Friday, Oct. 31, former LA Term Associate Director Frank Romero-Crockett was dismissed. In response to this and the announcement of impending changes to the program, students created a movement called #WantedByWalsh. The group demanded, via a Facebook group, the immediate resignation of Jennifer Walsh, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Facebook Page and Demands
The Facebook page, created Nov. 16, includes a graphic of Walsh’s face with the words “Wanted By Walsh.” Students behind the movement have been posting photos of students wearing cardboard signs with the slogan along with testimonies of why they are #WantedByWalsh. The page has about 500 likes.
Romero-Crockett posted to the page Nov. 19: “I am so humbled by everything that is going on. I know it’s frustrating not knowing what’s going on. The truth will reveal itself and hopefully soon. Good luck, students!” He declined to do an interview with The Clause or provide a written statement to the newspaper.
In one of the first posts, the group laid out its demands and reasoning:
OUR DEMAND
The dismissal of Jennifer Walsh from her position as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences effective immediately. Grounds for dismissal include:1. The colonization and takeover of the LA Term program, an urban immersion program centered on community development and social change, by persons in power with no relevant experience, qualifications, and/or credibility.
2. For creating a toxic working environment for the CLAS faculty by infringing upon and suppressing their academic freedom, which directly impacts the quality of our education and learning community.
3. The unethical criminalization of Frank Romero-Crockett, the Associate Director of LA Term and a staff member of color who was recently terminated.
WHY
1. To address the new initiatives Dean Walsh is suddenly imposing on the LA Term program, the students participated in a meeting with Dean Walsh on November 11, 2014. Students asked the question, “What professional background provides you the credibility to implement sweeping changes to a program that works in urban communities? Do you have any previous experience working with non-profits, communities of color and/or of lower socio-economic status in Los Angeles?” Jennifer Walsh avoided the question.
Students followed up this question with opportunities for Dean Walsh to address “how are people of color involved in the decision-making process of changing LA Term?” Jennifer Walsh avoided the question.
2. One of her first actions as Interim Dean last semester was to invite author Charles Murray to speak at APU, who:
- Wrote The Bell Curve, a book which controversially hypothesized that people of color were genetically bound to be less intelligent than white people.
- He has never apologized for nor retracted his statements
3. Strong proponent of “Three Strikes Law”
- The Three Strikes Laws are statutes which mandate harsher sentences of offenders who are convicted of three or more serious criminal offenses
- “Because many of these laws include drug offenses as prior ‘strikes,’ more black than white offenders will be subject to life sentences under a ‘3 Strikes’ law.” As stated by American Civil Liberties Union.
- This law is disproportionately used against people (especially men) of color
In response to Dean Walsh creating a climate of fear on campus, the students will commit to wearing and distributing signs that read #WantedByWalsh indefinitely. We will recruit and mobilize a critical mass of students who strongly resonate with this sentiment to share their concerns with the administration. If the concerns of the students are not met and the dismissal of Dean Walsh is not carried out, we will be forced to escalate. We reserve the right to exercise our right to assemble and display forms of protest over the injustices we have witnessed recently.
A new Facebook page, “We Want Walsh,” was created Tuesday, Nov. 25.
This page states: “We seek unity and advocate for the presence of Dean Walsh at APU. We will attempt to debunk the false or misinformed claims of ‘Wanted by Walsh.'”
The Protest
Beginning last week, students walked around campus wearing cardboard signs around their necks that said “Wanted By Walsh” to show solidarity with the movement.
LA Term students as well as LASA members display there signs as a means of protest to recent changes and actions taken to both LA Term program and issues on campus. Photo credit: Jessie Gomez
The APU community was invited to an informational meeting organized by the movement on Thursday, Nov. 20. At the meeting, alumna Katie Vasseur ’14, a former LA Term student and part of the protest, said Jennifer Walsh is the “point of symbolism for systemic racism, … things happening within institutions that are disadvantaging people of color.”
As outlined in fliers handed out to the campus community, the movement is targeting Walsh for three primary reasons. The first is to address potential changes to the LA Term program. The second is an invitation to Charles Murray believed to be extended by Walsh during her time as associate dean. Murray co-authored “The Bell Curve,” a controversial book published in 1994.
The movement’s issue with this invitation comes from, according to its flier, a hypothesis in the book that claims “people of color were genetically bound to be less intelligent than white people.” Murray’s invitation to speak was postponed indefinitely.
The third was Walsh’s involvement with the Three Strikes Law, which the flier states is “disproportionately used against people (especially men) of color.”
“We are not saying Jennifer Walsh is a racist or that she is doing things to students of color or personally attacking [anyone],” said alumna Ipolani Duvauchelle ’14.
