Category Archives: Tenure & Promotion

Symposium: Public Engagement and the Politics of Evidence in an Age of Neoliberalism and Audit Culture #highered #criticaled #caut #aaup

Public Engagement and the Politics of Evidence in an Age of Neoliberalism and Audit Culture

July 23-25, 2015

Faculty of Education, University of Regina

This symposium will examine accelerating trends in higher education: neoliberalism, the politics of evidence, and the audit culture. In an age in which value is often equated with accountancy, we will examine the place in the academy for public intellectualism, community-engagement, Indigenous epistemologies, and how the impact of our scholarship is, and ought to be, justly assessed. Invited presenters will provoke lively discussion, but going beyond discussion, and blurring the lines between presenter and audience member, participants will be invited to engage actively with other presenter/participants in attendance for the purpose of effecting changes at their home institutions. Opportunities will be available for reconsidering and strategizing academic issues such as faculty criteria documents, measurement rankings, traditional impact factors, and other academic matters affected by the politics of austerity, neoliberalism, and new management technologies. Action will also be encouraged through submissions to a special issue of in education (the University of Regina Faculty of Education’s journal), potentially collaborating on an edited book, TED-style dissemination videos, producing a list of recommendations, developing examples of inclusive faculty criteria documents, possibly developing a community impact factor as an alternative to journal impact factor metrics, and further actions as collectively discussed at the symposium.

Questions to be explored include:

  • What counts as scholarship and why?
  • How do we achieve accountability in an age of accountancy?
  • How do we measure research impact, (i.e., journal impact factor vs community and policy impact)?
  • Impact for whom?
  • Who and how do we determine whose evidence and what research is legitimate?
  • What can be done? How do we effect change to university practices?

Chomsky on the destruction of #highered #criticaled #edstudies #ubc #yteubc

Noam Chomsky, AlterNet, Reader Supported News, March 1, 2014– The following is an edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA. The transcript was prepared by Robin J. Sowards and edited by Prof. Chomsky.

How America’s Great University System Is Getting Destroyed

On hiring faculty off the tenure track

That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line. The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.

That’s one aspect, but there are other aspects which are also quite familiar from private industry, namely a large increase in layers of administration and bureaucracy. If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in US industry even more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer of management-a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities. In the past 30 or 40 years, there’s been a very sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up. There’s a very good book on it by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press, 2011), which describes in detail the business style of massive administration and levels of administration-and of course, very highly-paid administrators. This includes professional administrators like deans, for example, who used to be faculty members who took off for a couple of years to serve in an administrative capacity and then go back to the faculty; now they’re mostly professionals, who then have to hire sub-deans, and secretaries, and so on and so forth, a whole proliferation of structure that goes along with administrators. All of that is another aspect of the business model.

But using cheap labor-and vulnerable labor-is a business practice that goes as far back as you can trace private enterprise, and unions emerged in response. In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students. Graduate students are even more vulnerable, for obvious reasons. The idea is to transfer instruction to precarious workers, which improves discipline and control but also enables the transfer of funds to other purposes apart from education. The costs, of course, are borne by the students and by the people who are being drawn into these vulnerable occupations. But it’s a standard feature of a business-run society to transfer costs to the people. In fact, economists tacitly cooperate in this. So, for example, suppose you find a mistake in your checking account and you call the bank to try to fix it. Well, you know what happens. You call them up, and you get a recorded message saying “We love you, here’s a menu.” Maybe the menu has what you’re looking for, maybe it doesn’t. If you happen to find the right option, you listen to some music, and every once and a while a voice comes in and says “Please stand by, we really appreciate your business,” and so on. Finally, after some period of time, you may get a human being, who you can ask a short question to. That’s what economists call “efficiency.” By economic measures, that system reduces labor costs to the bank; of course it imposes costs on you, and those costs are multiplied by the number of users, which can be enormous-but that’s not counted as a cost in economic calculation. And if you look over the way the society works, you find this everywhere. So the university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.

In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “time of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt. At the liberal end of the spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki (New York University Press, 1975), produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis of democracy,” namely that there’s too much democracy. In the 1960s there were pressures from the population, these “special interests,” to try to gain rights within the political arena, and that put too much pressure on the state-you can’t do that. There was one special interest that they left out, namely the corporate sector, because its interests are the “national interest”; the corporate sector is supposed to control the state, so we don’t talk about them. But the “special interests” were causing problems and they said “we have to have more moderation in democracy,” the public has to go back to being passive and apathetic. And they were particularly concerned with schools and universities, which they said were not properly doing their job of “indoctrinating the young.” You can see from student activism (the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movements) that the young are just not being indoctrinated properly.

