Faculty Protests Commencement Speaker Switch

ORANGE —  The faculty of Chapman University has sent a critical memo to President James L. Doti protesting the replacement of Rep. Loretta Sanchez as Sunday’s commencement speaker with wealthy Republican donor and university trustee John Crean.

“If the process of choosing commencement speakers is going to be so subverted by individuals and pressure groups,” the memo said in part, “the university is embarrassed, ill-served and the corporate faculty protests this kind of undermining of due process.”

Literature professor Martin Nakell, who wrote the memo on behalf of the university’s more than 300 full-time and part-time faculty members, said some faculty were concerned that the decision to replace Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) was made arbitrarily after a faculty-student committee recommended the congresswoman.

All four faculty members voted for Sanchez, a Chapman alumna. All three student members voted for Crean.

The dismay on the part of the faculty was great enough, Nakell said, to lead to the memo--a rare act of defiance by instructors at the private university, whose trustees include some of Orange County’s most prominent Republicans.

“We feared that influences behind closed doors were brought to bear,” Nakell said Thursday. “The faculty fears politics intruded, and by that I mean something other than the democratic process.”

All this comes as the university prepares for its Sunday commencement exercises with remarks by Crean, whose granddaughter is among the graduates. Doti, who supported Sanchez in her race against incumbent Robert K. Dornan, was traveling back to Orange County from Washington and couldn’t be reached for comment.

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Controversy over commencement speakers is nothing new at private universities. What’s unusual about this case is that students are protesting a choice of the administration, said Larry Berg, a professor for 26 years in USC’s political science department.

In this case, students on the Chapman selection panel--including one member of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom--protested that Sanchez, the county’s first Democratic member of Congress in 12 years, was too political.

“It’s very rare in my 30 years around private universities to see students objecting to someone as being ‘too political,’ ” Berg said.

Chapman’s past commencement speakers have come from the university itself, including professors and department chairs. University spokeswoman Ruth Wardwell said the school prefers “one of our own” as speakers. Sanchez would have been the first politician asked to address a graduating class.

The fear of political intrusion comes several months after the university transferred ethics teaching for business students from the philosophy department to visiting libertarian philosopher Tibor Machan.

Mike W. Martin, a philosophy professor who taught the course for 12 years, said the decision was made without a usual faculty search and without consulting the professors who had been teaching the course.

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Provost Harry Hamilton said the faculty memo--and a response memo by Doti--address an incident of internal politics that has the importance of “a gnat.” He insisted there was no political pressure used to replace Sanchez and that Crean’s name was suggested by Doti because he was available, nearby and because his granddaughter was graduating. Hamilton made the final call on Crean.

He said Sanchez likely will be asked back as a speaker in future years and that her political affiliation had “zero” impact on the decision for Sunday’s event.

“This thing just snowballed because of a lack of information about how the [speaker selection] process went over 2 1/2 months,” Hamilton said. “It comes off as this diabolical plot [by GOP donors] and administrative bungling. There’s egg on everyone’s face but we’ve all agreed there needs to be better and more widely understood procedures next year.”

Trustee Doy Henley, a prominent conservative activist, said the suggestion that Republican politics are controlling university decisions is “ridiculous.”

“The faculty is making a real reach on this,” he said. “This is a private university and the reason I’m involved is that we want to do what we consider best for the students. We’re only interested in making our students successful.”

Mathematics professor Luis Ortiz-Franco, chair of the committee who recommended Sanchez, said he and other professors have heard from many students objecting to the way the decision was handled.

“I don’t think that faculty who may have a different political ideology than the donors are so much against the donors. What they are against is the general image that the philosophy of the donors may bring to the outside world,” Ortiz-Franco said. “We want politics outside of academia.”

Meanwhile, Sanchez will return to Orange County to deliver commencement addresses later this month at Cal State Fullerton and Cypress College. On Tuesday, she plans to join four other members of Congress to take testimony on the reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Act at Rancho Santiago College. A full field hearing was canceled by Republican congressional leaders.

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Names and Addresses

Previous Chapman University commencement speakers have not generated the controversy that surrounds this year’s replacement of Rep. Loretta Sanchez with Trustee John Crean. Here’s a look at who has spoken in recent years:

Class: 1993

Speaker: Steven Schandler, faculty chair

Class: 1994

Speaker: Jay Boylan, faculty chair

Class: 1995

Speaker: Cindy Dougherty, former vice president of student life

Class: 1996*

Speaker: Swari Paul, British industrialist (master’s ceremony); Marilyn Harran, professor of religion and history (bachelor’s ceremony)

Class: 1997

Speaker: Don Booth, professor of economics (master’s); John Crean, trustee and local philanthropist (bachelor’s)

* First time two separate ceremonies were held

Source: Chapman University