I smell trouble (with tenure)

It’s rare that I blog about something that happens at Ithaca, but this issue raises a string of questions those involved in tenure review across the country will have to address — or, in some cases more immediate than others, answer.

The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Ithacan reported late last week that an assistant professor at Ithaca College, Margo Ramlal-Nanoke, hired a law firm to confront the college’s administration and board of trustees about her tenure.

Ramlal-Nanoke, a native of India who grew up in the Carribean, teaches classes about global race, ethnic relations and women in the third world. She also advises the student group Students for a Just Peace, which supports human rights and is against the occupation of the Palestinian territories, according to the group’s online listing.

In a letter sent to the college’s board of trustees, Ramlal- Nanoke and her law firm alleged her tenure review was “influenced by blatant political lobbying against her based on her teachings on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

The situation revisits two questions that have plagued a handful of campuses during the past year: What constitutes academic freedom, and what role does it, and the influence of outside groups and organizations, play in granting tenure?

There are plenty of colleges that have academic freedom and freedom of speech in their mission statements. But where these colleges and universities seem to struggle is how exactly to put that into practice.

The lawyers representing Nanoke were involved in a similar tenure case of a political science professor from DePaul University last year. That also centered around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and ended with a settlement and that professor’s resignation.

The professor, Norman G. Finkelstein, caught heat for his writings on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and something he called the “Holocaust industry.” Ramlal-Nanoke’s lawyer, Lynne Bernabei, wrote in the letter to Ithaca’s board of trustees that her client was neither “pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, but many of the countries and societies she writes about are supportive of something other than Israeli policy.”

Columbia University has had its own share of tenure trouble. It’s in the midst of a two-year tenure review of Joseph Massad, a Palestinian-American scholar and associate professor of Arab politics in the university’s department of Middle East and Asian languages and culture.

A Chronicle of Higher Education article consulted professors who said Columbia’s tenure board voted “narrowly in favor” of Massad’s tenure, which the provost, Alan Brinkley ,then denied. Supporters of Massad recently convinced the provost to review his tenure, so the professor will get a second shot.

Joseph Massad’s writings and research on addressing “Zionism as the new anti-Semitism” and “encouraging the violent dismantling of “Jewish society in Israel”” have appeared in places like New Politics and the Journal of Palestine Studies. He has many supporters, but many people at Columbia, including students and faculty, think Massad is using his professorship as a mouthpiece instead of as a “venue for scholarship and inquiry.”

At Columbia’s sister school, Barnard College, Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology, came up for tenure, which launched a debate about the merit of her academic research. According to a chronicle article about El-Haj’s tenure, Paula R. Stern, a Barnard alumna, posted an open letter on the site Petition Online calling Abu El-Haj a scholar of “demonstrably inferior caliber” and urging Barnard to reject her tenure bid.

In a book published in 2001, El-Haj asserted Israeli archaeologists searched for an ancient Jewish presence to help build the case for a Jewish state. She also wrote that in these quests, Israelis sometimes used bulldozers, and in the process, destroyed remains of other cultures.

El-Haj’s legitimacy was questioned because her critics said she, as a Palestinian, was not qualified to analyze Jewish scholars, especially as a scholar not fluent in Hebrew.

All of the cases mentioned in this post revolve around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I find it hard to believe that a professor be so publicly scrutinized if he or she were publishing new research on relationships involving the Russia’s relationship with Georgia, or America’s relationship with China. What seems to be missing from all of these cases is a consistent way to determine what place political beliefs should play in classrooms, and to what extent they can damage a professor up for tenure.

As if all this wasn’t enough for Ithaca College to handle, another one of its own tenure cases was exhumed in the New York Times earlier this week in an article titled (get this) “Judgment Day.”

Part of the article was an account from Carolyn Byerly, a former journalism professor who sued the college for sex discrimination in 2001 because her tenure was denied on the basis of student evaluations, she said , which her department and dean said reflected an inability to meet the standard of excellence for teaching. Byerly said her focus “on how race, gender and sexual orientation are handled by the media led students to deny her chance for tenure.”

The basis for her tenure denial, she said, was only 43 negative evaluations “full of gender bias: out of several hundred positive ones.”

Byerly lost her case on summary judgment, and when she appealed, she was denied.

It seems like Ithaca College is on the edge of its own “judgment day.” And if Ramlal-Nankoe takes the college to court, it could be interesting to see if Byerly’s case comes into play.

Campaign contributions from Ithaca College donors

electionsThe New York Times has compiled an extensive database of individual campaign contributions on its Web site that’s easy to use and will divulge some pretty interesting stuff if you know where to look. You can search - by zip code - for any contribution of $200 or more donated by an individual.

So who’s donating in Ithaca? Ithaca College has very few politically generous folks, it seems: only three persons affiliated with the college have donated to a presidential campaign fund, according to the Times’ database.

