Antigay Controversy Bedevils Boston College

 For the third year in a row, Boston College, a Jesuit, Catholic institution, has left vacant the Thomas Rattigan Professorship of English. The most recent failed attempt to fill the position raised claims of antigay discrimination. Thomas J. Rattigan, a former brewing-company executive, established the professorship in 1993 in honor of his father.

The first two searches ended unsuccessfully when, in one instance, the selected candidate declined the offer and, in the other, the search committee was unable to find qualified candidates. The third search concluded acrimoniously last April when college president Rev. William Leahy, S.J., was accused of rejecting the leading candidates because they were gay.

Leahy announced plans to pass over the search committee's two top choices and offer the professorship to former New Yorker writer and public intellectual Jonathan Schell, the committee's third choice. College spokesperson Jack Dunn denied that Leahy's decision was influenced by the sexual orientation of the leading candidates, poet Mark Doty and Carl Phillips, professor of English, African, and Afro-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Dunn claimed that Leahy was unaware of Doty's and Phillips's sexual orientation until after the fact, and he accused the English department of sabotaging the search process. The department, according to the Boston Globe, raised no objection to Schell's selection but twice sought assurances from Leahy that, if Schell should turn down the offer, the position would be offered to one of the other two candidates. Leahy failed to respond. In the end, according to Dunn, "The committee chose to inform the candidates that the search was off."

For the search committee's top choice, Mark Doty, the aborted search was not the first time he had found himself a figure of controversy at a Catholic university. In 1999, when his memoir, Heaven's Coast, was selected as required reading for first-year students at Saint Thomas University in Minnesota, conservative Catholics objected vehemently. (See the article by Michael Allen Mikolajcak in the January-February 2001 issue of Academe.) Doty expressed bewilderment that Boston College's search process had "imploded." He told the Boston Globe that he had had "a very rewarding experience on campus." He said, "I got no signal that sexual orientation might be an issue."

The search committee's second choice, Carl Phillips, expressed outrage at the specter of antigay discrimination. Comparing the alleged motivation of the college's president to racial discrimination of previous decades, Phillips told the Boston Globe: "It would be sickening to be working at a place where this could happen. I don't think the president's actions are reflective of the Boston College community in general."

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