We might as well have picked up the March 15 issue of The Mac Weekly and read this Kafka-esque story:

HEADLINE: “Sociology professor temporarily denied tenure on secret student evidence; Macalester justice subverted by vigilante demand, due process killed by student hatchet job.”

ARTICLE: “Mudslingers of Sociology professor Terry Boychuk staged an eleventh hour protest on Friday at the Board of Trustees meeting in the Weyerhaeuser Boardroom, where Mr. Boychuk’s fate at Macalester was being determined. Terry Boychuk was accused by five protestors of sexual harassment and his tenure decision was tabled. The protestors have not revealed their secret evidence of sexual harassment, though they insist that it exists. The victims themselves did not file grievances against professor Boychuk. Many professors and students say that professor Boychuk has been denied his right to due process.”

We have been entertained with a variety of phrases to avoid calling this sort of people a motley rabble of protestors. Some call them activists, some call them concerned students. In the above fictionalized account, I refer to them as protestors. By that word I mean that their actions were motivated by objections to, and were in brute conflict with, a governing body. And why should we doubt to call such a set of people protestors, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them.

Protest is a dangerous instrument. If I may adapt a saying by Kierkegaard, a person wielding a dangerous instrument does not wave it around with the air and gesture of one delivering a bouquet of flowers. Would this not be madness. Convinced of the efficacy of the dangerous instrument, one recommends it without reservation, but also in a way to caution against it. So it is with protesting. A long tradition at Macalester of not thinking protesting wrong and deviant but naturally honorable gives it a superficial appearance of always being right and legitimate. And thereby hangs a tale. When protest meets due process, one has to give.

The protestors thought they were attacking a problem directly and solving it boldly. In fact, they acted ignorantly, mobbishly, scandalously and in vain. They should have participated in the process and allowed the system to do its job. Instead, they rebelled against the best and only tenure process we have. What is ironic is that upon the protestors’ defense of proper investigation in the name of sexual harassment, we have a situation where due process, equal protection and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, have all been compromised. We cling to equal protection and due process precisely because it protects people like Mr. Boychuk from the tyranny of well-meaning people.

Although President McPherson and the Board of Trustees let this happen by postponing the tenure decision, the students should have known better. They should have known that receiving tenure neither permits one to behave badly nor protects one from the consequences of one’s actions (though it is difficult to fire a tenured professor). We all know now that tenured professors can be fired on grounds of egregious sexual harassment. If the five students had an ounce of this knowledge, then Mr. Boychuk’s record would not have been unjustly and irreparably tarnished, Macalester’s tenure-track faculty members could sleep better at night, and Mike McPherson and the Board of Trustees would not have been compelled to make an eleventh hour decision to table the process. Justice was not signed, sealed or delivered. In the end, nothing will bring peace but the triumph of due process.

We have talked a great deal about due process, and now we have to make an effort to find out what it is. It is difficult to speak with exactitude because we may not be able to lay hold of the realities beneath the froth and foam. The treatment that has been accorded to Mr. Boychuk is evidence of the gap that lies between student interests and faculty interests and between due process and protest. In the words of John Dewey, “There are events which do more than tell in what direction the wind is blowing at a given time. They have a pivotal, a crucial, importance. They may become precedents for later activities in the same direction.” It may well turn out that the Boychuk tenure case is an event of such import. The turgid allegations and vigilante justice engaged in during the process of winning a victory for alleged victims of sexual harassment may possibly contribute to creation of a long black period in our life at Macalester. But hopefully the extreme this case will go in pursuit of due process may, on the other hand, assist the light of justice to shine more brightly.