Constance Bumgarner Gee


Constance Bumgarner Gee is an American scholar, memoirist, and advocate of the medical use of cannabis. She was the founder and Director of the Arts Policy and Administration Program at Ohio State University, and later an assistant professor at Brown University and tenured associate professor at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Higher Education: Marijuana at the Mansion, a 2012 memoir about her life as the "first lady" of several American research universities, including Vanderbilt where she alleges members of the board of trust were potentially corrupt.

Early life

Constance Bumgarner was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated from East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, with a bachelor of arts degree in Fine Arts. She then received a master's degree in Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in New York City. She received a PhD in Arts Education Policy from Pennsylvania State University in 1993.

Career

Bumgarner Gee was the founder and Director of the Arts Policy and Administration Program at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio from 1993 to 1997. She was Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island from 1998 to 2000. She later became a tenured Associate Professor of Public Policy and Education in the Department of Leadership and Organizations at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She resigned in 2010.
Bumgarner Gee was the executive editor of the Arts Education Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal, from 1997 to 2010. She also published chapters in scholarly volumes about arts education policy. According to academic Judith Smith Koroscik, one of her scholarly contributions is to ask "not why the public fails to understand, but rather, What does the public understand about the arts."
Bumgarner Gee published a memoir entitled Higher Education: Marijuana at the Mansion in 2012. In it, she recounts her times as the wife of university chancellor Gordon Gee, not only at Ohio State University, but also at Brown University and at Vanderbilt University. She alleges members of Vanderbilt's board of trust may have retaliated against her by exposing her marijuana use in The Wall Street Journal to hide their potential non-compliance with the Sarbanes–Oxley Act and personal conflicts of interest. She adds that Vanderbilt University began recruiting Jewish students for "antisemitic" reasons.

Civic activities

Bumgarner Gee served on the Board of Directors of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts as well as Through the Flower, arts organization, and Actor's Bridge, a theater company, all of which were based in Nashville. Additionally, she served on the Board of Advisors of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Bumgarner Gee is an advocate of the medical use of cannabis. In 2012, she explained to the Nashville-based newspaper The Tennessean as well as the television station WKRN-TV about why she supported its legalization for medical reasons. She testified to the Health Committee of the Tennessee House of Representatives in favor of the Safe Access to Medical Cannabis Act in April 2012. The bill, co-sponsored by state representative Jeanne Richardson and state senator Beverly Marrero and heard by state senator Glen Casada, was axed in the Tennessee Senate.

Personal life

Bumgarner Gee married Gordon Gee in 1994. In 2006, an article published in The Wall Street Journal revealed that she had been smoking cannabis inside Braeburn, the chancellor's mansion located at 211 Deer Park in Belle Meade owned by Vanderbilt University, to cure her Ménière's disease. As a result, the couple divorced in 2007. She now resides in Westport, Massachusetts.
In 2004, Bumgarner Gee was criticized for lowering the flag to half-mast at Braeburn after George W. Bush was re-elected as president of the United States.

Selected scholarship