Well how do you indoctrinate the young? There are a number of ways. One way is to burden them with hopelessly heavy tuition debt. Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy. They can even garnish social security if you default. That’s a disciplinary technique. I don’t say that it was consciously introduced for the purpose, but it certainly has that effect. And it’s hard to argue that there’s any economic basis for it. Just take a look around the world: higher education is mostly free. In the countries with the highest education standards, let’s say Finland, which is at the top all the time, higher education is free. And in a rich, successful capitalist country like Germany, it’s free. In Mexico, a poor country, which has pretty decent education standards, considering the economic difficulties they face, it’s free. In fact, look at the United States: if you go back to the 1940s and 50s, higher education was pretty close to free. The GI Bill gave free education to vast numbers of people who would never have been able to go to college. It was very good for them and it was very good for the economy and the society; it was part of the reason for the high economic growth rate. Even in private colleges, education was pretty close to free. Take me: I went to college in 1945 at an Ivy League university, University of Pennsylvania, and tuition was $100. That would be maybe $800 in today’s dollars. And it was very easy to get a scholarship, so you could live at home, work, and go to school and it didn’t cost you anything. Now it’s outrageous. I have grandchildren in college, who have to pay for their tuition and work and it’s almost impossible. For the students that is a disciplinary technique.

And another technique of indoctrination is to cut back faculty-student contact: large classes, temporary teachers who are overburdened, who can barely survive on an adjunct salary. And since you don’t have any job security you can’t build up a career, you can’t move on and get more. These are all techniques of discipline, indoctrination, and control. And it’s very similar to what you’d expect in a factory, where factory workers have to be disciplined, to be obedient; they’re not supposed to play a role in, say, organizing production or determining how the workplace functions-that’s the job of management. This is now carried over to the universities. And I think it shouldn’t surprise anyone who has any experience in private enterprise, in industry; that’s the way they work.

On how higher education ought to be

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory.

These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them-that’s freedom and democracy (see, e.g., John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, book 4, ch. 7). We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system” (“Founding Ceremony” for newly-organized Local Associations). Or take someone like, John Dewey, a mainstream 20th-century social philosopher, who called not only for education directed at creative independence in schools, but also worker control in industry, what he called “industrial democracy.” He says that as long as the crucial institutions of the society (like production, commerce, transportation, media) are not under democratic control, then “politics [will be] the shadow cast on society by big business” (John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party”[1931]). This idea is almost elementary, it has deep roots in American history and in classical liberalism, it should be second nature to working people, and it should apply the same way to universities. There are some decisions in a university where you don’t want to have [democratic transparency because] you have to preserve student privacy, say, and there are various kinds of sensitive issues, but on much of the normal activity of the university, there is no reason why direct participation can’t be not only legitimate but helpful. In my department, for example, for 40 years we’ve had student representatives helpfully participating in department meetings.

On “shared governance” and worker control

The university is probably the social institution in our society that comes closest to democratic worker control. Within a department, for example, it’s pretty normal for at least the tenured faculty to be able to determine a substantial amount of what their work is like: what they’re going to teach, when they’re going to teach, what the curriculum will be. And most of the decisions about the actual work that the faculty is doing are pretty much under tenured faculty control. Now of course there is a higher level of administrators that you can’t overrule or control. The faculty can recommend somebody for tenure, let’s say, and be turned down by the deans, or the president, or even the trustees or legislators. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen and it does. And that’s always a part of the background structure, which, although it always existed, was much less of a problem in the days when the administration was drawn from the faculty and in principle recallable. Under representative systems, you have to have someone doing administrative work but they should be recallable at some point under the authority of the people they administer. That’s less and less true. There are more and more professional administrators, layer after layer of them, with more and more positions being taken remote from the faculty controls. I mentioned before The Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin Ginsberg, which goes into a lot of detail as to how this works in the several universities he looks at closely: Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and a couple of others.

