Beloved at Altoona, she's accused of being disruptive

Sunday, January 11, 2004

By Paula Reed Ward, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Nona Gerard, a tenured professor at Penn State Altoona who faces termination for charges of grave misconduct and failure to perform, behaved like the actor she is one day last week, smiling for the audience and entertaining her supporters with a series of sloppy ballet leaps down the hall.

	Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Nona Gerard, standing, associate professor of theater arts at Penn State University's Altoona campus, chats with cast members of "A Dry Season." From left are Mary Rawson, Doug Martz, Sheila McKenna and Robin Walsh. The play, staged at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in Oakland, was performed Friday to raise money for Gerard's legal expenses. Click photo for larger image.

It was the kind of behavior that reinforces the view from each side of the case -- a disruptive loose cannon who should be fired or a dedicated, valuable teacher who expresses herself.

Those two personalities were the subject of a closed hearing that began last week at Penn State's main campus. Initially, the disciplinary hearing for Gerard, a theater professor for 16 years, was expected to last two days, but when the first witness spent almost 10 hours on the stand, the panel hearing the case realized it could not finish in such a short period.

Now the two administrators and three faculty members will reconvene Jan. 23 to continue the hearing. At the conclusion, the board will make a recommendation to university President Graham Spanier about whether Gerard should be retained or dismissed.

At the heart of the matter are allegations that Gerard has not fulfilled her duties as a professor and that she has created a hostile work environment for her peers.

Gerard's attorney counters that his client has always worked hard and is well liked by her students, but is being targeted because she has been outspoken on sensitive issues.

Administrators say that's not the case.

Penn State Altoona's dean and chief executive officer, William G. Cale Jr., brought the charges against Gerard in a 13-page letter to members of the university's Standing Joint Committee on Tenure on Aug. 11. He lists each of the claims against her.

Cale based the failure-to-perform charge on Gerard's vocal opposition to the "Integrative Arts" four-year degree, created at the Altoona campus in 2000. The degree combines various arts programs, including theater, dance, music, writing and visual arts, into one.

Cale claims Gerard made public attempts to discredit the IA degree and tried to sabotage the school's efforts to establish a dance curriculum.

"Not only have her behaviors weakened the delivery of our IA program, she has also served to cause conflict and discontent among the IA faculty," Cale wrote.

He said Gerard's actions led to the early retirement of one faculty member and the resignation of a co-coordinator of the IA program.

"In a flurry of e-mails in 2001 and 2002, she openly states that our faculty are not qualified to teach IA, makes accusatory and derogatory remarks to and about the IA faculty and states that 'I still cannot support this degree and would not encourage students to enroll in it,' " Cale wrote.

Gerard does not deny any of those points. In fact, she fully admits to openly criticizing the IA program at PSU/Altoona.

"Professor Gerard believed that the program as it was established on her campus was badly conceived," wrote Gerard's attorney, Jim Lieber, in a response to Cale. "Unlike a similar and successful program at the main campus, it suffered from a limited offering of courses, a chronic shortage of space and inadequate faculty."

In addition, Gerard has in the past raised objections to what she saw as nepotism, inadequate credentials and substandard faculty searches.

As for her professional status, Gerard has always received strong evaluations from her students and peers, and has won praise from the community for her theatrical productions, Lieber continued.

Among her students, she's known for being strong and opinionated, but also as a great teacher and fun director.

"She was something that I would aspire to be," said Danielle Southard, 24, who worked on about 10 plays with Gerard at the Altoona campus.

"She had a fun class," added Chad Markovich, 23. "You knew when you went in there, you were going to put your books down, go up on stage and have fun."

Both Southard, of Altoona, and Markovich, of Sandusky, Ohio, made the trip to State College last week to speak in Gerard's behalf.

They agreed their former professor had high expectations of her students, but they were rewarded for it.

"If you are willing to give and willing to do, she is willing to teach," Southard said.

Neither of them could understand the charges against Gerard, but they both know she has a different style of teaching.

"If one of the charges was failure to conform, that I could see," Markovich said.

There is no doubt she is a nonconformist, Lieber said of Gerard, an active gay feminist who does not hesitate to speak her mind.

