For a summary account of the faculty firings at Mount St. Mary's University and the deeper controversy behind them, see Scott Jaschik, "Purge at the Mount", Inside Higher Education, Feb. 9, 2016: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/09/mount-st-marys-president-fires-two-faculty-members-one-tenure.

For further details, please visit http://tinyurl.com/msmbackground.

We the undersigned, as members of the community of scholars, protest the firings of Edward Egan and Thane Naberhaus from their faculty positions at Mount St. Mary's University.

The manner and circumstance of their dismissal raise serious questions about the respect given to moral conscience and intellectual freedom at Mount St. Mary's. Of particular concern is that Prof. Egan was fired partly for actions taken in his role as faculty advisor to the university's student newspaper, which first broke the stories leading to the present controversy. It is also alarming that these faculty were fired without any academic due process as required under AAUP guidelines and the customary standards of tenure.

As a Catholic institution, Mount St. Mary's is bound by the teachings that "charity always proceeds by way of respect for one’s neighbor and his conscience" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 1789), and that in the context of the Catholic university "the freedom of conscience of each person is to be fully respected" (Ex Corde Ecclesiae, II.2.iv). As a university, it is bound by the standards that govern any such institution in respect of its faculty.

We call for these faculty to be reinstated immediately, and the administration held accountable for this violation of their rights.