Students at Loyola University New Orleans are pushing for the reinstatement of the school’s director of the African and African-American Studies program and the lone Black professor in the English Department.
After recently learning that the university decided not to renew the contract of Professor R. Scott Heath last fall, at least 100 students protested his dismissal last week, NBC News reports.
Students want university officials to rethink dismissing Heath, who has been a faculty member for four years. They and other supporters say the professor’s firing jeopardizes the University’s Black studies program because he is its sole faculty member.
“No one has sat me down and said, ‘This is why we’re not going to reappoint you,'” Heath said, according to Inside Higher Ed. Heath said he’s hesitant to call anyone racist, but he said “it’s definitely racial” because of who he is, the program he leads, and what he teaches.
Heath teaches classes on African American literature, Black popular culture and film. Some of his courses include “Octavia Butler Now! Reading Race, Gender and Critical Futures”, “James Baldwin Unplugged, and “American Playlist: Black Writing and Sound.”
“Getting rid of one of the only professors to teach those courses—it’s like a sinking blow almost,” Carson Cruse, a second-year student, and president of the university’s Young Democratic Socialists Of America chapter, told Inside Higher Ed.
“It seems like that there was a lot more going on than just that,” Cruse said. “It seems somewhat racially motivated.”
Heath said he learned he lost his job with a 3-2 vote from within the English department. He suspects the decision was prompted by an emergency trip to North Carolina in September to coordinate the funeral of a lifelong friend, Brian Horton, a director of jazz studies at North Carolina Central University.
According to NBC News, Heath says that he promptly informed the English department and students of the situation and that he kept in touch with them remotely during his absence. However, while he in North Carolina for ten days, Heath missed the deadline to renew his contract, which he must do annually.
The professor says he was given an extension by the English department but not an updated deadline. Heath says that his attempts to submit the needed materials to the department in October and January received no response. He believes that it “is possible” that his dismissal was planned, according to his interview with NBC News.
Heath’s students came together with members of the university’s Young Democratic Socialists and NAACP organizations to support Heath’s reinstatement.
They created an open letter and circulated it online to garner support for Heath’s reinstatement. The letter has been signed by more than 600 people, including students and locals from the broader New Orleans area.
“How are we, as a Jesuit institution, going to claim that we fight for the poor and oppressed when we are outlawing and silencing Black educators,” freshman Olivia Zachary said, according to the campus newspaper, The Maroon.
Organizers shared the petition with Loyola’s English department and other university management. However, Cruse said the university did not respond, which is what prompted students to protest.
In an email shared with students on Friday, the university’s interim president, Justin Daffron, said that he is reviewing Heath’s case, “including interviewing all key leaders involved in making the current recommendation.” He added, “as part of that assessment, I am taking extensive steps and consulting with experts to ensure that we are acting in a manner that is true to our values and equity-minded.”