by Darryl Sterdan, Tinnitist

Celebrate 60 years of of Beatlemania, take a trip with Journey, get down with The Bee Gees, get the word from Ralph J. Gleason, enjoy a slice of U2’s giant lemon, head for the country with Sawyer Brown — and more musical musings for the latest edition of your reading list:

Livin’ Just to Find Emotion: Journey and the Story of American Rock
By David Hamilton Golland

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Since exploding on the scene in the late 1970s, Journey have inspired generations of fans with hit after hit. But hidden under this rock ’n’ roll glory is a complex story of ambition, larger-than-life personalities, and clashes. David Hamilton Golland unearths the band’s true and complete biography, based on over a decade of interviews and thousands of sources. When Steve Perry joined jazz-blues progressive rock band Journey in 1977, they saw a rise to the top, and their 1981 album Escape hit No. 1. But Perry’s quest for control led to Journey’s demise. They lost their record contract and much of their audience. After the unlikely comeback of Don’t Stop Believin’ in movies, television, and sports stadiums, a new generation discovered Journey. A professional historian, Golland dispels rehashed myths and also shows how race in popular music contributed to their breakout success. As the economy collapsed and as people abandoned the spirit of Woodstock in the late ’70s, Journey used the rhythm of soul and Motown to inspire hope in primarily white teenagers’ lives. Decades later, the band and their signature song remain classics, and now, with singer Arnel Pineda, they are again a fixture in major stadiums worldwide.”

      

New Jersey Stage

(SPRING LAKE, NJ) -- Thunder Road Books will hold a launch party for Livin' Just to Find Emotion by David Hamilton Golland on Tuesday, February 6, 2024 at 6:00pm. Light refreshments will be served. The book lets fans relive Journey's greatest songs and moments with this fiftieth anniversary tribute.

Since exploding on the scene in the late 1970s, Journey has inspired generations of fans with hit after hit. But hidden under this rock ‘n’ roll glory is a complex story of ambition, larger-than-life personalities, and clashes. David Hamilton Golland unearths the band’s true and complete biography, based on over a decade of interviews and thousands of sources.

When Steve Perry joined jazz-blues progressive rock band Journey in 1977, they saw a rise to the top, and their 1981 album Escape hit #1. But Perry’s quest for control led to Journey’s demise. They lost their record contract and much of their audience. After the unlikely comeback of “Don’t Stop Believin’” in movies, television, and sports stadiums, a new generation discovered Journey.

Thunder Road Books is located at 1108 3rd Avenue in Spring Lake, New Jersey. Space is limited, click here to RSVP.

David Hamilton Golland is a historian, professor, and writer with a wide background in twentieth-century social and cultural history. In Livin' Just to Find Emotion Golland dispels rehashed myths and also shows how race in popular music contributed to their breakout success. As the economy collapsed and as people abandoned the spirit of Woodstock in the late 70s, Journey used the rhythm of soul and Motown to inspire hope in primarily white teenagers’ lives. Decades later, the band and their signature song remain classics, and now, with singer Arnel Pineda, they are again a fixture in major stadiums worldwide.

“Golland meticulously colors in the band’s artistic conflicts and power struggles, paying particular attention to Perry’s decision to leave, but he’s at his most convincing when he interrogates the racial dynamics at play in the band’s success…Golland’s passion and precision make this a pleasure.” -- Publishers Weekly

“Refreshingly, this is not the standard band biography. Golland...brings an academic approach to the subject, placing Journey within its proper historical musical context. Though it is clear that Golland loves Journey’s music, he also provides an overdue critical take on the group’s overall sound. He also discusses issues of musical influence versus appropriation. It is rare, and valuable, to find such insight in books like this. VERDICT Readers don’t have to be Journey fans to appreciate this cerebral approach to a biography about the band. For casual readers and scholars alike.” – Library Journal

David Hamilton Golland is dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monmouth University and founder of The Journey Zone, the leading source for all things Journey over two decades.

      

Monmouth Now

David Hamilton Golland, Ph.D., dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor of history, will publish his third book, “Livin’ Just to Find Emotion: Journey and the Story of American Rock” (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2024) on Feb. 6.

In “Livin’ Just to Find Emotion,” Golland writes the band’s complete biography, based on over a decade of interviews and thousands of sources. The book takes readers through Journey’s greatest songs and moments in this 50th anniversary tribute that is a complex story of ambition, larger-than-life personalities, and clashes.

As a lifelong Journey fan, Golland felt compelled to tell their story, but his roots as a historian encouraged him to dig beyond the surface, and he was surprised by what he uncovered. “[My] thesis [was] that the story of Journey—once voted America’s most popular band, according to a Gallup Poll—was the story of the re-segregation of popular music,” he explained. While chronicling the band’s history, “Livin’ Just to Find Emotion” also seeks to understand the context of how race in popular music contributed to Journey’s breakout success.

Golland explores the band’s rise to the top with their hit album “Escape” in 1981; front man Steve Perry’s quest for control and subsequent downfall; and ultimately the unlikely comeback of iconic song “Don’t Stop Believin’” and its relevance to a new generation of music fans.

“Golland leaves no stone unturned in this fine-grained chronicle of the rock group Journey,” according to a review in Publisher’s Weekly. “Golland’s passion and precision make this a pleasure.”

      

The Outlook

David Hamilton Golland, Ph.D., Dean of the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of History, will have his third book “Livin’ Just to Find Emotion: Journey and the Story of American Rock” released on Tuesday, Feb. 6 by the Thunder Road Books in Spring Lake, NJ. The book talks about Journey’s songs, what the band members were doing before Journey, the conflict between bandmates, and how, when Golland was researching for this book, he noticed elements of race dynamics between white individuals and African Americans.

Golland began, “I went back and listened to every single song and wrote a paragon for each song, and did research about Journey’s members and anything they did before Journey. The more I did the work and research, the more I couldn’t keep coming back to race; it became a race story, and it has a race thesis. You don’t need to pay attention to the thesis if you are a Journey fan. You don’t need to be a scholar to understand the book, but if you are, you will see what I am trying to argue. Rock and roll in the 1950s and 60s, white people listened to rock music, African Americans listened to soul music, and rock and roll united people to be one.”

Golland pursued this project for multiple reasons: he read a book about Journey that a journalist wrote and felt that it was a missed opportunity, the COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak, and he had much more free time on his hands.

“[The Journey book I read was] written by a journalist rather than a historian. Not that any one is worse, but [rather] a different way of looking at things. At the time, everyone was in quarantine due to the pandemic, and I asked my wife if I should try writing this book. She told me I should,” said Golland. While Golland was writing his book, he explained that he suffered from imposter syndrome and writer’s block. Nevertheless, he stuck to a process to help him through these difficulties.

“I’m not a journalist, I wasn’t a roadie for the band, so why would anyone want to read anything I have to say? I always have to contend with writer’s block, and it can be a combination of factors that is psychological, though. Go back to your sources and think deeper about them,” he continued. “I modeled myself on Victor Hugo, who wrote ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame.’ He would wake up early, write for hours, and be done by lunchtime. As a full-time professor, I would wake up early when I felt I was most creative, did it for hours until I felt satisfied with my work, and went to Monmouth feeling accomplished.” Golland advised serious writers to write every day and to keep their momentum going, even if they are not working on the main project.

“Sit down and write for half an hour,” he instructed. “If you are a serious writer, you must write every day, even if it’s not about the project; keep that machine moving.”

Golland additionally explained that this book is different from his other two, which were more academically focused and took about a decade to write; he views this book as a freeing experience. While this book took less time than his other works, only about three to four years, there were some bumps along the road with the original publisher that Golland worked with.

“When I got an agent, they tried to pitch to trade presses, and they failed, which cost us about a year,” he said. “I believe the agent made a critical error in not recommending the correct chapter; it’s similar to the ‘Sopranos’ ending. The chapter they recommended was when Steve Perry, the lead singer for Journey, left the band; what is the future of Journey?”

Golland continued, “I just think it was a bad call. They aren’t a bad agent, but they should have chosen a chapter from early in the book with the lead singer of Journey.”

After Golland’s original agent didn’t work out, he was approached by an independent publishing company named Lexington Books to help him publish his book. After reviewing his work, the company didn’t think they would be the best fit for him, but they did put him in touch with an imprint of Roman and Little Field to help get his book published.

Tanya Farrell, Partner at Wunderkind PR, said, “As an independent publicist, I am working closely with Rowman & Littlefield to launch the book. Like many publishing companies, Rowman & Littlefield takes care of distribution, marketing, and sales while I focus on booking media and events and acting as a consultant on the whole campaign.”

“Dr. Golland is an absolute pleasure to work with,” she added. “He is collaborative, kind, and intelligent; the perfect author.”

Farrell explained that she believes the book will do well and that it has already received great reviews by top trades. “‘Publishers Weekly’ called it a ‘fine-grained chronicle of the rock group Journey…Golland’s passion and precision make this a pleasure,’ and ‘Library Journal’ said, ‘Readers don’t have to be Journey fans to appreciate this cerebral approach.’ We also have two events confirmed and national media, radio interviews, and podcasts in the works. It will be a wonderful launch,” said Farrell.

Golland summed up the writing process and offered some helpful words to aspiring authors: “It’s always there; it’s always lurking. Finding something within the project to keep you focused and writing on the project helps you work through it. I advise a schedule. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t follow it because you’re only human.”

