Laura J. Burch
Contributing Writer
President Anne McCall’s opening remarks on the first night of the “Democracy and Academic Freedom: A Forum” series (Sept. 3, 2025) contained errors and omissions concerning the history of the College. These errors and omissions pose serious reputational risk to the College, and worse, perpetuate harm to people of color, women and victims of genocide.
To begin, let’s quickly identify the speech’s inaccuracies. First, Dr. Horace Mateer began teaching at what was then The University of Wooster in 1886, not 1881, and he did not offer a class containing elements of evolutionary theory until 1895. Second, it was not President Charles Wishart (1919-1944), but President Sylvester Scovel (1883-1899) who was Mateer’s strongest champion. Third, McCall’s claim that the trustees responded to Mateer’s offer to resign by allocating new funds to support scientific study is not verifiable in public records or previous histories of the College.
Opening a series devoted to democracy and academic freedom by centering an inaccurate and superficially rosy story about the “bravery and wisdom” of the white and privileged men of Wooster past (Mateer, Wishart, the trustees) reveals the President’s need to ignore the significant labor of non-white, non-male actors in the dramatic history of academic freedom at the College. President McCall could do no more than celebrate a manipulated version of Wooster’s history because a nuanced exploration would force her to confront the serious consequences of the damage she herself has done to academic freedom, people of color, women and Palestinians during her tenure.
On January 30, 2024, President McCall ordered an email about Palestine signed by four female faculty members to be scrubbed from all College inboxes. In response, on February 22, Wooster’s campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-CoW) published an open letter stating that the President’s “breaches of policy, practice, and principle represent a serious attack on academic freedom at the College of Wooster.”
Afterward, in further violation of College policy, President McCall directed the office of Information Technology to conduct secret moderation efforts of faculty use of the ZWD listservs. Simultaneously, the policy on listserv use was quietly scrubbed from the College’s website. In fall 2024, when faculty presented her with evidence of racist and misogynist outcomes from the secret listserv moderation, the President responded by shutting down faculty access to all ZWD listservs. The faculty subsequently voted to restore that access. President McCall ignored the vote. Each of these decisions violated College policies and the principles of academic freedom and shared governance.
President McCall’s censorship of the faculty coincided with her administration’s attempts to limit student freedom of assembly after protests led by Black women students at her 2023 inauguration and anti-genocide/pro-divestment protests led by student leftists in 2023-2024. The President’s time at Wooster has also seen the systematic dismantling of support structures for students of color, from the elimination of the Allen Scholarship and the Posse Scholar program at Wooster to the unilateral “restructuring” of the former Center for Diversity and Inclusion. Finally, she presided over a rollout of changes to campus facilities in the wake of Ohio SB 104 in ways that decreased the safety of transgender students.
So far, President McCall’s actions appear to enjoy the full support of the board of trustees. Meanwhile, throughout the years 2024-2025, Wooster student groups and AAUP-CoW continued to advocate for academic freedom and free expression in a series of open letters, teach-ins, protests, pamphlets, meetings and other actions. Student groups were especially focused on organizing against genocide and for divestment from assets benefiting the war in Gaza.
One might argue that college presidents must be careful these days about calling attention to themselves by making public statements about “controversial” topics like Palestine or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). But then, one might also point to the words of the president to whom McCall dedicated her current series. In his memoirs, President Charles Wishart expressly noted the hefty costs associated with the College’s principled stance on evolution: the cancellation of a $50,000 gift and the ire of enraged alumni whose pamphlets “attacked the professors, the president, the board of trustees, and even occasional campus speakers.” Or one could point to the words of students Jairaj Daniel and Walt Vanderbush, whose February 5, 1982 Letter to the Editor, “Trustees Farcical Charade Plunges Students into Subservient Position,” charged:
The events that have transpired leave us with serious doubts about the Board of Trustees’ commitment to academic freedom in dealing with the political and social issues of the day. And perhaps more importantly, we have become convinced that the trustees are unaware of the implications and the magnitude of their complicity with the [South African] apartheid regime.
By papering over the real successes, perils, difficulties and failures in Wooster’s history of academic freedom, and by excluding the voices of students and faculty who have historically challenged the College to return to its principles when it abandons them, the current President of the College becomes complicit in the harm produced by the forces of racism, misogyny and genocide.