From the issue dated June 27, 1997
A Professor's Death From Heroin Overdose Stuns a Campus
Colleagues say more compassion might have averted a tragedy
By Peter Monaghan
Bellingham, Wash. -- Within two weeks of being fired from Western Washington University for heroin use, Omar S. Castaneda, a 42-year-old fiction writer considered one of the brightest minds on the campus, was dead from a drug overdose.
His death in January came after a contentious series of disciplinary hearings concerning his arrest on charges of drug possession 15 months earlier.
The campus deliberations had already disrupted a promising career. Mr. Castaneda, a tenured associate professor of English who joined the university in 1989, had won awards and fellowships for his works of fiction and children's fiction, including the prestigious Charles H. and N. Mildred Nilon Excellence in Minority Fiction Award in 1993.
His death shocked the campus and raised lingering questions: How should the university have handled a professor's off-campus use of illicit drugs? Did people here respond inadequately to a colleague's plight, because of the stigma of heroin?
No one blames the university for Mr. Castaneda's death. But many of his friends and family members believe that the administration overreacted, and that it could have done much more to help him get counseling. The university's president, Karen W. Morse, insists that she offered such help, and that he refused it. Others, however, say her offer was contingent on Mr. Castaneda's resignation.
"The rhetoric we get at this university is that we're a family," says John R. Purdy, an associate professor of English. When a family member is in trouble, he says, "you don't kick them out of the family."
Just after Mr. Castaneda died, his friend William E. Smith, a professor of English, addressed the Faculty Senate: "We need assurances that community members who abuse substances can find help on our campus without jeopardizing their jobs and careers."
Professors say they have heard no such assurances.
In October 1995, Mr. Castaneda was on sabbatical when he was arrested in a town 10 miles from the campus. Police stopped his car just before 2 a.m. on a Saturday and found syringes and small amounts of heroin and methamphetamines in a pouch under his arm.
At a pretrial hearing on the legality of the police search, Mr. Castaneda admitted that he had used some of the drugs that day. Even so, the court found the police search improper, and the charges were dropped. But the professor's admission would prove fateful.
News coverage of the case prompted angry letters and telephone calls to campus administrators.
Mr. Castaneda's colleagues in the English department struggled to understand what had happened. "It was a shock to me, as to everybody else," says Dr. Purdy. He and the others had seen no signs that Mr. Castaneda was using drugs. He was a productive scholar, his teaching had won praise from students, and he had an unblemished record of attendance in his courses.
After the rush of news stories on his arrest, Mr. Castaneda's leave was canceled by the provost, Roland L. De Lorme, who appointed a five-member faculty committee to consider disciplinary proceedings. Its finding surprised administrators: The institution appeared to have no authority to regulate a professor's off-campus activities that were unrelated to university business.
Still, the committee voted 3 to 2 that Mr. Castaneda be suspended without pay for a semester and directed to apologize publicly.
Dr. Morse was not satisfied with the committee's finding and decided to fire Mr. Castaneda. In a May 1996 letter, she told him why: "My decision is based upon my responsibility as president and is influenced by my role as a parent. In my view, you have breached the responsibility and trust that is so critical for a university faculty member to maintain as an example, scholar, mentor and guide to students, colleagues and the public."
She has expressed condolences over the professor's death but no regrets about her actions. She still questions his fitness as a role model to students: "I didn't make this decision to please anybody or to displease anybody. I made it because I believed it was the correct decision to make."
Mr. Castaneda contended that he had been illegally fired. His lawyer, Robert D. Butler, says the president should have set aside her personal aversion to the professor's private behavior. Mr. Butler says administrators seemed to feel that the professor needed to be punished – that "we'll take his tenure away because the prosecutor's office was not successful."
A second panel of five faculty members, assembled to hear Dr. Castaneda's appeal, learned that Dr. Morse had had additional reasons for dismissing him. The university was in the middle of a fund-raising campaign, the president told the committee, "and one is always concerned about the impact of the public in an incident like this." She also feared that the controversy would threaten legislative funding for the university and weaken lawmakers' support for the granting of sabbaticals.
Asked to consider whether the university had grounds to fire Mr. Castaneda, the second faculty panel voted that it did not. E. Leroy Plumlee, a professor of management who chaired the panel, says the faculty handbook does not adequately define acceptable causes for removing a tenured professor. And while the university has a policy that prohibits the use of illegal drugs on the campus, he says, "nowhere does it say, '...or in Ferndale, Washington, or Chicago, Illinois, or anywhere else in the world.'"
The president appealed the panel's finding to the university's Board of Regents, which unanimously backed her. The process that had begun in October 1995 culminated last Christmas Eve, when Mr. Castaneda received notice that his dismissal would stand.
Patrick McCormick, a professor of art, resigned from the second panel to protest Dr. Morse's challenging its finding. "I felt the administration had let him down and were going after a quick fix that would appease the public," he says. He makes no excuses for Mr. Castaneda's admitted drug use and calls it"a very significant error. But it was not something so severe we couldn't get beyond it."
"We owed him more."
For Dr. Smith, the English professor, the death of his friend is "an ineffably sad event." Amid all the legal and governance wrangling, "what dropped out of the bottom was, Here's a colleague who needs help."
But for many professors here, more was at stake than Dr. Castaneda's job. They wondered whether the administration believed that tenured professors are always on university duty.