      

107.7 The Bone

A new book about Journey and their, well, journey to the top will be out early next year.

Livin’ Just To Find Emotion: Journey And The Story Of American Rock will follow the band from its earliest days all the way to its 50th anniversary.

Publisher Rowman & Littlefield describes it as “a complex story of ambition, larger-than-life personalities, and clashes.” It’s written by David Hamilton Golland with a foreword by Joel Selvin.

Livin’ Just To Find Emotion will be out Feb. 6th.

      

AntiMusic

The new book, "Livin' Just To Find Emotion: Journey And The Story Of American Rock", by David Hamilton Golland, and featuring a foreword by Joel Selvin, is set to be published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers on February 6, 2024.

Here is the synopsis: Relive Journey's greatest songs and moments with this fiftieth anniversary tribute. Since exploding on the scene in the late 1970s, Journey has inspired generations of fans with hit after hit. But hidden under this rock 'n' roll glory is a complex story of ambition, larger-than-life personalities, and clashes. David Hamilton Golland unearths the band's true and complete biography, based on over a decade of interviews and thousands of sources.

When Steve Perry joined jazz-blues progressive rock band Journey in 1977, they saw a rise to the top, and their 1981 album Escape hit #1. But Perry's quest for control led to Journey's demise. They lost their record contract and much of their audience. After the unlikely comeback of "Don't Stop Believin'" in movies, television, and sports stadiums, a new generation discovered Journey.

A professional historian, Golland dispels rehashed myths and also shows how race in popular music contributed to their breakout success. As the economy collapsed and as people abandoned the spirit of Woodstock in the late 70s, Journey used the rhythm of soul and Motown to inspire hope in primarily white teenagers' lives. Decades later, the band and their signature song remain classics, and now, with singer Arnel Pineda, they are again a fixture in major stadiums worldwide.

      

Bravewords

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers has announced the February 6, 2024 release of the new book, Livin' Just To Find Emotion: Journey And The Story Of American Rock, by David Hamilton Golland, and featuring a foreword by Joel Selvin

      

The Philadelphia Citizen
by Larry Platt

Let’s see. The Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions at the same time that cultural warriors on the right (looking at you, Vivek Ramaswamy!) are catastrophizing over workplace “wokeness” — the valuing of DEI and stakeholder capitalism in business.

Coincidence? I think not. What do you think is on the horizon? That’s right, while talk of reparations heats up, and while C-suite execs get more comfortable at least mouthing the idea of businesses serving people, planet and profit, get ready for a wave of legal challenges to how corporations make hiring and promotion decisions.

While few employers use the kind of race-based affirmative action universities engage in, we’re already seeing an upsurge in workplace reverse discrimination claims, like the $25.6 million award to the White regional manager of Starbucks who, a jury found, was fired and essentially scapegoated because of her race in the aftermath of Philly’s Starbucks-ing While Black incident in 2018, when the cops were called on two Black men who had the audacity to sit in the store at 18th and Spruce without ordering anything.

The point is that the Republican party under Donald Trump literally gave up even the pretense of having a policy platform in 2020; it became an all-culture war-all-the-time vessel. And workplace affirmative action is likely the next cultural battleground.

The problem is that all of those decrying so-called “Woke Capital” ignore some fundamental inconvenient truths. Like: Economically, affirmative action has been good for everyone. Don’t take my word for it. Affirmative action effectively got its start right here in Philly through something called The Philadelphia Plan in 1967; its architects were Republicans who argued that it would be good not only for Blacks, but for all businesses, that more robust opportunity and fuller employment would turbocharge the American economy.

The (Republican) father of Affirmative Action

Who made this argument? None other than Richard Nixon, who shrewdly saw political benefit in it. Arthur Fletcher, a Black Republican, became known as “the father of affirmative action” — he was its chief architect, and it remains a shame that his contribution to civil rights history has gotten lost through the decades.

Fletcher earned a Purple Heart in World War II, serving under General George Patton; played pro football for the Los Angeles Rams and the Baltimore Colts; became a lawyer and earned a Ph.D in education, and served as assistant secretary of wage and labor standards in the Department of Labor under President Nixon. Later, he’d go on to head the United Negro College Fund, where he coined the phrase “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” and he served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

But it was while in the Labor Department that Fletcher came to the rescue of The Philadelphia Plan, a groundbreaking federal affirmative action program that sought to integrate Philadelphia’s building trades. (The more things change …) The building trades were rife with discrimination. What few jobs Blacks had access to were of the low-skill, low-pay variety. In the waning days of the Johnson administration, The Philadelphia Plan mandated that, before the awarding of any contracts, contractors had to project in advance the number of non-White workers they’d have on any given jobsite. Federal contracting officers would then take such projections into account — along with all other factors typically considered — before awarding a contract.

Alas, in 1968, the U.S. Comptroller ruled that The Plan was effectively a quota system and therefore in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Enter the ever wily Nixon, who saw the issue as a way to divide two core Democratic constituencies: Blacks and organized labor.

In the Nixon administration, Fletcher oversaw the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, giving him the power to revoke federal contracts and bar contractors who practiced discrimination from bidding on future work. On June 27, 1969, Fletcher implemented the Revised Philadelphia Plan, which still required federal contractors to meet minority hiring goals that they’d lay out — that was a key point — for skilled, high-paying jobs in a vastly segregated sector of the economy.

Nixon fought for Fletcher’s Plan, and Congress approved it. According to A Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher and the Conundrum of the Black Republican by David Hamilton Golland, The Philadelphia Plan worked where it was implemented; by 1973, most skilled trades were showing 20 percent minority membership.

Alas, it was ultimately a pyrrhic victory. By 1973, opposition to Nixon’s escalating Vietnam War had gotten heated. Aligning with Nixon were White construction workers who were seen on the evening news beating up anti-war hippies. Nixon had found his Archie Bunker-like “love it or leave it” constituency — and, for fear of alienating it, he promptly abandoned enforcing The Philadelphia Plan.

Nixon’s foray into affirmative action may have been the product of a brilliantly devious political mind. But Fletcher? He was a true believer. According to Golland’s book, Fletcher used to say that the enemy of merit is discrimination. The goal was to establish a level playing field — and then for the government to get out of the way.

“President Nixon and his closest advisors jettisoned Fletcher and his ideas in favor of a Northern version of the Southern Strategy,” Golland writes. “Nixon’s decision to transfer Fletcher from the Labor Department to an innocuous job at the United Nations was a microcosm for the eventual collective decision by Republican leaders to abandon civil rights initiatives altogether.”

Not only would Fletcher not recognize his party today, he wouldn’t understand its knee-jerk opposition to affirmative action. Fletcher’s Republican party was the party of business, and he maintained until his death in 2005 that affirmative action was good for business, though his outlook often made him an ideological nomad in politics. “My conservative friends know the cost of everything but the value of nothing,” Golland quotes him as saying. “My liberal friends know the privilege of freedom, but they think its cost is free, that it’s yours for the taking. Not so.”

Good for business?

So, nearly two decades after his death at 80 years old, was Fletcher a prophet? Has affirmative action been good for business?

Let’s look at the facts. A 2018 McKinsey study found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 21 percent more likely to post above-average profits than companies in the fourth quartile. The same year, an employee recruiting firm survey of workers found that enhanced culture and greater innovation were correlated to diversity and inclusion. Similarly, Boston Consulting Group polled employees at more than 1,700 companies across the globe and found that those with above-average diversity at the management level posted revenue that was 19 percentage points higher than those led by lesser-diverse teams.

“Diverse and inclusive workplaces are shown to have higher employee retention rates, a more positive company culture, and higher earnings,” concludes Ahmed Younies, of HR Unlimited, Inc., an affirmative action consulting firm. “Instead of looking at federal affirmative action regulations as a burden, companies should see them as an opportunity.”

He might not have had the data back then, but these are the points Arthur Fletcher, and many other Republicans, were making 50-some-odd years ago. Diversity and inclusion, Fletcher intuited back then, was not charity or simply acts of high moralism. No, it was enlightened self-interest. The fact that 82 major corporations — including Google, Verizon, Apple, Mastercard, GE, GM and Meta — filed amicus briefs in support of race-conscious collegiate admissions in the recent Supreme Court case ought to prove three things: One, those Masters of the Universe, valuing their fiduciary responsibilities above all else, know just how much affirmative action means to their respective bottom lines. This is more about smart business than social engineering. Two: the powers-that-be of such industry leaders know that the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina was not just about college admissions; next in line, they know, is the workplace itself. And, finally, three: How ahead of his time was Arthur Fletcher?

New York Magazine
by Zak Cheney-Rice

The conservative backlash to the civil-rights era began immediately — and now it’s nearly complete.

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Arthur Fletcher had already been a Baltimore Colts lineman and an administrator for the state highway department when he started applying for jobs as a football coach in Kansas. It was 1957, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed de jure racial segregation in schools with Brown v. Board of Education. Fletcher lived in Topeka with his wife and five children, and he had $15,000 in debt from an ill-fated side career as a concert promoter. He was building tires for Goodyear to make ends meet, but his odds at landing a coaching job looked promising. He was, after all, the first Black player on the Colts.

But if Brown meant progress for millions of students, it meant little for Fletcher’s job prospects. “I presented myself to school board after school board after school board in the state of Kansas, and the answer was, ‘You are ready, but we’re not,’” he said, according to A Terrible Thing to Waste, historian David Hamilton Golland’s biography of him.

