From the issue dated September 17, 1999
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Denying Tenure: Who Said Anything About Fairness?
By KAREN SAWISLAK
"Now let me see if I have this straight," "Your department at Stanford approved your tenure bid by a vote of 26-0, with one abstention, and a humanities-and-sciences, senior-faculty promotions committee voted 5-1 in your favor? And then the dean of humanities and sciences, after reviewing your case with his associate deans, denied your promotion?" "That's right," I said. "Then," my friend continued, "in the course of an internal grievance procedure, the dean of humanities and sciences rejected the complaint you filed, and the provost upheld his decision? But after that, the majority report of the highest panel of faculty review at the university found that the deans had not had compelling reasons to reject the department's recommendation, and had not given adequate weight to a book you were working on or to letters from outside scholars who had reviewed your work?" "Yes," I said. "The board found that your grievance, in which you asked for tenure, should be granted?" "Yes." "Then the president set aside that faculty panel's determination, but offered to reinstate you as an assistant professor -- on the condition that you undergo the entire tenure-review process again?" "Right," I said. "And you refused?" "Right." My friend sighed and put down her pencil. "I'm sorry to keep asking you to go over the details," she said. "It's just that I find this very odd." That is the true account of my effort, starting in October 1996, to be promoted and tenured in the history department at Stanford University. I loved my work, and I know that I excelled at my job. I am convinced that I was treated unfairly -- that's why I fought for almost two years to overturn the negative decision. And that's why -- despite the fact that I beat very long odds by "winning" an appeals process that is not designed to favor the grievant -- I have started law school this year. Stanford's president, Gerhard Casper, concluded that my grievance had merit on very limited grounds: that my department had given me "exceedingly incautious counseling" about my progress in meeting the standards for tenure. I believe much more was at issue. My mentors in the history department had honestly communicated to me their understanding of what it took to be tenured, and they -- and I -- believed I had met those standards. I had published one book, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874, with the University of Chicago Press in 1995. An outside reviewer of my case had been on the committee for the Bancroft Prize -- one of the top awards in my field -- and told Stanford that my book had been a finalist in the competition. I had written two articles based on the book, five book reviews, had two more articles under consideration for publication when I came up for tenure, and was at work on a second book. But the humanities and sciences dean, John Shoven, wrote me that he and his associate deans had concerns about the quality and quantity of my scholarship, and that while my teaching was "excellent," it was "not sufficiently exceptional" to override other concerns. What the dean didn't talk about was a pattern I found as I prepared the first grievance I filed with Stanford. As I alleged in that document, during Dean Shoven's term of office, he had approved all six of the men put forward for tenure by my department. Of the four cases that involved women, he approved one, approved another with a demotion in rank, and denied two. At present, there are 34 tenured members of the Stanford history department: 29 are men, and 5 are women. I believe that the worst thing that even my harshest critics ever said about my tenure case was that it was "borderline," and that it just as easily might have been decided in my favor. But at the same time, I also believe that, in the years since I was first hired, top administrators at Stanford have backed away from the idea that consideration of a candidate's race or gender might properly figure in the promotions process, even as a minimal check meant to guard against unconscious bias. The provost at the time I came up for tenure, Condoleeza Rice, has publicly stated that the university has had a long-standing policy of considering affirmative-action issues in faculty hiring, but not in tenure or promotion decisions. The advisory board that reviewed my case "found no evidence that affirmative action policy or practice changed" while I was employed, but it did express "concern about the lack of a clearly articulated, widely disseminated, University-wide policy on some aspects of faculty affirmative action." At best, I would say, Stanford's policy in this area is mired in confusion. That's why I have filed a sex-discrimination complaint against Stanford with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission -- and why I will not accept the terms that Mr. Casper has set forth for my reinstatement. Even if I were to submit again to a complete tenure review, I do not think it is possible for such an evaluation to proceed with any sort of real fairness or objectivity. I do not think it was fair the first time around, long before my tenure bid became a cause celebre. And it is difficult for me to trust in the good faith of all who would conduct a new review, since I have been told that, after my grievance was under way, some of my former history-department colleagues wrote to the dean to qualify their prior support for my promotion. Then there is the matter of my mental health. I value it, and I cannot even begin to imagine the emotional toll of allowing Stanford to decide my professional fate again. I have a long list of academic achievements. I earned my