"However, Ms. Gerard has upset and disturbed others, including members of the present administration, certain faculty and, apparently, a large donor," Lieber wrote.

The lawyer was referring to a play Gerard directed in the fall of 2002, David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago."

The play, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977, explores the sexual beliefs of four people trying to sort through their personal identities and relationships. It contains strong language and graphic sexual discussions. Gerard's production also included partial nudity.

A donor to Penn State Altoona reportedly raised objections about the play without seeing it, Lieber said.

Lieber will not publicly identify the donor.

He thinks that, along with others on the faculty disagreeing with Gerard's views, has led to her potential termination. But those reasons are not valid, Lieber said.

He said the university's action against his client was a violation of her right to free speech. In his brief, he spends several pages on the First Amendment and academic freedom -- two things, he says, that are to be valued in a university setting.

"It is their intense disagreement with Professor Gerard's views and statements for which they want to terminate her," Lieber wrote.

But it's more than that, Cale maintains. In his letter to the tenure committee, he accused Gerard of grave misconduct, stemming from her "creating an intolerable and abusive work environment for numerous employees."

Cale named five faculty members at PSU/Altoona who said Gerard's behavior created a contentious workplace. Among them was an assistant professor of dance, K.T. Huckabee, whom Gerard criticized in an e-mail to the co-coordinator of the Integrative Arts program as being "talentless" and "as cold as a dead fish." To that same co-coordinator, Dinty Moore, Gerard wrote in another e-mail that he was "a rude and belittling man," and that she had "little if no respect for the way [he] handle[s] many situations."

Again, though, Gerard's attorney believes those remarks are protected free speech, and even more so because Gerard is tenured.

"While these views may not be what Dean Cale, Huckabee or Moore wish to hear or see, they all spring from academic and artistic concerns and are protected," Lieber wrote.

But Cale believes Gerard's criticism was so extreme it was detrimental.

"Universities are tolerant places, open to a wide range of points of view and individual expressions of behavior," Cale wrote in his conclusion to the committee members. "However, there comes a point in time when these individual expressions of behavior must be examined in relation to the goals and mission of the institution."

Not only did Gerard hamper the goals of the Integrative Arts program, she also had ample warning to change her attitude, Cale said. In various letters and meetings, Cale ordered Gerard to stop all "disrespectful and unprofessional behavior toward her colleagues," as well as to work within the divisional structure on campus.

In response, Gerard wrote an e-mail to Cale on Nov. 18, 2002, telling him she would no longer direct or be involved in any theater productions at the school. She signed the message, "most sincerely and honestly with great disgust at the thought of this decision."

Two months later, she received notice that her alleged misconduct could lead to her dismissal.

There are roughly a million college faculty members nationwide, and slightly fewer than half have tenure or are working toward it, according to the Washington, D.C.-based American Association of University Professors.

It's harder to dismiss someone who holds tenure, and critics of the system say that on some campuses, it protects poor performers and amounts to a lifetime job guarantee.

But defenders say the opposite is true, that it promotes good teaching and research by encouraging faculty to freely pursue their ideas without fear they might be summarily fired for holding an unpopular view.

Nationally, 40 to 60 faculty members with tenure face dismissal proceedings each year over issues related to job performance, said Jonathan Knight, director of the AAUP's academic freedom and tenure program.

"My sense is the large majority lose their jobs. Typically by the time an administration moves to this very serious step of beginning dismissal proceedings it will have marshaled a strong case, not always a winning case, but I think more often than not the faculty member loses," Knight said.

Doug Mertz, who's known Gerard for 20 years, has worked with her as both a fellow actor and under her direction.

"I've never laughed so much in a rehearsal," said Mertz, a teaching artist at the University of Pittsburgh. "As an actor, she's very sensitive, very generous, which is how she is as a person. That's why I don't understand any of this bad stuff.

"It sounds to me like she ruffled the feathers of a few of the wrong people."

Mertz made the three-hour drive to State College from Pittsburgh to testify before the hearing panel.

"Until this happened, I've never heard anyone say a bad thing about Nona," Mertz said.

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