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[chron9876]

This is not exactly a diversity thread, but related.

Is there such a thing as academic blacklist--that certain individuals are not hired, promoted, or accepted? I've heard about a few well known cases, mostly involving tenure denials (Princeton & Depaul) or conservative academics claiming to be marginalized in liberal campuses (Horowitz) etc. Have you witnessed or experienced such cases in real life, especially the ones involving influential senior academics? Are they isolated incidents of bullying or something you might consider a long-term blacklist?

[mouseman]

You are mixing things up here.  At most Ivies, tenure denial is the standard policy at all levels - this keeps up a supply of young pre-tenure faculty, and keeps tenured lines open for people who make a name for themselves elsewhere.  There are exceptions, and in fact Princeton has no small number of these - the E&E Department at Princeton tenures 2/3 of their faculty members hired as assistant professors, and this also seems to be the case in the Princeton CS department (most of their tenured faculty seem to have started at Princeton as assistant professors).

At DePaul, the people denied tenure were controversial (on the left, not the right), and mostly women and minorities - read up on these.  In fact, there seem far more politically motivated tenure denials of people on the left of the political spectrum than of people on right.

I'm also sure that within-discipline politics can affect the tenure processes of people who deviate from the standard theory of their field.  It wouldn't surprise me if there are many departments out there that regularly deny tenure to faculty who subscribe to theories and practices which are not popular with the rest of the department*.


* True, sometimes deviating from standard theory and practice demonstrates an inability to contribute to the field, such as a creationist in biological sciences, or a Young-Earther in astrophysics.  This is not always the case, though, a fact to which many people in many fields will attest.

[larryc]

There  is no literal blacklist of names, but there people who have put themselves beyond the pale, as Mouseman describes.

[midwestgrad]

There certainly is not a literal blacklist.  A tenure denial carries its own special stigma in many fields (especially the humanities, I think), but it has nothing to do with politics.  Regarding politics, there have been several well known cases of leftists being denied tenure in a politically-motivated process (as has been pointed out).  Frankly, I have never heard of a well-established case of a conservative being denied tenure for political reasons.  Perhaps those cases are out there, but I haven't seen them.

[donstefano]

I wouldn't use blacklists, but reputation effects. Reputation can be very powerful, but I have not seen it function in relation to political opinions or bullying. It's much more mundane: 'this person is a nice guy'. 'don't work with him, he's unreliable and never meets deadlines', 'this  guy is a pain in the ass, and everyone who ever worked for him ran away'. The academic world is small, and reputations travel fast. So yes, if early on in your career you have repeatedly missed publication or conference deadlines, you have pissed people off, and have slept around with grad students, you can be certain this will work against you in hiring, future research and publication opportunities etc. But this operates at the personal, not the ideological level. Unless you are a hard core ideological person and use every single occassion to whine on about it.