A longstanding partnership that has sustained the Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project will end
as the University of Illinois Springfield and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential
Library and Museum can’t agree on which entity should control the effort to
digitize every document ever read or written by the Great Emancipator.
The
ALPLM’s charitable foundation through which grant money flows for the project
has given notice that it is cutting off funds used to pay the salaries of UIS
researchers who staff the project, according to David Racine, director of the
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Policy Studies at UIS that provides
researchers. Racine said that the Abraham Lincoln Library Foundation gave
notice within the past two weeks that it will not be providing money to pay the
project’s five researchers whose contracts expire on June 30.
Chris
Wills, spokesman for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency that oversees
the ALPLM where the project is housed, confirmed that the partnership with UIS
is ending.
“As
we address numerous issues in completing the project, the ALPLM will not be
renewing its agreement with the University of Illinois at Springfield,” Wills
wrote in an email. “We thank UIS for its assistance in years past and look
forward to finding other ways to partner in the future.”
The
project’s future isn’t clear. Racine said that he doesn’t know what will
happen, although he added that he believes that the ALPLM will continue the
project in some form.
“You’d
have to ask them what the future of the project is,” Racine said. “We don’t
know. … I don’t think the papers will die.”
Wills
gave no specifics in his email.
“Questions
about the status of the UIS employees assigned to the Papers of Abraham Lincoln
can only be answered by the university,” Wills wrote. “The ALPLM is actively
taking steps to ensure the papers fulfills its vital mission of finding,
organizing and sharing the words that Abraham Lincoln wrote and read. More
details, including a staffing plan, will be announced soon.”
The
ALPLM’s decision to not renew contracts with the university comes after a
failed effort by UIS to take control of the project, which has been in turmoil
since the fall of 2015, when the state slashed its share of the project’s
budget, resulting in six of the project’s 12 employees being laid off. The
project began in 1985 as an effort to collect and publish documents from
Lincoln’s career as a lawyer. In 2000, researchers expanded their search to include
every document written or read by Lincoln.
Daniel
Stowell, the project’s director since 2000, was fired in January. In 2015, he
was told by IHPA brass that the inspector general was launching an
investigation, but the nature of that investigation has never been made clear.
During a Wednesday civil service commission hearing, Stowell, an IHPA employee
who is seeking reinstatement, acknowledged that he told state historian Samuel
Wheeler last year that he might move the project to the University of Virginia,
even though he could not move the papers without permission from the state of
Illinois.
“I
may have said something to the effect that if the Abraham Lincoln Presidential
Library and Museum didn’t want to support the project, maybe another
institution would,” Stowell said. “It (moving the project to Virginia) was
purely an example, it was not a threat.”
“Why
would you say something like that?” asked Andrew Barris, an administrative law
judge who is presiding over the case.
“I
was frustrated, for one thing,” Stowell answered. “I felt like we weren’t being
supported.”
Stowell’s
tenure turned rocky in the fall of 2015, when staffing was cut and he was told
to freeze spending. Stowell was placed on paid leave in the spring of 2016,
then returned to work after less than two months. Why Stowell was placed on
leave has never been made clear. Pressure on Stowell increased after ALPLM
director Alan Lowe arrived in Springfield last summer.
Within
a month of Lowe’s arrival, Stowell was facing questions about computer glitches
that made it difficult for researchers to see online images of Lincoln’s legal
papers. More recently, Lowe has criticized the project for not publishing any
papers save those from Lincoln’s legal career since researchers started
scanning non-legal documents more than 16 years ago. Lowe has also taken
Stowell to task for not getting permission to publish privately owned
documents, although transcripts can be put online.
A
spat between UIS and the ALPLM over a top researcher is also in the mix. Lowe
and Wheeler say that Stowell refused to order Stacy McDermott, the project’s
assistant director, to work in Springfield instead of performing her duties
from her home in St. Louis. However, according to testimony at the civil service
commission hearing, neither Stowell nor Wheeler nor Lowe could compel McDermott
to work in Springfield, given that she was, and still is, a UIS employee. Her
access to the project was cut off last fall after she refused to
report to work at the ALPLM.
Even
as Lowe and Wheeler were stepping up pressure on Stowell last year, UIS was
talking to the IHPA about taking over the papers project so that it would be
run entirely by the university, according to Racine and a letter from a UIS
lawyer to Lowe and Rene Brethorst, the foundation’s chief operating officer,
written last October.
Negotiations
to transfer the papers to UIS began shortly after Racine authorized McDermott
to continue working from St. Louis despite contrary demands from Lowe and
Wheeler, according to the letter from Rhonda Perry, UIS counsel. “We were
disappointed to learn that despite the ongoing discussions and negotiations
between the university and the museum regarding the transfer of the papers, the
museum has issued a letter terminating Ms. McDermott effective Nov. 1,” Perry
wrote.
During
the civil service commission hearing, Racine on Wednesday testified that
McDermott was an effective employee whose productivity seemed to increase after
she began working from home in 2014. In an interview afterward, Racine said
that UIS would still like to take over the papers project.
“We’ve
never changed our position, that we were willing to take it on,” Racine
said. “We gave it our best shot. It’s
sort of up to them to decide what to do. It seems this is all unnecessary. This
is a very valuable endeavor for the state of Illinois.
“It
just seems to me that this got out of hand.”
With
multiple entities having a role in running the papers project, Racine said he
realized that management of the project was potentially dicey when he took his
current job at UIS a decade ago. The partnership between the university and the
state goes back 30 years. “You have to kind of depend on goodwill from everyone
to make it work,” he said. “If you get three different masters trying to direct
the project, that can be a challenge.”
Spats
and turmoil within the ALPLM and IHPA haven’t helped matters, said Racine, who
pointed out that the institution, which opened in 2005, has had more than five
directors, both permanent and interim. Eileen Mackevich, Lowe’s predecessor at
the ALPLM, and Amy Martin, former IHPA chief, were infamous for quarreling
before both were replaced by Gov. Bruce Rauner.
“It
is a challenge to operate a presidential library and museum in the context of a
state government,” Racine said. “You want continuity in this line of work.”
In the
interests of efficiency and effectiveness, both Rauner and legislative leaders have said that the
ALPLM should be separate from the IHPA. Rauner has issued an executive order
making the ALPLM a standalone entity as of July 1, a move that’s been endorsed
by the state House of Representatives via resolution. The House has also passed
a bill to make the ALPLM independent from the IHPA. The bill awaits action in
the Senate.
UIS,
Racine said, offers a chance for stability for the papers project. Personnel rules in state government, he said,
often don’t work well for academics, who prefer working in university settings.
“Not
very many Ph.D. historians are chomping at the bit to work in state government,”
Racine said.
Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in May 25-31, 2017.
