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All of Dickinson State University’s full-time nursing faculty members resigned last week.
Dickinson State University/Flickr
Days after Dickinson State University’s entire full-time nursing faculty resigned in protest of heavy workloads, President Stephen Easton stepped down Monday.
“As the faculty will attest, I did not come here to make life comfortable for faculty, though I have tried to support them as much as possible,” Easton, a DSU alumnus who became president of the North Dakota university in 2020, said in an emotional recorded statement. “I did come here to do whatever I could for students, including what needed to be done, even though unpopular, to keep DSU here for future students.”
The 100-plus students in DSU’s nursing program, however, are currently in limbo. And it’s unclear who will be teaching them now that all seven faculty members have resigned.
Easton said in a written resignation statement that he came up with a plan for quickly hiring replacement faculty. But when he told the North Dakota Board of Nursing about it, he said the board told him that the plan didn’t comply with its standards for hiring new faculty.
Easton interpreted that to mean that the nursing board told him “I cannot fight for our students, that I cannot even look for new nursing faculty members”—a claim members of the nursing board flatly denied.
And while Easton acknowledged making “many mistakes” and said his “shortcomings were numerous,” his resignation statement also repeatedly suggested that his resignation was prompted by the nursing board’s insistence that DSU comply with its stringent hiring rules.
“This means I cannot work on behalf of DSU’s students by trying to find them new nursing faculty,” he said. “If I cannot work for DSU’s students, I am no longer a benefit to DSU. So I will step aside.”
The nursing board said in a news release Monday that it “DID NOT force” Easton’s resignation or “disallow” the hiring of replacement nursing faculty.
‘Crisis at the Institution’
The conflict between the nursing faculty and administration is the result of an increase in credit production requirements—the number of student credit hours generated by program faculty in an academic year. Easton announced earlier this year that he was imposing the changes on all faculty members as part of a wider effort to cut institutional costs, which has also included slashing numerous degree programs.
The move generated widespread faculty pushback, but the nursing faculty argued that it particularly jeopardized the specialized delivery of their curriculum, which requires small faculty-to-student ratios in safety-sensitive clinical settings. They also expressed concern that it could threaten the program’s accreditation.
“The modified credit production formula is unattainable under the current conditions,” Teresa Bren, one of the resigned nursing faculty members, told The Dickinson Press July 10. “It’s unethical for me to sign a contract that I know I can’t fulfill.” Bren said in an email to Inside Higher Ed Monday that Easton’s resignation “was not expected,” but she declined to immediately comment further.
After Bren and her colleagues resigned, Easton said he contacted the nursing board about his plan to restaff the program, which included posting job ads, contacting local licensed nurses about the vacancies and turning to other state universities for possible assistance.
But according to Easton’s statement, the nursing board did not reach out to discuss the plan with him directly before sending him a letter last Friday that said the plan “provides evidence of noncompliance” because the board requires that a nursing administrator oversee faculty recruitment efforts. DSU’s nursing administrator was among the faculty members who resigned last week.
Easton said, “It is not humanly possible to hire a nurse administrator quickly,” because accreditation standards require a nursing program administrator to hold a doctorate; filling such a position also involves assembling a search committee and conducting extensive interviews and a background check.
Given what he called the board’s “hasty action” in denouncing his plan, he said the only realistic option for staffing the nursing program by fall is for DSU to hire back the resigned faculty members, who have already been through the search process.
He went on to accuse the nursing board of “forcing DSU to make a choice between the interests of our current students and the interest of DSU’s future students, including but not limited to future nursing students.”
The board has dismissed those accusations, with members saying they will keep working with DSU to “continue the education of the more than 111 students left in the lurch due to the conflict between administration and faculty which resulted in this crisis at the institution.”
In a letter to DSU last Friday, the board also reminded the university about “multiple nursing program shortcomings” that would come under review at an upcoming board meeting on July 25. Those shortcomings included not only the mass resignations but also survey results from June about DSU’s nursing program, which detailed “significant discord between Mr. Easton, administration, and the nursing faculty.”
The board’s letter encouraged DSU to keep trying to fill its nurse administrator position and then restore its faculty “to pre-resignation staffing levels with the qualified individuals necessary for the effective instruction of future students.”
The Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing (ACEN) had already classified DSU’s baccalaureate nursing program as accredited with good cause, a probationary status that means the accreditor will visit the campus in spring 2025 to decide if the program is in compliance with accreditation standards.
That status stems from earlier, seemingly resolved concerns that “the nurse administrator has sufficient time for the assigned role responsibilities.” But more recently, the now-resigned nursing faculty expressed worries that the new credit production requirements put the program’s accreditation at new risk, The Dickinson Press reported.
Easton declined an interview with Inside Higher Ed Monday, as did DSU officials, who said they could not comment on the university’s plan or timeline for hiring a new president.
Eric Grabowsky, a former associate professor of communications who resigned in May because he anticipated that DSU would cut his position, said he believes the university needs a new president who hasn’t been involved with Easton’s administration.
A vocal critic of Easton’s leadership, Grabowsky described the administration as a regime that has “gone astray both in terms of ethics and competence,” citing issues with procuring faculty resources, management, hostility, academic integrity and hostility toward whistleblowers.
“There has to be a renewed perspective, because the last four years have been very difficult,” he said. “The nursing situation needs to be addressed, but so does the general DSU situation.”
Easton Worked to Weaken Tenure
Although Easton’s statement pointed to the wholesale departure of DSU’s nursing faculty as the driver of his resignation, he’s also been a part of larger efforts to weaken tenure protections across the state.
In 2023, he drafted a failed piece of legislation on behalf of Representative Mike Lefor, the North Dakota Legislature’s Republican House majority leader, that would have allowed the presidents of DSU and Bismarck State College to fire tenured faculty members at their discretion, with no ability to appeal.
This spring, the State Board of Higher Education signaled potential support for weakening tenure through Mark Hagerott, chancellor of the North Dakota University System, who said the board was considering implementing reductions to tenure protections across the state with the express goal of lowering the number of tenured positions at community colleges.
But one month later, the higher education board went into executive session and came out with a unanimous decision to end Hagerott’s contract, though he’s not set to vacate the position until December 2025.
In a statement emailed to Inside Higher Ed, Hagerott praised Easton’s leadership, noting enrollment growth during the president’s tenure and calling his team’s response to the pandemic “both innovative and of the highest integrity.”
Neither Hagerott nor Tim Mihalick, chair of the state’s higher education board, which approves presidential appointments, provided any details about what the process for finding new leadership at DSU will look like.
Grabowsky said it’s too soon to tell for certain if the ousters of both Hagerott and Easton are the start of a new era—for DSU and for higher education in North Dakota more broadly—but that the issues have exposed what he believes are larger governance breakdowns.
“The nursing situation shows that the concern is not about students in a substantive way,” he said. “Now that we have a lame-duck chancellor and now that the truth of the DSU situation is becoming more public thanks to the wisdom of the nurses, maybe more eyes will see what has been neglected to be dealt with at DSU.”
