ASU Economics Professor Brian Goegan sent out a mass email Thursday questioning the ethics of ASU’s Department of Economics, alleging that the department enforced fail quotas and required an online program that disadvantaged students.
In his email, which went out to all students studying economics at the university, he said he had been “let go” after five years of teaching because of his disagreement with two economics department policies he found to be “unethical.”
Freshman Adrik Vargas, a journalism and economics student, and said he feels like future students will have to be wary of taking economics Downtown. Downtown-based schools such as the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Public Affairs require most students to take an entry-level economics class, some of which feature the Cengage software Goegan railed against.
Vargas said he hopes professors at the Downtown campus do not ignore what has happened.
“I hope it’s awkward so that (this) is not forgotten,” he said. “I don’t want to leave this semester feeling like my grade was in the hands of somebody else.”
Junior Elizabeth Barry said she took Microeconomic Principles with Goegan her freshman year, and was upset when she heard Goegan was let go.
“He was one of the best teachers I have ever had. He explained things really, really well,” she said. “I think it is really immoral. Just the fact that they fired him means they know what they are doing was wrong and that he was right.”
ASU Executive Vice President Mark Searle countered Goegan’s allegations that he had been fired over his complaints about the department.
“We generally do not comment on the details of disciplinary matters related to faculty,” Searle said in his statement on the email. “There are many reasons that a faculty member’s contract might not be renewed, including when a faculty member resists course-correction of multiple shortcomings despite supervisory intervention.”
Goegan is still technically on the economics staff and teaching spring semester courses. But in December 2018, the university told him his contract would not be renewed after its end in May.
“I am still at this moment, as far as I’m aware, employed at ASU,” he said.
But whether or not he’ll be back in the class room on Monday, he’s not sure.
“My accounts at ASU have been completely locked down,” he said. “I’m not able to access any emails or any courses on Canvas.”
In his second allegation in the mass email, Goegan claimed the Department of Economics established “fail quotas” for three lower-level economics classes to prevent at least 30% of students from passing the class.
Goegan said that at a faculty meeting last year, Jose Mendez, another economics professor, discussed this grade distribution policy.
“It involved having 10% Ds, 10% Es and 10% Ws,” Goegan said. “He was saying that this was our baseline.”
Goegan argued this procedure was only put in place to show improvements with the usage of Cengage, and that teachers were asked to fail students who would have passed otherwise.
“I brought it up that it seems like you’re trying to make it look like you have a lot of failures and a lot of kids struggling,” he said. “For many instructors that’s not true.”
Downtown Devil reached out to Jose Mendez for comment but he was unavailable.
Searle denied claims about failure quotas in a statement for the university, calling Goegan’s accusations “misinformation spreading online and through the news media.”
“The accusation that the university would establish quotas in any course requiring to fail a certain percentage of students is unequivocally false. That is not who we are,” he said.
Goegan also objected to the department’s implementation of Cengage’s MindTap program, an online textbook and homework website that can be required for students to complete homework.
“If universities want to show they care about costs, they should be working harder to build more advanced coursework in house that they can provide students,” Goegan said in a Reddit post. “If they can’t, then they should pay the licensing fees for the courseware themselves and cut salaries in accordance with the reduced workload for professors.”
But Searle defended the department’s use of the program in his statement.
“As with all of ASU’s adaptive learning courses up to this point and many other classes there has been a course fee associated with using the adaptive platform. There is a fee to use MindTap but it also pays for the class textbook,” said Searle.
Lindsay Stanley, a spokeswoman from Cengage also responded to the claims: “We have a strong, long term relationship with ASU… Cengage has never provided a grant to ASU as part of this partnership. We remain focused on working to support the institution in their efforts to help students succeed in this course, as we have done for nearly a hundred years and with thousands of institutions.”
Searle’s statement also maintained students are allowed to enroll in other economics classes that use more traditional methods and don’t include MindTap.
But Goegan said instructors that made homework available on ASU standard student networks had been “forced to move those same assignments behind the MindTap paywall to ensure students must pay Cengage to pass the class.”
Searle said Cengage had not given ASU any grants to inspire use of the program.
Goegan’s email went viral and currently stands as the number one post on ASU’s Reddit page.
In his own Reddit post, Goegan described the university as “obsessed with being ‘#1 in Innovation,’” and said they make deals with education companies regardless of whether or not they are beneficial to students.
“That’s what I think is so important about the failure quotas. They needed to juke the stats so they could show how their ‘innovation’ was effective,” he wrote.
Bret Hovell, a spokesperson for ASU explained on behalf of Amy Hillman that the university is referring everyone to the statement made by Searle instead of commenting on each request.
In his mass email, Goegan asked students to send an email directly to ASU President Michael Crow and Dean Hillman protesting the use of Cengage and fail quotas in the economics department.
Goegan said he wanted the emails to ask Crow and Hillman to “take action to end these policies and to ensure that this does not happen again.”
Goegan said on Reddit that if the scandal keeps him from getting hired at other universities in the future “it will have been worth it.”
Contact the reporters at ldiethel@asu.edu and nhthomps@asu.edu.
Update: On April 19, this story was updated to include additional quotes from Mark Goegan, Bret Hovell, and Cengage.
Correction: On April 19, this story was updated to reflect ASU Spokesperson Bret Hovell’s name was incorrectly stated as Brett Hoval and Cengage Spokesperson Lindsay Stanley was incorrectly stated as Lindsey Stanley.
Lisa Diethelm is the Politics editor for the Downtown Devil while she studies at The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in downtown Phoenix. She grew up in California and started her journalism career in high school.