At the meeting, alumna Jordyn Sun ’14 provided a detailed timeline of events leading up to and following Romero-Crockett’s termination. The following is the timeline given by Sun, which she said comes from interviews conducted with current LA Term students.
Oct. 24 – Students receive word that CLAS Associate Dean Ryan Hartwig will be visiting the cohort.
Oct. 31 – Hartwig visits the cohort. During the visit, he asks to speak to Romero-Crockett outside. Romero-Crockett does not return and his termination is announced to students.
Nov. 3 – LA Term students receive word that the Los Angeles Police Department will be contacting them.
Nov. 6 – Students and parents are contacted by LAPD. They are asked questions about whether Crockett owned a firearm and an alleged threat made by Romero-Crockett in front of the students on Oct. 24. The Clause has confirmed that a report has been filed against Romero-Crockett with LAPD.
According to Sun, all 15 members of the current LA Term cohort denied the allegations and did not recall any threats made by Crockett or anything about a gun.
According to those at the Thursday meeting, Romero-Crockett’s termination left LA Term students feeling emotionally and physically unsafe. Junior global studies major and current LA Term student Madeline Santoyo noted the “emotional up and downs” students have experienced in the semester and said Romero-Crockett helped them through those times. Santoyo also said he was the students’ first call when they felt physically unsafe while traveling through the city.
Sun said the reason behind putting Walsh as the face of the campaign was to get the attention of President Jon Wallace and Provost Mark Stanton.
Walsh’s Response
The Clause sat down with Walsh and asked her to respond to each of the allegations against her according to the #WantedbyWalsh Facebook page.
On creating a climate of fear:
“I have to say that any kind of character assassination is really difficult to handle from a personal perspective because I’ve been on APU’s campus for nine years and feel like I have created not only a positive climate around me whether it is in the classroom or in my collegial relationships, but university-wide. I think it explains why in the past nine years I have been promoted four times, most recently to this position as dean that I took over on June 1,” Walsh said.
According to Walsh, she has received messages of support from students, which she said has encouraged her.
“I am not happy that my name – which I take a lot of care to maintain and as a sign for not only my devotion to God, but my desire to be an upstanding person – is being slandered,” she said. “There’s really not a lot I can say about the personal allegations because I think my character speaks for itself and the fact that I have the widespread support of my colleagues and my students – both current and former.”
On the criminalization of the former LA Term director:
“I am actually perplexed about that particular allegation. … I think that and the allegations that somehow we made decisions inappropriately on the basis on race or ethnicity or anything else is just patently false,” Walsh said. “Any personnel decision is made thoughtfully and carefully and in broad consultation with a lot of different people. Nobody on campus gets to move unilaterally when it comes to personnel decisions. So, by implication, if they are slandering my actions, then implicitly, there are a bunch of other people who are involved in those conversations.”
On bringing Murray, the controversial researcher, to campus:
“We, as a university, bring in speakers of a variety of different backgrounds and perspectives and points, and we had an opportunity to have a speaker come in and talk about getting ahead after college – and this is a nationally recognized speaker who typically speaks to universities several dozen times a year,” Walsh said.
According to the dean, students expressed concern and there were conversations about the timing of the speaker coming to the school. Since he would be coming at the end of the year, faculty and administration were worried that there wouldn’t be enough time to have “an opportunity to kind of process some of the prior scholarship in a thoughtful way,” Walsh said.
“Ultimately, the decision to bring in a speaker, especially one that is of a high national caliber, involves conversations across the university,” she said. “I received and accepted an offer to have him speak on campus, but did so after consulting others across campus. In hindsight, I should have consulted more broadly, but these decisions are never made by a single person; we don’t operate or make decisions that way.”
Her stance on the Three Strikes Law:
“I’ve been researching the three strikes law for 20 years,” Walsh said. “I am one of the very few academic experts that’s called to testify on the operational and implementational aspects of the law, so I’ve testified before the state legislative public safety committee, I’ve consulted widely with the California District Attorneys Association, I’ve given lots of interviews to the LA Times and local radio stations and I’ve also traveled to New Zealand to serve as an international expert on a sentencing policy measure that they were considering adopting and then ultimately adopted.”
Walsh said that people who feel strongly about this allegation probably never read her research about it. One of her books, “Three Strikes Laws,” outlines the pros and cons of the statute
“In all of my research as a political scientist, I’m trained to be objective and analyze how the law functions, if it accomplishes what the voters intended for it to accomplish, or the legislative body, so I’m actually really, really proud of my scholarly accomplishments in that it’s a labor of many, many years,” Walsh said.
