Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 2004
A Liberal Professor Fights a Label A faculty member accused of bias takes on students and a conservative group
By JENNIFER JACOBSON
Oneida J. Meranto did something this semester that she had never done in her career. She tape-recorded her lecture.
The reason: self-protection. Last winter two students filed grievances accusing the associate professor of political science at Metropolitan State College of Denver of having a liberal bias and intimidating conservative students.
Although college officials found as recently as October that she had done nothing wrong, she received death threats and dozens of hateful e-mail messages. She was too frightened to walk to her car alone, so students escorted her.
Should she be accused of bias again, she wanted a record of what she had said.
Sure enough, two days after she taped her lecture, another student filed a grievance against the tenured professor.
A Navajo who often speaks out at rallies for women's and minority rights, Ms. Meranto identifies herself as a liberal. She describes her politics as "very raw" and says they were shaped by the plight of Native Americans in this country. A former potter who ran art galleries in Colorado before earning her Ph.D. at age 40, she prefers acupuncture to chemotherapy in her battle against breast cancer. She has a soothing voice that can turn menacing when she is angry, which she often is these days.
What has happened to her shows how disputes about professors' political leanings can quickly escalate into vicious battles that pit students against faculty members and leave administrators stuck in the middle. The dispute at Metropolitan, which has drawn national attention, has already lasted a year, and shows no sign of ending.
In the aftermath of a contentious presidential election, such tensions may only become worse as emboldened conservative students try to oust professors they perceive as too liberal.
Ms. Meranto's experience has left her shaken but defiant. The most recent student to file a grievance "was in my class for 50 minutes," says the professor, who denies showing any bias in her teaching. "Where was the damage?"
Reining in Liberals
The controversy at Metropolitan comes at a time when Colorado, more than any other state, has tried to rein in what some call the liberal dominance in higher education by embracing the "academic bill of rights," a set of principles conservatives say colleges should follow to create intellectual diversity. Last spring public universities in Colorado promised to do more to follow the spirit of that document.
"The atmosphere that's been created in Colorado ... does seem to bring out these tendencies to make students more aggressive," says Robert M. O'Neil, founder of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and a professor of law at the University of Virginia. It gives them a sense that if "they pound and shout loud enough they'll be able to make something happen to a faculty member with whom they disagree," he says.
John Andrews, a Republican Colorado legislator, contends "that's baloney. Today the vast majority of students who dissent from leftism still feel they need to tiptoe through many classes or many campus situations if they don't want a fight on their hands."
The author of the academic bill of rights is David Horowitz, a longtime conservative activist and president of the California-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture. He has visited colleges across the country promoting the document's tenets. Critics contend that its purpose is to get rid of liberal professors.
In September 2003 Mr. Horowitz spoke at Metropolitan, and although he was invited by the student government, some students and faculty members protested his appearance.
Mr. Horowitz says he talked about the inappropriateness of such a demonstration during his speech. "A university should be a place for a free exchange of ideas," he says. "Sometimes I've had to correct conservative students. Sometimes they don't want Michael Moore to speak. I've tried to tell them we are for letting one hundred flowers bloom. We are for intellectual diversity."
Bad Student or Bias?
Ms. Meranto's ordeal began last fall when she butted heads with two students, Nick Bahl and George Gordon Culpepper Jr. Mr. Bahl, a Republican and a columnist for Metropolitan's student newspaper, was a senior in her class on Latin American politics. The professor describes Mr. Bahl as a problem student who complained that she didn't grade him fairly. She sent him an e-mail message saying that she was going to drop him from her class and that he should contact her department chairman, Robert Hazan.
Mr. Bahl disagrees with Ms. Meranto's version of events. In an article he wrote in January for Frontpagemag.com, an online journal run by Mr. Horowitz, Mr. Bahl says he complained about Ms. Meranto's constant lateness to class. "I wrote her an e-mail asking that she be on time, and moments later I received an e-mail from her telling me that she planned on 'dropping' me."
Mr. Bahl also criticized Ms. Meranto for what he saw as her liberal bias. "The fact that I learned 40 research-pages worth of valuable and intellectually beneficial information about Latin America in half a semester matters not to Meranto, since it wasn't the leftist blame-America-for-everything information she expected me to learn," he wrote in his online article.