Fletcher never asked for special treatment. His stepfather was a buffalo soldier. Self-reliance was the gospel in his childhood home. But everywhere Fletcher looked, bigotry and discrimination were freezing Black Americans out of an equal shot at American prosperity.

Fletcher left Kansas and took his chances in the West Coast–based defense industries, while immersing himself in the world of Republican political organizing. In 1968, he ran for lieutenant governor of Washington and lost. He was nursing his wounds that autumn when the president-elect offered him a job. Richard Nixon had barely won his own race that year. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had recently been killed, and America’s streets were smoldering. Neutralizing riots was top of mind for the “law and order” candidate. The solution he chose was “Black capitalism.”

“Instead of government jobs, and government housing, and government welfare,” Nixon said at the 1968 Republican National Convention, “let government use its tax and credit policies to enlist in this battle the greatest engine of progress ever developed in the history of man — American private enterprise.” His reasoning was that government aid in Black neighborhoods created waste and dependency. To promote equality and quell unrest, Black ghetto-dwellers needed pride of ownership through entrepreneurialism — more Black businesses and Black banks in Black neighborhoods.

The pitch was a natural draw for Fletcher. If Nixon had any doubts about whether he would support his civil-rights agenda, they were swiftly put to rest. “I don’t believe in jumping to welfare when there’s so much work out there,” Fletcher said when Nixon mentioned one of his welfare initiatives.

After he took office in 1969, Nixon appointed Fletcher to be his assistant secretary of Labor, making him one of the country’s highest-ranking Black government officials. At six-foot-four with dark skin and close-cropped hair, Fletcher was a fly in Nixon’s proverbial buttermilk — an administration of slick-haired white guys known by critics as “Uncle Strom’s Cabin,” according to Mehrsa Baradaran, a UC Irvine law professor whose book The Color of Money sheds light on this era.

The policy for which Fletcher is remembered, and that earned him the nickname “the father of affirmative action,” was introduced that June. It started as a modest tweak to the federal contracting process. The construction firms and tradesmen who were winning federal contracts at the time were almost all white, a reflection of how segregated local trade unions were. “We even found Italians with green cards who couldn’t speak English, let alone read or write a word, sentence, or paragraph — yet who were working on federal contracts,” Fletcher wrote. Meanwhile, the same contractors were claiming they couldn’t find qualified Black workers, an assertion that Fletcher decided to test by forcing them to integrate. He added a provision to federal contracts that required contractors to set “goals and timetables” for hiring more Black and non-white workers, expressed as percentages that were to be increased over four years.

The Revised Philadelphia Plan, as his initiative was called, is now considered the first example of “hard” affirmative action implemented by the federal government, a term that acknowledged that merely outlawing legal discrimination was insufficient redress for the wreckage wrought by two centuries of discrimination. Proactive, or “affirmative,” measures had to be taken, too.

“I consider that my little footnote in history,” Fletcher wrote of this fateful decision. “I went into that administration with the conviction that if we could change the role of Blacks in the economy, we’d do nothing short of changing the nation’s culture.”

Not long after, Harvard Law School debuted a parallel initiative known as the Harvard Plan, the core of which was a formula for evaluating applicants that considered their racial background. That plan was later adapted for the school’s undergraduate admissions, leading to explosive growth in the share of minority admits and establishing a pattern that has since been replicated across higher education.

Fifty-four years later, that period of growth is probably ending. In October, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, two cases that, when decided in June, are expected to outlaw the consideration of race in school admissions for good and, by extension, kill affirmative action across all sectors of American life.

If all goes as anticipated, this ruling would be the latest anti-civil-rights salvo from a right-wing Supreme Court majority that has already overturned Roe v. Wade. Several turns have led us to this crossroads. The Court has played a crucial role, narrowing the scope of affirmative action to the point that its original aim — redressing the material deprivation facing Black people and other minorities — has been supplanted by anodyne gestures toward diversity. But there’s also a deeper and more familiar betrayal at work. Affirmative action emerged at a time in American history when Black civil-rights advocates were calling for a comprehensive rewrite of the social contract. The pillars of their agenda included full voting rights, equal access to education, robust anti-discrimination laws with strong enforcement, universal health care, and a full-employment economy.

In the decades since, we’ve seen those pillars falter and crumble. The Supreme Court has invited the de facto resegregation of American primary schools and gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Black communities are beset by police violence and mass incarceration. Black families are afflicted by deadly health ailments and unemployment rates that are singular on the national landscape.

Now we’re heading toward the death of America’s last surviving race-based redistributive program. The controversies surrounding affirmative action have revolved around education — in other words, the legacy of the Harvard Plan — a narrow debate that has foreclosed the possibilities of what affirmative action could have been.

Arthur Fletcher’s Philadelphia Plan is a reminder that even the less ambitious civil-rights advocates once had more expansive dreams than improving diversity in ivory towers and the C-suite. It was ultimately doomed by several overlapping factors: the GOP’s wholesale turn against Black communities, the white working class’s betrayal of their Black peers, and the government’s terror of sparking a backlash from white voters. Alongside the Harvard Plan, it represented the other half of the affirmative-action equation: the idea that the government could help build a Black middle class the same way the labor movement made a white middle class, by creating good-paying jobs for low-skilled workers without a lot of education. And it never had a chance.

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The first-ever federal agency for investigating claims of racial discrimination in hiring, known as the Fair Employment Practices Committee, was created in 1941. Black workers were being denied jobs en masse despite a boom in the defense industry, and Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a 100,000-strong March on Washington if he did not take executive action. The FEPC managed to head off Randolph’s protest, but otherwise turned out to be functionally useless at stopping discrimination. It was defunct by 1946.

The more forceful equal-opportunity policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were a response to the pressure of the civil-rights movement. Kennedy gave an executive order barring employers from discriminating on the basis of race and required federal contractors to provide equal employment opportunities — meaning not intentionally keeping non-white workers out of a job. Johnson introduced permanent contract bans for scofflaw firms, while the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which he signed into law, made discrimination across a host of categories — race, sex, religion, national origin — illegal in areas including jobs.

But by the time Nixon was sworn in, every major effort by the federal government to make sure employers weren’t freezing Black people out of the job market had fallen short, giving rise to the ominous possibility of Black revolt. Nixon’s first term coincided with the age of Black power, an evolution of the civil-rights movement that was more militant. Its insurrectionary edge was expressed through uprisings in the nation’s Black ghettos, and its intellectual and political sympathies were wrapped up in the revolutionary movements spanning the Global South, especially Africa. These movements were anti-imperialist, and many were Marxist. The specter of a homegrown anti-capitalist insurrection, however small, during the height of the Cold War spooked Nixon, and he responded with a deadly counterintelligence program — COINTELPRO — dedicated to neutralizing groups like the Black Panthers. Publicly, however, Nixon adopted a less combative approach to the problem of Black dissatisfaction, which was focused as much on economic inequality as political inequality.

This was where Black capitalism came in. Fletcher sympathized with the anger in the ghetto, but thought that revolution was preposterous. “He was an unabashed capitalist, he was an anti-communist, and he saw fitting into the system as the best way forward for equality between the races,” said Golland, Fletcher’s biographer.

So when contractors started agreeing to the Philadelphia Plan’s terms and setting goals for how they would integrate, Fletcher felt vindicated. He set off on a victory tour with stops in Atlanta, New York, Phoenix, Chicago, and Baltimore, and made syndicated television appearances trumpeting the Nixon administration’s affirmative-action program, which was more aggressive than his Democratic predecessors’. The plan began to spread to other cities.

But with hindsight, it is easy to see his efforts were doomed. His work on Nixon’s behalf did not win him more influence. He’d almost single-handedly made the administration’s civil-rights agenda look sincere, but the president was still courting Jim Crow nostalgists. “A cabinet-level position for a Black man at that time would have undermined the Southern Strategy,” Golland writes, referring to the GOP’s growing dependence on white votes from former Confederate states. Plus, Fletcher’s success was making lots of people mad. “This thing is about as popular as a crab in a whorehouse,” said Everett Dirksen, the Republican Senate minority leader. The Philadelphia Plan was even more poisonous to white labor leaders and rank-and-file tradesmen, whose resistance to integration made them ripe targets for the coalition the GOP was trying to build even as it tried to placate the civil-rights community.

In the spring of 1970, hundreds of pro-war construction workers converged on lower Manhattan and attacked student demonstrators who were protesting the recent killings of four university students at Kent State. These workers were joined a few days later by local longshoremen, white-collar workers, and union leaders in a series of protests against the NYPD’s nonresponse to the student protests. Tens of thousands surrounded City Hall on May 20. Peter J. Brennan, a Nixon supporter who headed the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, followed up with a visit to the White House, where he presented the president with a ceremonial hard hat. Nixon’s embrace of the so-called “Hard Hat Rioters” enraged civil-rights leaders, but the president was starting to see the future of the GOP in these workers.

Brennan was an innovator in ducking Fletcher’s affirmative-action initiatives. He devised an alternative policy in New York that allowed local construction firms to exempt themselves from the Philadelphia Plan by coming up with their own more flexible integration goals. These so-called “Hometown Plans” were a sham, but they were good news for Nixon — if labor leaders complained to him about Fletcher being overzealous, he could point to this workaround as an alternative.

