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Penn Class, Awaiting Professor, Gets Word via E-Mail That He Died. In April.

September 19, 2011, 7:21 pm

As students waited last week for Henry Teune to show up to teach their political-science course at the University of Pennsylvania, an e-mail message arrived telling them that they needn’t wait any longer: Professor Teune had died five months earlier, and the course should have been canceled.

Under the Button, the student blog at the University of Pennsylvania, published the message that Penn’s political-science department administrator sent out to the students:

——Original Message——
From: Jennifer Bottomley
Subject: PSCI 291-301 Canceled
Sent: Sep 13, 2011 2:23 PM

PSCI 291-301 is canceled.
We are so sorry for this last minute cancellation.
With Dr. Henry Teune’s passing, this course should have been cancelled
over the summer and was an oversight.

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  • beckyfoust

    Enjoyed this lovely poem and Lisa’s thoughts on beauty and art.

  • larsenjeanne

    Yes, beautiful poem. Thanks, Lisa. And yes yes yes, a relief to think that the era in which to “aestheticize” is a bad thing is over. (Stinky word, of course, but…really!)

  • Guest

    Ouch.

  • tptrekker

    Inexcusable. U Penn political science administrator, do your job!

  • fullprof99

    I guess this could add to the academic folklore about how long students should have to wait for a full prof. to show up to teach a class.

  • 22086364

     Wow.  I guess we’re all just bricks in the wall.

  • alan_kors

    This is very sad.  Henry was not only a wonderful individual, but he had been a major force in faculty affairs for decades and in trying to maintain some small semblance of faculty self-governance.  He was a person of great dignity, and it a scandal that this has occurred.  

  • jcas3309

    Wow – as a Penn Alumni and administrator in higher education for many years, this is unacceptable. I am sure there is a process in the provost office for this; how many departmental meetings did they have within this period?

    F. John Case 

  • vandoesborgh

    None. It was summer.

  • soc_sci_anon

    As an administrator, you presumably know that most faculty at R1s are on 9-month contracts, and they spend their summers doing research, not sitting in faculty meetings.

    Also, even if the faculty met over the summer, it’s not their job to make sure the administrative staff — whether in the department or at the university registrar’s level — doesn’t screw up.

    Two screw-ups: not cancelling the class, and, once the error was discovered, sending an e-mail rather than walking over to the class to speak to the students in person. Now that’s just tacky.

  • sibyl

    This is a failure of several levels.  Where was the director of undergraduate studies?  The department chair?  The dean?  The provost?  The registrar?  What about even the advisors of the undergraduates who signed up for the class?  Did any of them wonder, hmm, I wonder whether any of my students signed up for Henry’s class and whether I should encourage them to take something else?

  • 153584ods

    As an administrator in student services/affairs I have to point out this situation is a perfect example of the disconnect between academic and service divisions. We in student services/affairs seldom hear about significant events, like a death, in a timely way especially when it is a coworker in another division. I’m sure the first people to find out about this faculty member’s death were his fellow faculty/department chair in his own department.  I am sure the dept. chair notified his/her dean, who, I’m sure notified human resources, etc. At most universities/colleges, what courses are offered and/or cancelled is the department/division’s decision so it follows that if a course is cancelled (for whatever reason) it would be the dept/division/etc. responsibility to notify the registrar and follow-up to make sure it doesn’t show up in the online courseofferings listing (which for those institutions using online registration will be the most up to date course listing).  I have to agree with soc_sci_anon on one point, however, no matter how you cut it, sending an e-mail was ‘just tacky’ 

  • suzannewayne

    It seems to me that Penn should have found a replacement instructor for this course. Are the students still able to add another class at this time? What about the students, who in losing this course from their schedule, are no longer full-time and whose federal financial aid (which requires full-time status) may be in jeopardy? Or what about the students who need this course this semester to continue progressing toward their degree?

  • info8036

    No reason not to stay on top of things.

  • cp3242

    Terrible! It seems as if technology services should be responsible for some sort of checklist by which a person is removed from the university system — courses, payroll, phonathon, etc. — upon death. We recently caught an error in which the university was poised to email a family email account with the father’s name in the subject line, despite the fact that he had died a few months prior. Although everyone was aware of his death, we did not have a series of checkpoints in place to remind us of all the varied systems storing his name as the primary point of contact for the student. If your campus is like mine, you utilize lots of homegrown systems, in addition to a central system. It’s nearly impossible to remember all the places you need to check and double-check. 