At the second hearing, President Morse said that while faculty members had a right to a private life, they did not "have a right to commit crimes, because they're citizens in their private lives, just as they're citizens of Western."
That, says Mr. Castaneda's lawyer, "makes every walk of life challengeable by the personal morals of the sitting president."
Some professors hoped that a lawsuit would clarify the issues. Before he died, Mr. Castaneda was poised to file a wrongful-dismissal suit. A key -- and confused -- issue in court would have been his fitness for employment.
Publicly, the professor maintained that he was not addicted to heroin. At President Morse's insistence, he submitted to testing by a university-appointed doctor and a clinical psychologist who specializes in chemical dependency. They found "no evidence of current chemical dependency," according to the doctor's report. However, the doctor suggested -- noting that Mr. Castaneda clearly had used drugs to some extent in the past -- that the university handle the professor as it would someone who is addicted, by requiring him to submit to unannounced drug testing and other measures.
That left administrators in an uncertain position. If Dr. Castaneda had been found to be addicted to heroin, state disability law would have mandated that he be provided medical treatment, and the university would have been barred from discriminating against him, although whether this would have prevented his being fired is a disputed point.
The president insists that she did offer drug treatment to Dr. Castaneda, but that he declined. "This was a chance for him," she says, "and he made some decisions all through this, and obviously before this, that were not my decisions -- that were his decisions."
The professor's allies tell a different story. His lawyer, Mr. Butler, says the president made her offer of assistance contingent on Mr. Castaneda's agreeing to resign. In the termination letter, Dr. Morse noted that she had invited him to resign when they had first met to discuss the case. She also offered to write a positive letter of recommendation for him.
Mr. Castaneda concluded that administrators had not offered "any kind of outreach from the heart," says Bleu C. Castaneda, one of his two children. The arrest and his dismissal had left him feeling embarrassed, contrite, foolish, and degraded, but administrators seemed to take no note of that, she and others say. Her father had begun to receive counseling at a drug-treatment clinic, but that did not seem to satisfy President Morse, Ms. Castaneda adds.
Rima Hassouneh, Mr. Castaneda's fiancee, says he did admit to her -- and to himself -- that he had a recurrent problem with heroin. But he felt that administrators were intent only on punishing him, not on helping him, she says, so he decided to try to defeat his problem himself. He failed.
Ms. Hassouneh says he told her of heroin use dating to his childhood in Michigan and Indiana. He was the son of Hector Neri Castaneda, a prominent philosopher who taught at Indiana University and other institutions. The family was originally from Guatemala.
By age 15, he was addicted to heroin. He thought that he had beaten the dependency within a year, but he would find himself battling it repeatedly in the years to come, Ms. Hassouneh says. In his seven years at Western Washington, he often went to Guatemala to do research for his writing, to visit family members, and sometimes just "to clean up," she says.
She adds: "He didn't get bad with heroin until he was into his sabbatical." He was using the time to write a textbook on creative writing, and he was progressing well. But he was also finding that life in Bellingham did not provide much stimulus for his work. "One of the reasons he turned to heroin again was because he felt a stagnation in his writing," Ms. Hassouneh says.
Still, she says, "Omar wanted to get out of his heroin addiction very badly." He had considered seeking professional help before his arrest, but he feared that this would not remain a secret in Bellingham.
Once it was clear that the university would not rescind his firing, Ms. Hassouneh says, Mr. Castaneda did seek medical treatment for drug dependency, at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Seattle. He qualified for assistance as a four-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force. At the time of his death, the medication he was on had proved so effective that he was not just medically stable but elated at being off heroin, she says.
What's more, he was also in the running for a faculty position in California, and in December he had delivered a new novel to his agent in Seattle. "He really was all right," Ms. Hassouneh says. "He was very proud that he was doing well and had gotten clean. He would say, 'I'm a free man.'" His death, she says, "came out of nowhere."
The day before he died, he had gone to Bellingham to look after repairs on his house. He stayed with a friend that night. Ms. Hassouneh says the friend told her later that the two men had had a few beers, and that Mr. Castaneda had used some heroin -- to celebrate his kicking the habit, the friend said. The next day the friend left for work, and Mr. Castaneda overdosed on the heroin.
A new book of his stories, Naranjo the Muse, is being published this month by the University of Houston's Arte Publico Press. The manuscript of his novel is being shopped around by his agent. Those books will join a body of work that had highly impressed his colleagues here.
In retrospect, at least, readers who knew Mr. Castaneda are finding that he had hinted at his personal turmoil in his writing. In the book of short stories that won him the Nilon Award, the first story, "On the Way Out," tells of a Guatemalan immigrant in the United States who is confused by his ethnic identity, addicted to heroin, and strangely attracted to death. The character overdoses and spends three months in a coma. In rituals, his mother then coaxes the "devils" from him and brings him back to life.
As a writer, Mr. Castaneda delighted in using literary sleight of hand to create alter egos for himself. These often served as a form of self-criticism, Ms. Hassouneh says. One of his stories tells of a caretaker of a chestnut grove ("Castano" is Spanish for chestnut) who is so gifted at fakery that his fellow villagers do not realize that he has died.
Mr. Castaneda's epigraph to Naranjo the Muse is a quote from Cassandra Mateo, an anagrammatic pseudonym: "Of course, through deceit and self-deceit, we cloistered writers hope our wounds will be turned into pearls."
Copyright © 1997 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
