8 Responses to “Stubborn professor gets the boot”

1. Suzanne Willis Says:
   March 10th, 2010 at 1:33 pm

   OK, Google tells me that Leavenworth and Kansas City are about 1/2 hour apart (which would have been nice to include in the article). So Prof. Heflin probably wouldn’t have had to move. A little more information would be nice, though; did she give any reasons for not wanting to keep an office in Kansas City? What if the two sites had been far enough apart that she would have had to move? Would the reaction have been any different? What if she moves to Kansas City and the next year the administration decides it wants her back in Leavenworth? Surely there is more to this story.

2. DR. Terminator Says:
   March 10th, 2010 at 3:38 pm

   Suzzane,

   Office hours are an implied responsibilty of the professor’s contract. They ought to be held for the convenience of students not a professor’s schedule nor place of residence. If she did not have a teaching load at the Leavenworth campus then she should have held office hours with students at the Kansas City campus. She didn’t have to move, maybe her lazy body, and drive to the campus just like many students have to drive to attend classes. There is no justification for her not complying with the Provost request. I have been at campuses where office hours are posted and the professor is not around. Some, leave the office open and lights on, pretending to be on campus. Professor Heflin was probably too stubborn and set in her ways. Hooray for the Provost, she probably terminated some old practices that faculty think are part of their “property rights”! You get pay to serve your students and they should not be inconvenient to drive to her favorite Starbucks!

   If you also google Professor Heflin in Leavenworth, the Courts of Appeals heard her case and let me summarize it for you: “Insubordination is defined as a willful disregard of an employer’s instructions, especially behavior that gives the employer cause to terminate a worker’s employment; and, an act of disobedience to proper authority, especially a refusal to obey an order that a superior officer is authorized to give. A single act of disobedience can constitute insubordination.” How do you like them apples?
   You seem to have some insight, so tell us more about the inside story.

3. Right Decision Says:
   March 10th, 2010 at 4:47 pm

   It’s a minimum of a 1/2 hour to get to Leavenworth from KCKCC on a good traffic day. Why should a student have to invest a minimum of an hour to meet with an instructor who teaches solely at the main campus? What about the money spent on gas to drive to Leavenworth? I believe having to drive to Leavenworth would be a deterrent for any student. It’s not reasonable nor is it in the best interest of the student. To me, it says alot about where this instructor’s heart is at – it’s all about her and not about the student. Decision was spot on.

4. Anne S. Says:
   March 10th, 2010 at 5:09 pm

   It sounds to me that she WAS available to the students at the new campus, just not in an office. It also sounds to me that she merely wanted to keep her physical office at the old campus. As long as she is available to the students, does it really matter where she keeps her file cabinets? With all the “new-fangled” electronics we have these days, it’s quite likely that everything she needs is on a web site, either her own, or one hosted by the school, or a flash drive.

   As Ms. Willis states, there has to be ore to the story.

5. Suzanne Willis Says:
   March 10th, 2010 at 5:30 pm

   I’m not sure I have any insight; I just didn’t think that I had enough information from the article to draw a conclusion about the case. To me the bottom line is the students – were they able to get help from the professor, and the access they needed? Were there complaints from students?

   This could very well be a case of a professor blowing off her students. Or it could be a case of an administrator insisting on adherence to the letter of the law whether or not it made a difference to the students (and I realize that administrators have the right to insist; I’ve been an administrator). Or it could be some combination, or none of the above.

   I work very hard to be accessible to my students, to encourage them to ask questions before, during, and after class, and to be available when they need help. They come see me before and after class; they send me email; but they almost never come to my office hours unless I make specific arrangements with them. I wouldn’t – and don’t – use this as an excuse to avoid having office hours, but I am concerned that there might be some other way of being available to students – rather than sitting in my office – that would better serve their needs.

