Faculty council regrets Pace honor

The Bloomington Faculty Council passed a resolution Tuesday stating it regrets the Kelley School of Business’ decision to honor former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace with the position of Poling Chair.

The resolution expresses the council’s “regret that Gen. Pace was brought to campus in a way that was offensive to the gay and lesbian community, and urges all campus administrators to be sensitive to minority concerns when awarding university honors.”
In a 2007 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Pace said he believed “homosexual acts” were “immoral.”

Council President Herb Terry said 19 members voted for the resolution and 15 voted against. He also said many council members at the meeting did not vote.

“The members of the faculty council are very heterogeneous, so I think many of them had very different reasons for voting for it to pass,” Terry said.

The resolution will now be sent to campus administrators, but Terry said he is unsure of the impact it will have.

The decision came after a debate between council members.

Before the vote, various council members brought up questions about the purpose of the resolution to Alex Tanford, the chair of the Diversity and Affirmative Action Committee, which drafted the resolution.

Most of the council members who spoke out about the resolution were against it. One member of the Diversity and Affirmative Action Committee, Michael Morrone, said he has opposed the resolution from the beginning.

“One of the big problems with this resolution is that there are so many interpretations,” Morrone said.

The council also discussed a memorandum submitted by the Kelley School of Business that asked for the withdrawal of the resolution.

But after about an hour of back-and-forth questioning, the council moved to end discussion and vote on the resolution.

Brian Horne, a member of the council and an associate professor of voice in the Jacobs School of Music, said he was glad the Diversity and Affirmative Action Committee rewrote the resolution, but he said he still wished the resolution had not passed because it could create a “chilling effect.”

“The Kelley School was so spanked by this, so punished by this, I believe that anybody in the future will back away – not most certainly from anybody with this controversial viewpoint, but any controversial viewpoint – because they don’t want to be scrutinized by this body in that way,” Horne said. “That’s not what a university should do.”

But Terry, who said his field of research is self-expression, said he did not think the resolution will have that impact.

He said he voted to pass the resolution because of how it was written.

“If I believed that this resolution would have any chilling effect on the invitation of people to come to campus ... or for the University to give them a minor honor like the Poling Chair, then I would have voted against it,” Terry said. “But I don’t think it will have that effect based on the resolution.”