Note: The Lawrence Times runs opinion columns and letters to the Times written by community members with varying perspectives on local issues. These pieces do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Times staff.
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To the Lawrence Community,
I recently retired from teaching biology at Haskell Indian Nations University, and so I am one of a handful of Native American supporters of the school who can speak to the current situation faced by administrators, faculty, and support staff as they struggle to uphold quality in its academic offerings and student well-being on the campus and in dormitories.
As federal workers, present employees are discouraged, if not outright banned, from speaking publicly about the school. I also graduated from Haskell in 1977, when it was a two-year community college, as well as from the University of Kansas and Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. I’ve taught biological sciences at nine colleges and universities from Kansas to Massachusetts and Nevada, including 22 years at Haskell.
When the pandemic hit and all faculty were sent home to teach remotely in March 2020, we were without training or experience in teaching online, and each of us were allowed to decide how best to deliver the remaining half of the spring semester over the internet. Most of the faculty, including me, remained off-campus until January 2023.
For several courses, I learned by watching YouTube videos to purchase suitable software, with my own personal funds, to turn my PowerPoint lectures into interesting and colorful videos, how to make fillable PDFs, online exams, and, by viewing hundreds and hundreds of videos, I identified appropriate instructive videos for labs. Then I posted them along with daily messages and answering emails promptly from students; for one course, I met weekly online for several hours. All faculty meetings were held online. For two years and nine months I did these things — from my home, using my own computer, software, printer, and internet server — all of which I paid for myself, as many teachers do. But the administration was supportive of our challenges throughout this period.
At some time during this pandemic period, March 2020 to January 2023, a coach was hired and fired, who later claimed that Haskell faculty as a group were unresponsive to a student’s claim of harassment. As far as I can tell, virtually no faculty could have been aware of these issues, since we were all assigned to work off campus during the years of the coach’s reports. Never were the faculty officially informed, learning of the issues only through news items, which provided online links to redacted investigated reports, and last summer’s congressional hearing.
I retired shortly before the faculty senate made a public statement in September 2024. Neither the statement nor the hearings made clear the important point that virtually all faculty other than some (or all?) coaches were teaching remotely. Moreover, I myself, and I believe most other faculty, were unaware that any athletes were meeting in person or living on the Haskell campus. It is unfair to characterize the faculty as being a party to a dysfunction that the school has been labeled with, when the coach’s accusations are conflated with unrelated administrative concerns.
Now we have come to two reported events that impact the school — a legislative proposal to remove the school from the purview of a federal agency (Bureau of Indian Education, in the Department of the Interior), and termination of nearly 40 of a reported 146 “permanent” (as opposed to contract) employees, including seven faculty. Loss of instructors is perilous when accreditation visits had been in the planning stages for some time prior to my retirement. I must assume that with the loss of the other 30-some staff members, successful upkeep of the buildings and grounds, as well as continuity and security of IT services, will be far more difficult. I recall hearing of closures to federal facilities that occurred quite suddenly in 1980s Massachusetts.
Let us not in 2025 allow Haskell to be lost — to our Lawrence community, as well as to young Native students across the country who count on an educational experience unattainable to them anywhere else in the world. The school, under a fairly new and diligent young president, has been unfairly maligned. As for the legislation proposed in Congress to remove the college from federal agency oversight, possibly with consequent loss of federal employee protections, the sudden loss last week of so many staff and faculty may soon mean: Mission Accomplished.
— Carole A. Tomlinson, Lawrence
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