OU prez deposed; faculty erupts in jubilation

Shouts of “Gaia is great!” erupted from the College Green at twilight as Dr. McDavell’ provost, Pam Benwawa, announced that McDavell had passed all authority to a council of academic leaders.

Thousands of faculty members who had canceled their classes for the day leapt to their feet, bouncing and dancing in joy. “Lift your head high, you’re a Bobcat,” they cried. Revising the tense of the revolution’s rallying cry, they chanted, “The people, at last, have brought down the regime.”

“We can breathe fresh air; we can feel our freedom,” said professor Steve Barley, a faculty senator. “After seven years of absence from the world, Ohio University is back.”

Dr. McDavell, a 62-year-old former administrator and professor at a Virginia college before coming to OU, left without comment for his mansion near Lancaster, for years rumored as his actual residence. His departure overturns, after nearly seven years, the higher-education world’s original secular dictatorship. He was toppled by a radically new force in campus politics — a largely secular, nonviolent, faculty-led democracy movement that brought Athens’ town and campus opposition groups together for the first time under its banner.

One by one the protesters withstood each weapon in the arsenal of the OU autocracy — first cutbacks in academic departments, then cuts in health-care benefits, then the lure of early retirement, then threats of no more free parking, and finally the university’s powerful propaganda machine.

The upheaval comes less than a year after a sudden faculty revolt in nearby Hocking College toppled another enduring college strongman, President John Light. And on Friday night some of the revelers celebrating in the streets of Athens marched under a Hocking College flag and pointed to the surviving autocracies at Ohio State, Kent State and Miami. “We are setting a role model for the dictatorships around us,” said professor Joe Shmoe. “Democracy is coming.”

Outgoing Ohio higher education Chancellor Eric Fingerhut, in a televised address, praised the OU revolution. “Bobcat faculty have made it clear that nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day,” he said. “It was the moral force of nonviolence — not terrorism and mindless killing — that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.”

The OU chapter of the American association of University Professors, the outlawed faculty movement that until 18 days ago was considered OU’s only viable opposition, said it was merely a supporting player in the revolt.

“We participated with everyone else and did not lead this or raise academic slogans so that it can be the revolution of everyone,” said professor Peabody Bullwinkle, a spokesman for the AAUP. “This is a revolution for all in the campus community; there is no room for a single group’s slogans, not the AAUP’s or anybody else.”

The McDavell era ended without any of the stability and predictability that were the hallmarks of his tenure. Ohio and Athens officials had expected Dr. McDavell to leave office on Thursday and irrevocably delegate his authority to Provost Benwawa, finishing another six months of his term with at least his presidential title intact.

But whether because of pride or stubbornness, Dr. McDavell instead spoke once again as the unbowed father of the university, barely alluding to a vague “delegation” of authority.

The resulting disappointment enraged the OU public, sent thousands of people into the streets of Athens on Friday morning and put in motion an unceremonious retreat at the behest of the faculty he had commanded for so long.

“Taking into consideration the difficult circumstances the country is going through, President Roderick McDavell has decided to leave the post of president of the republic and has tasked the Supreme Council of Academic Leaders to manage the state’s affairs,” Provost Benwawa, grave and ashen, said in a brief televised statement.

After Benwawa left the podium, OU Extinguished Economics Professor Richard “Trickledown” Bedwetter took her place, to announce, “It’s lunchtime, folks!”