Staff Complaints Led Knowles to Remove VES Chair

When former Chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) Ellen Phelan walked into a meeting with Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles on March 15th, she says she hoped to gain Knowles’ approval for two new faculty appointments.

But when she left University Hall an hour later, Phelan had been asked to resign as chair.

She refused, and three weeks later, Knowles forcibly removed her and appointed Kenan Professor of English Marjorie Garber—who is not a member of VES and has no formal background in the arts—to the position.

Phelan’s dismissal came after a myriad of informal complaints to FAS Personnel services from the VES department’s support staff, who say that some faculty called students and staff obscene names, hired them to run personal chores and errands, and publicly criticized them for their perceived personal and professional failings, which they say one faculty member meticulously recorded. Phelan, who lives in New York City and was only at VES’ Carpenter Center a few days a week, was criticized for her absenteeism and dismissive administrative style.

The department has had a long history of administrative troubles that compromised its programs and made other parts of FAS work overtime—for the past three years, the VES department has missed the registrar’s deadline for course catalogue listings.

Knowles told The Crimson that over the past year, VES had suffered from “a number of troubling problems.”

Phelan says that Knowles’ action was taken without any formal investigation of the complaints and says she is considering filing a lawsuit.

Puritanical New England Meets Hip New York

When Phelan, a prominent New York City painter, first came to Harvard, it was with a mandate. She was charged with bringing top artists to Harvard to teach undergraduates to make art as well as study it, a strategy that by all accounts has been wildly successful.

But when Phelan brought professional art to Harvard, she brought the culture of the art world with it.

“It was puritanical New England meets hip New York,” said Arnheim Lecturer on Studio Arts Nancy M. Mitchnick.

Phelan says she recruited famous career artists, who painted alone and often paid studio assistants to do everything from wash brushes to manage their archives. Their world bore little resemblance to either academic departments with rigid hierarchies and formal procedures or corporate environments that stress professional boundaries.

Faculty say that Garber, reputed to be a deft administrator and a trusty lieutenant to University Hall, is making VES look and run more like other departments. But some fear that this may freeze the rapidly developing program in its tracks.

They Didn’t Know it was Wrong

The staff complaints that directly led to Phelan’s removal centered on three of eight faculty members who have offices in the Carpenter Center: Phelan, VES Professor and former department chair Chris Killip, and former Head Tutor Mitchnick.

Killip, four staff members told The Crimson, recorded their every move and publicly harassed them, while Phelan and Mitchnick swore in front of students, made obscene references to both staff and students behind their backs and asked staff members to perform personal errands and chores.

“It’s a culture of unacceptable behavior that was going on for so long they didn’t know it was wrong,” said a University source familiar with the department. “The problem isn’t that one person says ‘fuck you.’ It’s that one person says ‘fuck you’ and everyone thinks it’s fine. There’s a total lack of discretion, confidentiality, and respect...and the hardest thing is to maintain your professionalism.”

“If I had known what kind of atmosphere I was getting into, I wouldn’t have come,” said a staff member.

Four staff members independently told The Crimson that Killip monitors their hours in the Carpenter Center and publicly reprimands them when he thinks they are not performing their jobs adequately.

In a meeting on May 3 with VES director of administration Susan H. Foster, Assistant Dean for Human Resources Laura Ervin, and Garber, a University source and one faculty member said Killip read excerpts from a personal diary of staff attendence and assailed Foster’s administration. Killip would not comment on the meeting, but said that “since [Phelan’s removal], I’ve kept a record. [I’ve done] timekeeping.”

After Harvard Film Archive staff failed to poster an outside kiosk earlier this year, Harvard Film Archive manager Julie A. Buck recalls, Killip left a large hand-written note on the wall, saying, “this is the most blatant show of incompetency, even for you people.” One staff member complained directly to Ervin that Killip told three staff members he watched them “all the time.”

Phelan says there was little she could do to control Killip.

“Chris is a tenured, full professor, and it’s very hard for me to reprimand him in a meaningful way,” she says. “The chair is a rotating member of the department and it’s not easy to tell your colleagues what they may and may not do.”

Mitchnick says that she swears in front of—but not at—students. In an e-mail earlier this year to academic coordinator Michael Lawrence, she says she wrote of a troubled thesis student, “Give the fuck a pass.” Lawrence forwarded the e-mail to FAS Personnel, and Phelan says Knowles read it to her when he asked her to resign.

“You can’t have a loose cannon like that around students,” a staff member said.

But Mitchnick says swearing was a “habitual” part of VES culture and was “not meanspirited.”

She and Phelan say they could not respond to the staff’s concerns about their vocabulary because they were never approached about them directly.

Before Foster’s arrival, two staff members say, certain faculty, including Mitchnick, asked many staff members, who did not feel they were in a position to refuse, to perform personal errands and chores, sometimes but not always for pay.

Assistant to the Chair Wells says Mitchnick requested that she xerox an entire course book that Mitchnick planned to give to Phelan as a gift. When she gave Mitchnick what she described as “a funny look,” Mitchnick responded, “Were you hired to do faculty support or what?”