In November 2003 Ms. Meranto had trouble with another conservative student. Mr. Culpepper, a 30-year-old former Marine who transferred to Metropolitan last year, was president of both the College Republicans (he founded the campus chapter) and the Political Science Association, a nonpartisan student group of which Mr. Bahl was a member. At the start of the semester, Mr. Culpepper, a political-science major, got along well with Ms. Meranto and asked her to be the association's adviser.
But Ms. Meranto and Mr. Culpepper soon had a falling out, and Ms. Meranto says both Mr. Bahl and Mr. Culpepper asked her to resign as the group's adviser, which she did.
Both students then filed grievances with the college against Ms. Meranto. Two weeks before the end of the semester, Mr. Culpepper dropped her course. The college declined to release the grievances, and it is difficult to pinpoint the students' complaints. Both sides agree that most of the conflicts occurred outside the classroom.
However, Ms. Meranto says Mr. Culpepper complained about a film she showed in class that he believed insulted the military.
Mr. Culpepper, who attended Mr. Horowitz's speech, was convinced that Ms. Meranto was impeding the intellectual diversity that Mr. Horowitz had championed.
At a state legislative hearing organized by Senator Andrews to consider the need for an academic bill of rights, Mr. Culpepper testified about what he saw as Ms. Meranto's political bias. Later he became an intern in Mr. Andrews's office.
The college's Faculty Federation, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, fired off a letter to the university's president, Raymond N. Kieft, calling on Mr. Culpepper to apologize for his "reckless charges" in writing to Ms. Meranto and asking the administration to write a letter supporting her. Neither was done.
Ms. Meranto complains about the lack of faculty support, particularly from colleagues in Chicano and women's studies. Vincent C. de Baca, chairman of the Chicano-studies department, writes in an e-mail message: "We had nothing to do with her situation and we want to keep it that way."
Mr. Hazan, the political-science chairman, contends that he and his dean made every effort to resolve the conflict at the departmental level, but "the students were far more interested in turning this into an elephant." Ms. Meranto was outraged by the students' disrespect, and the students were outraged by the challenge they got from Ms. Meranto, Mr. Hazan says. "It just got out of hand."
Hateful Messages
Ms. Meranto began receiving hateful e-mail messages and death threats: "Hispanics, they should be cooked, and mixed into the Taco Bell menu. They should all be killed." "Shoot this commie bitch."
When she asked to have her e-mail address changed, information-technology officials refused, she says, and told her it was a "freedom of speech" issue. So she had a student open her e-mail messages for her.
Articles that Mr. Bahl and Mr. Culpepper had written about her for Frontpagemag.com, posted with a photograph of her in front of a picture of Che Guevara, only fueled the intensity of the hate mail she received, she says.
Mr. Horowitz defends posting her picture. "We live in a free society with a free press," he says. "I didn't put a mustache or horns on her. We just published her picture so people would know who we're talking about."
The picture comes from the political-science department's Web site and was taken of Ms. Meranto seated in her office. She says the photograph is three or four years old and that she has since redecorated.
After hearing of her situation in the local press, J. Triplett Mackintosh, a Denver lawyer, contacted Ms. Meranto and offered pro bono legal help. He demanded that the college president issue a statement condemning the death threats, that the college provide her with parking close to her building, that all of her classes be in the same building as her office, that campus police provide her with security, and that her e-mail address be changed.
The college rejected each of the demands.
"I live alone, and the school didn't seem concerned," says Ms. Meranto, who is 55. When her evening class would finish at 8:30 p.m., two or three students would walk her to her car.
Mr. Kieft declined to speak to The Chronicle. Lee Combs, Metropolitan's general counsel, says the college did not change her e-mail address because it should always be accessible to the public. "It's in our directory," he says. "Students need to communicate with their faculty members. If someone off campus is harassing or threatening a professor, changing their e-mail address is not going to be an effective solution."
If she feared for her life, he says, "she should have gone to law enforcement."
Ms. Meranto says that when she asked campus police for protection, she was told "to think about getting a service dog."
