Thompson isn't fooling many
UCA's renegade-in-residence, President Winfred Thompson, now stands condemned by virtually every person and group with a conceivable stake or interest in the university -- with the single exception of the board of trustees.
In case anyone's lost track, Thompson has been condemned by the UCA Faculty, the UCA Student Government Association, UCA students generally, the public in countless letters to this newspaper, this newspaper, the Hendrix College faculty, the state newspaper's official editorial voice in more than one editorial that drew analogies between Thompson and other totalitarian dictators, and, just recently, by Gov. Huckabee.
I can't recall the last time a sitting governor of Arkansas used the word "outraged" to describe his reaction to something a state college president had done, but I'd guess it might have been back in the early '40s, just before Gov. Adkins fired J. William Fulbright from his post as president of the University of Arkansas. Whatever Fulbright did to tick the governor off wouldn't hold a candle to the outrages Thompson has committed, I guarantee you (in fact, Gov. Adkins was mad at Fulbright's mother), but the bad news for us now is that after the Fulbright firing the legislature made college presidents immune to being fired by the governor. That, friends, is a real shame, at least at this moment.
A more damning indictment of Thompson is the report of the American Association of University Professors, which will be published in the March-April issue of its national journal Academe. Considering the seriousness of the conditions the AAUP found and reported, it seems to me almost a certainty that the AAUP will officially censure Thompson and his administration. That is as it should be; AAUP censure represents to the world the absolute low point of academic mismanagement. To my personal knowledge, prospective applicants in distant states are already deciding not to seek employment at UCA. Once the report is published and when UCA is censured, the school will be lucky to hire anyone who's not two steps ahead of the posse.
Of course, Thompson has written and distributed a lengthy "response" to the AAUP report. I've read the wretched thing, and I can attest that it is exactly like any number of other documents Thompson has spewed forth in transparently false attempts to justify his heinous actions and those of his puppet subordinates. That is, it is a tissue of outright lies, distortions and misrepresentations, and legalistic attempts to confuse the truth. Incredibly, Thompson repeats a number of assertions that were discredited and disproved long ago, perhaps on the familiar tyrant's theory that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.
Thompson's response, however, will not fool many. Certainly not the AAUP, and certainly not anyone who knows a smidgin of the truth Thompson tries so lamely to conceal. But then, as we've seen so many times before, the only ones he really has to fool are a majority of the board of trustees. You'd think they'd eventually get tired of being fooled like that.
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(EDITOR'S NOTE: Jeff Henderson is a former English professor at the University of Central Arkansas.)