SU prof O'Brien was eager to take dean position at Marquette

The contract Jodi O'Brien had signed to accept the dean position at Marquette University was in the mail headed for Milwaukee when she got an unexpected phone call May 2 from Provost John Pauly. Pauly was soon joined on the line by President Robert Wild, S.J., who delivered the news some say she never would have gotten if she wasn't gay: Marquette was withdrawing its job offer.

"I was stunned," said O'Brien, who is openly homosexual and has taught sociology at Seattle University for 15 years. "I had no idea this was in the works."

Officials at the Midwestern Jesuit university maintain O'Brien's sexual orientation was not what led them to retract the offer they had made her six weeks earlier.

However, a number of faculty and students at Seattle U and Marquette have vocalized strong concerns that university officials unfairly denied O'Brien the job because she is gay and her work contains accounts of lesbian sex.

"I think the president [of Marquette] is responding to people who are concerned with what I represent," O'Brien told The Spectator. "I do not think the opinion of those people represents Marquette as a university."

Two Milwaukee archdiocese leaders, judicial vicar Paul Hartmann and Archbishop Jerome Listecki, expressed concern over Marquette looking at O'Brien for the dean position, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported early Wednesday.

Listecki had contacted Wild to relay concerns clergy and lay leaders had with O'Brien serving at Marquette, the archbishop's spokeswoman, Julie Wolf, told the Sentinel.

Hartmann wrote a letter to the faculty search committee considering O'Brien March 3. According to the Sentinel, he wrote O'Brien's scholarship might "create dichotomies and cause tensions" for the Catholic university's identity.

More than 100 Marquette students protested the decision Thursday. The university's faculty senate convened Monday to discuss the situation, but did not call for Wild's resignation or for the university to re-offer O'Brien the dean position—actions some say Marquette should take to remedy the situation.

Some have suggested Marquette could face legal ramifications for withdrawing the offer. O'Brien, when asked if she was considering legal action, didn't offer specifics but said, "I'm in conversation with the university about the best next steps. My hope is that the situation can become an opportunity for institutional learning."

O'Brien said Wild was concerned it would be difficult for her to serve as dean. According to O'Brien, Wild said she would receive "too much distraction from people external to the university who did not support my appointment."

The news that she would not be a dean at Marquette—Wisconsin's largest private university that has a undergraduate student population of 8,000, roughly double the population of Seattle U—left her disappointed, she said in a phone interview with The Spectator Monday.

"It was my impression that I would be a dean who could serve [Marquette] well," O'Brien said.

From her visits to campus, she got the sense that students and faculty at the 90-acre urban campus "were very eager to have a dean who represented the diverse interests and voices in the college."

O'Brien was first contacted about the position in fall of 2008.

Marquette's faculty search committee selected her as a finalist in spring 2009, but O'Brien withdrew from the search shortly after due to a death in the family that spring. Marquette closed its search without filling the position.

In fall 2009, Marquette started looking for a new dean again. A representative from Marquette contacted O'Brien asking her to resubmit her application, an offer she initially declined, O'Brien said. After conversing with colleagues, however, she changed her mind and re-entered the search process.

It was on O'Brien's birthday, March 24, when Pauly called her to make the offer to serve as the next Helen Way Klingler College of Arts and Sciences Dean.

"I was excited," O'Brien said. "I was very impressed with what I read about students and programs in the university."

O'Brien returned to Milwaukee in April to meet with Pauly and the interim dean of the college Jeanne Hossenlopp to hammer out final details of her contract.

When she returned home April 20, she signed a contract and returned it to Marquette, whose officials had already signed their part of the contract.

"At that point I was told the university communications person would be contacting me to put together the public announcement," said O'Brien.

In the meantime, O'Brien and her partner hired a real estate agent to help them look for houses in Milwaukee. She signed and mailed the contract back to Marquette. And she shared the news of her appointment with Seattle U's Provost Isiaah Crawford and President Steven Sundborg, S.J.

It was bittersweet saying goodbye to her colleagues at Seattle U, a university "that has truly been a home to me for the past 15 years," O'Brien said. But colleagues and friends encouraged her to take the position at Marquette, she said, where she would preside over a college of 30 academic majors and 250 faculty.

"I received a lot of support in the decision from colleagues at Seattle and elsewhere, who all suggested this was the appropriate next step for my career," she said.

O'Brien's experience as the faculty chair who oversaw the Anthropology, Sociology and Social Work Departments at Seattle U made her a strong candidate for the dean position, said David Powers, dean of Seattle U's College of Arts and Sciences.

"I think she was highly qualified" he said, adding that "[Marquette] certainly thought she was qualified, too."