10 September 2004

Dr. Elliott Pood, Ph.D.

Dean, CoAL

USM

Dear Elliott:

            I have your letter of apology, and I thank you for it. I knew, and said, all along, that there was a breakdown in communications somewhere and called the incident a tempest in a teapot. But I do have some thoughts about the two letters that I want to share with you.

            First, we both know that you have known since last spring or at least early summer, because I kept Angela posted as things developed, that I was leaving USM either by retirement or by resignation before the fall semester started. I was told that you did the paperwork to keep me from getting paid in September some time before you wrote letter #1, so your letter informing me that you were recommending my termination, dated September 2, was obviously something you had been thinking about for some time: it seems to me that your pleasure in writing and sending it is palpable in the letter itself. Apparently you did not ask Angela on August 31 or September 1 if I had returned my contract, as you should have, because if you had asked her she would have told you that I had resigned; if you did ask her, and she told you that I had resigned, then you should resign immediately as an administrator.

It seems to me that a good dean would first of all have offered a veteran professor of 27 years, or even a first-year assistant professor for that matter, the simple courtesy of calling and asking me to come by your office to talk about what was going on, if you were not sure. What if, for example, I had not gotten the contract in the mail (I was gone a good deal of the summer, you know)? What if there was bureaucratic slippage somewhere? Did you in fact check with the president’s office, which is where I would have sent my contract, I believe by instruction, had I signed it, to see if it was there? What if I had registered a protest with the president about my salary and was waiting to hear from him before signing? What if I had simply gotten sick—or had an accident or some other crisis—and couldn’t bring it in on the last day? What if I had needed help rather than termination? Did any of these possibilities even occur to you? They would have to a good dean. (By the way, the letter came on Saturday before Labor Day when I wasn’t home to sign for it, so I could not get it until Tuesday and so spent an anxious 3-day weekend wondering why somebody at USM had sent me a certified letter.)

            Second, when you learned from David Wheeler that in fact I did resign properly, a good dean might have had the professional courtesy, not to mention the simple decent good manners, to pick up the phone and call me immediately to apologize and to tell me that an official letter of apology was on its way. But you chose to send another faceless, impersonal, formal certified letter, which like the first was delivered at a time when I was not home to sign for it, and I had again to go to the post office to pick it up the next day, and so it was another 48 hours, another extended period of anxiety, before I got the apology letter. That’s just unacceptable, Elliott, and might suggest that for some reason you just dont want to confront me even on the phone---fearful of conflict perhaps, even though you advertise conflict as your meat and potatoes.

            You won’t believe this, but everything I have said to you in the year we have known each other (and that includes this letter) has been in what I consider your and the college’s best interests and emerge out of my sense of what a university should be; I’ve always taken it not just as my right but as my duty to my profession and my university to argue with administrators when I think they are doing something wrong. You alone among the administrators I’ve argued with for my 34 years in the profession seem to have taken my arguments personally; but even in the most heated of our exchanges, I have been trying to persuade you to be a dean, a professional and a colleague: our dean, our advocate, our leader, and not a shill for the administration. No matter what you say now about your having worked behind the scenes after Frank and Gary were fired (nobody believes that, by the way; what we know is that you simply disappeared, nobody knows where), a good dean would have been much more visible, out in front leading the college through that crisis because we needed somebody to cohere around. But you left us, some have said perhaps deliberately, to flounder and make our own way through the uncertainty, the agony, and the mess. You didn’t even tell us to sit down and shut up and get over it, which at any rate would have been something. As it was, you gave us no leadership whatsoever. None. And that’s too bad: that was your moment: you could have been the man of the hour, earned our trust, been a mensch, gained our respect and secured a place in our hearts, but you didn’t: you just flatout failed us.

You have chosen to be a shill, of course, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t have shown me more simple courtesy in this matter than you chose to, and I’m really curious to know why you wanted to intervene in an already very painful process of separation that you well knew had been under way for several months. The only possible explanations I can think of are that you 1) wanted to make the separation even more painful, 2) wanted to make sure I couldn’t come back to USM in case the MSU position didn’t materialize, 3) wanted to humiliate and embarrass me, and/or 4) wanted the simple satisfaction of having fired me. I hope writing and sending the letter felt as good to you as it felt to me to see you acting so completely in character.

The first letter is vindictive and therefore pusillanimous: knowing as you did that I was leaving, getting officially out of your hair, you might have had the grace to simply let it alone, to let it happen as quietly as I was trying to let it happen; but that’s just not you, is it? You had to get one last shot in, and apparently for very old reasons: we hadn’t even had a good argument since way last spring—the best I can remember, we hardly passed a word with each other over the last several months—and I thought that hostilities had ceased. So your bad behavior in terminating me is simply gratuitous, Elliott: you should be ashamed. You owe not just me but the entire college an apology too.

But since you did apologize to me—and I want everybody to know that—I forgive you for this tawdry episode and wish you and the College of Arts & Letters well. But I do hope you will learn something from our contretemps, so that you and my friends and colleagues at USM will benefit mutually from it. And I leave you with the request that you never treat them as you have treated me. They are all good and worthy folks who deserve much better than that.

Sincerely,

Noel Polk