Two very brief notes about high-profile scandals in academia:
1) While it involves one of my faculty colleagues, I have no special insight to offer into the case of Valerie Barr’s firing by the NSF over long-ago political activity. I know and like Valerie as a colleague, and she did some really good stuff as chair of the CS department, but that’s all I know.
As reported by Science, the government’s actions in this case seem like that very special kind of stupid that you get in extremely large organizations, where this probably isn’t really about her at all. Either somebody in a position to make trouble has a bug up their ass about this particular organization from the early 1980’s, or somebody in a position to make trouble has a beef with the NSF and is taking it out through petty bureaucratic horseshit.
Regardless of the actual reason, this reflects very badly on the NSF, on the Office of Personnel Management, and the Federal Investigative Services.
2) The other Great Big Scandal running through academic circles is this whole Steven Salaita business, where he was offered a tenured position at Illinois, then had the offer taken back at a very late stage because of “uncivil” comments he made. There’s been a lot of back and forth, and calls for boycotts, etc.
This one doesn’t reflect well on anyone involved. Salaita’s Twitter comments were intemperate and asinine, the flip-flopping by Illinois has been disgraceful, and I strongly suspect that had the asinine remarks been of a different political slant, a lot of the people writing outraged essays about the whole business would be writing similar volumes about how the tweeter in question richly deserved to be drummed out of academia (and a completely different subset of people would be outraged at length). Which is why I have no real enthusiasm for writing about this (part of why I’m posting it on a Saturday morning when nobody will read it…).
As long as I’m commenting on scandals, though, I might as well note that while Salaita’s comments were very dumb, they’re not half offensive enough to deserve firing. Especially by the standards of jackassery on Twitter. The actions of the Illinois administration in caving to pressure from donors were venal and cowardly, and reflect very poorly on the university. I’m basically in agreement with Sean Carroll’s comments on this and other bothersome speech issues: the bar for firing/disinviting/banning people for saying things we disagree with ought to be very high indeed.
And that’s it for academic scandals this week. On the bright side, um… at least academia is having a better week/month/year scandal-wise than the NFL? Yay?
I find discussions of the Salaita case exhausting to follow. One person makes a point about academic freedom or the proper limits to academic freedom, then another person says something about employment law and hiring processes. I definitely have an opinion on the case, but these are non-sequiturs.
I do find it interesting that employment offers are not approved by the board of trustees until after a person has started teaching. The part of the job that causes my department chair the most stress is scheduling classes, balancing everyone’s needs (and some people are very needy…) against the department’s needs. Imagine if 2 weeks into the term it came out that the new guy is no longer working here.
Worse, imagine if that news came along and you’d already ordered some very expensive equipment for the new guy’s lab space.
They aren’t actually non sequiturs, because academic freedom is a contractual right rather than a constitutional right. Read your contract and the related policies. Free speech is a constitutional right, but that right applies only to the State and not a private employer. (It must get really interesting for lawyers when the employer is the State in the form of a non-profit corporation, i.e. a person embodied by its Board of Trustees with various fiduciary duties to the corporation and the People.)
Maybe I am rare in having had many people over my career, starting in grad school, explain to me that the Board does all of the hiring for the college or university, even janitors. They act on the advice of others (President, Provost, Dean, Department Chair, Committee), but the decisions are theirs and theirs alone. as is also the case for each step up the hierarchy I listed. The offer letter is a contract, but not the same as the contract you sign after the Board approves it. Ditto for anything involving tenure.
Because our Board does not meet on what one might describe as a timely basis (no meeting in August), full-time hires can be approved before they start teaching (if the paperwork is ready) BUT part-time hires AND extra loads cannot be approved until a meeting in September. All contracts are signed in September.
As Alex notes, this means that a newly hired prof could decide to not sign the contract as much as several weeks into the semester, just as the Board can reject it at that time. The same would apply to a continuing prof who changes their mind about an overload class. However, in all cases they (like the college or university on the other side) would be liable for breaking the contract made when they agreed to teach a particular class that was offered to them.
A young colleague was surprised to learn that an agreement made some months ago concerning an overload carried some additional requirements that were not spelled out at the time ze made that decision. Those happen to be in the college policy manual that is the contract governing our employment, but only folks on major academic committees or surprised by those rules have ever read it carefully.
As a matter of law, you are right. Academic freedom is a contractual right. On any “is” question–Is this action consistent with the applicable rules as they currently exist?– I defer to the lawyers.
But there are also “ought” questions to ask: Ought university officials consider statements such as Salaita made when they use their discretionary decision-making authority to extend or not extend job offers? Ought an academic refrain from making the sorts of statements that Salaita made? Ought civility be considered when institutions are writing policies? Whatever your opinion on these matters, they are distinct from the question of whether a given action is allowed under existing policies. In many discussions of Salaita I have seen one person making a point about what they institution can or can’t do under (their interpretation of) existing rules, and then seen another person respond with “ought” statements.
Regarding the NSF case: They have had a problem lately with rotators. They depend on people who leave their positions for a year or two to serve temporarily at NSF headquarters. However, rotators do not enjoy any of the job protections that tenure-track faculty, let alone civil servants, enjoy. I know someone who was a rotator at NSF but was forced to leave due to baseless accusations of wrongdoing (I don’t know the specifics of the case). In the wake of that case, several prominent scientists in my field asked the NSF for assurances that similar scenarios would not recur, and assurances were apparently given. So much for those assurances.
BTW, “Dean Dad” Matt Reed put a name to the legal issue in this case: “legally, I think he has a strong claim on “promissory estoppel.”” Look it up. Given that he gave up a tenured position on the basis of that promise, this could get really expensive.
Those are good “ought” questions, Alex, and the search committees I have served on have always started their process by clarifying what we would and would not look at. However, we have no control over what others might look at, and each has a different fiduciary duty to the college.
IMO, no full-time job offer should be made by the college until it is binding on the college, yet I know why that is not done: it would take too long and you might lose a top candidate to another offer. However, it is wrong to delay such decisions for many months as must have happened in this case and risky to pull it from what as likely the consent agenda.
The University of Illinois, of course, is not a private employer.