Education: The Moonlighter

Kenneth Ian Leighton Mills is not, in his own words, “an Old Blue member of the Yale inner circle.” On the contrary, he is a heavy-shouldered, 6-ft. 4-in. black from Trinidad with a towering Afro hairdo and a penchant for blue jeans. He is also an avowed Marxist. Nonetheless, as a pupil of Oxford’s distinguished logician AJ. Ayer, he so impressed the Yale philosophy department that he was hired in 1968 to teach courses on revolution and black liberation. And when Yale confronted the threat of a May Day riot two years ago, he worked diligently to help keep the peace.

At 36, his salary as an assistant professor was only $13,000, and he worried about gaining tenure. So he was happy to do some consulting for the Social Welfare School of the New York State University at Stony Brook, and even happier when Stony Brook offered him a full professorship, tenure, the possibility of “innovative teaching,” and $26,000 a year. Without telling either university about his job at the other, Mills began making four weekly trips over the 115 miles between New Haven and Stony Brook. At Yale, on Fridays, Saturdays and Tuesday nights, he taught his two regular courses. At Stony Brook, the rest of the week, he taught two courses in social studies, headed a health research project, and even chaired the faculty committee on appointments, promotions and tenure. At both institutions he was popular with students and, as one dean put it, “extraordinarily able, dedicated, brilliant.”

No university objects to a professor writing in his spare time, but both Yale and Stony Brook have rules against their faculty members secretly serving on other faculties as well. So when Stony Brook learned of Mills’ dual loyalties, it reluctantly asked for and got his resignation. At Yale, Provost Charles Taylor sent two administrative assistants to Mills’ bachelor apartment with a demand that he resign within 24 hours. After Mills refused, President Kingman Brewster suspended him for a year for “blatant disregard of ethics.”

Best Sellers. Mills admitted a mistake but not a fault. In a 15-page letter he reminded Brewster that “there are faculty members who spend time doing extensive consulting, who write best sellers, introductory textbooks or columns for popular magazines—all of which do not necessarily contribute to scholarship or teaching, but which earn substantial amounts of money while requiring large amounts of time.” Mills named no names, but nobody had difficulty recognizing, among others, Erich Segal, author of Love Story, and Charles Reich, author of The Greening of America.

How much moonlighting is permissible? There are no standard rules, and the Yale Daily News argued that Mills “violated in letter a regulation which is flaunted in spirit by a large number of Yale College faculty members.” It promised to publish a series of articles on other Yale professors who have briefly taught elsewhere or done other outside work. But in the words of one Yale political science professor who believes nobody should attempt two full-time jobs: “Morally this issue is akin to bigamy. It doesn’t matter if you satisfy both wives; you’re still morally in the wrong.”