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President’s Reversal of a Tenure Denial at the College of Charleston Draws a Faculty Rebuke

May 4, 2011, 12:47 am

Faculty leaders at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina, on Tuesday approved a resolution condemning a decision by the institution’s president to overturn a tenure denial for a professor who is married to the president’s chief of staff, The Post and Courier, a newspaper in Charleston, reported. The resolution states that the intervention by the president, George Benson, undermines the integrity of the tenure and promotion process. While the college president has the final say on who is approved for tenure, faculty members complain that it was “unorthodox” of Mr. Benson to use his power to reverse a decision by a faculty committee even before the professor had completed the official grievance process. The professor, Deborah McGee, is married to Brian McGee, a former chairman of the college’s department of communication who is now Mr. Benson’s chief of staff.

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  • cwehlburgtcu

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  • archman

    Let me get this straight. The *tenure committee* denied tenure to the professor, but the *president* overrode the committee??? And the professor who this is happening to is married to the president’s chief of staff???

    I would LOVE to hear the administrative spin that the university president puts out to defend his decision. It is shameful that cronyism to this extent is still present in the United States. This president is either not an academic himself (and thus has no idea how big a deal tenure is and how hard we work for it), or he is completely full of himself. Probably both.

    Even if Deborah McGee secures her “forced tenure” from the president, she will forever be ostracized and stained by her peers. Academics do not look favorably upon our own who use family connections to game the system. She will no longer become “Professor McGee”, but the “Chief of Staff’s Wife”.

  • bowl_haircut

    “Academics do not look favorably upon our own who use family connections to game the system.”

    Well now, let’s not get carried away.

  • skocpol

    The above paragraph selectively (perhaps deliberately trying to amp up the controversy?) leaves out relevant information contained in the click-through article.

    The Chancellor initially, officially APPROVED the tenure committee recommendation to DENY tenure. Ms. McGee then appealed through channels, possibly submitting additional information or arguments that the committee and/or faculty had/has not heard. We certainly haven’t. The Chancellor says that he should have waited to announce his decision, having perhaps left out some part of the grievance process, the importance of which we do not know.

    Remember. This is Stephen Colbert’s home state. Things are not necessarily what they seem to be on the surface. It was Brazil, not the Appalachian Trail. And this is this is the Chronicle, which may be developing chronic flaws.

    William Skocpol, Boston University

  • goodeyes

    Skocpol, your posting contradicts the news article and it was only one paragraph long. The grievance process should have been completed before the President reviewed his decision and perhaps changed it. This is called due process for the candidate and for the committee. Mistakes can be made.

  • willynilly

    While I agree with your observation that The Chronicle has shown a recent strong inclination to add and/or subtract facts or to inject heat and/or emotion in these type stories – obviously for the purpose of attracting more readers or to grow legs on the account so as to get a several day “run”. That is a given in modern journalism.

    But notwithstanding that agreement, no matter what the true facts are or how persuasive the mitigating circumstances, there is no winning strategy or gracious exit available to the Chancellor. The appearance and the smell of the entire affair are too damning for the Chancellor to overcome. Ms McGee is the clear winner and the Chancellor is the clear loser. But this kind of debacle is commonplace in any organization that practices nepotism in its hiring practices.

  • teachfordamasses

    Um, and would that be “nepotism” when departments scramble to find a place for hiring the spouse of a desirable faculty job candidate? Or decide to hire a two-fer when they actually only want the better qualified of the two spouses? We do that all the time and never call it nepotism, which it clearly is. This type of nepotism is of a different sort and magnitude (assuming the professor’s reversal of decision was due to favoritism, which I do not know that it was) from that in this article, but as long as we bend the rules to accommodate spouses who would not otherwise have been hired, we shouldn’t bandy these words about so freely. In my department no one even raises an eyebrow at these practices: business as usual. Writ large = Deborah McGee’s tenure reversal.

  • richardtaborgreene

    Either the appearance or the reality is problematic here—the only reason people tolerate the indignities and en-petty-ifying of careers it involves is some semblance of fairness about it. Take that away and tenure becomes just friends of my friends—same a journal editing.

  • 22185161

    What if the tenure committee denied tenure to a qualified candidate simply because of who she has chosen to marry? That IS possible, you know.

  • 22280998

    If new information was presented, the grievance process should have been allowed to note that as a basis for overturning the initial decision. In our system the various committees are encouraged to list book, paper, and grant submissions which of accepted would have changed their recommendation. That has, in fact, been used to technically “overturn” original decisions. Seems odd in this case not to wait for the grievance committee report or to indicate what this new material was.

  • eudaimon

    Academia is rife with conflicts of interest. Every once and a while, something floats up to the surface. In many places, tenure and promotion really are about friends hiring friends. After all, it is someone else’s money. People looking for fairness in academia will be disappointed, though faculty do have to follow informal rules when divvying up the resources of their institutions among themselves.

  • archman

    Folks, re-read the article again. The College of Charleston faculty have submitted a formal statement condemning the president’s actions. This is pretty unusual a step to take (particularly for a southern state). It is very likely that the faculty have a pretty solid case to justify their response to what the president has done. It would be nice if more details would be forthcoming, but I doubt we may hear much more. The president is probably squirreled away with the university legal and PR teams.

  • 11274135

    I was on a motorcycle tour last spring. We stopped for gas. One of our party, while filling his tank, overfilled it and splashed gasoline on his bike. We wiped it all off to avoid the possibility of fire. But then, when this guy then tried to start his bike, it wouldn’t start. The engine wouldn’t turn over. So we’re trying to figure out what the spilled gas got into that was interfering with the starter. About that time, another biker rode up and asked what the problem was. We told him. He tried to start it and failed. But then he said, “must be a loose battery connection,” took off the seat, tightened it up, and vrooom. The failure to start was unrelated to the gas stop and gas spill. It just happened at the same time. The symptoms actually indicated a battery connection problem, but the experience of the immediate context (gas spill) blinded us to the obvious. So, it might be reasonable to consider that the reversal of the tenure decision and the fact that the candidate was the wife of the president’s chief of staff have nothing to do with one another. That’s just not as good a story.

  • quidditas

    Yeah, I was just going to say–I guess the administration wants a crack at that cronyism too.

  • opentosuggestion

    I’m curious to know where you teach. When I was in the US, spousal appointments at my university had to be approved by the relevant departments and so entailed the routine campus interview process — and departments rejected candidates they found unacceptable. And if it was a matter of bringing in someone with tenure, there was, in addition to departmental scrutiny, a university committee that had to approve the department’s recommendation.

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