text of the petition is unedited and appears exactly as it does online, with the exception of a formatting change to the list under the third demand. The Voice added an indentation to the list and changed its numbering style for clarity.