Still, firms that had failed to uphold their own integration plans were having their contracts terminated. To them, even the most modest requirements — one union was asked to increase its Black membership from six out of 800 — were an intolerable threat to the bottom line. Eventually, white labor leaders turned against Fletcher in force and made Nixon choose between them. “This fellow Fletcher, this appointee of yours, I’m sure you’re not responsible for what he’s doing right now,” said Brennan at a 1971 meeting with Nixon. “People are trying to do the right thing and being harassed.” For his part, Nixon saw Black people as ingrates for not rewarding him with more votes. “We’ve done more than anybody else,” he complained, “and they don’t … appreciate it.”

Fletcher was transferred out of the Labor Department in 1971 and stripped of his enforcement authority. “Fletcher had served his purpose,” writes Golland of how Nixon abandoned him. Meanwhile, the president’s relationship with Brennan was only getting stronger. Nixon agreed to withdraw his support for the Philadelphia Plan if the Labor leader agreed not to endorse his Democratic opponent in the 1972 election. At the time, this was practically unheard of. Democrats were the party of trade unions and could reliably count on the vocal support of Brennan and other white union leaders. But the Democratic Party’s association with civil rights under Kennedy and Johnson had caused a rift with the unions, which were now becoming more reactionary thanks, in part, to the Philadelphia Plan. Nixon made a devil’s bargain: Sacrifice Black equality to bring the white working class into the GOP’s tent. As agreed, Brennan declined to endorse George McGovern. He was rewarded by being named Nixon’s new secretary of Labor.

Brennan’s rise effectively killed proactive federal enforcement of affirmative action in the early 1970s. Fletcher stuck around after Nixon’s impeachment to help Gerald Ford, and eventually stumped for the former vice-president during his successful 1976 Republican primary campaign against Ronald Reagan. But Fletcher spent most of his next chapter in the private sector, capitalizing on his GOP connections and association with the Philadelphia Plan to become a prized diversity consultant for Fortune 500 companies seeking to hire more minorities.

Historians see the migration of white working-class voters to the GOP that Nixon brokered as crucial to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election. Its consequences include the most committedly right-wing Supreme Court majority in a generation — a cohort that makes no apologies for operating less as dispassionate jurists than as agents of the conservative movement. That Nixon’s Southern Strategy was hastened by an affirmative-action policy that he himself championed shows the deft and cynical way he played on both sides of the racial divide.

The idea that affirmative action would have a major economic component, that a nudge from the government would make Black capitalism an instrument of equality, had failed. And it was not just a Republican failure — as the parties underwent a realignment and Democrats became more fully the party of civil rights, they, too, abandoned the idea of labor-based affirmative action. From then on, affirmative action would increasingly be associated with education, on the assumption that a rite of passage through college would foment a robust Black middle class.

--

The deprivation that Black Americans faced in the post-Nixon years was relentless. In 1980, the Washington Post sent reporters to check on how Fletcher’s Philadelphia Plan was faring 11 years after its debut. They found a local welder named Ephraim Oakley, who had invested $15,000 in equipment under the impression that the federal government would ensure he could get work. But when he tried obtaining a union card with the local steamfitters, he was turned away. “Because those damned people won’t let me into their union, I’m losing thousands of dollars in work,” he said. “I’m being penalized for being a nigger.” The plan had made some of the trade unions more racially mixed — it was implemented in more than 30 cities — but federal enforcement had fallen by the wayside. “It absolutely failed,” said Golland.

Here was the main problem with “Black capitalism”: There wasn’t enough capital in Black communities to sustain it, ensuring that any asset-holders who set up shop were immediately underwater. Nixon never wanted to fund his initiative, either, making it little more than a politically expedient cover. “Black capitalism was a decoy,” said Mehrsa Baradaran, the Irvine law professor.

Ronald Reagan’s election was accelerating the white working-class migration to the GOP, a theme of which was the perceived overreach of the civil-rights movement. Cries of reverse discrimination against white Americans echoed across the country, fueled by the metamorphosis in large segments of the economy from blue-collar to white. The middle class was shrinking, the pathways into it narrowing. “In the context of diminishing rewards for the white majority facing a more and more tenuous grasp on the middle class, what is predictable is animosity,” said Touré Reed, who is co-director of the African American Studies Program at Illinois State University.

Meanwhile, other forms of affirmative action were also coming under assault. The first major challenge to affirmative action in higher education came in 1977, when the case of Allan Bakke reached the Supreme Court. Bakke was a white medical-school applicant in California who claimed he had been rejected from UC Davis because of a racial quota. Arguing that “reverse discrimination is as wrong as the primary variety it seeks to correct,” Bakke sought to eliminate the consideration of race in school admissions entirely. In an attempt to appeal to the Court’s conservatives, the lawyer for the school, Archibald Cox, reframed the legal basis for affirmative action by saying it served the interests of schools to allow them to curate a diverse environment. In the summer of 1978, Lewis Powell, the swing vote appointed by Nixon, split the difference: Davis’s quota system had to go, he ruled, but schools could still consider race in admissions as long as promoting diversity was their only objective.

The decision is credited with saving affirmative action in higher education. But it also narrowed its scope, such that its original rationales — redress for past discrimination and the end of material deprivation — were legally invalid and de-emphasized in the public consciousness. And it gave legal heft to trends that were already smothering the redistributive ambitions of the 1960s: a growing consensus that America did not owe anything to Black people.

In 1989, the Supreme Court delivered a decisive blow against affirmative action in the building trades when it ruled against the capital of Virginia’s policy of setting aside a percentage of contracts for minority-run firms. The GOP had effectively rebranded such policies as a quota system for unqualified Black people — or “affirmative Black-tion,” as Reed put it, quoting the derisive nickname used by Edward Norton’s neo-Nazi character in American History X.

In Texas in 1992, a Republican congressional candidate named Edward Blum lost an election. He responded to his defeat by blaming an unfairly drawn district, which made it too easy, in his opinion, for a minority candidate to triumph, and brought his case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996. The Court ruled in his favor, citing an illegal racial gerrymander — the first of many legal victories for the conservative activist, who made it his life’s mission to eradicate the consideration of race in any aspect of the law or education.

The national mood was in his favor: California voters passed Proposition 209 the same year as Blum’s first Supreme Court victory, outlawing affirmative action in any state or government institution. According to a 2020 study by researchers at UC Berkeley, Prop 209 led to a “cascade” of Black and Hispanic UC applicants into “lower-quality” public and private schools, resulting in steep long-term declines in their degree-completion rates and wage earnings.

This was all happening amid an influx of Asian immigrants in the 1990s, who were generally wealthier, more highly educated, and more attractive to white-collar employers than their predecessors in the post-1965 wave. White people seeking to justify America’s racial inequities had long pointed to this cohort — people with East or South Asian ancestry, often glossing over the more downtrodden Southeasterners and Pacific Islanders — as evidence that racism’s grip had loosened, or to argue that Black people were pathological and so deserved whatever grim fate befell them. But as Asian Americans established themselves in greater numbers, and in some cases started outpacing whites in income and educational achievement, many began to wonder why their successes had not earned them a proportional spot among the country’s elite.

The concerns of these Asian American activists dovetailed with decades of white conservative demagoguery, resulting in an almost absurd amount of quibbling over which of the highest-achieving students in the country deserved access to its most exclusive schools. “That’s one of the things I’ve always found personally disturbing about this,” said Reed. “I don’t think that most of the differences between these applicants are actually meaningful.”

Blum helped bring the case of a rejected University of Texas applicant named Abigail Fisher that ended up before the Supreme Court in 2016. Fisher’s lawyers argued that she was rejected in favor of less qualified minorities, and her defeat, amid revelations that her grades were less than sterling, was met with glee — hashtags like #StayMadAbby and pejorative nicknames like “Becky With the Bad Grades” took over social media. But Blum was already preparing his encore. He has since partnered with the ideological descendants of those 1990s Asian American activists, organizing them under the name Students for Fair Admissions, to argue that Harvard has a quota for keeping Asian applicants out. (In its less famous sister case, SFFA has claimed that the University of North Carolina’s recruitment of first-generation and low-income students discriminates against other applicants.)

If Blum’s challenges are successful, the effects would be devastating. Everywhere that such programs have been eliminated, their modest benefits have revealed them as far preferable to their absence: more minorities in jobs and in schools, and with greater access to the trappings of a middle-class life. It would also be a fitting, if grim, end to a policy that has been assailed and chipped away at from its very inception.

--

By the mid-1990s, Arthur Fletcher, fresh off a position as George H.W. Bush’s chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, found himself a lonely defender of the policy he helped create. “I would have been content to remain a footnote in history had the Republican Party, to which I have been loyal for more than fifty years, decided not to use affirmative action as a wedge issue in 1996,” he wrote. “Even my old friend Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader, who strongly supported affirmative action over the years, has turned against it in his drive to win the GOP nomination for president.”

Fletcher decided to throw his own hat in the ring as the only pro-affirmative-action Republican presidential candidate. But there was no appetite for what he was offering, 25 years after a GOP administration had made his affirmative-action program a centerpiece of its Black agenda. He technically ran in the 1996 election, but his campaign was doing so poorly that he had to bow out in 1995.

Fletcher died in 2005. His biographer told me his effects included newspaper clippings from almost every single story about Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court case that extended Powell’s decision to preserve affirmative action in higher education. “He wasn’t involved in the case at all, but it mattered to him,” Golland said. He’d also never changed his party affiliation, despite the reality that being a pro-affirmative-action Republican had become an oxymoron. Change from the inside was still possible, Fletcher believed. “From 1976 to 1995, that’s slightly less than 20 years,” Golland said. “Fletcher thought that if the party can change that quickly in such a short period of time, it can also change back.”

