Professor’s Suit Says Using Bard Got Him Fired

It is the very sort of tale Shakespeare might have told: complex, filled with politics, pitting man against woman, laced with intrigue and offering piquant commentary about the human condition. But this modern day morality play has an updated venue. It is being staged in the classrooms at Arizona State University.

The issue of what educators may say and teach and whom such lessons may potentially offend is at the heart of Jared Sakren’s unlawful dismissal case against ASU.

The case, set for trial in May, is another flash point in the battle for academic freedom on the one hand and for an enlightened and diverse curriculum on the other. The battle lines here are clearly drawn.

The school says the acting teacher failed to do the job he was hired to do, created a sexist work environment and, in his directing of students, refused to present certain works in the “postmodern feminist/ethnic canon.”

He argues that he was pilloried for teaching Shakespeare and other classical playwrights whose sole offense was that they were European, white and male, and says he was bullied out of his job by militant feminists with an agenda.

Sakren, an accomplished actor and director who taught at Yale and the Julliard School in New York, was hired by Arizona State’s theater department in 1994 and charged with establishing a graduate-level acting program.

The 42-year-old Sakren came into the ASU job with a long resume as a classics specialist.

His emphasis on works from the Elizabethan and Restoration periods is considered by many to represent an excellent foundation for teaching actors. But others contend that the plays’ dearth of leading parts for women make the works of Shakespeare and others of his era only marginally useful as teaching texts.

At least one former student has come to his defense. Actress Annette Bening told Campus magazine, “To discourage the teaching and performing of Shakespeare is like taking a painting or art student and saying, ‘Don’t study Rembrandt because he lived in a patriarchal society.’ ”

According to Sakren, the department chair and other staff members pressured him to include feminist works, plays by minorities and other writers with divergent views.

Among the texts Sakren was urged to use was a play called “Betty the Yeti: An Eco Fable,” a work that recasts Sasquatch as a female who has sex with a logger--and the union transforms the man into an environmentalist. When Sakren rejected the work as being inferior, he says, he was labeled a sexist.

“They were making programmatic decisions,” the teacher--who is married and has two daughters--said of his former bosses, both women.

“[They said] ‘We need an ethnic play, we need a play written by a woman.’ It had nothing to do with the course, nothing to do with certain standards, nothing to do with what I was teaching. Their interest was in presenting a certain viewpoint, a feminist viewpoint.”

The case is being watched in some quarters as a bellwether of academic freedom.

“He was basically asked to rewrite Shakespeare, canned for what seems to me, at this distance, a flimsy pretext,” said Glenn Ricketts, public affairs director for the National Assn. of Scholars, a Princeton, N.J., group that advocates an emphasis on liberal arts education.

“He was made to capitulate to the women’s studies department, and there’s a lot of that happening . . . sad to say.”

The university maintains that Sakren failed to move the program in the agreed upon direction--to prepare actors for jobs in a market where new works and interpretations are stressed and the performance of Shakespearean plays is dwindling.

He was also criticized for his lack of collegiality and absence from class.

An attorney with the Arizona attorney general’s office has advised ASU’s dean and theater department staff not to discuss the case.

However, the school’s arguments are clearly set out in some of Sakren’s performance reviews provided by his attorney.

In a 1996 review, Sakren’s teaching skills were praised, but a faculty member wrote, “In virtually every area of his work at ASU, Mr. Sakren has been oblivious of, or has contributed to, a climate of sexism. As a director, his casting choices and interpretations of women’s roles are so retrograde that a significant number of our women students . . . have expressed disgust at the fact that a university theater department could be presenting such work.”

Elsewhere, Sakren’s job reviews criticized him for relying on a “totally Euro-American, male canon of plays,” and for being “wedded to the idea of classical training.”

Sakren challenged his poor reviews and on various internal appeal levels his arguments were upheld, mostly on procedural grounds. Nevertheless, his contract was terminated last May.

Since then, Sakren has been directing another Shakespeare festival in Sedona and guest teaching around the country.

His lawsuit alleges he was discriminated against for being male and stripped of his academic freedom. Sakren maintains he’s being punished for not caving in to ideological zealots.

“We’ll see how it turns out,” he said. “Maybe, in the end, the cautionary tale will be, ‘Just shut up and do what they say.’ ”