They are:

A notable Ithaca community donor was Michelle Berry, the alderperson of the city of Ithaca’s 2nd Ward, who’s stepping down next year. She’s been a very active opponent of the racial incidents in the Ithaca Central School District, and she was also Tompkins County’s Poet Laureate at one time. She’s also been an adjunct faculty member at Ithaca College before. Ms. Berry donated $250 to Democratic contender Barack Obama’s campaign. A number of professors and staff at Cornell University also donated money, but there are too many to list, so check out the database if you’re interested to learn more.

Overwhelmingly, donors in the 14850 zip code donated money to Barack Obama or John Edward’s campaign. Donations to Hillary Clinton came in a distant third.

Roundup: Under Fire Edition

Presidents not doing so hot: Lee C. Bollinger and Richard Roberts, of Columbia University and Oral Roberts University, respectively, are not doing well by the eyes of the faculty they lead. For Bollinger, more than 100 faculty members signed a statement of concern raising issues with the way he’s running the school and that Iranian visit from September. Roberts had the faculty raise a vote of no-confidence ? especially troubling since he went on leave last month and is being accused of using the school’s money for political gain and gifts for his family. There’s also a dean at Washington University in St. Louis who the faculty is looking to remove.

More about presidents and their money: The Chronicle’s annual report on presidential salaries (”Executive Compensation”) is out, and it shows increases are bigger for the larger institutions. The median salary is above $500,000 for those at large, research institutions, and troublingly low sums for community college presidents. Again you may get rebuffed by the pay wall, but it’s worth it to make comparisons between different colleges.

As for Ithaca? Peggy R. Williams makes $254,040, and benefits raise the total compensation near $300K ($291,195). In comparison, the top earner, Boca Raton, Fla. Lynn University president Donald E. Ross makes more than $5.5 million, and Williams is nestled between presidents from Manhattanville College and Molloy College. Fun fact: Molloy College is running their own capital campaign! Their goal is much more modest, only between $7 and $10 million.

Trolling elsewhere? Treasure Troll, the former Ithaca OTR blogger is out. It was his decision to go after the mess I started, and it appears a lot of what I linked to is now dust in the wind. I hope he’s moving over to Buzzsaw’s blog, which covers an interesting array of topics but has been MIA for a while.

From South Hill to Sweden. Plus, broken images!

This blog isn’t about Ithaca College, but it’s been making a few small waves in the blogging world. The Park School of Communications has made a big push to study where traditional media and online innovation intersect. Professor Kim Gregson’s class studying Second Life (read The Ithacan story about it) has been leading the way. Our school has it’s very own island and a sister island for our Independent Media Center (which is coming soon in First Life), and we’ve been getting people to virtually-visit the vector version of school. Thank goodness our school isn’t decorated like that in real life! Gregson has her own blog keeping tabs on the rest of the class’ progress.

ithaca.jpgBut people are noticing. Rasmus Karlsson, a graduate student in Sweden, flew over to the island, got his requisite freebie shirt and posed for a group picture. He seems impressed with the idea ? like a lot of people in academia ? about the idea of introducing an educational aspect to what is essentially the world’s largest virtual chatroom classroom.

Second Life aside, however, it appears like Ithaca hasn’t gotten all the kinks worked out of their online presence. William, a high school student from Queens, has been getting the typical barrage of brochures and emails from colleges trying to woo him to apply. Ithaca, in it’s we’re-so-hip-to-this-internet-thing-attitude, bashed all those other colleges with paper viewbooks (which, um, still work pretty well for them) and bragging about how they offer video and 360 degree views. Then they had a broken gif image in the email. “If this is the cutting edge,” he blogged, “then there must be a better knife out there somewhere.” Ouch.

The price of academic freedom

How much would you pay to have a classroom free of liberal bias indoctrinating our free thinkers in higher education? Free of women’s lib classes that ask men to wear high heels and dresses to understand what women go through? For the Arizona Senate, they’re not asking the students to pay for the, um, freedom from hearing what professors might actually think. They’re fining the professors.

benjamins.pngIf you are a professor at a public or community college (but it does apply to K-12 teachers as well) and SB 1542 (n?e SB1612) goes through, you could very well be have to pay the Man for doing things like: endorsing or opposing any candidate for any political office; having an opinion on any pending legislation; merely talking about any current decision in any court, unless you talk about them in a non-positive/non-negative way; or, my personal favorite, advocating ?one side of a social, political, or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy.?

If a professor is found spouting off anything perceived as partisan (the Arizona Daily Star suggests things like “evolution, global warming, foreign policy, voting rights, education policy” but really, the list could be twisted to include anything), the proposed legislation states that they could face up to $500 dollars and for higher offenses flat-out termination. The Arizona Republic calls it what it is: unconstitutional.

Sen. Thayer Verschoor, the Republican majority leader, spoke out about why exactly he thinks crumbling our shadow universities with this legislation is necessary. The cross-dressing lesson was “peculiar” to him, but this gem from Inside Higher Ed is too good not to quote:

In another case, he said, his comments offended a professor?s political sensibilities. While Verschoor did not remember the specifics of the political exchange or the class, he said that the professor accused him of being ?a political plant? and then said that ?plants are to be urinated on.?