Phelan says Mitchnick made certain staff members so uncomfortable—Lawrence threatened to leave the department if her behavior did not improve—that Phelan removed her from the Head Tutor position last fall.

Phelan has lived in New York throughout her time at Harvard, and her attendence at the Carpenter Center was erratic. When she was not teaching in the fall, she was absent for several days at a time.

A staff member said Phelan’s absenteeism also prevented her from even seeing much of what staff called her colleagues’ unruly behavior and made it impossible for her to discipline them.

Phelan says that her position at Harvard “was sold to me as this three days-two nights commuting thing,” but that as time went on, the frequency of her commutes decreased dramatically.

“She didn’t make it a secret she didn’t want to be here,” said Wells, her assistant. “She was never here, and what she knew was just what people bothered to call her and tell her about. You can’t solve problems on the phone all the time.”

Catch-22

According to VES Events and Publications Coordinator Melissa W. Davenport, the new staff expressed their concerns about the work environment at length to Foster, hired last summer, who relayed the concerns to Phelan.

Foster says she told Personnel that she planned to quit if the department’s atmosphere did not improve, and according to Wells, Davenport, Lawrence, Wells and manager of finances Laurie Snow met with Ervin and Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs Elizabeth Doherty at the Sumner Road office of FAS Personnel in January to voice their complaints.

Two weeks later, the same staff met with Doherty again in University Hall. There, Wells said, Doherty asked them if they were willing to express their concerns as formal written complaints that would require University investigation if Knowles saw fit to request them. All agreed, and Foster urged staff members to keep their concerns confidential.

The next the staff heard of the matter, Phelan was gone. After meeting with her on March 15, Knowles removed her without consulting the staff or the department faculty, and made no public statement. And ten days later, according to President-elect of Harvard’s Board of Overseers Richard E. Oldenburg ‘54, Knowles cancelled the department’s visiting committee, which was scheduled to do an external review of the department.

The faculty were shocked. In an April 4 meeting requested by Hooker Professor of Visual Arts Alfred F. Guzzetti, Knowles described to the VES permanent faculty the general tenor of the complaints but refused to give them specific examples of misconduct.

According to Guzzetti, Knowles said the staff’s right to confidentiality prevented him from either identifying the source of the complaints or discussing individual incidents.

The day after the meeting, Killip says he asked Knowles on behalf of the VES faculty asking him to formalize the charges so that they could be investigated before Phelan was forcibly removed.

Knowles referred Killip to General Counsel Anne Taylor, who told him there was no requirement that the complaints be written and investigated, and that there was no reason the staff should come forward if they did not wish to.

Because, according to FAS policy, chairs serve at the pleasure of the Dean, Knowles was not required to articulate any reasons for Phelan’s removal. As Taylor explained to Killip, he certainly didn’t have to launch a formal investigation or identify the anonymous sources of information to justify what she called an “administrative adjustment.”

Taylor says she warned Killip that if he were to ask the staff about their concerns, he might put himself at legal risk.

“I cautioned him against any interaction that could be construed as intimidating and retaliatory,” Taylor said.

Killip says that Knowles and Taylor put the faculty in a impossible “catch-22” in which Phelan and her colleagues could not confront their accusers or even hear the charges against them, further aggravating an already strained relationship between VES faculty and staff.

“If these complaints were ever adjudicated, they would never rise to the level of an abusive work environment,” Phelan said. “It’s an abusive work environment to the faculty. You have the dean removing the chair based on allegations that had not risen to the level of formal complaints...and can’t be rebutted. You have the people who complained sitting in their offices and you can’t ask them because that would be harassment. The faculty is miserable and feel very undermined and demoralized.”

The “catch-22” led Phelan and Killip to be suspicious of the staff who were installed against their objections. Phelan told The Crimson that she felt like the new staff were put in as a “surveillance team” instructed to report back to University Hall, an assertion which Foster denies.

Phelan and Mitchnick say they felt betrayed by the new employees.

“You can learn not to swear,” Mitchnick said, “but to betray the trust of the people you work with? For Michael [Lawrence] to [forward the “fuck” email to Personnel] was treacherous.”

Three current staff members say that many of the department’s permanent faculty no longer say hello to them in the Carpenter Center since Phelan was removed.

“We’re seen as these little rats, that we were just sent by FAS to spy on Phelan,” Wells says.

A Revolving Door

A staff member says he felt resentment from faculty members who overwhelmingly opposed the restructuring.

FAS Personnel conducted an internal review of the 29-member VES staff last year which resulted in the departure of two longtime former staff members, Kathleen Chaudhry and former finance manager Karen Brown, and brought in four new staffers with extensive academic administrative experience. Six months later, each of the four new staff members had complained to FAS Personnel about the working environment in the VES department.

The restructuring also led some faculty to resent the external interference.

“It used to be a very friendly department,” Killip said, “but Personnel’s involvement changed things considerably.”

