From the issue dated October 31, 2003
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4 Fateful LettersProfessors denied tenure at a small private college in Wisconsin fight back
Waukesha, Wis. On a cold, blustery Saturday last semester, Kevin McMahon and his wife, Charlene, were planning to catch a late lunch and perhaps a movie. It had been a stressful year for the two assistant professors of chemistry at Carroll College, with a toddler at home and the strain of coming up for tenure at the same time. But just before their babysitter arrived, so did two certified letters from Carroll's president. One said that Mr. McMahon had won tenure. The other said that his wife had not. Instead of going to lunch, the couple left to find a private place to talk. They drove to a nearby Target store, where they sat in their parked car and cried. That same day, three other Carroll professors -- two in religion and philosophy and one in computer science -- received letters similar to Ms. McMahon's, saying they had lost their bids for tenure. Mr. McMahon was one of only two professors who did earn tenure. News of the unprecedented number of denials hit this small campus of white stone buildings like a bomb. The entire five-member Tenure and Promotion Committee, which had recommended the professors, resigned in protest, calling the decisions by the Board of Trustees an "egregious miscarriage of justice." Professors and students here have rallied around the four faculty members, voting no confidence in President Frank S. Falcone last spring and marching this month along the campus's perimeter to chants of "Justice for faculty" and "Falcone must go." After the march, the professors in religion and computer science announced that they had filed a lawsuit against the college for breach of contract. And Ms. McMahon has already lodged a gender-discrimination complaint with the state. All of them want to keep their jobs. "They shot us in the back," says Penny S. Johnson, the assistant professor of computer science. Carroll officials won't talk about the individual tenure cases or the legal charges, but they say the private college, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, has done nothing wrong. Every year professors at colleges around the country come up for tenure -- and, inevitably, some of them miss the mark. But what has made the decisions here so unsettling and unusual, some people say, is that by all accounts each of the four professors excelled in teaching, research, and service -- the traditional standards by which tenure candidates are judged. Nonetheless, Carroll's president and trustees simply decided that it didn't make good business sense to keep them. Financial issues typically don't figure into tenure cases unless a college is facing financial collapse, or enrollment is declining and a college wants to close a program. Neither is the case at Carroll. "This is very unusual," says Cathy Ann Trower, a senior researcher at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education and an expert on tenure. She predicts that the denials will raise doubts about the stability of tenure, particularly because the decisions follow the layoffs of tenured professors at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln amid budget problems last spring. "It only takes something like this, that gets a lot of recognition, to spark a whole new wave of questioning," she says. Gary W. Stevens, president of the Faculty Executive Committee at Carroll, calls what happened here "a general attack on tenure." The American Association of University Professors agrees, and complained late last month in letters to Carroll's president and board chairman. What has angered people most is that the college plans to fill at least three of the four jobs with instructors who will not be eligible for tenure. "We believe that withholding tenure for qualified candidates in order to replace them with non-tenure-track faculty is inimical to the principles of academic freedom which tenure serves," say the AAUP's letters. But Mr. Falcone, the president, says that the college, while financially healthy, "has a very small margin for error." He adds, "Carroll fits into the profile of many small schools in that we don't have a lot of financial flexibility, and so we've become very cautious on long-term commitments." Offering tenure, he says, is an expensive proposition: "If somebody gets tenure at 35, then you're thinking about 30 more years at least." For each professor, he says, "our calculation is that this represents a $2-million financial obligation." While Carroll students are increasingly interested in its professional programs, five of the six professors who were up for tenure last semester were in the liberal arts, where enrollment has been slipping. And all six were concentrated in just three academic departments, meaning that if Carroll granted all of them tenure, it risked "tenuring up" some departments, says Mr. Falcone. "This closes off the opportunity for bringing in new faculty members in the future," he argues. Unusual Offer Well before the letters arrived at the McMahons' home that day last semester, there were signs of trouble in Carroll's chemistry department. Three of its four professors were coming up for tenure at about the same time. Last fall Lynne L. Bernier, vice president for academic affairs, shocked the department by asking if one of the three wanted to step out of the running and accept a non-tenure-track post. Joseph J. Piatt, who was up for tenure in chemistry along with the McMahons and got it, remembers thinking that the offer was