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Fired for Flunking Students

Steven Aird, an associate professor of biology at Norfolk State University, is getting the boot at the end of this semester for flunking most of his students and resisting university pressure to dumb down his classes, The Virginian-Pilot reports.

For more than four years, Aird has carried on a running battle in which NSU administrators repeatedly pressed him to raise his pass rate and he steadfastly refused.

Twice, he was denied tenure and issued a one-year terminal contract, meaning he would have to leave at the end of the year. After the first denial, he filed a grievance. A faculty grievance committee found in his favor, ruling that the tenure decision was flawed by procedural violations and retaliatory actions by administrators.

He reapplied and was turned down again, despite a favorable recommendation by a departmental tenure review committee. Citing seven classes in which 83 to 95 percent of his students got a D or F, Sandra DeLoatch, dean of the School of Science and Technology, wrote that Aird’s “core problem” was “the overwhelming failure of the vast majority of the students he teaches.”

His bosses say it’s the teacher’s responsibility to make sure the lessons are getting through.

Aird, on the other hand, says coddling students who don’t pass muster does them a disservice: “I really care about my students,” he told the reporter, Bill Sizemore. “That’s why I refuse to lower the bar. The objective should be competence, not grades.”

Aird isn’t the only professor who’s felt pressure to lower his academic standards, Sizemore writes. He quotes Joseph Hall, a chemistry professor and president of the Faculty Senate, who said that …

“faculty are – I’ll use a nice word – encouraged to try and pass 70 percent of their students.” If the rate drops below 70 percent, [Hall] said, “faculty are called in and asked to explain what they’re going to do about it.”

Sharon Hoggard, a spokeswoman for Norfolk State, denies the assertion that the university is setting the bar lower, Sizemore writes:

“It goes against our very mission, which is to provide an affordable high-quality education for an ethnically and culturally diverse student population,” Hoggard said in an e-mail response to the Pilot. She pointed out that NSU is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, for which it must meet stringent standards.

Read the whole story.

The Siren Call of an Overseas Position

In my previous post on good advice from mentors, I mentioned that of not taking an overseas position while I was A.B.D. I thought I’d follow up on that.

During my doctoral program, I received a February phone call out of the blue from a dean at a college with an overseas branch. The campus was in a quiet, tropical country. It was near the beach. The pay was extremely good in terms of the local economy: “most of our faculty have house servants, in fact.” It was near the beach. The position included two round-trip airfares, special insurance for medevac air ambulance if necessary, and the prospect of tax-free income if I kept my days in the States within a certain limit that’s established by the feds. It was near the beach. The teaching load was very nice, with extended vacation periods. Did I mention that it was near the beach?

I was intrigued by the position and the prospect of such an experience, but I was in the early stages of being A.B.D. My mentors each said, “NO! DON’T DO IT!” I think they actually spoke in all caps, in fact! They were emphatic.

My A.B.D. status was in large part the reason I declined the kind offer, but it was so tempting. I have a feeling that there are wonderful opportunities afforded by overseas positions, but I likewise sense that timing is everything in terms of how such appointments will impact the job search down the road.

In most of the searches I’ve run, we have had at least one applicant who was serving in an overseas appointment. They are hard to treat equally because of time differences for phone calls, costs related to on-campus interviews, relocation expenses, and a ton of other reasons. Mind you, we have always tried to treat them fairly and to ignore those kinds of factors, but the challenges for overseas candidates are nigh unto insurmountable.

I do, however, know a few people who’ve held those kinds of positions and who have benefited from the experiences, though the benefits have been more personal than professional, I suspect.

I’m curious, though, about two things.

First, if you’ve had experience in an overseas appointment, what is your advice to others who are considering such a position?

Second, for those of you on the hiring committees, what’s the reality about how overseas candidates are treated?

News in Administrative Appointments

Richard McCarty, a renowned psychologist and dean of Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science, has been appointed as the university’s next provost. See a university press release for more details.
Jay Stein, founding director for the Center for Health and the Built Environment at the University of Florida’s College of Design, Construction and Planning, will become provost of the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh, effective July 1, the Press-Republican, a daily newspaper in Plattsburgh, reports.
Sidney A. Ribeau, president of Bowling Green State University, will become Howard University’s next president on August 1, the Washington Business Journal reports.
Chicago State University’s governing board has picked Frank Pogue Jr. as the university’s temporary chief, the Chicago Tribune reports. He replaces the controversial Elnora D. Daniel, who will step down at the end of June.

West Virginia U. Faculty Demands President's Resignation

Faculty members at West Virginia University have voted no confidence in Michael S. Garrison, the university’s president, and are calling for him to step down “for the good of the institution,” Paul Fain reports on The Chronicle’s Web site.

Demands for the president’s resignation come in the wake of a recent scandal in which the university retroactively awarded an M.B.A. to the state governor’s daughter, Heather M. Bresch, even though she had not completed enough credits to earn the degree, Fain writes.

The university’s provost and the dean of the business school resigned from their posts as a result of the scandal, “although both remain on the faculty, and Ms. Bresch’s degree was revoked,” he notes.

While an investigative panel’s report found that President Garrison was not personally involved in the matter, the president says he accepts “full and total responsibility for failures that led to the award of unearned credits and grades to a former student,” but has no plans to resign, writes Fain. He notes that “only the university’s Board of Governors can fire the president, and so far its members have expressed unanimous support for Mr. Garrison.”