The new staff say they were perceived as outsiders with no loyalty to the department and had to suffer the stigma of replacing longtime employees.

But faculty and continuing staff alike say that VES was in such a state of administrative chaos before the restructuring that University Hall had no choice but to intervene.

During Killip’s tenure, the department’s administration was plagued with a revolving door at the top-VES went through three chief administrators during Killip’s four years as chair, and the position was often left vacant for months at at time.

Lower-level staff members were thus forced to run the department without guidance, resulting in VES missing FAS deadlines and not maintaining a clearly allocated and enforced budget.

“It’s old news,” a University source said. “Every year, the staff get fired.”

Staff say VES rarely met Registrar deadlines for providing visiting faculty selection and course information, and say Phelan did little to enforce those deadlines.

“Many faculty and staff complained that everything had to go through her and she wasn’t there enough,” Davenport said. “There was a lack of appreciation for deadlines in the department which I had hoped would improve but which was actually getting worse. The Carpenter Center needs a certain amount of advance publicity to guarantee attendance, and things were getting more and more last-minute.”

Under Phelan’s leadership, VES consistently made substantial changes to its course listings and faculty appointments until early June, just before the course catalogue went to press.

One source suggested that the reason Knowles replaced Phelan in March instead of June was that he was he was concerned that if the staff all left because of the environment—as many had threatened—the department would stop functioning, and there was a risk that the VES department would not report grades in time, and would not arrange for teaching staff for the next year.

Phelan says that she may not have excelled in academic bureaucracy. “[Knowles] may have a point that I don’t know how to run a department,” she said. “Why would I? Have I come up through academia?”

“Old-Fashioned” Accounting

The high rate of administrative turnover also meant that there was little oversight of an accounting system that Chaudhry called “old-fashioned and loosey-goosey.”

(Clarification)

Phelan then complained that there was no “clarity” in Brown’s budgets for the Carpenter Center.

When Knowles asked Phelan to resign, she says he accused her of financing “lavish dinners.” Phelan denies that financial mismanagement took place when she was chair.

Chaudhry says that VES members were given free reign to make professional purchases on faculty on the department’s tab.

Under former chief administrator Missy Allen, faculty and staff could easily reach into the department’s pocketbook.

“The purchase order book would be lying behind the counter,” Davenport said. “Anybody could buy things and wouldn’t have to justify it until after the fact.”

“I could say, ‘I’m busy,’ and give Karen [Brown] a stack of receipts and say these are my course receipts, and she would take care of it,” remembers Mitchnick. Brown refused comment.

According to Snow, when she arrived at VES last summer, many department faculty were entirely unfamiliar with the official University policies regarding budget requests.

Some faculty are frustrated by Snow’s insistence on procedure. “Should I learn how to fill out forms?,” Mitchnick asked. “Yeah, I suppose so. But it’s a nuisance. Who has time to do the bloody receipts? This is about corporate business. Do it right or you won’t get reimbursed.”

Creative Art in the Liberal Arts

Garber will not have any more official power over her colleagues than Phelan did, leading Phelan to say she thinks that staff complaints were not the underlying reason for her removal.

Instead, she says, the complaints served as an excuse for Knowles to cut off the growth of VES. She speculates that Knowles wanted to run the VES department more like FAS’ more academic departments rather than as a group of practicing professionals.

“Why would [Knowles] do what he did on such flimsy hearsay?,” Killip asks. “It’s fairly self-evident that Dean Knowles does not prioritize the making of art, only the study of art within the confines of academia.”

Most of the premier artists Phelan hired as visiting faculty have careers outside of academia, don’t depend on Harvard for their income, and aren’t interested in taking on the administrative burdens that come with professorship.

In a detailed five-year plan for the department that Phelan submitted to Knowles nearly two years ago, she expressed interest in an array of non-ladder and half time appointments, as well as a fifth-year graduate program.

“I’ve been saying to Dean Knowles for some time, how far do you want this go?,” Phelan said. “How good do you want this to be? You tell me where the limit is. Right now we have a very strong undergraduate program. If you want to maintain the status quo, you don’t need me...We’re seen as too vibrant and innovative and kids are flocking to us. It might mean more resources.”

Garber is a longtime veteran of FAS bureaucracy, and has a reputation for academic professionalism devoid of the laissez-faire art world attitude that Phelan brought to VES.

Department faculty say that Garber has already started to clamp down on the administrative confusion that Phelan and Killip presided over. The Carpenter Center has already completed its list of guest lecturers for next year, the earliest it has done so in recent memory. And course information, though still late, now appears to be on track.

But Garber’s presence comes at a price—Phelan has already decided to take a leave of absence next year.

“I’m not someone who goes to parties where I’m not invited,” Phelan said, “and I’m not someone who stays places where I’m not welcome. This is an untenable situation for me... It’s their school. They can do what they want with it. If they don’t want to have an art program, fine.”

—Staff writer Daniel K. Rosenheck can be reached at rosenhec@fas.harvard.edu.