Inside Higher Ed: Protecting a Punished Professor
When most of Saint Vincent College’s tenured faculty members voted last year to criticize President James Towey’s management of the Benedictine college, most professors were so nervous about retribution that few were willing to discuss their concerns in public. The Rev. Mark Gruber was an exception, and he may be paying a price for that outspokenness now.
The Benedictine monk and professor of anthropology has been stripped of his teaching duties and barred from the college and from all interaction with students, punished amid accusations of sexual misconduct that were initiated last summer by Towey and the archabbot at the affiliated Saint Vincent Seminary. Towey and Archabbot Douglas R. Nowicki called state police to Saint Vincent last summer to investigate charges that Father Mark had downloaded child pornography onto a campus computer — allegations that the police deemed to be unfounded, because they found no images on the computer of men under the age of 18, and because the computer was in a common area and many people had access to it.
Follow
