Little Pink House_ A True Story of Defiance and Courage - Jeff Benedict [68]
“Amy and I know Sawyer,” Steve Hallquist said. A year earlier, Sawyer had helped them resolve a simple property-line dispute. “We’ll call him.”
The private off-campus meeting held by Connecticut College faculty ended up being a planning session to oust Claire as president. She was criticized for everything from finances to her leadership style. Some faculty were so angry they wanted to go directly to the board of trustees with a letter spelling out the school’s financial woes and demanding Claire’s resignation. Others suggested a less confrontational approach—sending a small group of respected senior faculty to talk with her directly and encourage her to step down voluntarily. This approach would spare Claire any public embarrassment and keep the school’s financial woes out of the newspapers.
The more diplomatic approach prevailed. But the half dozen senior faculty who enjoyed good relations with Claire failed to make the kind of headway their colleagues wanted to see. And with only a few weeks remaining before the end of the spring semester, a small group of professors drafted a petition calling on Claire to resign. Mobilized and energized, the leaders of the petition drive needed only two weeks to get 78 of the school’s 105 tenured professors to sign it. Before submitting it to the board of trustees, one of the professors tipped off the Day. On May 7 the newspaper broke the news of the petition.
The news was stunning. The college president who had used her clout to spearhead an economic revival in New London had suddenly become vulnerable. It was the talk of the town from the Fort Trumbull neighborhood to City Hall. It was hard not to suspect that her extensive time commitment to the city had led to her neglect of the campus.
Two things were clear: the gloves had come off, and Claire was challenged with a revolt. Her personal secretary, Claudia Shapiro, couldn’t believe the faculty had actually gone public against Claire. Shapiro, soft-spoken and in her sixties, had started working for Claire the year she became the president. She found Claire very demanding yet irresistibly likeable. On birthdays and Jewish holidays, Shapiro always discovered a gift from Claire hidden in her desk drawer, usually signed “Aheba, Claire,” Hebrew for “Love, Claire.”
Shapiro saw sides of Claire that few people saw. She acknowledged that Claire’s dominant personality surely had its flaws. “She had a habit of offending people,” Shapiro said. “Then people forget the good parts about her and they hold grudges.”
But to Shapiro, Claire’s qualities far outweighed any imperfections. “She was a workaholic, very driven and very aggressive,” she said. “People loved this when she started. But after she made a few mistakes, these same qualities were disdained.” And certainly she didn’t deserve to be run out, Shapiro felt.
Privately, some professors agreed. “For all the criticism of Claire,” one senior professor told Shapiro in confidence, “when a parent brings a child to our campus, all the things we brag about were brought in by Claire.”
None of that mattered now. There was blood in the water and the notion of a faculty revolt against a college president immediately attracted national attention. The Chronicle of Higher Education, the leading periodical for academia, ran a two-thousand-word story titled “A Promoter of Town-Gown Cooperation Finds Development May Be Her Undoing.” It outlined the dispute between the faculty and Claire, quoting professors who had turned solidly against Claire. The Chronicle also reported that it had obtained a videotape of Claire speaking at a black Baptist church in New London right around the time she was trying to garner support for the NLDC’s plan to demolish the Fort Trumbull neighborhood. In her speech, Claire likened her leadership at the NLDC to the social-justice movements