It has not changed back. Almost 20 years have passed since Fletcher’s death, and his beloved GOP has migrated even further away from his ideal. For all his misplaced faith in his party, the Kansan knew that Black people faced too many obstacles to become full participants in the economy without help. Today, you can barely find a Republican who’ll acknowledge the problem, let alone be affirmative about solving it.

A big reason why Fletcher’s affirmative-action idea was palatable to Nixon, and why Cox’s diversity rationale appealed to Justice Powell, was because both were a rebuke to the idea that a racially egalitarian America could be achieved through a mix of generous welfare programs and aggressive enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. Black capitalism’s central promise was that simply giving Black people access to the free market could allow them to rise up economically, but even that proved too much for white America. Black capitalism has now been replaced with an even hollower promise of diversity. “The main purpose of ‘diversity’ is to give white people a more diverse experience rather than to give non-white people an equal opportunity,” said Golland, Fletcher’s biographer.

Today, affirmative action gets treated even by Democrats like a child they’re mildly ashamed of. President Joe Biden supports it, and in 2021 his administration urged the Supreme Court not to hear the Harvard case. But while few in the party disparage it, they don’t embrace it, either, likely because of the mixed messages provided by polling. And they certainly haven’t adopted anything resembling an affirmative-action policy for the labor force. Even the most obvious solution to the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action, a renewed push for universal programs like in President Johnson’s Great Society, is complicated by the prospect of a familiar backlash against programs that are often coded as helping Black people.

When the Bakke arguments were heard in 1977, there was still much to be optimistic about: the major legislative victories of the civil-rights movement were just a decade old, and the new social order it birthed was still taking shape. People camped outside the courthouse to see how America’s most powerful institutions would respond to one of its first major challenges, and Powell’s ruling was greeted with relief. We live in a different world now. The anti-civil-rights backlash that followed has since calcified into a dominant theme of our politics. Betrayal of the movement is becoming more complete by the day — losses that we swallow more frequently now than before, but no less bitterly. “I’m assuming a bloodbath is coming,” said Reed. “But we’ll see. I hope not.”

The Philadelphia Tribune
by Dwight Ott

Lately, the label, ‘the most important civil rights leader you’ve never heard of,’ has been given to many lesser-known heroes and sheroes of the mid-20th century movement.

Arthur Allen Fletcher, the father of affirmative action, is chief among them. Fletcher, a, is the father of affirmative action.

This civil rights activist, education advocate and politician who served in four Republican presidential administrations put “flesh and bones” on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream by designing and pushing through an apparatus that requires entities such as businesses, education systems, governments and the like to open doors normally closed to white women, people of color and those of varying sexual orientation or gender identities.

Affirmative action, sharpened by Fletcher in Richard M. Nixon’s presidential administration, can be credited with getting those disadvantaged communities into higher education, skilled labor jobs and elite careers en masse, something that had not been seen in fledgling America’s short the history.

“There has been no greater stalwart in the struggle for freedom and opportunity” than Arthur Fletcher, former Howard University President Patrick Swygert said in a published report. “He believed in an America that lives up to its promises and he worked to make sure America fulfilled those promises.”

Fletcher’s biographer, David Golland, agreed. Golland said Fletcher believed that affirmative action was the true pathway to make America a “meritocracy.”

According to Golland: “Fletcher believed a true meritocracy was possible if the government could establish a level playing field and then simply get out of the way.”

The enemy of merit is discrimination. This evil has largely kept men and women of African, Latin, Native American and Asian ancestry, the LGBTQ community and many white women out of education, jobs and careers that lead to real and sustained wealth.

Born Dec. 22, 1924, in a Black neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona, Fletcher was intimately acquainted with America’s lifelong romance with racism.

Golland’s biography describes how Fletcher’s mother, Edna Miller Fletcher, was a registered nurse and certified teacher. Yet, she could only find work as a live-in maid. That meant that, while his mother worked, Fletcher lived in various homes including those of Native and Mexican Americans, according to Encyclopedia.com. Despite his own college degree, Fletcher himself had to work menial jobs as a janitor, a doorman, an iceman and sundry other menial positions.

Fletcher’s father, Andrew A. Fletcher, was career military serving in an all-Black regiment of the U.S. Army. The family moved around quite a bit. According to the web site, young Fletcher attended seventeen different schools by the time he was in the eighth grade. After hearing educator Mary McCleod Bethune speak, he developed an interest in civil rights.

He organized his first protest in 1943 at the Junction City Junior/Senior High School in Kansas, “boycotting the yearbook because it placed photographs of black students at the back of the book,” Encyclopedia.com chronicled.

“He also distinguished himself on the school’s football team as a halfback and defensive end. To build up their fire before playing against white teams during that racially-charged time, Fletcher and his black teammates read accounts of black lynchings,” it said.

Fletcher graduated high school at Junction City and finished Washburn University, with bachelor’s degrees in political science and sociology. Fletcher later earned a Juris Doctorate, a law degree, and a Ph.D. in education.

In 1950, he spent a short time playing professional football for the L.A. Rams and was the first Black man to play for the Baltimore Colts.

Fletcher went to college using the G.I. Bill, after having served in World War II under General George Patton and earned a Purple Heart.

The Philadelphia Plan

Fletcher became involved in politics, ran for office and supported others in their bids. Meanwhile, presidents dating back to Harry S. Truman were pressured by civil rights groups to integrate federal construction projects brought on by the post WWII building boom, Golland, Fletcher’s biographer, said.

The NAACP, Urban League and other civil rights groups were pushing against discriminatory practices that relegated Blacks in the building trades to lower paying jobs particularly working on inner-city homes, whereas lucrative positions controlled by unions, went to whites and were passed between fathers, sons, uncles and nephews, blackpast.org said.

Enter the Philadelphia Plan.

This federal affirmative action program was established in 1967 “to racially integrate the building construction trade unions through mandatory goals for nonwhite hiring on federal construction contracts,” blackpast.org defined. However, it ended in 1968 as courts decided it violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

By 1969, Fletcher, now assistant secretary for Wage and Labor Standards in the Department of Labor in Nixon’s administration, implemented the Revised Philadelphia Plan. It set goals and dates for federal construction contractors to hire minority workers.

The revised plan went on to require all federal contractors to diversify all employment categories, with or without backing from unions that oversaw hiring. Failure to do so could mean contract disqualification.

“Where it was implemented, the plan worked, with most skilled trades showing more than 20% minority membership by 1973,” Golland said.

Fletcher’s methods became templates for affirmative action initiatives in businesses, governments and education entities nationwide and have held up despite constant legal challenges including the Bakke v. University of California Board of Regents decision of 1978. In it, the U.S. Supreme Court held that using racial quotas in college admissions was unconstitutional, but using race as one of several factors in such decisions was legal, according to online sources.

Universities such as Harvard and the University of North Carolina have clung to this method of affirmative action for years. Ironically, both programs are now under fire, endangered by the skeptical scrutiny of a new conservative majority on the court that is expected to end affirmative action when their decision is released in June.

People of color on the court have opposing views. Republican Justice Clarence Thomas and Yale graduate grew up poor and admits benefiting from Fletcher’s affirmative action. However, Thomas, who is Black, said he resented the program because it “stigmatized” him.

Conversely, Hispanic Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer, who also was an affirmative action beneficiary, said she felt “worthy” of affirmative action not diminished by it.

“The question, is not, how did I get in? It’s what did I do when I got there?” she told students at Michigan State University in 2018. “And, with pride, I can say I graduated at the top of my class.”

The Outlook
by Dae'sani Clarke

David Golland, Ph.D., was recently appointed as the new Dean of the Wayne D. Murray School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Before joining Monmouth’s campus, Golland was previously a professor of history at Governors State University in Chicago, Illinois. He served in a variety of capacities over his 12 years at the institution.

Upon ascending to his new position, Golland expressed some of his first impressions about the University. “I love Monmouth! I’ve met so many people here who share my commitment to excellence in higher education.”

Golland mentioned his ambitions for the University, as it currently houses 13 academic disciplines and four centers. He started, “I want to better integrate all of these disparate pursuits so that we can work together in serving our students and supporting their scholarship.”

The new Dean intends to direct his attention specifically to the Departments of Communication, Art and Design, and Music and Theatre. According to Golland, these departments’ pursuits are most closely aligned with one another.

“These departments will work together on a new Film Studies program in anticipation for an influx of future students seeking eventual employment at a planned Netflix headquarters at Fort Monmouth,” continued Golland.

Richard Veit, Ph.D., Associate Dean and Professor of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, served two years as the Interim Dean for the School. Veit hopes to support Golland in their effort to build partnerships across other schools that create positive outcomes for Monmouth students.

Veit said, “I look forward to supporting him as he implements his vision for a robust and dynamic School of Humanities and Social Sciences.”

Aaron Furgason, Ph.D., Chair and Associate Professor for the Department of Communication, added, “I am excited for the opportunity to see what new academic initiatives Dean Golland has for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.”

Golland responded, “During my time here, I hope to be remembered for my patience and thoughtfulness in helping faculty serve students…I have noticed that the faculty already goes above and beyond their normal duties to accommodate the School and its students.”