Meanwhile, the faculty are increasingly reduced to a category of temporary workers who are assured a precarious existence with no path to the tenure track. I have personal acquaintances who are effectively permanent lecturers; they’re not given real faculty status; they have to apply every year so that they can get appointed again. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And in the case of adjuncts, it’s been institutionalized: they’re not permitted to be a part of the decision-making apparatus, and they’re excluded from job security, which merely amplifies the problem. I think staff ought to also be integrated into decision-making, since they’re also a part of the university. So there’s plenty to do, but I think we can easily understand why these tendencies are developing. They are all part of imposing a business model on just about every aspect of life. That’s the neoliberal ideology that most of the world has been living under for 40 years. It’s very harmful to people, and there has been resistance to it. And it’s worth noticing that two parts of the world, at least, have pretty much escaped from it, namely East Asia, where they never really accepted it, and South America in the past 15 years.

On the alleged need for “flexibility”

“Flexibility” is a term that’s very familiar to workers in industry. Part of what’s called “labor reform” is to make labor more “flexible,” make it easier to hire and fire people. That’s, again, a way to ensure maximization of profit and control. “Flexibility” is supposed to be a good thing, like “greater worker insecurity.” Putting aside industry where the same is true, in universities there’s no justification. So take a case where there’s under-enrollment somewhere. That’s not a big problem. One of my daughters teaches at a university; she just called me the other night and told me that her teaching load is being shifted because one of the courses that was being offered was under-enrolled. Okay, the world didn’t to an end, they just shifted around the teaching arrangements-you teach a different course, or an extra section, or something like that. People don’t have to be thrown out or be insecure because of the variation in the number of students enrolling in courses. There are all sorts of ways of adjusting for that variation. The idea that labor should meet the conditions of “flexibility” is just another standard technique of control and domination. Why not say that administrators should be thrown out if there’s nothing for them to do that semester, or trustees-what do they have to be there for? The situation is the same with top management in industry: if labor has to be flexible, how about management? Most of them are pretty useless or even harmful anyway, so let’s get rid of them. And you can go on like this. Just to take the news from the last couple of days, take, say, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank: he just got a pretty substantial raise, almost double his salary, out of gratitude because he had saved the bank from criminal charges that would have sent the management to jail; he got away with only $20 billion in fines for criminal activities. Well I can imagine that getting rid of somebody like that might be helpful to the economy. But that’s not what people are talking about when they talk about “labor reform.” It’s the working people who have to suffer, and they have to suffer by insecurity, by not knowing where tomorrow’s piece of bread is going to come from, and therefore be disciplined and obedient and not raise questions or ask for their rights. That’s the way that tyrannical systems operate. And the business world is a tyrannical system. When it’s imposed on the universities, you find it reflects the same ideas. This shouldn’t be any secret.

On the purpose of education

These are debates that go back to the Enlightenment, when issues of higher education and mass education were really being raised, not just education for the clergy and aristocracy. And there were basically two models discussed in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were discussed with pretty evocative imagery. One image of education was that it should be like a vessel that is filled with, say, water. That’s what we call these days “teaching to test”: you pour water into the vessel and then the vessel returns the water. But it’s a pretty leaky vessel, as all of us who went through school experienced, since you could memorize something for an exam that you had no interest in to pass an exam and a week later you forgot what the course was about. The vessel model these days is called “no child left behind,” “teaching to test,” “race to top,” whatever the name may be, and similar things in universities. Enlightenment thinkers opposed that model.

The other model was described as laying out a string along which the student progresses in his or her own way under his or her own initiative, maybe moving the string, maybe deciding to go somewhere else, maybe raising questions. Laying out the string means imposing some degree of structure. So an educational program, whatever it may be, a course on physics or something, isn’t going to be just anything goes; it has a certain structure. But the goal of it is for the student to acquire the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to challenge-that’s education. One world-famous physicist, in his freshman courses if he was asked “what are we going to cover this semester?”, his answer was “it doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.” You have gain the capacity and the self-confidence for that matter to challenge and create and innovate, and that way you learn; that way you’ve internalized the material and you can go on. It’s not a matter of accumulating some fixed array of facts which then you can write down on a test and forget about tomorrow.

These are two quite distinct models of education. The Enlightenment ideal was the second one, and I think that’s the one that we ought to be striving towards. That’s what real education is, from kindergarten to graduate school. In fact there are programs of that kind for kindergarten, pretty good ones.