Ph.D. at a top program (Yale) in impressive time (five years), and worked for eight years in a first-rank department. I have broad experience as a teacher of graduate and undergraduate students, excellent student evaluations, and a highly regarded first book. My second book is well under way, and that project has already been awarded three nationally competitive humanities fellowships. I have won many other honors. Last year, I found a temporary haven in a research appointment at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard and staved off unemployment. But all I have to show for two years of a fairly extensive search for another teaching position is a stack of more than 20 rejection letters. I will soon be 37 years old, I need to earn my own living, and I am unwilling to continue to face the uncertainty of the history job market. So this year, I am sitting in entirely new classrooms, as a first-year student at Boalt Hall, the law school at the University of California at Berkeley. I plan to study labor and employment law. I have spent a long time trying to understand why I was denied tenure. This was my first serious encounter with professional failure. It was a shock, and it took some time for me not to feel that I had done something wrong, that I just wasn't good enough. As anyone who has been denied tenure can attest, the institution and its defenders do their best to reinforce such a sense of personal inadequacy and shame. In my case, colleagues expressed their dismay and surprise at the dean's decision, but they also warned that an appeal would be painful. Was the implication that I had shortcomings that I might want to hide? But I did not go quietly, as expected. As soon as I saw the contents of my tenure file, even in the redacted form allowed me by the university, it was clear to me that something was very wrong. So I publicized my situation, gathered information, retained outstanding lawyers, wrote endless appeals, and found my way to other women who had suffered similar injuries. Perhaps, as I had been warned, an open fight with Stanford killed my chances of moving to another academic job. But I felt that my best choice was to search for answers that I could believe. The most meaningful result of refusing to accept Stanford's judgment is that I now know that I did not fail. Quite the reverse: There is no doubt in my mind that Stanford failed to treat me with fairness or with equity. My experience, while perhaps extreme, in many ways reflects the larger reality of what are hard times for virtually all young Ph.D.'s. There is a labor glut, and many institutions see little utility in granting lifetime positions to faculty members who can easily be replaced with entry-level newcomers. The minority of applicants who do make it to the tenure track often face mysteriously shifting standards of review, and a tenure bar often raised to levels far beyond the achievements that had been required of the same senior colleagues who decide our fates. In an era of diminished respect for scholarly and disciplinary expertise, administrators regularly overturn the recommendations of their faculties. At top research universities like Stanford, junior faculty members face the double trouble of managers who are cost- and status-conscious. With eyes only for the "best of the best," those managers increasingly reserve the prize of tenure for a handful of proven, often high-priced "stars." There is also the double bind that confronts female and minority faculty members at elite institutions. We are poorly represented; we often shoulder extensive teaching, advising, and service loads. As a consequence, it is harder for us to do the research and gain the reputations that truly "count." But when it's time for our tenure reviews, we still face the hurdle of supposedly neutral evaluations meant to determine our future promise. And our employers increasingly prefer not to spell out the standards by which we will be judged. Stanford's president was stunningly blunt in making that point to me, when he wrote that "the tenure decision is a prediction; it is not a matter of 'equity,' as you argue. One does not 'earn' tenure. Instead, the University makes complex decisions on the basis of which lifetime appointments are granted or withheld." The president approvingly quoted from the minority opinion of the committee that heard my grievance: "Because the larger context in which the predictive decision is made is constantly changing and is, to some extent, outside the control of the candidate, there are no hard and fast criteria for tenure. The latter is an unsettling thought to untenured faculty." Unsettling indeed. Such a stance is a recipe for favoritism and discrimination. It is significant that men in the humanities at Stanford are far more likely to be successful in their tenure bids than are women. I was hired in 1990 and came up for tenure in 1997. For example, in my cohort, people hired from 1986 through 1991, 8 women were denied tenure in the humanities and 6 were granted it; 6 men were denied tenure, and 12 granted it. In 1997-98, according to the American Association of University Professors, only 11.4 per cent of Stanford full professors were women; 28.8 per cent of associate professors were women; and 26.7 per cent of assistant professors were women. In 1998-99, 12.4 per cent of full professors were women; 26.2 per cent of associate professors were women; and 28.8 per cent of assistant professors were women. Gender and racial biases can and do affect decision making at colleges and universities around the country, especially in the complex and inherently subjective calculations such as those involved in tenure reviews. But if it is policy that individuals rise or fall according to shifting notions of "merit," there is little way to identify discrimination. As Mr. Casper wrote me, equity is not a goal of the Stanford tenure process. But Stanford has a real problem with gender equity. Some highly publicized gender-equity cases have given the medical school the reputation of a notorious boys' club. Stanford's overall percentage of female faculty members has long been below the average percentage for both public and private research universities. Indeed, the percentages of female faculty members on the science, engineering, and humanities faculties at Stanford appear to be lower than the percentages for similarly titled units at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- which recently acknowledged that it was guilty of systemic bias against the women on its science faculty. But when then-provost Rice was asked about M.I.T.'s admission at a meeting of the faculty senate last spring, she said the situations were different. She further stated that she had reservations about the methodology that M.I.T. investigators had employed (although she also noted in the meeting that "we could all do better"). Some of the same data that Stanford officials seem unconcerned about have now captured the attention of the federal government. Last year, I helped to organize a charge of systemic gender discrimination at the university that has been filed with the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. More than 30 present and former Stanford female faculty members and researchers have now joined the complaint. The university's compliance with federal equal-employment law -- and whether it maintains an adequate plan for hiring and promoting female and minority faculty members -- is at issue; its ability to receive over $500-million per year in federal funds is at stake. We complainants, and many others on the campus, eagerly await the results of the continuing investigation. I am a historian. I know that people often differ in their understanding of facts, and that there are many ways to tell a story or make an argument. But I have been trained to seek out all the evidence, and to be aware of my own biases as I puzzle out meanings. As a scholar and teacher, I am deeply committed to such methods and to their underlying values. It is a source of sadness to me that my tenure struggle has made me wonder if evidence actually matters much in academic administration. In his offer to reinstate me, Mr. Casper made a point of rejecting a key finding of the majority of the faculty board that had reviewed my case: "I particularly disagree with the Advisory Board majority's suggestion that, if the Dean decides to reject the recommendation of the Department and the School's Appointments and Promotions Committee, the burden of proof somehow shifts to the Dean to demonstrate that he has 'compelling' reasons to do so," he wrote. Months later, I still stare at that sentence with disbelief. How can a great university, a place supposedly devoted to truth-seeking and analytic rigor, decide the question of who warrants promotion in a way that seems like so much hocus-pocus? Tenure, as the president wrote me, is based on a "prediction." There are no set criteria for judgment, and proudly so. One does not earn tenure; equity is not a concern; and a decision maker need not have compelling reasons for an action. Stanford administrators swear up and down, to me and to everyone else, that their tenure process is fair. I think they sincerely believe that. But how can the rest of us be sure? Because those who run the system say it is so? So I am continuing my battle. I hold in reserve the prospect of mounting a lawsuit as an individual, and currently wait for the two Labor Department agencies with which I have filed claims to move forward. I want the E.E.O.C. to closely compare my qualifications to those of the men who were promoted to tenure in my department by the same dean who denied my bid. Like me, Stanford shows no sign of giving up. University officials appear to be arguing that my rejection of their offer to return and face the tenure review again is irrational, and that my sex-discrimination claim is frivolous. We shall see whose arguments ultimately prevail. "You're not going to like this," my good friend warned, as she started to tell me about a lunch conversation at the Stanford Humanities Center, where a young assistant professor voiced his opinion that the fact that I had declined reappointment in favor of law school merely confirmed that I was "not a true scholar." My friend was right. I hate to hear things like that, to be reminded that I remain the object of profound misjudgments. I also hate that Stanford officials accuse me of demanding that they lower their proverbial standards for a woman. I hate the fact that it is so hard to open the eyes of most people who themselves have not experienced discrimination to the unfairness and inequities that structure the academy. And it disturbs me to know that some of the readers of this piece are likely to dismiss me as an unqualified, angry, whining woman. All I can say is that, even though I have decided to move on to law school, my own sense of my worth as a scholar is undiminished. Since I was denied tenure, my ability to think clearly and critically has been my salvation. Refusing to accept obvious answers, uncovering buried information, and analyzing complex circumstances have taught me a great deal, and have led me to what I can accept as the truth of the matter. But anyone would be right to think that I am angry. Karen Sawislak is a law student at Boalt Hall at the University of California at Berkeley.
http://chronicle.com Section: Opinion & Arts Page: B4
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Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education