unorthodox. "All of us thought it was unfair to be hired in a tenure line but told right before you're submitting your package that there's going to be a tenure quota," he says. None of the three accepted Ms. Bernier's offer -- which immediately established a competition for the two tenured slots. Ms. McMahon, who had started her academic career at McMurry University, in Texas, before moving to Carroll in 2000, wasn't required to submit her tenure file for another year. But she rushed forward with it so she wouldn't be left out of the mix. Even so, Ms. McMahon believed that she had at least as good a chance as the two men. With just 2,000 undergraduates, Carroll expects professors to form close ties with students, who often drop in on professors to talk not just about classes but about personal problems. In her three years at Carroll, Ms. McMahon had come to be considered a role model for female students interested in science, and she had attracted a faithful following. "The number of students I teach is greater than anyone else in the department," she says. Michael D. Schuder, chairman of the department, supported all three of the junior professors. Last fall he wrote a letter to the Tenure and Promotion Committee praising Ms. McMahon. "I foresee her assuming the role of department chair very quickly after tenure," he wrote, adding that she was "a perfect fit for Carroll and the chemistry department." The idea that Carroll planned to grant tenure to only two of the three chemistry professors plunged Ms. McMahon, who is 34, into a depression. "I couldn't get out of bed," she says. Her mother came from Montana last year to help with housework and ended up staying for more than two months. "I thought, What am I gonna do if it's me who doesn't get it?" the professor recalls. The only answer that came to mind: "I would sit in a corner all day in my basement." For Ms. McMahon, whose parents had never attended college, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus and having an academic career was a dream come true. "Teaching is everything I've wanted to do my entire life," she says. She and her husband didn't like the idea of picking up and starting over. They had met at McMurry but had grown fond of this friendly Midwestern town about 15 miles outside of Milwaukee, where they'd bought a Victorian-era duplex, taken down walls, made curtains, and refinished furniture. Around the time they filed their tenure documents last fall, they learned that Ms. McMahon was pregnant with their second child. No Warning Ms. Johnson, the 34-year-old assistant professor of computer science, says that unlike the chemistry professors, she received no warning that her position at Carroll was precarious. The college hired her in 1998, a year before she'd even earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "I heard constantly I was a shoo-in for tenure," she says, noting that during reviews of her performance in her second and fourth years, "there was never a hint of trouble." In a letter that her chairman wrote last February, he called her "one of the primary department 'go to' individuals," and he called her teaching "excellent." So sure was Ms. Johnson that she would earn tenure that when the certified letter arrived at her home last semester, she tore it open, glanced at it, and announced to her husband, "I got tenure." It was her husband who, reading it over more closely, noticed its specifying that the Board of Trustees had voted "not" to grant her tenure. Panicked, she immediately went to the Internet to search for job advertisements. The next day she sent off 12 applications. "I felt obligated to keep my family up and running," says Ms. Johnson, whose husband is a maintenance worker for a hardware store in their hometown of Sauk City, about a 90-minute drive from the campus. As is customary, Carroll gave all four professors a final year to teach at the college. But in August it offered them "presidential leave." They would receive a year's pay and be released from all responsibilities at the college. Ms. Johnson was the only one to take it. The others felt that it was a ploy by Carroll to get rid of them quickly and without a fight. Last month, after Ms. Johnson had cleared out her office, she talked to a reporter amid boxes and four hefty white-and-black binders that contained her tenure dossier. She will bank her Carroll salary this year and start working this month as an instructor, off the tenure track, at Moraine Park Technical College, in Fond du Lac. But because she will earn about $20,000 less there, her husband will not be able to stay at home, as they had planned, to care for their infant daughter, Mandy. Faculty Leaders Nelia Beth Scovill and Joel J. Heim were considered up-and-coming young scholars by many at Carroll, reputations they had built since joining the faculty in 1998. The two are married, a fact they say administrators did not realize when they were each invited to interview for one tenure-track position in the college's religion department six years ago. Ms. Scovill got the job and Mr. Heim came along, teaching part time and then full time until, three years ago, he was appointed to a tenure-track job in the newly merged department of religion and philosophy -- the same one as Ms. Scovill. Both are ordained ministers of the Christian Church (Disciplines of Christ). Mr. Heim, who is 44, redesigned the philosophy minor and earned excellent teaching evaluations from students, who said he was "caring and understanding," "there to help at any time," and had a "passion for the material." He is one of the few assistant