On the love of teaching

We certainly want people, both faculty and students, to be engaged in activity that’s satisfying, enjoyable, challenging, exciting-and I don’t really think that’s hard. Even young children are creative, inquisitive, they want to know things, they want to understand things, and unless that’s beaten out of your head it stays with you the rest of your life. If you have opportunities to pursue those commitments and concerns, it’s one of the most satisfying things in life. That’s true if you’re a research physicist, it’s true if you’re a carpenter; you’re trying to create something of value and deal with a difficult problem and solve it. I think that’s what makes work the kind of thing you want to do; you do it even if you don’t have to do it. In a reasonably functioning university, you find people working all the time because they love it; that’s what they want to do; they’re given the opportunity, they have the resources, they’re encouraged to be free and independent and creative-what’s better? That’s what they love to do. And that, again, can be done at any level.

Read More: RSN

Wayne State U. and Faculty Union Work to Defuse Conflict Over Tenure Rights

The Chronicle: Wayne State U. and Faculty Union Work to Defuse Conflict Over Tenure Rights

Representatives of Wayne State University and its faculty union are beginning talks this week in an attempt to head off a major clash over tenure rights.

The Michigan university’s administration and the faculty union set up a special committee on tenure last week as part of an agreement to extend the union’s contract, which had been due to expire on July 31, until the end of September. The six-member panel, comprising equal numbers of union and administration officials, has been charged with trying to resolve an escalating conflict over a contract proposal from the administration. Union leaders have denounced the proposal as an attempt to gut tenure protections, an allegation that university officials deny.

The conflict centers on an administration proposal, offered in the early round of contract negotiations, that would in effect scrap previously negotiated job protections for tenured or probationary faculty members, as well as seniority-based protections afforded many academic staff members, and replace them with new rules governing the suspension or termination of such employees.

The administration’s proposed contract language would give the university’s president, or an administrator working on the president’s behalf, the power to terminate such employees for a variety of reasons, including a “failure to meet professional responsibilities,” a “failure to perform academic assignments competently,” and a “financially based reduction in force.”

Union officials have denounced the proposed contract language as an attempt to do away with tenure and have accused the university’s chief negotiator of explicitly characterizing it as such. Last week the AAUP’s national office began circulating a petition protesting the proposed contract language, which it described as offering “extremely broad” justifications for termination and replacing faculty peer review with the judgment of administrators.

In an e-mail sent to Wayne State’s employees last month, President Gilmour argued that the proposal was “being misinterpreted” as intended to eliminate tenure when instead its goal is to give the administration more leeway to remove faculty members who are not doing their jobs.

“Faculty tenure is an important aspect of academic freedom, and we support it,” he said. “But it cannot be a place to hide for those whose performance or behavior is poor.”

Legal battle ends, “larger struggle continues” for professor denied tenure because of her politics

Legal battle ends, “larger struggle continues” for professor denied tenure because of her politics

The North Carolina Supreme Court won’t consider a petition of discretionary review by professor Terri Ginsberg, who was denied tenure several years ago after her outspoken criticism of Israeli policies.

Ginsberg, a film scholar, has said that following her public criticism of Israeli policies, she endured immediate retaliation from the administration of North Carolina State University, where she was a professor of film studies. As I reported in January 2010, she was “punished with partial removal from — and interference in — duty, non-renewal of contract and rejection from a tenure-track position” in 2008.

Student News on Chan v UBC Racial Discrimination Case

The Managing Editor for the Ubyssey, UBC’s student newspaper, reported in a feature article in this morning’s issue on the Chan v UBC and others racial discrimination case to be heard by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT) this summer. Jonny Wakefield reports:

The threshold to dismiss a complaint at the BCHRT is low. Since 2006, it appears that no cases against UBC have gone to a full judicial hearing. But one professor’s complaint has survived numerous attempts by the university to have it thrown out. The hearing, scheduled this summer, will be one of the very few times that the university has had to deal with a complainant in a public forum.

That discrimination complaint came from Jennifer Chan. Chan is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education. In May 2010, she filed a complaint of racial discrimination with the BCHRT, naming the university and four employees—among them senior administrators—as respondents. Chan, who is Chinese Canadian, alleges she was not selected for a prestigious research chair in part because of her race.

That appointment was to the Lam Research Chair in Multicultural Education. Chan was shortlisted for the chair in October 2009 and when it was announced that another candidate—a white woman—was given the appointment, Chan started to make complaints about bias in the process.

In short, Chan said the search committee of five members from the Faculty of Education broke every hiring rule in the book. It failed to keep any records of its procedures, including how the search was conducted and what criteria were used to determine merit. The committee also failed to consult Chan’s references, which included former Lam Chair holders. The Ubyssey contacted Chan’s references independently and confirmed that they had not been contacted regarding her application.