He reads and hears about the problems all the time ? we can only guess which sources ? and says the bill isn’t designed to create academic freedom ? at least the perversion of the term by the likes of David Horowitz. For the record, Horowitz does not agree with the legislation for higher ed but is cool with it in K-12.

Horowitz is at least half-right here. College students are adults and if they cannot engage in intelligent, civil and reasoned debate about so-called controversial issues with their professors, and fellow students, what are they doing in college? Conservatives shouldn’t be silenced, just like liberals shouldn’t be fired, but this is the wrong way to do it.

Roundup: Barriers and borders

Troubling: Mexican-American high school students just don’t perceive their barriers to college. They’re real, according to a new study put out by a new study from the University of Oregon. Even though the numbers are up, Latinos have lagged behind in attendance rates at 10 percent compared to blacks (18 percent) and whites (34 percent). The study found that the students themselves found a lot of barriers ? lack of confidence, fear of leaving behind family, parents not understanding things like how to apply for financial aid ? more difficult to overcome. Even if their parents did attend college, the barriers are not any less lack of confidence. [Via The Daily Texan]

Fighting for change: Several hundred Minnesota State College and University students rallied in St. Paul to protest the rising price of tuition. Legislators seemed to take notice: a few bills have already been introduced, including one that would funnel funding down to the state schools to cap the costs. [Via StarTribune]

Religion in question: In a soon-to-be-published study, researchers found that 23.4 percent of professors describe themselves as atheists or agnostics. Digg is, of course, working itself into a frenzy over this. Interesting tidbit: psychology and biology professors had the lowest rate of believers at 61 percent each.

Seriously: Dear Yale, there has to be a better way to get senior class donations. IvyGateBlog declares ________-in-a-box jokes dead, dead, dead.

Roundup: Who’s next?

Meeting of the minds: Emory University had already announced His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama starting as a professor. Now add Salman Rushdie to the roster. He’ll be donating his collection of manuscripts and writing to them as well. Why Emory? “[B]ecause they asked me and nobody else ever had,” Rushdie said. The 18th anniversary of fatwa against Rushdie is on Valentine’s Day, interestingly enough.

Feared outbreaks: Baylor University is dealing with a single case of meningococcal meningitis, but Cheney University in Cheney, PA, is dealing with another, scarier problem. An HIV-positive prostitute claims she had sex with 10 male students and can’t confirm how many of them used condoms. The university is encouraging any of the men to get tested as soon as possible.

Sold: The coverage does not stop here at College Ave. The final bid for a year’s worth tuition at OWU: $18,669.99. Not really a steal, but I’m sure there’s a T-shirt involved. More interesting: an eBay auction for “College tuition, room, and board… is so expensive I have to sell my hat.” Clever. Check for gratuitous shots of Hatty McHatterson.

Starving for retention

mit-greygrey-footer3.pngAfter being denied tenure and trying to convince the department head for two years to change his mind, James Sherley, a stem cell scientist at MIT, is on a hunger strike. Now Sherley doesn’t even want tenure. he’s not eating to make his point: Sherley is black, and MIT did not give him tenure because of racism. He also wants the provost, L. Rafael Reif,, to resign. In an email to his colleagues, he said he “will die defiantly” to show how far racism has gone in all campuses, not just MIT.

MIT, to put it lightly, feels otherwise: junior faculty members are tenured at much lower rates, and Chancellor Phillip Clay said ominously that “comments from experts outside MIT” are part of the reason. The Scientist reports that Provost Reif started a committee to encourage the hiring of minority faculty. According to a book published (on MIT Press) in 2001, only 2% of faculty were black.

He had 214 signatures from a petition in 2005. After his last meal of two bowls of Rice Chex we’ll see how long we sticks it out.

Roundup: Less funny ha-ha

lampoon.gifUnpunk’d: Harvard Lampoon sends out two emails to entire university claiming “once and future president” Lawrence Summers had been reinstated after a lengthy search, then outing their own hoax with another hoax. After having their phone number listed as the clearinghouse for a lottery to join a Summers forum ? a hot ticket, indeed ? the Harvard Crimson was clearly not amused. When the Crimson is funnier than the ‘Poon, something is definitely wrong. (For anyone keeping score, no candidate has been named.) Via IvyGateBlog.

Unfair termination? Spring Arbor University in Michigan fired John Nemecek ? an ordained Baptist minister ? because he is transgendered and was seen on campus wearing women’s clothes. Nemececk, who now goes by Julie Marie, had been undergoing treatment to become a woman and had been banned from teaching classes in person, but the privaate, Christian university released her because of a lack of “model Christian character” for their students. Nemececk is suing.

Unfair removal? William and Mary’s president, Gene R. Nichol, ordered the removal of an 18-inch-tall historic cross in the chapel to make the space more welcoming to all faiths. The problem: 13,000+ signatures in an online petition demanding it back, including alumni threatening to withhold donations. 1,100 signatures are supporting Nichol. The Board of Visitors is being asked to overrule Nichol, which may happen later this week.