Cal State Fullerton President Mildred García denied a letter of reprimand appeal by Alain Bourget, Ph.D., on Thursday evening, when the president decided the reprimand would stand.
An administrative hearing was held for Bourget on Oct. 23, where he was able to plead his case before a faculty panel. The panel was unable to reach a decision, finding that both Bourget and the math department were at fault, so it deferred to García. She issued her decision the same day the panel deferred to her.
Bourget asked to use an alternative textbook for a spring 2014 Math 250B section. An email exchange between Bourget and Stephen Goode, Ph. D., math department chair, showed that the current text was never officially adopted through a department motion.
The book was written by Goode and co-authored by Math 250B course coordinator Scott Annin, Ph. D.
“My recollection is that when my text became available (around 1989), we adopted it by unanimous consent so no formal motion was necessary,” Goode said in the Oct. 17, 2013 email.
There was a formal vote to place Goode and Annin’s book as the course-wide text in March 2014, nearly six months after Bourget asked to use an alternative text.
Months before the official vote took place, Bourget thought existing policy and the unanimous consent were too weak to be binding. He used an alternative text for the spring 2014 semester, which resulted in his reprimand letter on June 11, 2014.
Associate math professor Tyler McMillen, Ph. D., testified at the hearing that he sat on an ad hoc committee where four out of five members opted to allow Bourget to use a different text than Goode and Annin’s textbook.
Bourget wanted to use a book by MIT professor Gilbert Strang, Ph. D., because he thinks it is not only cheaper but also more effective.
Testimony from Robert Koch, Ph. D., former dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, refuted McMillen’s statements at the hearing. Koch said that that committee could not reach a general consensus.
“(The ad hoc) committee was kind of a joke, to be honest,” Bourget said.
In her decision, García reasoned that Bourget didn’t have sufficient evidence at the hearing and allowed the reprimand to stand. Nothing in García’s response mentioned any policy surrounding math textbooks, or the vote to legitimize Goode’s text after Bourget used an alternative. Instead, she cited an article from the collective bargaining agreement between faculty and administration.
García was not present at Bourget’s appeal hearing.
Under the collective bargaining agreement of the California Faculty Association — a union for the professors — the president had 21 days to either uphold the letter, overturn it or send the case to arbitration.
Carol Lundberg, chair of the Faculty Hearing Panel, sent Bourget a letter that held the panel’s decision, via campus mail just before noon Thursday. Lundberg and the panel found troublesome how the textbook was chosen and who was in charge of the operation.
“In a situation where the department chair (Goode) and course coordinator (Annin) are the authors of a multi-section course text, it seems especially prudent to create a process for deciding on course texts that enables faculty to express their honest views about a text. That process did not seem to be in place,” the letter read.
The panel found that there was a lack of policy and mechanism for textbook changes.
The panel also reasoned “that the department leadership authored the text, (which) created a situation wherein making a change was likely quite difficult.”
Bourget did not make his textbook change proposal in a timely manner, the panel reasoned.
In the letter, the panel also decided that the process of making a department consensus on a book was flawed. They cited the ad hoc committee, formed by Koch, that allegedly didn’t come to a consensus.
“We are not confident that members of that committee felt free to advocate for a change,” said the letter from the panel.
