Maine professor barred for crediting students who protested Kavanaugh

The response was immediate — and incendiary — when people learned that students at the University of Southern Maine had been offered course credit if they joined a bus full of people planning to protest Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court and lobby Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to vote against it.

Hundreds of people called the university, including furious alumni, upset students, and prospective students and their parents. Critics saw the class as an outrageous abuse of the public university’s mission, a case of liberal academics trying to indoctrinate students. “It was fierce, ferocious … and threatening,” said Glenn Cummings, the president of the university.

Last week, he announced that Susan Feiner, the recently retired longtime faculty member who had offered the one-credit course, would be barred from teaching at Southern Maine and any of the state’s other public universities.

University leaders called it a rogue action by a former employee.

Feiner, whose father was the plaintiff in a well-known Supreme Court case after he was arrested for a speech that angered a crowd, saw it very differently. “Hecklers were permitted to shut down what they disagreed with,” she said.

Feiner, who was a tenured professor of economics at Southern Maine, had been outspoken as a faculty union leader and an advocate for students who said they had been sexually assaulted. She retired in September. But a National Education Association grant had funded the university’s faculty union for the Frances Perkins Initiative for Social Justice Education, intended to create high-impact pop-up classes for busy students.

After hearing Kavanaugh and a woman who accused him of sexual misconduct testify, Feiner had the idea of getting students on a bus to Washington for a lesson in civic engagement and a chance to witness history.

Cummings told the campus Wednesday that Feiner had been barred from teaching “for her role in listing and promoting an unauthorized class that advanced her personal political agenda. The course was promptly rescinded and university officials took immediate steps to ensure that institutional resources were not … used to support one-sided political activism.”

Feiner said she didn’t think the class was a partisan effort. “Any student from any political perspective at USM would have been welcome on that bus. … I think it was taken as partisan because the Republicans in Maine turned it into something that was partisan.”

The executive director of the Maine GOP did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier this month, the party issued a “RED ALERT” on its Facebook page saying Southern Maine was offering a free college credit and a free bus ride to Washington to protest Collins, calling it “shocking and unacceptable,” and noting, “The event page goes so far as to ask if STUDENTS are okay with being ARRESTED.”

The main organizer of the bus to Washington was Diane Russell, a former Democratic state legislator and gubernatorial candidate in Maine. Everyone on the bus, other than some reporters covering the protest, opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court, Russell said.

A photo in the Portland Press Herald shows Feiner leaving the bus holding a printed sign aloft: “A sexual predator does not belong on the Supreme Court.”

Russell said the bus was paid for by the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal advocacy group.