When denied tenure, most faculty members take their final year to find a new job or career path, pack up their offices, and quietly leave the campus. A few fight back — with a complaint, for example, to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or a lawsuit alleging discrimination or failure to follow proper procedure.
Juan J. Rojo, an assistant professor of Spanish at Lafayette College, has taken a more extreme step: He is starting a hunger strike to protest the college’s denying him tenure.
Mr. Rojo announced his intention this week during a faculty meeting at the private, liberal-arts college in Easton, Pa.
“It’s the most attended meeting of the year,” Mr. Rojo said in an interview. “I thought it would be the best time to do it.”
Lafayette’s provost, S. Abu Turab Rizvi, was at the meeting. Mr. Rizvi was a member of the committee that had voted overwhelmingly to grant Mr. Rojo tenure.
Also in attendance was the president, Alison R. Byerly, who had twice used her authority to override the recommendation of the seven-member Promotion and Tenure Review Committee to grant Mr. Rojo tenure.
We respect Professor Rojo’s right to disagree with the decision, but hope he will express his views in a way that does not endanger his health.
Ms. Byerly’s actions are at the center of questions about shared governance that have been raised by Mr. Rojo and some members of the review committee, according to documents shared with The Chronicle. Mr. Rojo has also expressed concerns about the treatment of minority faculty members at Lafayette and the president’s use of student evaluations in making her decision.
Ms. Byerly, who has been president of Lafayette since 2013, did not respond directly to a request for comment. But Roger Clow, the college’s assistant vice president for communications, wrote in an email to The Chronicle that college officials are “very concerned” about Mr. Rojo’s hunger strike.
“We respect Professor Rojo’s right to disagree with the decision,” Mr. Clow wrote, “but hope he will express his views in a way that does not endanger his health.”
Use of Student Evaluations
Mr. Clow noted that the college had followed all of its regular procedures in handling Mr. Rojo’s tenure application. But Mr. Rojo, who also teaches courses on 20th-century Latin American literature, said several aspects of his review had been unusual, including the length and timing of the process, which took nearly a year to complete, despite a unanimous recommendation for tenure from his department and a nearly unanimous decision by the review committee.
The president took three months to make her decision to recommend against tenure, Mr. Rojo wrote in a letter to his colleagues. “This represents a cruel indifference to the … impact the tenure process has on the people being evaluated,” he wrote.
Mr. Rojo and a majority of the tenure committee also took issue with the president’s apparent reliance on student evaluations to determine the professor’s effectiveness as a teacher, even against the assessment of his peers.
“While two colleagues who have personally observed Prof. Rojo’s teaching provide some positive comments on his performance,” Ms. Byerly wrote in a letter in March explaining her recommendation to the tenure committee, “they do not offer substantive rebuttal of specific student concerns reflected in the evaluations.” She noted that “a number of negative student comments throughout the file” described Mr. Rojo as “unfair, intimidating, and a harsh grader.”
The Promotion and Tenure Review Committee responded to the president’s critique by saying that student evaluations of teaching “must be used judiciously” and are only one of several ways that teaching quality can be assessed.
While one member of the committee agreed with Ms. Byerly’s recommendation to deny tenure, a majority of the group was concerned that the president’s action might undermine the faculty’s role in determining who should be granted tenure. “An emphasis on shared governance is implicit in the presumption that the president concur with faculty judgment except in rare instances and for compelling reasons,” the committee wrote. “We respectfully disagree with the president’s decision here as we view our decision in this case as based in evidence and deliberation.”
In mid-June, after meeting with the tenure committee, the president wrote a brief letter to the college’s Board of Trustees, saying that she still could not recommend tenure for Mr. Rojo. On August 2 the board sent a note informing Mr. Rojo that it had decided against granting him tenure.
Concerns About Diversity
Mr. Rojo also questioned the commitment to faculty diversity at Lafayette, where 6 percent of students are Hispanic and 5 percent are black. College officials did not respond to a request for information about the number of faculty members who are members of minority groups.
If this decision stands, I fear that it will have marked the end of faculty self-governance and move us to a paternalistic relationship with the president and board.
Mr. Rojo also said several recent faculty members denied tenure were minorities. Officials at Lafayette did not respond to a request to confirm that information.
In his letter to his colleagues, he wrote: “At a time when the college speaks of diversity, I am puzzled as to why a qualified Latino faculty member who is deeply engaged with minority students on campus and who can relate to their experience is being asked to leave on the basis of a single vote instead of the overwhelming majority vote of the two faculty committees that thoroughly evaluated my case.”
In the interview, Mr. Rojo said that if his department or the tenure-review committee had voted to deny him tenure, he would have accepted the decision and moved on. But the president, he said, is the person least familiar with his research and teaching.
“If this decision stands,” Mr. Rojo said in his letter to colleagues, “I fear that it will have marked the end of faculty self-governance and move us to a paternalistic relationship with the president and board.”
Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.
