Letters from the National Campus Director

Toward a Better Tenure and Hiring Policy · 22 November 2005

The new policy states:


Violations of procedural due process or substantive due process are not covered by the principle of the confidentiality of a hiring or tenure meeting of a Department. Any faculty-member who believes that such violations have occurred has the right and the duty to report such violations immediately and in writing to the appropriate high administrator who deals with faculty issues at the university in question.

For those not familiar with the language of the proposed policy, procedural due process has to do with errors that occur in the administrative process of the hiring or the tenuring itself, for example, a failure to provide the number of external evaluations required by the tenuring process, or a failure of the tenure subcommittee to visit the candidate's courses to observe teaching, and so forth.

Substantive due process is usually a much more serious charge and refers to allowing non-permissible factors such as the candidate's race, gender, political views, or religion to play a role in the formal decision making process.

Two recent examples illustrate the need for this change in policy.

• Professor William Bradford, one of only a handful of American Indian law professors in the nation, is currently an untenured associate professor of law at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Law School (IUPUI). Last spring, Prof. Bradford became the target of a concerted attack by "progressive" law faculty to deny him tenure and even to terminate his employment at the school. This attack was incomprehensible in view of his academic record, which outshone many full professors on the IUPUI law faculty. Bradford claimed that the attack on his status was triggered by his refusal to sign a petition in behalf of Ward Churchill, whom the progressive caucus on his faculty supported.

• Professor David Graeber is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale. Despite a highly regarded record of teaching and scholarship, he was told in May of 2005 that his teaching contract would not be extended. Graeber traces faculty opposition to his continued tenure at Yale to his participation in protests against the IMF and G8 and his published defenses of anarchism as a political philosophy. He noted in a May 2005 interview that he was unable to prove that unallowable factors influenced the committee's decision because "I'm not allowed to know what was said in the senior faculty meeting where my case was discussed."

The stories of professors Bradford and Graeber demonstrate exactly how the tenure process can be abused when confidentiality is used to conceal non-allowable reasons for a candidate's rejection. The proposed reform addresses this problem by removing the burden that confidentiality places on committee members to conceal their knowledge of due process violations.

"Tenure and hiring committees currently function like star chamber proceedings where there is little accountability and no transparency," commented SAF Chairman David Horowitz. "The pressures of collegiality prevent committee members from publicly objecting to any perceived lack of fairness. Given the lack of accountability, it's hardly surprising that the results are so one-sided. Every recent survey has shown the one-sided dispositions of liberal arts faculties and the increasingly diminished state of intellectual diversity on even the best university campuses."

A certain amount of confidentiality within the tenure and hiring process is an understandable requirement and should be expected both by those charged with evaluating candidates and by the candidates themselves. However, when "confidentiality" is used to obscure abusive conduct and to prevent challenges to discriminatory actions, the interests of preserving the general integrity of the hiring and tenure processes override those of preserving the privacy of the deliberations.

In keeping with recent history, our new policy has already been attacked under false pretenses by some in academia, including William Scheuerman, president of the United University Professions, who called the proposal "ideological claptrap." As with similar attacks on the Academic Bill of Rights, any charge that there is an ideological basis for this proposed policy change is absurd and slanderous.

Just as the ABOR was inspired by the existing academic freedom philosophy of the American Association of University Professors, this new hiring and tenure policy was not created from thin air. The AAUP itself has printed articles in its journal Academe emphasizing that confidentiality provisions in hiring and tenure meetings do not apply when the proper procedures are violated or abused. All we are asking for is the formal institution nationwide of a policy which is already in place in many universities.

We are confident that, if adopted, this new policy would lead to greater openness and fairness in hiring and tenure processes by removing the cloak of enforced ignorance that currently surrounds these decisions.

Sincerely,

Sara Dogan
National Campus Director
Students for Academic Freedom

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