   I realize I am straying far afield from the bare outlines of the case as presented in this article; it got me thinking, though. (Must be spring break…)

6. Judy Nye Says:
   March 11th, 2010 at 1:55 pm

   This is definately insubordination. The instructor has a job because of the students and the instructor has a boss/supervisor/provost/president/dean, whichever the case may be. I don’t believe most of us would tell our supervisor where we want our office unless an option was being offered. Thankfully the court decision was upheld.

7. Terry Says:
   March 22nd, 2010 at 4:07 pm

   I agree that the student’s needs should always come before the teacher’s preferences, but I don’t think students were the focal point of this story. The University decided that it preferred to have the teacher officed on the main campus–for whatever reason, most likely so that she would be more easily available to students but not necessarily so–and the teacher refused. Does she have a right to stay where she pleases and ignore direction from her employer? The court says no and I agree with it. Unless the teacher can show a compelling, work-related reason to stay in the old office, she has no right to refuse the direction of the University.

8. Ruth Heflin Says:
   October 27th, 2010 at 1:36 am

   Wow! I never knew this case made any news media, since absolutely no one in the media ever called me for an interview.

   Here’s the low-down that all of you speculated about. I was a very good contract negotiator for the faculty at KCKCC, and got the administration to agree to Interest Based Bargaining for the next contract (after faculty had stacked the previous contract, mind you). Too busy to participate in the next round of negotiations (I was teaching 17 credit hours a semester on average to make financial ends meet), the administration’s negotiators convinced my colleagues to a secrecy agreement, meaning no one could report back to their constituents any information being negotiated. I warned my colleagues (one is now a dean, imagine that!) that SOMEONE was going to be harmed by this secrecy agreement, but they would not listen to reason. Low and behold, faculty who work with students in “lab like classes” in Humanities were left out of a lucrative agreement struck secretly by the math/science faculty. Several Humanities faculty threatened to leave the union, so our dean asked the Provost to attend our next faculty meeting to explain what happened and what could be done to rectify the situation. He proceeded to try to blame our division rep, an English professor, who knew nothing about how these different classes are classified. I pointed out that they were supposed to be doing Interest Based Bargaining, and that, as the only person in the room who knew what specific faculty would be impacted by this agreement, it was the Provost’s responsibility to take the information to the negotiating table. In effect, he had violated Fair Bargaining.

   I became Target Number One, and the Provost worked hard to find a way to fire me for the next couple of years, including having the HR director red flag anything with my name on it, trying to create a situation where he could fire me for insubordination. I ended up having to file a grievance against him because he moved my office from Leavenworth (where most of my online students lived) to the Kansas City campus, despite my allergies to the molds that grow rampantly there. That grievance was not resolved until late April, early May, but I won (and the courts all agree on this point). When I went to return my office to the Leavenworth Campus, the Provost threatened to terminate me if I did not immediately move my office back to the KC campus.

   I was between a rock and hard place, to use a cliche. If I obeyed the order, I violated the faculty Master Contract. If I disobeyed the order, he could fire me for insubordination.

   I chose to stand by the faculty contract.

   Would I do it again, having gone through all the legal rigamarole thrown at me by this anti-faculty administration?

   You betcha. Tyrants need to know there are people who will oppose them. We don’t always win, but we should be willing to stand up for what is right.

   Was I concerned about my students? The whole time. I did not move my office in May, after winning my grievance, for instance, because all my online students knew where to find me. At the end of the semester like that, I knew someone would try to contact me there, and I didn’t want anything they dropped off in the KC office missed as we finished the semester. In fact, one student’s computer DID crash right about then, and she hand carried her final project into me at that office. Even if I had posted an online note to my students about a change in my office, she would have not seen it, since she had no personal computer to use at that time.

   What some folks at KCKCC still worry about are online faculty they cannot see on a daily basis. Some of the administrators are convinced online faculty are just home or out fooling around (since that is what they would do in similar circumstances, apparently. The Provost hated me because I was right about his responsibilities in negotiations, and the administrators (and faculty) who are jealous of online faculty lined up to provide him with the ammunition he needed to fire me.

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