Observation February Nine

“Who is Susan Chambers?”

I’ve had precisely one interaction in my entire life with current William Jewell College President Susan Chambers, I’m about to tell you about it. Before I do, you should have the context that Susan Chambers is the person responsible for leading the search committee that appointed Dr. Elizabeth MacLeod-Walls in the first place. Chambers was later (presumably) involved in the decision of the William Jewell College Board of Trustees to extend MacLeod-Walls’ contract shortly after the start of the pandemic.

In the early hours of COVID-19— literal minutes before I loaded up a college-owned van to transport students to St. Louis, Missouri, for our national championship debate tournament—I attended a gathering of Jewell faculty in Gano Assembly Room. Our charge was to meet with then-Board President Susan Chambers to give feedback on the faculty’s perception of Jewell’s president, Elizabeth MacLeod-Walls.

With the specter of COVID looming, as is the case with Jewell’s current financial situation, I don’t know that any of us truly could have understood how bad it was going to get—with the meeting, with COVID, with Jewell, with any of it—but I can’t stress this fact enough: this is my last true memory of a day when I woke up and didn’t really know what COVID was.

There isn’t some artful or polite way to explain the result of this meeting, so I’ll get right to it: the entire faculty sh*t all over Elizabeth MacLeod-Walls for the entirety of the meeting. We would have kept going, but Susan’s time was limited, and she (frankly) seemed shocked. As the microphone was passed around, nobody spared a single detail—we all hated her. 

It was as if we had all been subject to four years of abuse, and now it was time for us to review our boss, so we really let her have it, with good reason. All of her stupid marketing decisions, her financial leadership, her outright racism, her self-aggrandizement, her general demeanor, her authenticity, her general administrative bullsh*t, and her myriad lies. There wasn’t a single positive comment about Elizabeth MacLeod-Walls’ leadership advanced in the room that day. I defy anyone else who was there to challenge my memory and remember it differently. I very genuinely walked away from the meeting thinking, “Wow, that has to be it, there is no way that the board could renew her contract after that.” Nevertheless, shortly thereafter, word began circulating among the faculty that MacLeod-Walls had been re-signed by Chambers and the Board of Trustees to another four-year deal. 

When the history of William Jewell College is finally written, it will be the MacLeod-Walls era (2016–2024) in which Jewell became the most insufferable version of itself—“The Critical Thinking College.” 

Susan Chambers is part and parcel of all of that. 

In fact, it’s for this reason that I say the rest of the Board of Trustees must be totally derelict because they’re letting the person who’s already overseen the start of the collapse try to rebuild from the rubble. Why don’t you just put a monkey in charge of selling the bananas? Seriously, I hope any of your read this. Bang up job, you idiots. 

And while this ventures into the personal, Chambers has a very hateable Google-persona. When I’ve seen her deliver public comments, her speaking voice has the same fake-affect as Macleod-Walls, a tell that she’s accustomed to being in rooms with money. She’s exactly what you’d expect out of a monied white woman who earned her business bona fides as “Chief People Officer” for Wal-Mart—a publicly articulate executive, and probably not a person who means to do harm, but someone who should be thought of as a detached, rich idiot most-invested in her own investments. 

During her tenure at Wal-Mart, Chambers was involved in a controversy stemming from a now-famous internal memo she authored in 2005. This is public knowledge, so I’m not breaking news here; all you have to do is ask ChatGPT. If you want to read it yourself, the full text of the memo is available here. It was only intended for Wal-Mart’s board of directors before being leaked publicly. It addressed concerns about rising employee benefit costs.

This is all to say, we don’t have to look that hard or guess that much to know how Susan Chambers talks when she doesn’t think anybody else will read it. People don’t change that much over the course of their lives. And when it comes time to make downsizing choices that impact real people…

Among Chambers’ recommendations were increasing the proportion of part-time workers and making fewer workers benefit-eligible, a business strategy Jewell has already been engaged in since the time I started there in 2011. The same memo suggests that expanding cart collection duties of cashiers might lower overall insurance premiums by making people be more physically active.

With no solution or otherwise show of concern, Chambers callously notes that 46% of Wal-Mart associates receive some type of public assistance in a section that somewhat famously ends with the line, “While critics have not yet harnessed all of these facts, they are successfully exploiting those they do have, suggesting that, when discovered, the others will also become effective ammunition.”