After Jackson State University faculty Senate president and tenured psychology professor Dawn McLin was placed on administrative leave pending termination for allegedly abusing her position’s power, it created an atmosphere of fear among her colleagues.
According to the Mississippi Free Press, McLin has had to perform the duties of her position at a time of great friction between faculty and school administration. This tension has resulted in multiple votes of no confidence from the faculty Senate directed at the current and former administrations of the HBCU.
Although the faculty members the paper spoke to at an Oct. 8 meeting called to support McLin are unsure of why she was placed on leave, they believe how the university is treating her is highly irregular, particularly because, as a tenured professor, she is owed more due process than they believe she has received from JSU administration.
According to faculty Senate executive committee members, McLin was not
issued a written warning before her suspension and has been accused of harassment, malfeasance, and insubordination. Per the American Association of University Professors, a professional group that acts as a union of sorts for university professors, the treatment of McLin is exceedingly rare; it only happens at the most once or twice every few years.Anita Levy, a program officer for the AAUP, wrote in a statement to the paper via email that the actions of the university appear to be retaliatory, “Such actions are generally taken in retaliation for criticisms of the administration the faculty members may have offered in the performance of their faculty leadership duties.”
Although McLin is owed a hearing in front of a faculty panel, members of the faculty the Free Press spoke to indicated that Marcus Thompson, JSU’s president, could still terminate her regardless of the panel’s recommendation. Faculty also shared with the outlet that they believe if McLin can be placed on leave with no prior warning, any one of them could be as well.
Neither McLin nor university officials spoke to the Free Press before it ran its story. McLin could not speak at the Zoom meeting because, according to a member of the Senate executive committee, she had already been “removed from the university altogether.”
Although the call was initially supposed to be a general assembly meeting to help the faculty prepare for the upcoming fall semester, the presence of Onetta Whitley, Thompson’s general counsel, and Van Gillespie, Thompson’s chief of staff, unnerved some at the meeting. This is because a meeting of the full Senate is typically not attended by anyone from the president’s office unless they are there at the request of the Senate.
At one point, Whitley spoke and explained why she believed the president’s office did not receive an invitation to the meeting.
“We know the faculty senate has recently undergone some changes and that may explain why we did not receive such an invitation.”
Whitley continued, “I wanted to say to the faculty senate how much we are looking forward to working with you all. We hope to be in a position to foster, really, a better working relationship than in 2024, a more collaborative, collegial relationship than what I understand has existed between the administration and the faculty senate in the past.”
In addition, Whitley’s remarks during the meeting in which she called for a more collegial relationship between the president and the Senate also confused some meeting attendees because they believed their relationship was already collegial. One Senate executive committee member also noted that the lack of a relationship exists because Thompson doesn’t directly communicate with the Senate himself, telling the Free Press, “He doesn’t have any communication with us.”
One member on the call questioned how the administration approached the entire process despite the faculty advising a cautious approach out of fear of facing the consequences for standing up for McLin.
“We love JSU as much as they do,” the faculty member said. “The question we have to ask is this the best way to address the issue of faculty? Is this the best way to address the needs of students? Is this the best way to address the community?”
They concluded, “(Jackson State) does not belong to one person or two persons. It belongs to all of us.”
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