Thoughts on Ave Maria Law School

X-posted from PB.com:

We the undersigned alumni and other members of the Ave Maria School of Law community past and present, hereby strongly oppose the actions of the school's administration and Board of Governors in ejecting Professors Stephen Safranek, Philip Pucillo, and Edward Lyons from our community. The administration and Board have disregarded these professors' academic excellence, Catholic sensibility, ethical integrity, and personal sacrifice. Their ejection, widely recognized as a purge of faculty that disagree with the administration and Board on issues of governance and decision-making processes, is gravely injurious to our school's mission, seriously damaging to its reputation, and inconsistent with the principles of a Catholic academic community. The injury is exacerbated by the direct harm caused to students who are enrolled in these professors' classes and who are entering the grueling federal judicial clerkship application process, a process whose deadlines are imminent and whose miraculous success for our community has been largely due to these professors' tireless and irreplaceable efforts. We therefore implore the administration and Board to fully reinstate these professors before the fall semester begins.

(HT: Leiter) This petition was prompted by employment actions by the administration against the mentioned faculty, which had elicited a prior statement by "a majority of the faculty of Ave Maria School of law," expressing their

... profound sorrow regarding the deplorable treatment of tenured Professor Stephen J. Safranek at the hands of the administration of Ave Maria School of Law. Dean Bernard Dobranski has initiated the process to terminate Professor Safranek's tenure and the School has now suspended him without pay (as of September 15, 2007) during the termination process. We believe that it is critical to publicly disassociate ourselves from and condemn the administration's conduct.

I have been reluctant to comment on the Ave Maria situation in the past, because I do not know all the facts. I am still unwilling to take sides. Yet, as a Catholic legal academic, I now believe that the currect situation at Ave Maria is bringing both Catholicism and Catholic legal education into disrepute. To put it in the economic terms I am most comfortable with, what started out as a local dispute is now generating negative externalities affecting all of us with an interest in Catholic legal education. One prays that the contesting sides will join together and prayerfully seek reconciliation.