“For example, I have been impressed by Professor Patten’s introductory political science class for their creative thinking about electoral issues,” expanded Golland.

Patrick Robbins, a sophomore music industry student, believes Golland will positively contribute to the success of the Department of Music and Theatre Arts. He said, “I look forward to a bright future for not only the department but the School as a whole.”

Robbins was interested in knowing Gollands aspirations not only for the School, but the University as well. Golland answered, “I would like to see increased diversity in the student body and among faculty here at Monmouth.”

According to the US Department of Education, Monmouth’s student body is 61 perecent female and 39 percent male. Regarding race, 69 percent of students are white, 3 percent are Asian, 5 percent are African American, and 15 percent are Hispanic. One percent are international students.

Golland reiterated the dedication of the faculty and staff to facilitate the most optimal student outcomes. He highlighted a couple of faculty in particular, “Professor Jodry’s teaching style in Professional Counseling; Professor Maginn’s teaching activities in her intermediate Spanish class; and Professors Dooley and Mitchell hit the mark in their Model UN program.”

by Pamela E. Scott-Johnson, Provost/Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, Monmouth University

Greetings, Members of the Monmouth University Community:

Please join me in welcoming the new Dean of the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr. David Golland.

Dr. Golland joins us from Governors State University (University Park, Illinois) where he served over 22 years in higher education, eight years as Department Chair, and more than twelve years as full-time faculty as a Professor of History. He also served as President of the University Faculty Senate. Additionally, Dr. Golland has received national acclaim for his media commentary and published works on civil rights, politics, and labor; with his major projects, books, and chapters making notable contributions to scholarship, national leadership, and public policy. He has contributed to the historical profession and community with over 20 appointments, including appointments and elections to key leadership roles such as the Board of Directors (National Association for Ethnic Studies, Park Forest Historical Society) and multiple Boards of Trustees. Moreover, Dr. Golland’s commitment to diversity and inclusion highlights over two decades of serving racially- and ethnically-diverse student populations. His experiences within a diverse and racially and ethnically inclusive environment will facilitate our commitment to strengthening diversity, equity, and inclusion. His leadership will move forward our strategic goals of excellence. As the longtime Humanities and Social Sciences Department Chair, he served an interdisciplinary team of tenure-line, term, visiting, and adjunct faculty teaching American Studies Anthropology, Geography, Global Studies, History, Japanese, Latin American/Caribbean/Latinx Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Religious Studies, Sociology, and Spanish. He developed the schedule of courses, chaired tenure-track searches, evaluated applications for retention, tenure, and promotion, supported junior faculty, recruited and supervised adjuncts, and oversaw curricular development. He also served as the Faculty Senate President during a state budget crisis and pandemic. As the Faculty Senate President, he oversaw and facilitated the university standing committees, helped steer the General Education Council and Graduate Studies Council; participated on the Foundation Board of Directors, promoted faculty service, shared governance, and academic freedom across the university.

Dr. Golland’s role as Dean will officially commence on July 11, 2022. We look forward to his contributions not only to the McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences, but to our university as a whole.

With special thanks and appreciation, please also join us in recognizing our Interim Dean of the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr. Richard Veit, who served for the past two years. Consistent with his awards of distinction and outstanding service to Monmouth, Dr. Veit served as Interim Dean with merit and honor to the administration, faculty, and our students. During his leadership he guided the School through the COVID pandemic, managed the school’s budget during a period of significant budget constraints, facilitated the transfer of several hundred courses from a primarily in-person modality to an emergency remote learning modality, and most importantly, provided positive and progressive leadership to a large and complicated academic unit.

Dr. Veit will return to his role as the Associate Dean to the School, and once again we thank him for his service and look forward to his continuing contributions. We are grateful for his leadership and collaboration.

American Historical Review
by Danielle Wiggins, California Institute of Technology

In his biography of Arthur Fletcher—one-time professional football player, former head of the United Negro College Fund, and most notably the primary architect of federal affirmative action policy—David Hamilton Golland seeks to unravel the “conundrum” of the modern Black Republican—that is, why would someone who many heralded as a civil rights hero and whose core principles were largely abandoned by the GOP remain a Republican to his dying day? Chronicling Fletcher’s Republican activism from his time as vice chairman of the Kansas Young Republicans in the 1940s to his appointment as assistant secretary of labor during the Nixon administration, Golland joins scholars such as Leah Wright-Rigueur, Timothy Thurber, and Joshua Farrington in investigating moderate Black Republicans’ efforts to fight for civil rights from within the party of Lincoln and their often-failed attempts to stem the rising tide of conservatism in the party between the 1930s and 1970s. In continuing to follow Fletcher’s career after the conservative takeover of the party in the less historicized 1980s, Golland’s A Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher and the Conundrum of the Black Republican extends this narrative forward. Fletcher’s story ultimately reveals how Republican politics and Black interests became increasingly incompatible and how one man tried, often in vain, to reconcile the two.

Golland uses personal interviews with Fletcher, the Fletcher family, and political figures who knew “Art” as well as archival materials from presidential libraries and the US Commission on Civil Rights to answer the biography’s central question: Why did Fletcher become and remain a loyal Republican? He roots Fletcher’s Republicanism in several experiences of his childhood. His mother refused to accept welfare, though she struggled to make ends meet as a domestic during Fletcher’s childhood. Later, his stepfather, a career serviceman, further instilled a sense of self-competitiveness and the ethic of self-help, principles that Fletcher believed were best upheld by the GOP. First in Kansas and then in California and Washington state, Fletcher became active in Republican politics, where he gained insight into the intensifying battles between moderates and conservatives that would soon emerge at the national level.

Fletcher’s civil rights activism began in his childhood, when Mary McLeod Bethune visited his class. She implored the children to “always carry a brief for black folks” (quoted on 19). He learned from her that the government could serve as a “vehicle for achieving civil rights,” but as a believer in self-help he stopped short of supporting direct aid. When Fletcher struggled to find adequate employment as a college graduate and a World War II veteran, he became an equal opportunity advocate. He blended his Republican principles with his concern for civil rights to create a self-help civil rights philosophy that undergirded the mentorship program he organized in Berkeley, California, and the cooperative he developed in East Pasco, Washington. His self-help civil rights garnered the attention of the Republican establishment—first, the moderate Republicans in Washington who convinced Fletcher to run for lieutenant governor and eventually the Republican National Committee. In 1968, Fletcher addressed the platform committee, where his ideas about self-help, economic opportunity, and business enterprise informed Nixon’s ideas about Black capitalism. Fletcher forayed his expertise into a position on Nixon’s transition team and then, most notably, into a position in Nixon’s “Black Cabinet” as assistant secretary of labor.

In the book’s most compelling chapter, Golland details how Fletcher engineered affirmative action policies for federal contracts by revising the Philadelphia Plan. The revised plan instated hiring goals and ranges and required that contractors put forth a “good faith effort” in diversifying their workforces. The plan required the desegregation of the building trades. Unsurprisingly, Fletcher encountered opposition from union leaders. Nixon initially supported Fletcher and the Philadelphia Plan in an attempt to demonstrate that he supported civil rights. But as rank-and-file union members, whose support Nixon hoped to cultivate, began to resist affirmative action, Nixon abandoned the ambitious plan and backed the much weaker “New York Plan.” To appease rightward-moving union leaders, he removed Fletcher from his cabinet position in 1971. In the following years, the Republican Party’s opposition to affirmative action and other civil rights legislation would only grow.

Yet Fletcher stayed on. After his removal from the Department of Labor, Fletcher continued to fight for civil rights from within the Republican Party, not because he was naïve, Golland argues, but because he “held fast to his principles and believed that he could still pull the GOP in a more productive direction” (209). When George H. W. Bush tapped him to head the US Commission on Civil Rights, Fletcher believed he could push the party to once again embrace civil rights. Yet, after Bush vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990 and continued the party’s assault on affirmative action, Fletcher’s steadfast support was accompanied by a “public rage.” He remained a loyal but often disappointed Republican until his death in 2005.

Golland concludes by returning to the driving question of the biography: Why did Fletcher remain a Republican even as the party systematically undermined the very policy he created? Golland emphasizes Fletcher’s belief in self-help, individualism, and other Republican principles. But these claims would have been more convincing if Golland had provided insight into Fletcher’s political views outside of affirmative action. If he was in alignment with conservative Republicans on issues such as welfare reform, criminal justice policy, full employment, or women’s and LGBTQ rights, his loyalty would be less puzzling. Nevertheless, Golland makes the compelling claim that Fletcher’s steadfastness was rooted in his belief that “the Republican Party could flip back to moderation as quickly as it had been lost to the conservative wing” (287). In chronicling the story of a man whose party loyalty often seemed to defy reason, Golland’s biography underscores the contingency of the conservative ascendency and suggests that the rise of a nationalist conservatism within the GOP was never inevitable or totalizing. And perhaps more significantly for our contemporary moment, Fletcher’s steadfast belief in the GOP suggests to readers that the Republican Party may still have the potential to change once again.

WZZM TV 13 Grand Rapids
by April Stevens

hypnagogicfun blog
by David Potash, Wilbur Wright College

Journal of American History
by Keith Miller, Arizona State University

This book traces the life of Arthur Fletcher, a genial dynamo who, after running unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of Washington State, rose high in the national Republican party.

