Emporia State University faculty express no confidence in general counsel who opposes tenure rights

Yahoo

11-03-2025

Steven Lovett, an Emporia State University attorney and author of the bill undermining faculty tenure at 32 Kansas public higher education institutions, outlined reasons for introducing the bill in the Kansas House. He said property rights tied to tenure were unnecessary to preserve academic freedom. (Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector)
TOPEKA — The Emporia State University Faculty Senate passed an unscheduled, secret-ballot vote of no confidence in ESU's general counsel in the wake of his advocacy for legislation that would undermine tenure at state universities.
The no confidence vote in general counsel Steven Lovett is the latest development in turmoil over ESU's decision to terminate tenured faculty in the fall of 2022.
Some of the fired professors in 2023 filed a federal lawsuit in which they argue that tenure is a property right that was unduly taken away from them. Earlier this year, Lovett, a defendant in the lawsuit, proposed a legislative solution that would retroactively abolish property rights inherent in tenure.
ESU spokeswoman Gwen Larson didn't answer questions for this story but previously said Lovett acted as a private citizen when he introduced House Bill 2348.
A House committee is poised to take action on the bill, which received support from Lovett, his wife and one other academic. The University of Kansas chancellor and Kansas State University president were among three dozen opponents who warned in a hearing last month that the proposal would harm state universities and jeopardize academic freedom.
ESU Faculty Senate president Mallory Bishop made a motion for a vote of no confidence in Lovett during a Faculty Senate meeting last week. Bishop, an untenured director of ethnic and gender studies at ESU, declined to comment for this story but outlined proceedings in an email she sent to all faculty March 6.
'This motion did not appear on the agenda, as my intention was to have an opportunity for Senators to vote without interference or undue influence,' Bishop wrote in the email. 'This is not conventional, but our policies and procedures do not explicitly convey how to conduct a vote of no confidence.'
Bishop may have violated the Kansas Open Meetings Act by not disclosing the motion on the agenda. She also conducted the vote by anonymous ballot, which would be unlawful for a vote on binding action. As she wrote in her email, the no confidence vote 'stands as an expression of Faculty Senate views.'
The result, according to her email: 10 voted in favor, zero against, eight abstained, and two unnamed faculty members walked out of the meeting without voting.
Larson, the ESU spokeswoman, didn't respond to questions, including whether Bishop's concerns about interference were reasonable, if the process undermines the credibility of the vote, and what significance, if any, ESU administration places on the vote.
Nicholas Fleisher, associate professor and chair of linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was the primary author of an American Association of University Professors report on ESU in 2023 that warned of the university's attacks on academic freedom. He said in an interview for this story that the situation at ESU 'just sounds utterly dysfunctional.'
Fleisher said it was 'utterly bizarre' that Lovett was allowed to keep his job as general counsel after bringing a bill a that affects the entire university.
'When we were interviewing people from ESU in the course of preparing the report, many people talked about precisely this kind of climate of fear and intimidation,' Fleisher said. 'There were a number of people who made allegations that some of the folks who were chosen for termination were chosen because they had clashed with either the president or the dean or another administrator at some point.'
He advised concerned faculty members to speak up.
'Staying silent doesn't really buy you much safety in the long term,' Fleisher said. 'In this kind of situation, if you've got an administration that is behaving egregiously, it's generally better to call it out, draw attention to it, try to oppose it, as early as possible.'
The House Judiciary Committee could take action on Lovett's bill any day, but its fate remains uncertain.
During a hearing last month, Lovett said he wrote the two-page bill without direction from ESU president Ken Hush or anyone else. He argued the First Amendment protection of free speech should be sufficient to protect academic freedom at colleges and universities.
He also proclaimed that he was voluntarily surrendering his own tenure at ESU.
'As the Legislature is examining government inefficiencies and costs, while demanding fiscal accountability and the elimination of waste, it is time to address the long-standing myth about tenure,' Lovett wrote in testimony provided to the committee. 'The taxpayers of Kansas, and the higher education system of Kansas, should no longer be burdened by the unnecessary expense or operational paralysis of any state employee's 'entitlement' to his or her job.'