According to the dean, what she has found in her research is that “about half of the eligible offenders have been treated less severely as they would have otherwise been. In other words, instead of facing a very long sentence of 25 years to life, they face a much-reduced sentence because of that use of discretion.”
“What I’ve testified before legislative bodies in the past is that our allowance for discretion where DAs can decide who the law applies to and who should be treated with more leniency has actually created a more workable system than other states who have a harsher punishment scheme with no discretion at all,” Walsh said. “That has been the focal point of my research, is trying to share that piece of it because I think it is an important piece that very few people really know about and hear about.”
On the “dramatic” removal of Romero-Crockett:
“It was certainly not our intent to make any dramatic personnel changes,” Walsh said. “In fact, it wasn’t our intent to make personnel changes at all, but sometimes these things are unavoidable and we have to move quickly, if necessary. So after broad consultation with a number of individuals on campus, I decided that we needed to move more quickly and others agreed. So, we had to take more decisive action in order to to kind of make sure that things went as well as they could.”
Walsh stated that students cannot know all the information involved. “Even though students, again, aren’t able to be privy to the details, I guess my takeaway message hopefully would be that we obviously don’t want to create disruption if it’s avoidable, but in this case, it simply wasn’t,” Walsh said. “If we were presented with the same set of factual circumstances, I would have to make the exact same decision again. There was just no other alternative, and we looked, and there just was no other way.”
LA Term Changes
“We have an immersive program that allows students to live downtown with home-stay families that are selected by the program administrator, and then they take classes at the LA regional center, which is in the Mid-Wilshire district, and then they are out in internship sites two days a week working with nonprofits in the community,” said Walsh.
After looking into the program, she and others decided to take immediate action and make a personnel change.
“The challenge, though, is that with any kind of personnel decisions, we cannot share any confidential and private information about that,” Walsh said. “So, students were left with a lot of questions about why now, what happened, they really liked this staff member, so they’re hurt and they’re confused. I think some of what we’re seeing this week and last week … is really a response to that anger and confusion. They don’t understand why and are somewhat angry that they can’t know the full story.”
Currently, there are student life interns available to work with any such problems that may arise at LA Term, according to the dean.
A member from the current LA Term cohort expressed at the Wednesday night meeting that she now feels unsafe because she and others counted on Romero-Crockett to help during situations in which they felt threatened, such as walking home in the dark.
Although this was not part of Romero-Crockett’s job description, Walsh said she believes students came to rely on his constant presence. She added that this feeling could make some faculty frustrated, since that is opposite of LA Term’s goal.
“The whole purpose of LA Term is to show that urban neighborhoods are not inherently unsafe, so the whole goal is to show that whether you’re living in the suburbs or you’re living in an urban area, one is not safer than the other,” Walsh said.
She asserted LA Term students aren’t in “danger zones,” and there is an intern who has received authorization to increase her weekly hours to be more available for assistance.
“When you have students who are very passionate and very loyal to a program and there is a change, again, that is very difficult,” Walsh said. “In terms of the program itself, other than a personnel change and a few minor adjustments about how we select internships and home-stay families, I think it’s going to be largely the same.”
According to Walsh, one of the changes would be to have each of the home-stay families undergo a background check, “which is common practice for all APU employees,” she said.
These families were officially informed Friday, Nov. 21 of Romero-Crockett’s dismissal.
As for internship changes, Walsh said leaders are making more connections based on students’ requests.
“Students had expressed interest in partnering with Christian organizations that perhaps we weren’t in current partnerships with, and so we’ve been entered into discussions,” Walsh said. “We’re not going to change anything for spring because we have existing partnerships that are working well, but we’re looking at perhaps adding some partnerships to try to address what students have said they would really like to have an option on.”
Finally, Walsh said there would be changes to the spiritual aspect of the program, including finding ways for students to get involved with local churches. She said that coming from an on-campus environment of going to chapel three times a week, students found themselves “really struggling spiritually” in LA Term.
“We thought that strengthening of the spiritual piece was going to be important,” Walsh said. “Again, some students were fine, other students found that they were a little bit adrift. We are a ‘God First’ institution. We want to make sure we solidify that.”
Walsh then met with students Friday, Nov. 21 from 1-3 p.m. to talk about the changes and the movement. Nov. 24, the movement made a post to its Facebook page about the meeting.
“For everyone who has been asking, Friday’s meeting with Jennifer Walsh left us even more overwhelmed and grasping for answers than before. We will be releasing more information about our next steps soon but in the meantime stay tuned. Stay wanted,” said the post.
In response, on Nov. 26, the #WantedbyWalsh group posted a letter of clarification of its goals. One is to get President Wallace and Provost Stanton to be in on the conversation about the controversy.