While championing African American entrepreneurship and opposing racial segregation, Fletcher clung steadfastly to the Gop throughout his career, despite its propensity for what Richard M. Nixon's presidential adviser John Ehrlichman called “liberal zags and conservative zigs” in Republican presidential policies related to civil rights. Leveraging his position as undersecretary of labor in the Nixon administration, Fletcher promoted the Philadelphia Plan and the Revised Philadelphia Plan—early efforts at affirmative action that aimed to integrate the construction trades, which often discriminated against African Americans. White workers in hard hats ardently resisted these plans, creating flash points in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Seattle that Fletcher sought to address.

After serving under President Gerald R. Ford as deputy assistant for urban affairs, Fletcher failed to garner an important post under President Ronald Reagan, whose administration, David Hamilton Golland explains, proved “abysmal for civil rights.” Both before and after becoming president, however, George H. W. Bush cultivated a friendship with Fletcher. Despite the infamous Willie Horton Tv ad that helped elect Bush by appealing to white racist fears, Fletcher clung to his friend, who tapped him to chair the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. As Golland notes, both former president Richard M. Nixon and Jesse Jackson congratulated Fletcher on the appointment. Bush then zigged conservative by vetoing an affirmative action bill, zigged conservative again by nominating Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, then zagged liberal by signing an affirmation action law that strongly resembled the vetoed bill.

The book's title refers to Fletcher's inability to halt the growing conservatism of his party under Reagan or to change Bush's ambivalence about affirmative action. Nor did he succeed in prodding large numbers of African Americans to join the Gop. As Republican presidents zigged increasingly conservative during the 1970s and 1980s, they kept writing him warm thank-you notes, even as they increasingly spurned his advice.

Focusing tightly on Fletcher, Golland chooses not to examine other notable, moderately liberal black Republicans (such as Archibald Carey Jr. and former baseball legend Jackie Robinson) who preceded him and only briefly notes the experiences of other black Gop loyalists who grappled with their party contemporaneously with him. Not content simply to write biography, however, Golland treats Fletcher's frequent inability to affect Republican policies as a powerful symbol of the inability of African Americans as a whole to alter the direction of the Gop.

By bringing the largely forgotten Fletcher into view, Golland presents a fresh and valuable perspective on the dismal fortunes of African Americans within a fairly recent version of the party whose members once placed Abraham Lincoln in the White House and cheered when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Topeka Capital-Journal
by Tim Hrenchir

By GSU News

Governors State University's Faculty Senate President David Golland's second book has been selected for a campus-wide freshman reading program at Washburn University, where Arthur Fletcher earned a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1950.

Fletcher is the central figure in Golland's “A Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher and the Conundrum of the Black Republican.''

A civil rights leader who was widely considered the father of affirmative action, Fletcher was the first Black player on the Baltimore Colts NFL team. After his football career, he began a life in public service and served as an adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. President George H.W. Bush named Fletcher Chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Golland's book exploring Fletcher's life was published in 2019 and celebrated on campus.

“It’s such an honor,” Golland told cjonline.com about his book being selected for iRead. “To be one of the authors chosen by an institution as prestigious as Washburn, with well over a century of higher education in Topeka, and for them to see my book as being important enough for every member of the freshman class to read is such an incredible honor.”

Read the entire cjonline story here.

Topeka Capital-Journal
by Linda Ditch

While some aspects of college life have changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Washburn University is continuing with the annual iRead program. This year, all first-year students will read “A Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher and the Conundrum of the Black Republican” by David Hamilton Golland.

“It’s such an honor,” said Golland about his book being selected by faculty and staff of WU’s Mabee Library. He is a history professor at Governors State University, with a specialization in African American history and civil rights. “To be one of the authors chosen by an institution as prestigious as Washburn, with well over a century of higher education in Topeka, and for them to see my book as being important enough for every member of the freshman class to read is such an incredible honor.”

Arthur Fletcher, an alumnus of Washburn, was a civil rights leader and widely considered the father of affirmative action. He was the first Black player on the Baltimore Colts NFL team. After his football career, he began a life in public service and served as an adviser to several presidents.

As assistant secretary of labor from 1969 to 1971, Fletcher issued the Revised Philadelphia Plan, the foundation for affirmative action programs. While serving as executive director of the United Negro College Fund, he is credited with helping coin the phrase, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Fletcher served as deputy adviser for Urban Affairs to President Gerald Ford and as chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights from 1990 to 1993.

“The iRead program encourages the entire campus community to think deeply about a shared topic,” said Alan Bearman, dean of university libraries and the Center for Student Success. “This year’s book is timely and provides opportunities to engage our students across numerous disciplines and classes, as well as learn more about one of our historically significant alumni. We look forward to the discussions and connections made through this experience.”

The public is invited to join in reading Golland’s book, and during the fall 2020 semester, professors are encouraged to incorporate the book into their curriculum. Also, the Mabee Library will host a series of virtual events around the book, culminating in a discussion with Golland.

“I often find myself thinking what would Arthur Fletcher do,” Golland said of the current times. “So much of what I concentrated on in the book was Fletcher’s politics, but he really was a civil rights leader as well as a politician. He wouldn’t necessarily call for defunding the police. I don’t think he would be going quite so far as that, but I think he would be looking for more serious police reforms than we currently have. He certainly recognized these issues during his lifetime.”

Golland is the author of two books and numerous essays, including “Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity” and “The Arthur Fletcher Papers,” an annotated collection of Fletcher’s personal papers organized in conjunction with Mabee Library. “A Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher and the Conundrum of the Black Republican” is available for purchase at the Ichabod Shop in the Memorial Union on the Washburn University campus.

WIBW-TV 13 Topeka
by Sarah Motter

TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW) - Washburn University is highlighting the works of a civil rights leader and Washburn alumnus in its 2020-2021 iRead selection.

Washburn University says its iRead program, coordinated by Mabee Library, encourages a community-wide reading experience, especially among its first-year students. It says the iRead selection for the 2020-2021 school year is “A Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher and the Conundrum of the Black Republican” by David Golland.

WU says during the fall 2020 semester, professors are encouraged to incorporate the book into their curriculum and Mabee Library will host a series of virtual events around the book, culminating in a discussion with Golland.

The school says Arthur Fletcher, an alumnus of Washburn University, is a civil rights leader and widely considered the father of affirmative action. It says Fletcher was the first Black player on the Baltimore Colts NFL team and after his football career, began a life in public service and served as an advisor to several presidents.

WU says as assistant secretary of labor from 1969 - 1971, Fletcher issued the Revised Philidelphia Plan, the foundation for affirmative action programs. It says while serving as executive director of the United Negro College Fund, Fletcher is credited with helping coin the phrase, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

According to the school, Fletcher served as deputy advisor for Urban Affairs to President Gerald Ford and as chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights from 1990 - 1993.

WU says Golland is a professor of history at Governors State University, with a specialization in African American history and civil rights. Golland says he is the author [of] two books and numerous essays, including “A Terrible Thing to Waste,” “Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity” and “The Arthur Fletcher Papers,” an annotated collection of Fletcher’s personal papers organized in conjunction with Mabee Library.

“The iRead program encourages the entire campus community to think deeply about a shared topic,” said Dr. Alan Bearman, dean of university libraries and the Center for Student Success. “This year’s book is timely and provides opportunities to engage our students across numerous disciplines and classes, as well as learn more about one of our historically significant alumni. We look forward to the discussions and connections made through this experience.”

WU says “A Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher and the Conundrum of the Black Republican” is available for purchase at its Ichabod Shop in the Memorial Union on the Washburn University campus.

Copyright 2020 WIBW. All rights reserved.

Journal of Southern History
by Angela D. Dillard, University of Michigan

David Hamilton Golland’s biography of Arthur Allen Fletcher (1924–2005), the influential black Republican who was the architect of the Revised Philadelphia Plan and the “‘father of affirmative action enforcement,’” reads like an American political tragedy (p. 1). Established in 1967 and revised in 1969, the Philadelphia Plan was designed to integrate segregated building construction trade unions through mandated hiring goals in federal contracts. As the government official most responsible for the revised plan, Fletcher also laid the foundations for the expansion of affirmative action initiatives during the early years of President Richard M. Nixon’s administration.

Golland provides a thorough and at times plodding account of Fletcher’s life and what it tells us about the history of the Republican Party’s relationship to its African American loyalists, especially those, like Fletcher, who were major advocates for civil rights. Other scholars have mined this fraught history, particularly from the 1930s to the 1970s, but A Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher and the Conundrum of the Black Republican makes the party’s betrayal of its commitment to racial egalitarianism deeply personal and surprisingly vivid. This is the power of biography. The climax arrives near the middle of the book in chapter 4. “After nearly three years with the Nixon administration” as the assistant secretary of labor from 1969 to 1971, Fletcher “had redefined and enforced affirmative action and become a national figure.” “Politically, however”—and this is a dangling-on-the-edge-of-a-cliff use of the word however—“his utility to Nixon and the Republican Party was to support a very important lie the party was telling the nation: that it still stood for racial equality. By allowing Fletcher to enforce the Philadelphia Plan—within limits—the Nixon administration could say that it was continuing and expanding the civil rights initiatives of the previous administration even as it was actually curtailing civil rights policies in other areas” (p. 161).

Golland interlaces the biography with scenes from the fierce battle for the soul of the party waged between its conservative and liberal wings. And while the history of conservative ascendancy is by now well-trod territory, with a number of excellent studies on what that transformation meant for African Americans, Golland adds to the literature by bringing that narrative well into the 1980s and 1990s.

