'Savaged by Sheep'

WWU professor disciplined for abusive style earns a new hearing

By Tim Johnson · Wednesday, June 3, 2009

He is Odin, the fearsome but not-so-grim trickster and bearer of wisdom, and to those who appreciate his style Professor Perry Mills delivers the tang of something rare in the world—the freedom to speak one’s mind, screw the consequences. Those less charmed stumble from his classes bewildered, insulted, even feeling cheated. He laughs at them.

His sightless eye, his game leg and wild whiskers give Mills the bearing of a pirate. His oaths are equal parts Shakespeare and locker room porn, delivered with all the thunder and fire of a blunderbuss but little of its aim.

Mills, 67, returned to his teaching position at Western Washington University’s Theatre Arts Department last fall after being suspended with pay in 2004 pending a disciplinary ruling by the university. His office in the department was dismantled and reassigned.

Mills protested; but in 2007 the university’s actions were upheld in Whatcom County Superior Court, a ruling that was undone in a mixed decision by a state appeals court May 26.

The appeals court found university officials erred in closing Mills’ disciplinary hearing to the public and press without legal grounds to do so. Their decision voids both the conclusions of the hearing and the subsequent decisions and actions that arose from it. If university officials decide to pursue the matter, they must begin again.

“I was the only reporter there and they kicked me out,” researcher Paul de Armond recalled. “In that moment I went from reporting the news to being the news. Now they’ve got to start from scratch—if the university decides to pursue the matter at all.”

Yet, in the greater portion of its decision, the appeals court found itself in agreement with both the faculty hearings panel and later comments and conclusions of Superior Court Judge Steven Mura. Observing the abusive conduct that drew Mills a suspension—”using foul language with and toward students, employing a combative teaching style, discussing other faculty members with students in a derogatory and demeaning manner, enjoying his wit at the expense of students… berating and demeaning students in the guise of humor”—the court found merit in the university’s claims.

The ruling returns the matter to university officials, who may decide to appeal the decision or hold another hearing, this time open to the public. The ruling also allows Mills to recoup his legal fees, which have mounted to a quarter of a million dollars. The university has spent perhaps twice that amount.

“Four hundred thousand dollars of your money going for higher education,” Mills laughed. “Don’t you feel proud? I sure do.

“I don’t know what else to say about this, other than that I was savaged by sheep from hell.”

A pedagogy of mockery

“No reasonable person could differ that Mills’ words used at the university workplace toward faculty, students and stuff constituted persistent verbal abuse on his part, documented and unwelcome since at least 1998,” Whatcom Superior Court Judge Steven Mura noted.

The appeals court found likewise: “Despite his attempts to categorize his invective as a teaching device, we doubt that Mills has any First Amendment interest in presenting a stream of insults directed at various discrete (and constitutionally protected) groups.”

Troubles began in Western’s Theatre Arts department in 1998 with a changeover in administration, including a succession of interim deans. Indeed, the entire campus was torn by a series of administrative upheavals and reorganization. At the end of that academic year, Professor Mark Kuntz took over as chair of Mills’ department. Mills—with an unremarkable vitae and a history of clashes with faculty and staff—was denied promotion to full professor. The department’s new chair took full measure of Mills’ acid displeasure.

Perhaps it was inevitable the two—Mills, grotesque in character and appearance, and Kuntz, charming and handsome, each charismatic in his own way—would clash fantastically, even theatrically.

In his new duties as department chair, Kuntz rebuked Mills for making derogatory comments toward and about women, minorities and gay students. “Your repeated need to express your desire to ‘kill’ people is not appropriate and will stop,” Kuntz admonished. In return, Mills began a more thoughtful investigation into departmental accounting practices that were diverting his students’ course fees to other uses.

The course for which Mills is renowned and through which most students first encounter the professor, Introduction to Cinema, has traditionally collected a small course fee Mills intended should be used to develop a critical film library. The popular course, always attended at capacity, had collected such a surfeit of fees—in one accounting, more than $20,000—that without adequate accounting could (and did) go toward other purchases as well. That pilfering of purpose—which had been ongoing for some time before Kuntz took over as chair—touched off a firestorm between the two combatants.

In March 2003, in response to formal complaints from Mills, the university began an audit on the missing student course fees.

In her initial response, WWU Internal Auditor Kim Herrenkohl discovered a lack of university policy regarding the collection, spending or accounting of special course fees. She noted, “The lack of university policies increases the risks that special course fees will be spent inappropriately, not properly accounted for or not consistently collected. There is also an increased risk that different employees or students will have different opinions on how the funds should or can be spent,” she said.

Defaulting to state guidelines, Herrenkohl found, as Mills alleged, the special course fees were not being applied to the purpose for which the fees were collected. She reported this finding to university administrators.

Linda Smeins, then interim dean of Theatre Arts, also found Mills’ complaints about fees had merit, although she noted “the chair of a department has the budget authority for fees accounts.” Among other items, Kuntz had used the fees to purchase film equipment the department made available for general use.

Mills volleyed a note to Kuntz, claiming he had destroyed the system of fee collection for the cinema class, tearing it down and leaving it “a shambles done to death by short-sighted greed…. I consider that you have done an evil and inconsiderate act which deserves censure,” Mills wrote.

Kuntz—chafed by Mills’ jabs and japes—wrote Smeins in early 2004. “Perry,” he said, “was overheard telling a group of community members I had embezzled $20,000 of state funds, and how he had ‘called the cops on me.’

“While we continue to protect his right to speak freely under the protection of tenure, he continues to be a considerable liability to the university. I wonder,” Kuntz asked, “how long we are going to allow this to happen?”

The answer came abruptly the following fall, at the beginning of a new academic year, when Mills was escorted from campus by police after he had allegedly brandished a knife while sketching a stage play.

