Weekly Briefing: 'An Atmosphere of Total Fear and Distrust'

At this college, sometimes speaking out has a cost. ADVERTISEMENT [Weekly Briefing Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. ‘An Atmosphere of Total Fear and Distrust’ Michael Phillips, a Collin College history professor who has taught at the Texas institution for 14 years, found out that he will be out of a job in May. The news was delivered to Phillips on Monday, and comes less than a week after Collin College, in a suburb north of Dallas, said it would pay $70,000 and legal fees to a [former professor who was fired]( after her negative Twitter post about Mike Pence. Why is Phillips out? Let’s go back to the fall semester. For Phillips’s first assignment of the fall, he asked students to write a paper about the history of pandemics and epidemics in North America, starting with Christopher Columbus and up to Covid-19. When Phillips assigned the paper, he told his students how anti-mask sentiment during the 1918 flu pandemic slowed the country’s recovery. He also told students about a man from the Houston area who had died from a preventable illness after he couldn’t get a hospital bed during a surge of Covid-19 patients. In Texas, Republican legislators have banned public colleges from requiring face masks. Phillips urged his students to consider wearing a mask in class anyway. Earlier in the pandemic, Collin lost a nursing professor, Iris Meda, who died from the virus. Her family maintains that she caught it in the classroom. But when Phillips made his masks comment, some students complained to administrators about the recommendation. Administrators reminded Phillips of earlier warnings that instructors should not even suggest wearing masks. In August, Phillips [posted a photo on Twitter]( of a college presentation that barred instructors from encouraging masks. Later, he was disciplined for that tweet, according to college records. Administrators wrote in a discipline form that he had posted the picture “without context.” On Monday, Phillips tweeted that his career at Collin was coming to an end. Phillips wrote on Twitter that the senior vice president had suggested that Phillips could leave the college quietly if he said he was doing so voluntarily. Collin College officials didn’t immediately respond to a request from The Chronicle for comment on Phillips’s accusation. “They have created an atmosphere of total fear and distrust,” Phillips told our Michael Vasquez. “There are forbidden subjects, like talking about masks.” This isn’t the first time Michael has reported on Collin. Last April, [he profiled the institution’s president]( who’d played down Covid-19 risks and berated a professor in a collegewide email. Michael has also covered the case and subsequent lawsuit of Lora D. Burnett, another ousted Collin professor. I asked Michael if these administrator-versus-faculty-member stories show any signs of stopping at Collin. He said this latest firing — on the heels of a $70,000 settlement with a former professor — shows that the college has accepted these situations as a cost of doing business. Collin College is doubling down on its policies. [Read the full story here](. SPONSOR CONTENT | Vitalsource [Learning Science Proves Practice Does Make Perfect]( ADVERTISEMENT Lagniappe. - Learn. Don’t let anyone give you grief about your comfortable footwear. Your “ugly” shoes are[worth a lot](. (Bloomberg Businessweek) - Read. Make time for another pandemic-era mystery: [the case of the missing chocolate milk](. (The Washington Post) - Listen. [Ezra Klein’s interview]( with the novelist Ruth Ozeki touches on writing, meditating, and when it’s OK to listen to the voices in your head. My favorite part of the interview examines why our culture treats so many objects as disposable. 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