Dear Hamilton Community,

*The following letter is addressed to Rev. Jeff McArn, submitted to The Spectator for campus-wide viewership*

To my friend, Rev. Jeff McArn,

It is Sunday morning at the start of a new academic year. As usual, I stop by the local Byrne Dairy to buy coffee and a donut on my way to do some errands: picking up dog food, a few veggies for grilling tonight. And there you are on the front page of the local Utica

Observer-Dispatch

, smiling like a delighted criminal in a mug shot, like you have been convicted, but only not really. I know the grins are not meant to coincide with the subject of the story. Instead, the story tells us what so many good stories tell us, that there is someone who has been hurt in the midst of natural, human, or supernatural disaster. Your hurt was fully human, and that makes it all the more upsetting.

I have spent much of the summer with concerned colleagues trying to remedy the disastrous situation brought on by the Dean of Students’ higher ups: Dean Chris Card and Associate Dean Maria Genao-Homs. In late June, they told you that you no longer had a job at Hamilton, even after 27 years of stellar service. They offered little more response to your efforts than the inkling that the Dean of Students’ office was moving in “new directions.”

Over the summer, faculty-led conversations with Dean Card, President Wippman, and Dean of Faculty Ngoni Munemo revealed little more: that the Dean of Students’ office was shifting its trajectory and you were not part of it. Dean Card had made his decision, and President Wippman stuck by it. (Dean Munemo had nothing to do with the decision).

Only, here we are in late August (two full months later), as students start the new year, and the Dean of Students has offered no “new directions,” and in fact has done little to nothing to replace you (as if you were replaceable!). You would think there was some great new clear direction but all we have heard is a lot of endlessly replaceable phrases about “best practices” and “goals” and blah, blah, blah.

And there you were just doing the work without having to translate anything into some corporate speech, reaching out over the decades to community leaders: the Oneida Nation, Bosnian Muslims, Zen Buddhists, Pagans, Jews, Quakers, the “nones,” and so many more.

I teach in Religious Studies, where you were slated to teach, as usual, a course on American Religious Freedoms. Only, no one in administration thought it might be good to let our offices know you were no longer at Hamilton, leaving us in the department at the last minute having to delete the course from the schedule, even though a full 16 students had signed up.

And you had been slated to offer the “American Freedom” trip through the orientation program, but apparently the Dean of Students office left the management of your absence up to orientation leadership (without any prior notification or communication to them). Because nine first year students had already signed up for the trip, and because there was no room on other trips, it had to run without your careful planning and stewardship. Those new students, many of whom had hoped to establish a connection to the Chaplaincy via this trip, had to be told by their student leaders that you would not be part of their important initial experience on this campus.

Ultimately, there is the matter of your firing, the horrific HR decision (according to higher ups, this is “normal” practice) to make the sudden irruption into your life: the quick cutting off of email (as students, alumni, faculty tried to reach you), the eviction from your office space (in which you had resided for so long), the rapid cutting off of all your benefits, the cutting off of your connections to all of us at Hamilton (staff, faculty, alumni, students), and to cap it off the “escorting” of you across campus (understanding that the Campus Safety Officer was himself duly embarrassed by having to do this) that makes all of this so difficult.

In short, as I start the new semester, I miss you. There has not been anyone over my 15 years at Hamilton that has embodied community like you have. I miss the place of connection that you held: on campus, in interfaith gatherings and in the local Mohawk Valley and Utica. I miss you in my life on the Hill, my companion (literally, the “one I share bread with”), my friend.

Sincerely,

S Brent Rodríguez-Plate

Professor of Religious Studies and Cinema and New Media Studies, by special appointment