The American Association of University Professors has asked the president of DePaul University, the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, to “suspend” his decision not to reverse a denial of tenure to a philosophy professor, even though an appeals-review committee recommended that he do so. In a letter posted on a blog written by Peter N. Kirstein, vice president of the Illinois conference of the AAUP, the national association said DePaul had not followed its own due-process procedures for Namita Goswami, whose tenure denial the appeals committee said had been linked to academic-freedom violations. DePaul professors have already asked the university’s board to look into a string of failed tenure bids by minority faculty members.
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4 Responses to AAUP to DePaul President: Reconsider Tenure Denial
disembedded - December 21, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Oh please…who listens to the AAUP and fameball Cary Nelson anymore? Only the Chronicle….
derekindle - December 22, 2010 at 7:54 am
Exactly…no one cares about the AAUP. Their claim to fame is only these crap cases they like to get in The Chronicle.
profperf - December 23, 2010 at 4:06 pm
Well, now that a couple of the usual suspects have weighed in with such helpful responses, we might actually consider the substance of Committee A’s report. I think that the Illinois AAUP has done a fine job of holding up DePaul’s disturbing approaches to tenure and promotion to the light of day. The Philosophy Department has been guilty of, at least, contradicting itself throughout this case, from the point of hiring to its final recommendation–if you don’t want an interdisciplinary, critical race/feminist scholar, then don’t bloody hire one in the first place! It sounds to me as if the boys’ club (and, yes, I am a boy myself) found out it didn’t want what it probably was told by someone else at the university it needed to have–someone to bring a spark of diverse thought and interests to a fairly sedimented program. SO, this solution is to punish the individual they no doubt felt forced to hire and then use the vagaries of evaluation of her quality of mind as their excuse for non-tenure. I don’t know–haven’t rad her scholarship or her student evaluations. But if I were an untenured faculty member at DePaul, I would find this ongoing pattern chilling indeed. Gee, maybe there are some openings for medical ethicists at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Arizona–sounds like some of the philosophers would fit in fine with what the diocese there wants its hospital’s values to be.
Maybe instead of denying Dr. Goswami tenure they should just excommunicate her and be done with it.
physicsprof - December 23, 2010 at 4:28 pm
Profperf: “if you don’t want an interdisciplinary scholar, then don’t bloody hire one in the first place!”
What if they were truly interested in hiring a scholar in a hot interdisciplinary field only to discover later that it was all hot air and BS? Isn’t that what probationary period is for?