President receives death wishes, Chapman grapples with proving values
The debate over the fate of former law professor John Eastman may have created a rift between students, faculty and senior staff. Photo illustration by SAM ANDRUS, Photo Editor
There are people who want President Daniele Struppa dead. Evidently, they aren’t afraid to admit it. Despite the announcement that former law professor John Eastman and Chapman University have parted ways, hate mail keeps pouring into Struppa’s inbox.
He’s confused. People hope he loses his life, and tell him directly — all because he simply didn’t fire Eastman?
“(They’re) not death threats, but wishes. Death wishes … wishing me to die and wishing me to have cancer – this has been fairly common,” Struppa said. “These are hundreds, over and over and over. So I have lost faith, frankly, in our citizenship, in our people.”
A cowboy-hatted, fist-waving Eastman was seen speaking alongside attorney Rudy Giuliani Jan. 6, asserting the use of “secret folder” vote matching at a “Save America” rally at Capitol Hill. A massive “CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY LAW PROFESSOR” graphic affirmed his identity on live television, and it was announced Jan. 13 that Chapman and Eastman were severing ties. Yet while that has brought relief to a swath of the university community, the residual effects of the Eastman saga seems to still weigh heavily on administrators and faculty like Struppa.
Former law professor John Eastman speaks to a “Save America” rally at the 6:00 timestamp.
Ever since Eastman’s Newsweek opinion was released Aug. 12, and particularly during a vigil hosted through the Fish Interfaith Center the night of the Capitol Hill insurrection, many members of the Chapman community have repeatedly urged Struppa to fire Eastman. The president released a campus-wide email Jan. 9 — four days prior to Eastman’s retirement — stating that he cannot determine on his own whether Eastman is a criminal or should be disbarred and therefore fired.
“I am not the Emperor of Chapman University, nor I am the Supreme Leader of Chapman University,” Struppa wrote Jan. 9. “I am the President of the university, and as such, I am bound by laws and processes that are clearly spelled out in our Faculty Manual.”
Struppa specified that he’d received countless requests from the community that Eastman be disbarred, which in reality would be not up to him, but the State Bar of California.
“We teach students logic and then I see it being failed constantly,” Struppa said. “If you are disbarred, you can be fired; if you are a felon, you can be fired ... People kept telling me about, ‘He should be disbarred,’ or ‘What he committed is a crime.’ And so I said, ‘Well of course, if he is disbarred, we fire him.’”
In response to a question about whether the Eastman parting-of-ways killed two birds with one stone — comforting conservative donors who didn’t want to see him fired while appeasing the larger public that wanted him gone — Struppa dejectedly noted it killed “no birds.” He said people on the political-left wanted Eastman fully fired, while those on the right believed he forced the professor to retire.
“By taking the position I’ve taken, everybody’s angry. But part of the anger is because people are not willing to look at the facts as they are, and there is nothing that we can do about that,” Struppa said. “I am sad because I see important values of the institution being trampled, and I am sad because I see the inability of people to engage in respective dialogue anymore.”
“By taking the position I’ve taken, everybody’s angry. But part of the anger is because people are not willing to look at the facts as they are, and there is nothing that we can do about that. I am sad because I see important values of the institution being trampled, and I am sad because I see the inability of people to engage in respective dialogue anymore.”
Hundreds of Chapman faculty members signed onto statements or released opinion pieces condemning Eastman’s legal actions and Jan. 6 public speech. Tom Zoellner, a Chapman English professor who helped gather faculty signatures for a Dec. 8 petition, noted that the intent of the faculty’s public response was to assert a divide between Eastman’s actions and the true values of the university.
“The institution suffered a severe blow on Jan. 6. This calls into serious question Chapman University’s reputation,” Zoellner said. “(Faculty) did the university an enormously good service by making the point publicly, in all the journalism that came out of this incident, that Chapman University actually is not a crazy cauldron of conspiracy teachings.”
The months of criticism from students, faculty and parents — many of whom have referred to Chapman as a racist institution, Struppa noted — appear to have weighed on the president. Struppa argued the university has taken tangible steps towards diversity, equity and inclusion demanded by on-campus organizations like the Black Student Union and the Student Government Association, such as setting aside a budget of $1.5 million to recruit Black faculty and hiring several Black professors across different schools. However, Struppa said he believed people didn’t want to acknowledge the positive change.
“To say that we have done nothing is just unfair. That’s what troubled me; it’s the continuation of a narrative that is not based in fact,” Struppa said. “A moment (during COVID-19), in which you freeze all hires, to put in the budget of $1.5 million to hire only Black faculty — that’s a gigantic step.”
That frustration may have boiled over in a response to Orange resident Robyn Class’ Jan. 22 email to the president, in which Class said she was “disgusted with what Chapman has become” and that the university had “(sold) its soul to the highest bidder.” Struppa responded to Class that she was “disinformed on this matter” and her statements were “offensive and groundless.”
“People write to me that Chapman is a fascist university, a racist university, because of John Eastman. Nobody writes to me that we are a communist university because we have professors from the far left,” Struppa said. “So from a purely logical point of view, why do you make the jump from John Eastman to the entire institution, and you don’t make the jump from ‘Professor X,’ who is a Marxist, to the entire institution?”
Beyond Struppa, a number of faculty and senior staff used narrative-inspired diction in discussing the state of the university post-Eastman with The Panther: “We can now turn the page permanently,” or “We’ve closed a difficult chapter.” Regardless of the verbiage used, the sentiment is clear: It’s time to move on.
"I am hopeful that we can continue to build on the progress being made with issues of diversity and inclusion,” wrote Lori Cox Han, a Chapman political science professor, in an email to The Panther. “It’s so unfortunate that one individual brought such negative attention to our university.”
“I am hopeful that we can continue to build on the progress being made with issues of diversity and inclusion. It’s so unfortunate that one individual brought such negative attention to our university.”
Keith Weber, director of the Health and Strategic Communication program at Chapman, said there is a general sense of “Thank God this thing is over with now” among faculty in response to Eastman’s retirement.
“Not having known him or worked with him or anything else, like, ‘Why am I dealing with these things? Why am I dealing with phone calls from people asking me if I know who this person is?’” Weber said. “Everybody is better for this divorce that happened.”
Even faculty members who work in the same school as Eastman, like law professor Tom Campbell, have issued opinion pieces against his beliefs. When asked how the former professor’s actions might impact the Dale E. Fowler School of Law, Campbell told The Panther that the Chapman faculty has articulated many different perspectives that mitigate the effects of one voice.
“Any fair observer will see that Chapman has a broad range of points of view and that the university is welcoming to a debate,” Campbell said.
It remains to be seen how the state of the university will progress. Struppa, however, still holds faith in the university’s integrity, even as his faith in the American discourse at large wanes.
“I will think the same when I stop being president: I don’t think Chapman is a racist institution,” Struppa said. “Do I think it’s a perfect place? No, of course not. But I don’t think we are a racist institution; we make significant efforts — sometimes misguided, sometimes successful.”