Described by Golland as “‘loyal to a fault,’” Fletcher’s Job-like belief in the party of Abraham Lincoln is stunning (p. 163). The second half of this well-researched book follows Fletcher’s struggles to return the party to the principles of racial egalitarianism, to stop the steep decline in the percentage of the black vote garnered by Republicans, and, especially as the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under President George H. W. Bush, to encourage a healthy pattern of collaboration between African American leaders and the GOP on issues of mutual interest. None of these efforts were terribly successful. By the 1990s the GOP could barely claim more than 10 percent of the national black electorate. Healthy collaborations between liberals and conservatives have become vanishingly rare, and American politics overall has suffered with African Americans relegated to one-party voters.

In a dramatic shift, new black conservatives who did take prominent roles in Republican administrations in the 1980s and 1990s were required to denounce affirmative action as a veritable job qualification. Thus, Fletcher became the last Republican, black or white, to defend the initiatives he helped create and was relegated to the status of the most important Republican civil rights activist of whom many people have never heard. He realized too late that the party had left him behind; too much of American history has left him out.

By Mike Nolan, Daily Southtown

Governors State University’s embattled president accepted responsibility Friday for a payroll scandal under which the school paid more than $1.5 million to people who were doing little or no work, but resisted calls for her to step down.

Faculty at the school’s board of trustees meeting said the state watchdog’s findings regarding Elaine Maimon had put the University Park school in a bad light and hurt morale among teachers. They have urged that Maimon, who is due to retire at the end of June, either quit early or be removed by the board.

In shouldering the blame for the irregularities, laid out in a report made public in December, Maimon said “I regret the cost to the university,” but that “I never personally benefited.”

She said that during her career “I have worked 24/7 to demonstrate integrity as an ethical values-based leader.”

The governor’s office of executive inspector general concluded 33 people had been terminated from the south suburban university but continued to collect their full salaries and benefits. Some of those people were technically employed by Governors State but were doing no work, while others found other employment, according to the findings.

The employees were even told to submit falsified timesheets to make it look like they were still working full-time at the university, the report said. It was part of a poorly monitored and inconsistent system for firing certain workers, according to the report, which laid the blame squarely on Maimon.

She, according to the watchdog, authorized the falsified timesheets and "mismanaged” the terminations of multiple employees.

In a vote last month that was delivered to the board, the faculty senate said it had no confidence in Maimon’s leadership and demanded she either step down or be removed. The union that represents university faculty echoed that sentiment.

In an apparent response to those demands, Maimon, the university’s president since 2007, said that continuity is needed as GSU searches for her replacement.

In her interview with the inspector general’s office, Maimon told investigators that she was familiar with the termination policy but said she was not directly involved in those decisions. She said she did not know of any workers getting paid after they stopped working at the university or of their submitting timecards to that effect, according to the report.

During the public comment period of the meeting and before Maimon’s remarks, faculty and students criticized board members for not taking action.

“If mismanagement of money is not enough to lose your job at GSU, what is?” professor Kim Boland-Prom said.

Sandi Estep, president of the University Professionals of Illinois chapter at the school, said “morale is at an all-time low."

She and Lyle Evans, a graduate student, requested that a forensic audit of university finances be conducted.

“Students are the reason this institution exists,” Evans said. “Students deserve to know where our dollars go.”

Another professor, Carlos Ferran, also called for board action.

“It’s your turn,” he said. “You must step up to the plate and search your conscience and do what’s best.”

Faculty Senate President David Golland said the university “would be better off immediately ending” Maimon’s employment.

The fallout from the report has, at least for the time being, saved money for those planning to attend GSU next year.

A motion to raise 2021 tuition by 2% failed on a 3-3 tie, with two board members absent. Before the vote, Trustee James Kvedaras said it wasn’t right to talk about hiking tuition in the wake of the report, though the board will likely revisit the issue.

In a memo Tuesday to faculty, administration and staff, Lisa Harrell, board chairman, said she and Trustee Angela Sebastian-Hickey will meet with legislators during the spring session in Springfield to discuss GSU’s funding priorities and “update them on our reform agenda in response” to the inspector general’s findings.

The inspector general interviewed 14 former Governors State workers between January and May 2018 in order to find out what payments they received for what work after they were informed they’d been terminated.

The names and job titles of the employees involved were redacted from the report, as was information about when they worked for the university.

By JMKraft

On January 16, 2020, Governors State Faculty Senate voted 25 – 1 for a No Confidence vote against Dr. Elaine P. Maimon, President of Governors State University.

The Office of the Executive Inspector General issued its report finding that President Maimon engaged in mismanagement, misfeasance, and/or malfeasance which cost the university nearly $1.6 Million.

This activity consisted of requiring an employee to submit false timesheets, paying employees after they ceased working for GSU, with these payments totaling $1,598,108 to 33 at-will employees after they had been terminated without cause.

In its September 20, 2019 response to the OEIG, the GSU stated that it has formed an executive search committee to begin the process of selecting the University’s next president by June 20, 2020 (when Maimon’s contract expires).

From the letter sent by David Hamilton Golland, University Faculty Senate, to Dr. Elaine P. Maimon, President of Governors State University:

It is my duty to inform you that today, by a vote of 25-1, the University Faculty Senate adopted a resolution of no confidence in your leadership of Governors State University.

We did not take this action lightly, nor was it based on personal animus. Many senators, myself included, have enjoyed a warm and courteous relationship with you and your husband over the years. Neither did it result from policy disagreements, as academics can and do disagree on such matters on an almost daily basis, and we consider such discourse healthy for an academic institution. Finally, this vote was not the result of union machination; we did not coordinate this with the UPI, nor was it “negotiation by other means.”

Rather, our consideration of confidence in your leadership followed a careful, dispassionate analysis of the report of the Office of the Executive Inspector General in Case #17-01703, in which you were found to have engaged in mismanagement, misfeasance, and/or malfeasance which cost the university nearly $1.6 Million. In addition to this clear ethical lapse, we were particularly concerned that this took place during a state budget impasse, when the university raised tuition and fees and cut academic programs, demonstrating an astonishing failure of your administration to prioritize teaching and learning. It is therefore with great sadness that the Senate, acting on behalf of the faculty in our capacity as the permanent stewards of the institution, recommends and urges your immediate resignation as president of Governors State University.

By Mike Nolan and Dawn Rhodes, Daily Southtown

Faculty at Governors State University are urging that President Elaine Maimon, due to retire at the end of June, resign or be removed from office after a government report revealed that under her watch the school paid more than $1.5 million in salary to people who were doing no or little work for the university.

The faculty senate took the no-confidence vote Jan. 16, sending the resolution seeking Maimon’s ouster to the board of trustees, according to David Golland, faculty senate president.

The university’s board has scheduled a special meeting for Monday afternoon, and many faculty members are expected to attend, he said.

The union representing faculty at GSU was encouraging its members to attend, according to Sandi Estep, president of the University Professionals of Illinois chapter at the school. Following the faculty senate’s vote, the union had issued a release saying it strongly supported the senate’s action.

In the release, Estep said the union wanted to see Maimon held accountable and removed “from office immediately.”

In response to the faculty vote, the GSU board said it respects the senate’s vote and that trustees are “focused on overseeing the policy and procedure reforms” initiated during the state investigator’s report.

The report last month from the Illinois governor’s office of executive inspector general concluded 33 people terminated from GSU continued to collect their full salaries and benefits. Some of those people were technically employed by GSU but were doing no work, while others found other employment.

Employees were even told to submit falsified timesheets to make it look like they were still working full-time at the university, describing it as part of a poorly monitored and inconsistent system for firing certain workers, according to the report.

The report alleged Maimon had authorized the bogus timesheets and "mismanaged” the terminations of multiple employees.

"GSU has had a long-standing practice of automatically paying at-will employees after they were terminated without cause and stopped working,” the report states. "Many former employees said it was common knowledge that GSU paid terminated employees without requiring them to work.”

Last September, the university said that Maimon, who has served as president since July 2007, would retire at the end of June. The university is searching for a replacement and said it expects to have a new president in place by sometime in June.

Golland said that 25 of the faculty senate’s members, in a secret ballot, voted in favor of the no-confidence resolution, with one disagreeing and one member absent. The results of the vote were sent the same day to the board of trustees.

He called it a “very difficult and painful step” because “many of us are admirers of Dr. Maimon.”

Golland said the findings of the report represent “a tragic coda to an otherwise positive presidency.”

The faculty senate advises GSU on matters such as curriculum and educational policy and taking the no-confidence vote was “not acting out of a sense of personal animosity toward Dr. Maimon,” Golland said Friday.

Maimon, the university’s fifth president, has seen the school transition to a four-year university with the addition of a student residence hall.

In her interview with the inspector general’s office, Maimon told investigators that she was familiar with the termination policy but said she was not directly involved in those decisions.

She said she did not know of any workers getting paid after they stopped working at the university or of their submitting timecards to that effect.

"Ms. Maimon stated she was not generally consulted about these issues because she is ‘just not in the weeds’ on these matters,” the report said.

The inspector general interviewed 14 former GSU workers between January and May 2018 in order to find out what payments they received for what work after they were informed they’d been terminated.

The watchdog found the employees were given wildly different instructions about what they were expected to do between their termination notice and their last day of work. Several weren’t given any guidance and did no work. Some were told not to come to work but to be on standby, but ultimately never were asked to complete any tasks.