professors at Carroll to serve on the college's Faculty Executive Committee, a group of elected faculty representatives. Ms. Scovill, who is 39, says that while considering her case last fall, members of the Tenure and Promotion Committee urged her to consider running for president of the executive committee. She says they wondered aloud, "If you were asked to be part of the administration, what would you say?" She says, "They clearly saw me as a leader." Mr. Heim was home alone on the Saturday that the tenure news arrived in the mail. When he opened the letters, "I actually laughed," he recalls. "It was just so bizarre." Shortly after the news became public last spring, the chairman of the religion-and-philosophy department retired after 34 years at Carroll. In denying Mr. Heim and Ms. Scovill tenure, the department is left with no tenure-track faculty members. A $2-million Obligation President Falcone calls the tenure denials "fiscally driven decisions," based on the "institutional needs" of the college. But he acknowledges that the college is not facing a "financial exigency" that threatens its survival or that may force the closure of academic programs -- the only times, according to AAUP guidelines, that finances should be allowed to affect tenure. "This," he says, "is where we diverge with the AAUP." Mr. Falcone has good reason to be concerned about the college's financial health. Ten years ago he was hired to clean up a financial mess at Carroll. Enrollment had slipped below projections, and the college was facing what the president calls a "life threatening" $1-million deficit. Since then, enrollment has risen by more than 50 percent, to 2,052 full-time students, and the college's endowment has more than doubled, to $29-million. But Mr. Falcone says that despite those positive signs, when the trustees did the math, they decided that they couldn't afford to grant tenure to all six professors last year. While five of the six were in the liberal arts, the proportion of students enrolling at Carroll to study in professional fields like health sciences and business, has increased to 69 percent from 58 percent over the past decade. Meanwhile, liberal-arts enrollment has been dropping. In a letter that Ms. Bernier, the vice president for academic affairs, wrote last spring about Ms. McMahon, she said the board's decision to deny tenure "was not based on an absence of merit" on the professor's part. Rather, she wrote, "The board's decision was in response to short- and long-term institutional needs." She wrote similar letters about the other three professors. But the faculty members note that there is no mention of "institutional needs" in the document that lays out the conditions for faculty employment at Carroll. Instead, that document -- which the college considers a contract between each professor and the Board of Trustees -- says candidates for tenure will be evaluated "based upon the needs of the instructional program of the college and a candidate's potential for contributing to those needs." To those who did not get tenure, that refers to whether their courses were in demand, something they say is true in each of their cases. The number of students majoring in chemistry has doubled since 1995, to 83, and the number of religion majors has risen to 13 from just 3. Gerald L. Isaacs, chairman of the computer-science department, acknowledges that Ms. Johnson's courses were popular, and that the college is scrambling to staff them. Still, he says, it has always been clear that overall "institutional needs" factor into tenure decisions. "A small college like Carroll, with a small endowment, cannot afford to be everything to everybody," he says. "Tough decisions have to be made." But a lawyer for Ms. Scovill, Mr. Heim, and Ms. Johnson says, "We believe that the evidence in this case presents a striking example of an institution failing to follow its own written contractual criteria for making tenure decisions." Pilgrim Christian Church, where Ms. Scovill and Mr. Heim are members, has started a legal-defense fund for the four professors. Some students at Carroll held a sit-in outside the president's office last semester to protest the tenure decisions. Haakon Haakenson, a senior who helped organize the protest, is concerned about the college's plans to replace at least three of the four faculty members with non-tenure-track instructors. "It is beneficial to have people here who have an investment in the curriculum," he says, "and with people on one- or two-year contracts, you don't have that same sense of ownership." Ms. McMahon says that she is still "in mourning" for her job, but that daily doses of Paxil control her depression now. The college, she believes, denied her tenure because she was pregnant and female, a charge that forms the basis of the complaint she made to the state's equal-opportunity agency. "They've messed with the wrong woman," she says. The tenure decisions have caused some friction at home between Ms. McMahon and her husband. "Why did they have to choose him over me?" she asks. But she notes through tears that he has been nothing but supportive, and has never celebrated his own tenure success. Mr. McMahon, who has a wry sense of humor and likes to make witty cracks, grows darker when acknowledging that the tenure decisions have "poisoned" his feelings about Carroll College. "Some random, uneducated decision by the Board of Trustees," he says, "has suddenly ruined our lives. http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 50, Issue 10, Page A10 |
Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education