Professor Benjamin Page (whose important work on American plutocracy is briefly described here) has circulated a statement regarding Prof. Stevens and recent events at Northwestern:
To: Colleagues at Northwestern and elsewhere
From: Benjamin I. Page, Fulcher Professor
Concerning: Jacqueline Stevens
September 22, 2016
In intellectual terms I have great respect for Jackie. She is very smart. Always provocative and interesting. I have enjoyed a number of lively interactions with her. Politically (in the world and national sense) I usually agree with her views, including some that others may consider far-out. Personally, we have always been on friendly terms. She has never caused me the slightest harm or discomfort – unless one counts my impatience with some of her lengthy discourses at department meetings; but that is par for the academic course.
Unfortunately, however, on matters of departmental citizenship and collegiality Jackie has fallen sadly short. She seems to have allowed her strong views on various substantive and (especially) procedural issues to provoke her into extreme actions that have traumatized a good many departmental colleagues – faculty, staff, students, and especially Chairs, the last three of whose lives she has made miserable repeatedly and over extended periods. Jackie’s recent scorched-earth policy of tendentiously blogging about normally confidential personnel matters threatens to disrupt the very functioning of the department. It has led our outstanding current department leaders Sara and Al – and most of my senior colleagues, including myself – to question whether it could be possible for any of us to serve as Chair with Jackie actively making trouble in the department.
This is a bad business. My sense is that several departmental colleagues and university administrators have been working very hard to avoid disaster. But Northwestern (and probably other universities as well) does not seem well prepared to deal with highly unusual situations in which extreme behavior by a single tenured faculty member threatens the functioning of a whole department. I am hopeful that this particular situation can be resolved. Perhaps new procedures will also be needed to protect against anything similar happening in the future.
The Political Science Department at Northwestern has been a wonderful intellectual home for me. I like and respect every one of my colleagues. I have greatly enjoyed working and talking with them. It is probably accurate to say that there is no other department in the country that could have been so helpful to the flourishing of my scholarly work. I would be extremely distressed, and would consider it a terrible loss to the university and the country, if anything were allowed to seriously damage such a fine group of scholars and human beings.
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