Administrators at Northeastern Illinois University violated principles of academic freedom when they rejected a linguistics professor’s bid for tenure in June 2012, the American Association of University Professors said in a report released on Tuesday.
The professor, John P. Boyle, had received a unanimous recommendation for tenure from his department’s personnel committee and acting chair, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the faculty-elected University Personnel Committee, according to the report.
But Mr. Boyle had raised faculty-governance concerns, the report says, and that may have contributed to a faculty vote of no confidence in the university’s president, Sharon K. Hahs, and its provost at the time, Lawrence P. Frank. And because Mr. Boyle had raised those concerns, several people interviewed by the AAUP’s investigating committee said they considered the decision by administrators to deny him tenure a retaliatory move.
The report further says that because the president did not respond to the allegations of retaliation, she violated principles of academic freedom.
Administrators deny that accusation, saying that the university has “consistently and repeatedly” rejected the charges of retaliation, including to the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board. In January 2013 the executive director of the labor board dismissed Mr. Boyle’s charge that he had suffered retaliation after filing an unfair-labor-practices ccomplaint, and the board upheld that decision in May.
A Controversial Reorganization
When Mr. Boyle joined the linguistics program, in 2006, it included a concentration in teaching English as a second language. In 2007 five of the nine linguistics professors voted to split linguistics into two separate programs and to create an independent master’s degree in teaching English as a second language.
The five professors in the majority formed the new program. Both linguistics and teaching English as a second language, or TESL, were initially housed in the department of anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics.
The organizational shift moved several undergraduate courses from the linguistics program to the TESL program without the usually required authorization, according to the report. Mr. Boyle, who the report says was the department’s only untenured faculty member, spoke about those governance concerns at an open meeting of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Academic Affairs Committee.
The chair of the university’s Faculty Senate, a linguistics professor, interviewed colleagues and found broad concerns about shared-governance violations in the faculty, according to the report. She presented those concerns to the faculty, the provost, and President Hahs.
The Faculty Senate voted no confidence in Ms. Hahs and Mr. Frank, the provost, in November 2010, and even after Ms. Hahs expressed her commitment to shared governance, the faculty as a whole voted no confidence in both administrators again in February 2011.
In June 2012, Ms. Hahs gave two reasons for denying Mr. Boyle tenure: lack of cooperation with colleagues and failure to submit a plan to improve his teaching and performance of primary duties, which had been characterized as lackluster in a 2011 letter of reappointment. The university’s Board of Trustees upheld the president’s decision by a vote of 6 to 1, according to minutes of the board meeting.
Mr. Boyle had submitted his plan for improvement to the wrong office, according to the AAUP report, and corrected the mistake after the deadline set by the president.
The report says that the concerns the president cited about lack of cooperation stemmed from tension between linguistics and teaching English as a second language. In Mr. Boyle’s final probationary year, 2011-12, he had faced complaints from professors in the TESL program that he was inappropriately advising students to switch their minors from that area to linguistics.
Lack of ‘Compelling Reasons’
Though presidents and boards sometimes do reverse faculty decisions on tenure, those reversals should occur only when there are “compelling reasons stated in detail,” said Rebecca J. Williams, a professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas who led the AAUP’s investigating committee.
In the Northeastern Illinois case, Ms. Hahs’s reasons were not convincing, Ms. Williams said in an interview.
Records and interviews in the AAUP investigation did not support the assertions that Mr. Boyle had lacked collegiality, Ms. Williams said. Further, the AAUP discourages using cooperation as a criterion for tenure, she said.
Ms. Hahs wrote to faculty and staff members at Northeastern Illinois on Monday that the university had declined to share confidential personnel information with the AAUP during its investigation because the AAUP rests outside of university processes and is unaffiliated with the faculty union.
In a university response to a draft of the AAUP report, in October, officials said it was “disturbing” that the AAUP investigating committee was “all too ready” to interpret the university’s confidentiality in personnel decisions in a negative light.
“There is absolutely no support for this conclusion other than the AAUP’s apparent assumption that any refusal to share confidential personnel information with an AAUP committee must necessarily reflect bad motives,” the university’s response says.
The university also said that several pieces of the AAUP report, including its assertion that the Board of Trustees had not taken formal action following the faculty’s vote of no confidence, were inaccurate. The response notes that the board endorsed the president’s performance.
Such mistakes, the university said, helped the AAUP form unwarranted conclusions about Northeastern Illinois.