“A lot of my students would ask for references for their part-time summer jobs,” she said. “This endowment chair is a very prestigious position. Why were external references not contacted? Was it because the candidate was predetermined? Or was it because of some other factor?”

One of those factors, she argues, was her race.

See Ubyssey 15 March 2012 pp. 6-7 for more, and BCHRT for decision to hear the Chan v UBC and others [Beth Haverkamp, David Farrar, Jon Shapiro, Rob Tierney] case.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Bethune Cookman

AAUP Academic Freedom and Tenure: Bethune Cookman

An Association investigating committee report on Bethune-Cookman University in Florida deals with the 2009 dismissal of four professors and the termination of the services of three additional faculty members. The stated reasons for these actions ranged from charges of sexual harassment of students to claims of insufficient academic credentials to the purported need to reduce the size of the faculty for financial reasons. The report concludes that, in each case, the professors were denied virtually all AAUP-supported protections of academic due process. It further concludes that the administration’s reliance in the dismissals on outside investigators, consultants, and attorneys to deal with matters for which the faculty should have responsibility speaks poorly for the climate of shared governance at the institution.

Read the report (.pdf).

AAUP Accuses Bethune-Cookman U. of Denying Due Process to 7 Dismissed Professors

The Chronicle: AAUP Accuses Bethune-Cookman U. of Denying Due Process to 7 Dismissed Professors

An investigative panel of the American Association of University Professors has accused Bethune-Cookman University of denying due process to seven dismissed professors, including four men who, the panel says, were fired for sexual harassment based mainly on hearsay and on complaints from unnamed students relayed to administrators by a consultant.

In a report issued on Friday, the AAUP panel broadly characterized Bethune-Cookman, a historically black college in Daytona Beach, Fla., of being “repressive of academic freedom.”

“A pervasive atmosphere currently exists at Bethune-Cookman University in which the administration supports favorites and ignores or punishes those who fall out of favor or who question, contend, or appeal,” the report says. “No adequate mechanism or procedure exists for the impartial or balanced hearing of grievances.”

Officials at Bethune-Cookman said on Monday that they planned to respond to the AAUP report, but were not yet prepared to do so.

AAUP to Universities: Tenure Is Not Just for Researchers

The Chronicle: AAUP to Universities: Tenure Is Not Just for Researchers

In a new report, the Association of American University Professors continues to push for a tenure system that includes contingent faculty members—both full-time and part-time—who are the backbone of the professoriate.

Tenure Denial Reversed at Ohio U

Inside Higher Ed: Tenure Denial Reversed

Overruling top administrators, Ohio University’s president has decided to award tenure to a journalism professor accused of threatening fellow faculty, Inside Higher Ed has learned.

Roderick McDavis, the university’s president, declared Tuesday that Bill Reader would be granted tenure after more than a year of contentious debate about his case.

Court Denies Conservative Pundit-Professor’s Bias Claim Against University

The Chronicle: Court Denies Conservative Pundit-Professor’s Bias Claim Against University

A federal court has rejected a claim that the University of North Carolina at Wilmington committed viewpoint discrimination against Michael S. Adams, a prominent conservative commentator and associate professor of criminology, by denying him a promotion based partly on its review of online columns and other expressions of opinion that he included in his application to move up the ranks.

Jury Finds Iowa State Professor Filed False Bias Complaints in Pursuit of Tenure

The Chronicle: Jury Finds Iowa State Professor Filed False Bias Complaints in Pursuit of Tenure

In a case that sheds light on how bitter personal feuds can drive the actions of faculty members, a jury has ruled that an associate professor of sociology at Iowa State University brought false charges of gender discrimination against two colleagues he had viewed as obstacles to his gaining tenure.

Idaho Faculty Members Fear That New State Policies Will Undermine Tenure

The Chronicle: Idaho Faculty Members Fear That New State Policies Will Undermine Tenure

Faculty members at Idaho’s public colleges and even some campus leaders fear that policy changes approved last week by the State Board of Education will allow administrators to furlough and cut salaries of tenured professors without having to declare a financial crisis.

The state board, however, disputes that interpretation. The changes are meant to give campus presidents more authority to temporarily furlough employees to balance their budgets during an economic

Ohio U Faculty Challenge Tenure Denial

Inside Higher Ed: Faculty Challenge Tenure Denial

In denying a qualified Ohio University journalism professor tenure, university administrators violated principles of due process and failed to produce sufficient evidence to justify their opposition, a faculty committee has found.