  • http://singingstring.org/ asongbird

    Talk about your Ghost in the Machine!

  • http://www.facebook.com/kgschneider K.G. Schneider

    Dr. Teune didn’t die “over summer.” He died in April, and the campus website ran an obit for him: http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/volumes/v57/n30/obit.html As did the student newspaper: http://thedp.com/index.php/article/2011/04/political_science_professor_henry_teune_dies_at_75

    I feel for the students, and I also feel for Dr. Teune.

  • copesan

    It is the job of the department chair supervise the administrative staff in his/her department! and  to do the final check of the roster for fall courses.  The department administrator should not take the fall for this in the absence of adequate support and supervision.  “Department administrators” work under a wide variety of conditions – its not necessarily a standard description – different departments work things out in different ways – but the bottom line is that too many of them end up being the cleanup staff for things which faculty and department leadership were supposed to do, were responsible to do, and then when they don’t and things screw up, run around with their hair on fire.  Also, many administrative staff do not work on a 12 month calendar but on a 9 or 10 month contract.  So don’t blame the administrative staff until you have more evidence of how this particular department works and whether they make it possible for their staff to function effectively.

  • copesan

    No – U Penn department chair, do your job!

  • mdwoodhull

    This would have never happened at a small private school……   ;)

  • wassall

    Perhaps the Political Science department could have still run the course by pulling a “Weekend at Bernie’s.” I wonder if the students would have noticed.

  • happyhistory

    One would think, right?  I had the misfortune to spend a number of years at a small private school where the provost once bragged to me that the president didn’t even know a faculty member who had been teaching at the school for close to 50 years….the provost thought he/she was being funny by making such a remark….I was aghast, and went home that night saying “time to go elsewhere”…not a school even the size of Penn, but a tiny little place. 

  • Dr_Zachary_Smith

    Academic freedom is the freedom to teach even when you’re dead.

  • nykol

    OMG. Are you joking here? Foremost, the Department Chair is accountable for this mishaps because she/he should be aware of faculty members’ status in the department, viz. who will be teaching for that particular semester, who has taken sabbatical, who has pass away. This is truly a major protocol issue here as to how news of a faculty member is communicated to the students, the entire University community. But to notify the students in an email is unprofessional, uncaring, insensitive,  and a cowardly act. To recapitulate, the Chair dropped the ball indeed!

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_RSRD4KFLLVQHEM4QYHLLFBQR6M chaz

    C’est la vie!

  • rmelton5

    Another, if lesser, embarrassment is the grammatical construction of the final sentence: ”This course should have been cancelled over the summer and was an oversight.” According to Ms. bottomley’s construction, the course itself was an oversight, rather than the error itself.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Weds-Bunneh/100001763898247 Weds Bunneh

    How was it “last minute”?

  • plinthic

    The name Dr Teune is an anagram for “tenured”.  Coincidence?

  • ruritania

    Alumnus.

  • Mark Graff

    It’s time to FIRE the dept. chair for a major SCREW UP. Don’t try to make it look better by calling it a mishap or referring to the hierarchy that includes the dean, the dean of academic affairs, the provost, or the guy who sits on his ass collecting ASS DOUGH!! If enough people get fired, then MAYBE the system will be accountable to THE STUDENTS who are (supposedly) the reason for the system’s existence!!

  • Mark Graff

    I don’t know which is worse: the administrator’s pride in ignorance or a prof who stubbornly refused to retire after 40+ years……in either case, it shows how bad American education is.

  • llouis

    This will be a fabulous example to use in library instruction classes to discuss research, peer review and the scholarly conversation.

  • chandrak

    It is a very interesting discussion.  However, so far no one knows exactly how birds navigate.

  • greenhills73

    Man cannot fathom the brilliant mysteries of our creator, yet he has endowed us with a curiousity that keeps us busily trying to solve them.   

  • x7c00

    From now on I will take BirdBrain as a complement.
    Regards,
    Tim

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