"I Swear"

No I am not talking about this group from way back when.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, another faculty member was removed for failing to sign a loyalty oath upon employment at the California State University system. This marks the second time a faculty member was denied employment on this basis. The first was at CSU East Bay of a mathematics instructor, and both are Quakers and both, I believe, are adjunct professors. California's loyalty oath was added to the state constitution for the expressed purpose of preventing communists from taking public jobs in 1952.

Now having been an adjunct for nearly nine years, and aside from asking the obvious about religious freedom and the archaic practice of this particular loyalty oath, I have to ask these questions just off the top of my head:

• I wonder if any tenure track professor was denied employment on the basis of refusing to sign or altering a loyalty oath?
• I wonder what protections, resources, and advice are afforded to part-time lecturers?
• Do the CSU's counterpart, the research powerhouses of the University of California system (i.e., UC Berkeley, UCLA, etc.), also administer loyalty oaths to their tenure track and part-time lecturers?

I'm just curious about these kinds of institutional distinctions. I've always maintained that if a rule is in place, it must be applied equally across the board or none at all (well that's more of a guideline than an actual legal procedure but anyways ... ). When I was hired to teach a course at "Some University" in their "Pretty Cool" program, I had to sign a loyalty oath. It was a short document that looked as though it was printed in the 1950s with the ink from the mimeograph still fresh after all these years. It made me wonder if it literally was printed in the 1950s when questions about loyalty and the infiltration of communism (thanks to McCarthyism and the nationwide "red scare") inflamed this country, and again in the late 1960s when a very conservative California legislature enacted to strangle the state's university professors and their activism. I wasn't sure if that was because the school had not hired that many new faculty -- which could've explained why there was a distinct generation gap -- or that the school was not an attractive institution to work -- which is also plausible since some of the buildings were literally from the Stone Age and just being a professor is not a lucrative job. I was also tempted to inhale the document hoping that I could catch a whiff of the intoxicating fumes from the blue ink but I digress.

Anyways, I asked the administrator -- who looked as though he was there since the 1950s -- what would happen if I did not sign it. He simply said, "You won't get hired."

WTF???

"So there's no way around it?"

"None at all."

"Can I change some of the wording?"

"You can't do that."

"Because?"

"It's against the law."

"Really?"

"Yep."

"Can I sign it under a different name?" At this point, I was being somewhat of an ass, but he nevertheless maintained his composure. I could tell from his facial reaction that he either found me or the whole thing really amusing.

"Nope."

I took the pen in my hand and hovered over the "Sign here" section of the document. I looked up at him again with a concerned look on my face and he blurted out, "You won't get paid."

*GASPS* He got me. I was done for and so I signed the document, once again as the wretched of the academy I am so happy to receive pennies for my labor. I handed the abominable oath back to him and I could have sworn I saw a snicker, maybe a curl on his upper lip, as if I signed my soul away. Curse him!

But to complicate my story a bit further, "Some University" was not the only university that I taught for the California State University system. I had taught elsewhere in the system and none of them ever once asked me to sign a loyalty oath on condition of employment and payment.

Go figure that one out.

May 5, 2008

California State U. Sacks Another Quaker Instructor Over Loyalty Oath

Yet another Quaker instructor has been sacked by the California State University system for objecting to a state loyalty oath that clashes with her pacifist religious beliefs, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Wendy Gonaver, an American-studies lecturer at California State University at Fullerton, was fired the day before the start of classes because she would not “sign an oath swearing to ‘defend’ the U.S. and California constitutions ‘against all enemies, foreign and domestic’” unless she was allowed to include a statement explaining her views, “a practice allowed by other state institutions,” the reporter, Richard C. Paddock, writes. The university refused to grant her request.

Earlier this year, California State University at East Bay fired Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker mathematics instructor, for trying to add the word “nonviolently” to the state loyalty oath and for refusing to sign it when the university did not allow her to add the word. She was later reinstated.

See an item on The Chronicle’s News Blog for more details.