An ad hoc committee of Ohio’s Faculty Senate on Sunday issued a report recommending that Bill Reader be granted tenure status and labeling the process up to this point as “tainted” and “compromised” by a variety of administrative missteps.

Tenure and the Workplace Avenger

The Chronicle: Tenure and the Workplace Avenger

For millions of Americans, last Friday’s mass shooting at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, in which three faculty members were killed and two others and one staff member were injured, has conjured up frightful memories of massacres at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. And in its wake, concerns are being raised yet again about campus safety and emergency response.

Tenure Case Hinges on Collegiality

Inside Higher Ed: Tenure Case Hinges on Collegiality

Something’s rotten in Ohio.

Depending on whom you believe, a bizarre tenure case that has unfolded over the past year at Ohio University either represents a last-ditch effort to oust a troubled and potentially dangerous professor or a concentrated conspiracy to derail his career before it truly begins. Either way, Bill Reader’s tenure case is headed for some sort of conclusion this month.

A journalism professor since 2002, Reader’s tenure decision went before a departmental committee last January. Despite glowing teaching evaluations and no documented trace of disciplinary action in his past, the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism’s Promotion and Tenure Committee agreed only narrowly to recommend that Reader receive tenure. The 7-5 vote sent a clear message of dissension within the ranks, and served as a precursor for recommendations of tenure denial from the school’s director, the college of communication’s tenure review committee and the dean. In the meantime, a cascade of charges and countercharges have been made, centering on whether Reader is the kind of professor Ohio wants to have around.

When Tenure Means Nothing

Inside Higher Ed: When Tenure Means Nothing

Clark Atlanta University violated the rights of 55 faculty members — 20 of them with tenure — when it eliminated their jobs without faculty consultation or due process, and without regard to whether or not they had tenure, according to a report issued Wednesday by the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP called the dismissals — covering a quarter of the faculty — “outrageous” and “especially egregious.”

The historically black university said at the time that it was responding to an “enrollment emergency,” and repeatedly denied that it was facing “financial exigency.” The latter state is one that the AAUP requires for the elimination of the jobs of tenured professors (although even in such cases, the association’s guidelines require faculty participation in the process, which was largely absent at Clark Atlanta). Not only do AAUP guidelines not allow for such job eliminations as a result of enrollment declines, but the report questioned whether the declines were as significant as the university claimed.

Tenure-o-meter

Inside Higher Ed: Tenure-o-meter

For some young professors, any evaluative tool called the “Tenurometer” (i.e. tenure-o-meter) is sure to turn some heads.

Which is the point, says Filippo Menczer, associate professor of computer of informatics and computer science at Indiana University and co-creator of the Tenurometer, a cheekily named tool (still in beta phase) designed to measure scholars’ impact on their fields by counting how much they have contributed to the literature and how frequently those articles have been cited.

Pedagogy a poor second in promotions

Times Higher Education: Pedagogy a poor second in promotions

Study finds ‘hypocritical’ sector fails to practise what it preaches. Rebecca Attwood reports

Universities stand accused of hypocrisy this week over their claims to value teaching, after a major study of promotions policy and practice found that many are still failing to reward academics for leadership in pedagogy.

Research by the Higher Education Academy and the University of Leicester’s “Genie” Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning examines the promotion policies of 104 UK universities.

30-Minute Chat to Tenure

Inside Higher Ed: 30-Minute Chat to Tenure

Lloyd A. Jacobs announced last week that in his role as president of the University of Toledo, he plans to interview every faculty member who comes up for tenure before making a recommendation to the board on whether to approve the bid.

While many faculty members are angry about the idea that an academic career can be evaluated in a short conversation, Jacobs said he finds it odd that people expect a president to urge trustees to grant tenure to someone without the president having talked to the person and formed an independent judgment. “I think that the concept of university presidents being relegated to a rubber stamp role is one of the downsides of our current higher education,” he said.

Idaho State U professor fired despite faculty vote

The Olympian: ISU professor fired despite faculty vote

POCATELLO, Idaho – An Idaho State University engineering professor who was suspended in August says he has been fired, despite backing from a faculty appeals board.

The Idaho State Journal reports Habib Sadid confirmed Friday that university president Arthur Vailas had terminated his employment.

In a statement, Vailas said his decision was in the best interests of the institution.