A battle over identity of school roils faculty at Catholic University
Earlier this summer, an informal body called the Faculty Assembly took an unofficial vote of no confidence in its president and provost.
About a year after John Garvey was named president of the Catholic University of America, Stephen McKenna, chair of the media studies department, was trying to fill a faculty position. After a lengthy search, he and others narrowed it down to three candidates—only to learn the new president had rejected all three.
According to McKenna, Garvey canceled the search in February 2012 because none of the three finalists openly identified as Catholic. McKenna said that when he visited Garvey’s office to discuss the matter, he was lectured on “how to pre-target a desired Catholic candidate, and run a search designed to land that person.”
“This was both new and alarming,” McKenna wrote recently in an email. “The policy had always been, ‘all other things being equal, hire the Catholic.’ Clearly now we were to follow that policy with a wink.”