‘Without merit’

It is ironic indeed that the closed hearing of five faculty peers—the closed hearing found invalid by last week’s appeals court ruling—found no merit to the claim.

“No credible testimony was presented to the panel to demonstrate that Professor Mills had, in October 2004, engaged in any threatening conduct in class with a pocketknife or in any other conduct at that time with a tool or weapon which could reasonably have caused fear in the students,” noted the Faculty Senate Standing Committee on Grievance and Sanctions.

Yet, in their assessment of the relationship between Mills and Kuntz, the panel found, “Mills vigorously and repeatedly asserted that certain expenditures by Kuntz of student funds constituted criminal acts of ‘embezzlement’ and ‘theft’ by Kuntz. The panel is of the opinion that no reasonable person would classify as a crime Kuntz’ decision to purchase camera equipment rather than films and to place these items in Miller Hall where they were accessible to any student. The panel therefore concludes that Mills’ persistent assertion that Kuntz was guilty of crimes was not only confrontational but, given the two professors’ mutual distaste, vindictive or even malicious. Nevertheless,” they found, “the proper expenditure of student fees is a matter of legitimate public concern and of open and even vigorous debate.”

Mura, in his 2007 ruling on these issues, was of a similar mind.

“Albeit Professor Kuntz used these students’ fees for purposes that were outside of the theater department, there’s nothing I see in the record that establishes he falsified records in order to use those funds for purposes for which they were not designed,” Mura commented. “The burden falls upon Professor Mills to prove that Professor Kuntz falsified records and lied about where the money was going.”

The appeals court did not comment on these findings, which has drawn fire from critics—among them de Armond—who believe Mills was removed from campus on ginned up charges after he blew the whistle on a widescale theft. But was it massive cover-up, or the tugging of a thorn from the side of an ox frequently gored? Sometimes distaste for a style doesn’t hide much more than distaste for a style; or, as Perry might observe, sometimes a stinky cigar is just a cigar.

“One of the reasons they kept the hearing closed is they didn’t want the student witnesses to receive any cross examination,” Mills related. “They just wanted them to come in and slime all over the situation and then leave. With an open hearing, they’ll have more people who observed these events calling ‘bullshit’ on everything.

“The university first tried to charge me as a terrorist, vaguely. They got tired of that one when the police chief told them my pocketknife wasn’t a machine gun. So now they’re just stuck with the situation that I am an unrepentant asshole and may try to disassemble their criminal empire with my pocketknife.”

Corrosive wit

Declining to consider possible motives underlying Mills’ suspension, the appeals court focused instead on Mills’ colorful performances.

“The simple fact,” the court wrote, “is that the vast majority of conduct for which he was disciplined occurred exclusively outside the classroom. These instances of conduct alone would have justified the university’s imposition of discipline….

“With respect to Mills’ conduct that did occur in the classroom, we are unable to conclude that the university’s interests were outweighed by Mills’.”

The faculty panel, sensitive to issues of academic freedom, found similarly.

“Professor Mills,” they wrote, “knows, understands and even expects that some recipients of his words will be deeply upset and disturbed, and that not all of them will be able to respond positively to his challenge. While on occasion he truly may not have formed a prior specific malice for the particular person to whom he is then uttering his words, he shows continuing disrespect to that class or group of persons. He knows always to be present are those who are not able to or choose not to rise to his challenge.

“…The findings and judgment of the panel do not criticize the substance of his classes or nature of his scholarship; instead, they are centered on his abusive conduct to others. Even were the panel not to find his conduct malicious, at best [we] could only find that his verbal acts were taken with an ongoing, deliberate and reckless indifference to the impact his actions have on those students and other persons who do not or cannot rise to his challenge.”

“I’ve never had a grievance filed against me by students,” Mills countered. “And that’s the easiest thing in the world to do. All you have to do is go down to the dean’s office and say, ‘I think this guy’s an asshole.’ The dean tells the professor that a grievance has been filed and he’s supposed to show up at a certain time and talk to the student with the dean. Nothing like that happened, ever, for 30 years.”

Absence of complaint was insufficient in the minds of the faculty panel.

“Calling one fellow faculty member ‘faggot’ and another ‘cunt’ might merit and even stimulate a punch in the nose; the fact that the recipients of those and other utterances by Professor Mills generally chose to swallow their indignation and not immediately fight back physically or verbally does not elevate the status of his words to protected speech,” they wrote. “Verbal abuse is verbal abuse.”

Admittedly finding fault in the reluctance of department peers to correct Mills’ corrosive wit, the panel observed, “This is a very difficult case. Professor Mills has clearly shaped the personal and professional lives of a number of students in a very impressive manner at the very same time that he has marginalized others. While some students are tempered and strengthened by the fire of his conduct, his repeated abuse of others, students, faculty and staff alike, is destructive of the academic community and requires clear and unequivocal condemnation.”

In the end, perhaps what is really being condemned is an expression of intellectual freedom once more common on campuses, before they were corporatized and sanitized, rendered correct and “safe.” A brand out of the Sixties, its vanguard was Lenny Bruce, used satire and scorn to puncture stuffed shirts and trigger a teaching moment.

“Jesus Christ,” Mills laughed, “the students say, ‘I hate the son of a bitch. He gave me the grade I earned instead of the one I wanted.’

“I used to post student evaluations on my door. One of my favorites said, ‘Maybe if Mr. Mills would stop telling us how lazy and ignorant we are, maybe we’d consider him a better teacher.’ There’s a winner: Another candidate for U.S. Senate!”

Tim Johnson is a former student of Perry Mills. Paul de Armond contributed substantial research and analysis to this article, for which the author is grateful.