In February students held rallies in support of the professor and they enlisted the help of a Native American spiritual leader to conduct a "smudging," or symbolic cleansing, of the college. "A lot of people walked with him and prayed about the school," Ms. Meranto says. He "asked the negative spirits to go away." He blessed her office.
When that hit the papers, she says, "you know how journalists treated it -- it seemed ridiculous."
Mr. Horowitz thought so, too. He posted the flyer for the prayer vigil on his blog and entitled the entry "Indian War Party in Colorado." The first sentence reads: "Ever wondered how loony universities have become?"
As the hate e-mail messages continued and the college investigated the students' grievances, Ms. Meranto directed her energies toward another fight -- against breast cancer. She was diagnosed with the disease in the summer of 2002 and has opted not to use western medicine to treat it. Instead she practices alternative treatments, such as Chinese acupuncture, and has prayed with her tribe.
Concerned about Ms. Meranto's health, her chairman reduced her teaching load last semester from four classes to two. At the height of the controversy, she says, she was very emotional: "If somebody asked me about it, I would start crying."
In July she left for Egypt on a Fulbright fellowship, but the president did not issue his decision about the students' charges until August.
"You are entirely within your legal rights to hold and express views contrary to your students' on Latin American politics, current public issues like the 'student bill of rights,' and the proper responsibilities of student organizations you advise and its members," Mr. Kieft wrote in his decision, on August 9. "The College cannot and will not presume that your treatment of students reflects ideological bias or prejudice merely because you express your point of view."
He wrote that students had the same rights to freedom of expression and association as she has, and that the college requires that she grade students on their academic performance and not their point of view. "This investigation gave me substantial reason to believe that you acted at all times consistently with this standard," he said.
He concluded that "'watchdogs' for 'political bias' who seek to remove professors holding a point of view will inhibit the rich dialogue that must take place in the classroom and destroy the expressive freedom that is essential to the search for truth."
Ms. Meranto says she was pleased with the president's decision.
Conservative activists, both on and off campus, singled her out because she is a Native American woman, she says, and as such, is highly visible.
Mr. Horowitz denies taking aim at Ms. Meranto. And he calls her fears about being fired ridiculous. "She has the entire administration, the teacher's union, the law, which is tenure, and my academic bill of rights all on her side in protecting her job," he says. "We're just trying to get the woman to have decent manners."
Instead, he says, she introduced her politics into the classroom and intimidated conservative students who disagreed with her: "She went on the warpath."
But after the president's decision, Ms. Meranto says, she continued to receive hateful e-mail messages and nasty comments from conservative students who had begun to use a chat room run by Creative Resistance, a left-leaning student organization.
No Evidence
Hoping to avoid last year's turmoil, taping her lecture seemed wise, Ms. Meranto says. She also included in her syllabus the exact page number in the Student Handbook that students should consult if they wished to file a grievance about her teaching.
Two days after her first "American National Government" class, William R. Pierce, a freshman, did just that, saying that "she attacked Republicans. She inferred that we are incapable of thinking critically and should therefore drop her class," he said. Ms. Meranto denies it.
The president, in an October 21 decision regarding Mr. Pierce's complaint, wrote that he "found nothing on the tape that would insult, demean, ridicule, or evince hostility toward College Republicans, Republicans in general, or conservatives as such."
When Mr. Hazan, the department chair, learned that Ms. Meranto had felt compelled to record her class, he says he didn't know whether to congratulate her for protecting herself or to be "saddened about the state of affairs in academia."
As Ms. Meranto works with the Faculty Senate to create policies that will protect professors from harassment, acrimonious debate about her behavior -- and calls for her resignation -- have continued among students. Jesse Samora, this year's chairman of the College Republicans, wrote to the professor last month in the Creative Resistance chat room that he "could give one half rats ass what your political ideologies are. ... I hope that we can sit down and talk about this at your leisure, maybe when you are clearing out your office."
Ms. Meranto defended herself in the chat. She wrote that she had been redeemed and told Mr. Samora to "go to hell."
In the meantime, it looks like Mr. Culpepper won't go away anytime soon. Next month he plans to file another grievance against Ms. Meranto with the college's Board of Trustees.
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