www.spu.eduSPU President Phil Eaton is in the news with frustrated faculty voicing concerns over his handling of information in their most recent accreditation report. (The PI carried it on the front today, but the SPU student paper, The Falcon, led with the story yesterday. (As an alum and former Falcon writer and editor, it was heart-warming to see their scoop.) Eaton’s handling of their legendary soccer coach Cliff McCrath’s forced retirement only added fuel to the fire.By way of context it’s worth noting that this kind of tension isn’t new territory for Eaton. In the fall of 2002, he announced that the school was considering a change to a semester system and created a faculty task force to explore issues related to making the change. It was pretty quickly apparent that the committee was looking at the issue of implementation, not whether they should actually make such a change and faculty reacted. By the end of the year, faculty held a vote on the subject. It came down a resounding no vote on semesters and maybe a bit of a no confidence vote in Eaton on the subject. Switching to semesters was taken off the table. Before that, it was the hiring and subsequent removal of poet Scott Cairns in the English Department. In 1997, Cairns, a devout Christian, was offered a spot at SPU. But it turned out he had written a poem on the interaction of a poet and his muse that contained the line “sopping vulva.” Eaton found out about the poem and yanked the job offer, much to the chagrin of faculty. Cairns is now at the University of Missouri and has published extensively, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship last year. In a not so subtle move, Cairns’ poetry now appears on occasion in Image, SPU’s arts journal. The whole incident was made all the more ironic by the fact that Eaton himself had once been a long-haired hippie poet, freaking out the more uptight students at Whitworth in Spokane in the seventies (my mom has the yearbook to prove it.) The saga was detailed in a May 1997 issue of the Seattle Weekly (scroll down for a short synopsis).Tension between faculty and administration is pretty much the standard at institutions of higher learning, but it’s starting to look like Eaton may be over staying a welcome that was never very warm to begin with.