"Purge at Ave Maria"

"Purge at Ave Maria Law?", asks Inside Higher Ed:

[I]n recent years, the fighting at Ave Maria law hasn’t been about cutting edge Catholic legal thought, or pitting the law school against secular competitors. Instead, the professors — many of them people who share the philosophy behind the law school — have been in revolt over what they see as the dean’s efforts to squelch them.

A recent push by the administration to fire a tenured professor at the law school — one of the professors who created the original proposal to build Ave Maria — has other professors deeply concerned. Many at the law school are afraid to speak publicly, saying that they believe the professor threatened with dismissal is being punished for objecting to some of the dean’s decisions. But privately professors say that they fear the law school has lost its values and a growing number of Catholic legal thinkers are going public calling for radical change at the law school. . . .

Regardless of their views on moving to Florida, they said that the crisis facing the law school has to do with squelching of dissent and a very narrow view of authority and Catholic thinking. “Tom Monaghan and Dobranski view Catholicism as co-existing with the right wing of the Republican party, which means a 1920s-era, free market capitalism, exploitation of workers and employees, abuse of employees and their families — all is OK in the name of God, because God approves you if you are rich and powerful,” he said.

Safranek said that the law school’s leadership has abandoned not only academic freedom, but Catholic teachings about the dignity of individuals and the importance of treating one another with basic respect. “They are the ones who don’t believe what the faith has to teach,” he said. “We are really the ones trying to maintain the Catholic identity of the institution. They want it to be an offshoot of the Republican Party.”

Ugh.  I would only add that it seems a bit too quick, and unfair to the Republican Party, to suggest -- as Prof. Safranek is, perhaps erroneously, quoted as suggesting -- that (what appear to be) the appalling departures at Ave Maria from the basic norms that should govern an academic community, and Ave Maria's (apparent) failure as an academic enterprise, reflect, in some sense, the school's (or Monaghan's, or Dean Dobranski's) Republican-ness.  Of course, I'm not there, so I could be wrong . . . .