Wise Advisories

I posted last week about bypassing a mentor’s advice against interviewing at a teaching institution. As I’ve reflected on that posting for a few days, I’ve pondered the good advice I received from my mentors. Two things come to mind.

First, they encouraged me to jump into the search process early on, when I had just reached A.B.D. status, even as they warned me explicitly that I was not likely to land a good job at that point. They told me that the search process was sort of a two-stage project, the first stage being the gaining of experience and the broadcasting of my name as a kind of advertising and the second being an earnest pursuit of my initial career appointment.

Next, they strongly urged me to pass up an appointment overseas when I was A.B.D. I had an intriguing offer, and the compensation looked pretty good relative to my graduate assistantship. One of my mentors told me, though, that accepting it while I was A.B.D. would put me into an 80-plus-percent likelihood of never finishing my dissertation because of trouble accessing resources (this was in the days before the Internet had taken over). At the time I thought he was being paranoid. Now I know that he was being judicious.

What was the best advice you ever received from a mentor? Did you realize that it was wise counsel at the time, or did you need a bit more experience to understand it better?

California State U. Sacks Another Quaker Instructor Over Loyalty Oath

Yet another Quaker instructor has been sacked by the California State University system for objecting to a state loyalty oath that clashes with her pacifist religious beliefs, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Wendy Gonaver, an American-studies lecturer at California State University at Fullerton, was fired the day before the start of classes because she would not “sign an oath swearing to ‘defend’ the U.S. and California constitutions ‘against all enemies, foreign and domestic’” unless she was allowed to include a statement explaining her views, “a practice allowed by other state institutions,” the reporter, Richard C. Paddock, writes. The university refused to grant her request.

Earlier this year, California State University at East Bay fired Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker mathematics instructor, for trying to add the word ?nonviolently? to the state loyalty oath and for refusing to sign it when the university did not allow her to add the word. She was later reinstated.

See an item on The Chronicle’s News Blog for more details.

Office Space

A friend of mine teaches at a school where a good deal of remodeling is under way. “They moved me,” she observed, “to a wonderful new office with a beautiful view. My old office, though, was mercifully converted into a hallway.”

I’d say that if your office is convertible into a corridor, it was not the nicest office in the world.

At my previous place of service, I had a fabulous office: on the corner, on the third floor, with a million-dollar view of the ancient quad. At my current institution, our newest buildings have very attractive offices, but I’m in an older building with sternly spartan offices. Even my decanal suite has nary a window.

I was thinking about this the other day and about how when I was on the market, I usually asked to see where my office would be. One school in North Carolina had almost palatial offices, with expansive views of the mountains. One in Florida was on the Intercoastal Waterway. Other places, though, were kind of sad, even depressing.

As you’ve made your rounds on the market, have any of you been either impressed or discouraged with the office space or lab facilities to such an extent that it impacted your decision to accept an offer?

Double Whammy for Wheaton Professor, and Other Reading

Kent Gramm, a popular and longtime English professor at Wheaton College, is out of a job because he won’t explain the reasons for divorcing his wife to college officials — as required by institutional policy, The Chicago Tribune reports.
Dean Dad explains why good administrators sometimes make bad decisions.
A study of postdoctoral researchers at Fermi National Laboratory found evidence of institutional gender bias there, Richard Monastersky reports on The Chronicle’s News Blog. The author, Sherry Towers, a physicist, examined the research productivity and career trajectories of 57 postdoctoral physicists working on Fermilab?s DZero collaboration, an experiment involving some 700 physicists around the world, from 1998-2006 and found that while female postdocs outproduced many of their male counterparts, they were much less likely to be permitted to present their papers at conferences, a fact that ultimately hurt their careers, Monastersky writes. See an article at Nature, and related posts at Historiann, Keeping It Simple, and Young Female Scientist.
The National Academy of Sciences has elected 72 new scientists to its ranks, 16 of them women, Jeffrey Brainard writes on the News Blog. That’s an improvement over last year, when only nine out of 90 were women, he notes.
Don’t miss an interesting discussion on The Chronicle’s Forums about how working professors cope with chronic illness, which was inspired by a recent post at Shifting Careers.

Is the U. of Idaho's President Leaving? and Other Presidential News

According to an article in today’s Idaho Statesman, the University of Idaho’s president, Timothy P. White, has informed the university’s governing board that he is being wooed by another institution. No word at this time on who’s recruiting him.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison has released the names of nine of the 55 applicants who applied for the job of chancellor, but one of them — Jorge V. José, vice president for research at the State University of New York at Buffalo — had asked that his name be kept secret, Paul Fain reports on The Chronicle’s News Blog. Uh-oh!
Meanwhile, the University of Oregon’s longtime president, David B. Frohnmayer, has said he will retire in June 2009, The Register-Guard, a daily newspaper out of Eugene, Ore., reports.
According to an article in the Houston Chronicle, Rick Perry, the Texas governor, thinks John Montford, a former state senator who’s currently a senior vice president at AT&T, would be an ideal choice for the job of University of Texas system chancellor. Montford was chancellor of the Texas Tech University system from 1996-2001.
Edna Mora Szymanski, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Maine at Orono, will become president of Minnesota State University at Moorhead on July 1. See a system press release for more details.
Western Washington University’s governing board has picked Bruce Shepard, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, as its next president, a WWU press release confirms. He’ll replace the longtime president Karen W. Morse, who is retiring in September.

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