The tyranny of the Board of Regents, and probably your boss too

Dustin Avent-Holt

Dustin Avent-Holt is an associate professor of sociology at Augusta University.

Imagine a world where you are exiled from the United States for speaking out against the actions of its political leaders. Kicked right out of the country. We actually don’t have to imagine this. The Gulag system in the Soviet Union did this very thing for decades under the Stalinist regime. The Nazi regime in Germany led many Jewish academics and political activists to flee the country for fear of persecution, and the fascist Mussolini regime imprisoned political dissidents.

I assume most of us would find this kind of practice abhorrent in the US today. It violates our fundamental political sensibility that we should be free to engage in activities and speech as our own conscience dictates, and speak out against those we disagree with who are in positions of power. Yet this is the anti-democratic world the Board of Regents, the body governing state of Georgia’s 26 public colleges and universities in the University System of Georgia, is trying to create. Not for the country as a whole, they don’t have that kind of authority. But they are currently crafting language in their policy manual that would allow them to fire professors without demonstrating cause.

If they are allowed to follow through this will effectively end tenure, the bedrock of academic freedom, for professors in the state of Georgia. Tenure enables professors to speak out on controversial issues (like I’m doing now), to pursue controversial research, and to expose students to new and often controversial ideas. It means we have a higher education system where we are able to pursue knowledge that betters our society, without fear of retaliation from our university leaders or political leaders. These changes that allow professors to be fired without cause are the equivalent of sending professors to Siberia.

Now, you may be thinking, “Hey, isn’t this just the world we live in. I mean, I don’t have tenure at my job. Can’t my own boss fire me for any reason as well?” Yes, they very likely can. The default employment contract in the US, including both Georgia and South Carolina, is “at-will” employment, where an employer can fire any employee for any or no reason (except an illegal reason). In this sense, most workplaces without additional protections from unions or other democratic controls are anti-democratic institutions.

But, is this how we should be organizing employment in our society? What exactly is so different between being fired for saying something your boss doesn’t like and being exiled from a country for saying something its political leaders don’t like? Sure, if you get fired maybe you will find another job (of course even today employers are less likely to hire you if you are fired, to say nothing of the politically-motivated blacklisting of the McCarthy era).

But even if you could find another job with relative ease does that make it ok to fire employees without cause? Are we right to allow someone to have so much power over us that they can undermine our livelihood because they don’t like what we say or think or do, any more than we are right to allow political leaders to exile political dissidents?

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I don’t think so. The Board of Regents, as with most employers, have dictatorial power over employees in the University System of Georgia. Amidst rising COVID cases they are openly and actively preventing faculty from implementing basic COVID mitigation strategies such as masking and online instruction, disregarding the health and safety of not only faculty, but staff, students and the broader community around campuses. They have openly threatened to discipline faculty, including firing them, if they implement mask mandates in their own classes or convert their in-person classes online, and they have said they will not listen to political protests from faculty voicing concerns about these policies.

One way to describe this is failed leadership, but in fact it is tyrannical leadership. Acting Chancellor MacCartney and the Board of Regents are acting like fascist dictators and trying to consolidate even more power into their own hands with these proposed policy changes.

In the short run, we must stop the Board of Regents from destroying the last bastion of freedom in the workplace. In the long run, we need to reinstate workers voice and power in all places of employment. We all benefit when employees are citizens of their workplaces, not subjects of despotic employers.