THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 10, 1995 TAG: 9506100256
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARC DAVIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 104 lines
It was the roughest possible start for Regent University's young new president.
One minute, Terry R. Lindvall, a former film professor, was meeting his counterparts at Old Dominion and Norfolk State universities. He wanted to know: What exactly does a college president do?
``I felt like Prince Hal trying to be King Henry V,'' Lindvall recalled.
Hours later, the then-45-year-old Lindvall was called to the most tumultuous meeting in Regent's short history, a meeting with 100 law students angry over the firing of their dean. Lindvall called it ``the post-riot meeting.''
It was there, at this tense gathering, Lindvall recalled, that he pushed Regent away from its old abhorrence of tenure as ``immoral'' and ``un-Christian,'' toward a more traditional system.
``What we had was a Rube Goldberg type of tenure that didn't work as well,'' Lindvall testified Friday in Circuit Court. He summarized his message to students that day in 1993: ``Let us not pretend to have tenure; let us have tenure. . . . We needed to graduate from being this kind of elementary school to a real university.''
For one hour Friday, Lindvall testified in the case of three Regent professors who are suing the university over tenure.
The trial ended Friday after six days of testimony. Written briefs will be filed by both sides in the next few weeks, and the judge is expected to rule in late July.
The professors say Regent's old system of rolling three-year contracts, scrapped in 1994, was a guarantee of lifetime employment. They say they are entitled to have their old 1993 contracts renewed.
The professors say that under the new tenure system, they can be fired for almost any reason. They refused to sign the new 1994 contracts.
Regent, however, claims the old system never was tenure, and that the university always could deny faculty new contracts for any reason. Regent says the three professors must serve out the remainder of their 1993 contracts and leave in 1996.
For six days, several professors and top Regent officials, including Chancellor Pat Robertson, testified about their perception of Regent's tenure system.
The most dramatic, and humorous, testimony came Friday from Lindvall, who was one of Regent's seven original faculty members. Coincidentally, another of the seven, Elaine S. Waller, is one of the professors suing the school.
In testimony, Lindvall described his 1993 meeting with law students. At the time, he said, he was just one month into his presidency, and still unsure what he should be doing.
The new law dean had asked Lindvall to reassure students that their school was not in jeopardy just because the old dean had been fired.
``I had never seen such anger and rage in my life, since the 1960s,'' Lindvall said. ``It was something we had never seen in the history of Regent University.'' The graduate school was founded in 1978.
Students and faculty were angry over the firing of Herbert W. Titus, founding dean of the law school, in July 1993, the same week Lindvall was appointed president.
Both actions were seen as attempts by Robertson to move the school toward the academic mainstream. After Titus' firing, tenure became a hot issue on campus, as faculty and students demanded to know how secure professors were.
Among top administrators, Lindvall said, tenure was a dirty word. Trustees considered it ``a virus'' that could turn a religious college into ``a sinful, secular institution,'' Lindvall testified.
At Regent, the employment system consisted of rolling three-year contracts for senior faculty, almost always renewed.
Everyone at Regent called it tenure, Lindvall said, but it wasn't. It was like a wooden wind-up decoy duck, Lindvall said - it quacked and swam, but it couldn't fly or lay eggs. The old contracts ``really didn't measure up to the standard of what traditional tenure was,'' he said.
But at the 1993 meeting with law students, Lindvall pledged a radical change. He said he would ``educate'' Regent's trustees on the value of real tenure.
``The traditional kind of tenure was not all bad,'' Lindvall said in a March deposition, ``particularly if we had post-tenure review.'' But other Lindvall testimony about the same 1993 meeting might hurt Regent's case.
At the meeting, acting law dean Paul Morken contradicted Lindvall, according to a transcript of the meeting read in court.
He told the students that Regent did have traditional tenure, and faculty were guaranteed lifetime employment. Lindvall never corrected him in front of the students, according to the transcript.
Lawyers asked Lindvall if he corrected Morken in front of the students. Lindvall said no, that that was not the time or the place.
In 1994, Regent adopted a new tenure policy. It provides for five-year reviews of tenured faculty, but it also says professors can be fired for actions ``inimical'' to the university.
In a memo, Regent's provost defined that as ``utterances or . . . actions that are detrimental to the university or reflect negatively on the institution.''
In March, the ABA gave Regent one more year of provisional accreditation. An ABA committee wrote that Regent's new tenure policy ``on its face appears to comply with the standards'' for accreditation. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
Regent University President Terry R. Lindvall entertained the court
with stories and jokes about his time at the university. Story, Page
B3.
KEYWORDS: TRIAL LAWSUIT REGENT UNIVERSITY TESTIMONY by CNB