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Fired for tone?
Updated 4/6/07
The AAUP cautions against making collegiality a criterion for promotion review--and with good reason:
Collegiality is not a distinct capacity to be assessed independently of the traditional triumvirate of teaching, scholarship, and service. It is rather a quality whose value is expressed in the successful execution of these three functions. Evaluation in these three areas will encompass the contributions that the virtue of collegiality may pertinently add to a faculty member's career. The current tendency to isolate collegiality as a distinct dimension of evaluation, however, poses several dangers. Historically, 'collegiality' has not infrequently been associated with ensuring homogeneity, and hence with practices that exclude persons on the basis of their difference from a perceived norm. The invocation of 'collegiality' may also threaten academic freedom. In the heat of important decisions regarding promotion or tenure, as well as other matters involving such traditional areas of faculty responsibility as curriculum or academic hiring, collegiality may be confused with the expectation that a faculty member display 'enthusiasm' or 'dedication,' evince 'a constructive attitude' that will 'foster harmony,' or display an excessive deference to administrative or faculty decisions where these may require reasoned discussion. Such expectations are flatly contrary to elementary principles of academic freedom, which protect a faculty member's right to dissent from the judgments of colleagues and administrators.A distinct criterion of collegiality also holds the potential of chilling faculty debate and discussion. Criticism and opposition do not necessarily conflict with collegiality. Gadflies, critics of institutional practices or collegial norms, even the occasional malcontent, have all been known to play an invaluable and constructive role in the life of academic departments and institutions. They have sometimes proved collegial in the deepest and truest sense. Certainly a college or university replete with genial Babbitts is not the place to which society is likely to look for leadership. It is sometimes exceedingly difficult to distinguish the constructive engagement that characterizes true collegiality from an obstructiveness or truculence that inhibits collegiality. Yet the failure to do so may invite the suppression of dissent. The very real potential for a distinct criterion of 'collegiality' to cast a pall of stale uniformity places it in direct tension with the value of faculty diversity in all its contemporary manifestations.
Lest there be any doubt about how "collegiality" may be used to suppress the free exchange of ideas, to chill debate, and even to scupper the careers of dissenters, one need only look to the case of Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson, whose department disliked his temperate, reasoned objection to some of its politicized practices and so tried to deny him tenure for failing to be properly collegial.
It looks like DePaul is revisiting the issue of whether a professor's perceived civility--or lack thereof--should figure into tenure review. Controversial political science professor Norman Finkelstein received a positive (9-3) tenure vote in his department, and a 5-0 vote in favor of tenuring him from the college-wide personnel committee.
But now a dean has stepped in, and has raised the specter of collegiality, circulating a memo opposing Finkelstein that says, in part, that "the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein's published books ... border on character assassination" and that his tone violates "some basic tenets of discourse within an academic community." The dean goes on to note that Finkelstein's tone is "inconsistent with DePaul's Vincentian values, most particularly our institutional commitment to respect the dignity of the individual and to respect the rights of others to hold and express different intellectual positions." Finkelstein's case will be definitively decided in June -- so the memo does not accompany a decision to deny tenure to him, but it does reveal that Finkelstein is encountering some potentially job-ending criticism about his personal intellectual style -- or, to put it another way, about his collegiality.
ACTA is not privy to the facts and takes no position on Finkelstein's case. Without addressing whether Finkelstein deserves tenure, there are some things to note about the dean's introduction of collegiality criteria at this stage of the process.
Even if the dean's criticisms are content neutral, motivated entirely by a dispassionate assessment of Finkelstein's scholarly manners, there is a problem here, and that has to do with how entirely abusable and subjective such assessment is. Some are already drawing a connection between the dean's opposition to Finkelstein and Finkelstein's controversial position on Israel, arguing that opposing Finkelstein on the grounds of civility is simply a cover for opposing him on the basis of his politics. And that's the rub with collegiality criteria when they appear in tenure cases -- they only really come up at times when it's not possible to distinguish a scholar's manner from his beliefs, and as such they are always already profoundly tainted.
The dean's critique of Finkelstein--which was supposed to be confidential but was leaked to the media--exemplifies how criticism of a scholar's collegiality tends to shade into opposition to his viewpoint. Discussing Finkelstein's tone, and his tendency to attack fellow scholars, the dean writes, "I find this very characteristic aspect of his scholarship to compromise its value and find it to be reflective of an ideologue and polemicist who has a rather hurtful and mean-spirited sub-text to his critical scholarship -- not only to prove his point and others wrong but, also in my opinion, in the process, to impugn their veracity, honor, motives, reputations and/or their dignity ... I see this as a very damaging threat to civil discourse in a university and in society in general." Here an unpleasant tone is taken as proof that the person taking the tone is an ideologue without an argument. But being mean is not the same thing as not being right--or it shouldn't be. The problem with the dean's argument is that on the terms he lays out (terms that are, by the by, those that have been painstakingly installed by our speech-code friendly campus culture), being mean means, by definition, that no matter what you say you are wrong.
The dean may well be right that Finkelstein's scholarly comportment is unseemly, and that it does more harm than good as an intellectual style. But making poor intellectual etiquette the basis of a tenure decision is risky business, particularly when, as here, it involves over-riding standard procedure.
The academy needs to protect the free exchange of ideas with everything it has. Without it, the academy is pointless--and as too many studies have already shown, ours is an academy that is becoming more one-sided and more close-minded by the day. Collegiality criteria are a quick route to disaster. And no matter what one thinks of Finkelstein's politics, or his scholarship, or his manners, it's crucial to be aware of the larger context framing his case.
Posted by acta online at April 3, 2007 08:29 AM
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