Kean University’s president will ask the institution’s board next month to reject two-thirds of the professors up for tenure this year, further antagonizing a faculty that has been at odds with the administration for years.
Kean’s faculty union said this was the first time the president, Dawood Y. Farahi, had recommended that a majority of those seeking tenure—six of nine faculty members—be denied. All but one of those professors had received positive votes from their academic departments, the union said.
“A lifetime job in the state university system is not an entitlement, it has to be earned,” Mr. Farahi wrote in an email to The Chronicle.
“There has been a shift in recent years,” he added, “to make the process of earning tenure at Kean more rigorous.”
The university extended tenure to all four candidates who made bids last year, according to Mr. Farahi. While the university did deny candidates in each of the three years before that, it has granted tenure to a majority of the candidates who have applied since at least 2009.
According to the faculty union, Mr. Farahi sent letters this month to six professors, telling them that at the board’s meeting, on December 7, he would recommend that the university turn down their tenure bids.
“In a normal year, 10 to 20 percent of faculty up for tenure are denied,” said James A. Castiglione, an associate professor of physics and president of the union, the Kean Federation of Teachers. “What’s happening this year is an acceleration of the trend to undermine tenure at the university.”
Mr. Castiglione said the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty members at Kean had declined by about a quarter since 2004, to 300 this year from a high of around 400 a decade ago. Over the same period, he said, the number of adjuncts—who are allowed to teach up to two classes each per semester—has grown to nearly 1,000 from 400.
Unspecified Faults
In October the university’s provost recommended that the university turn down all but one of the nine professors who made tenure bids this year, said Mr. Castiglione. In the recommendation the president is expected to make to the board, said Mr. Castiglione, Mr. Farahi will reverse two of those negative decisions.
Mr. Castiglione would not identify the professors by name but said the three whose tenure the president will recommend approving teach in counselor education, in educational leadership, and in the doctoral psychology program. Of the six the president says should be denied, two are in the sciences, and one each are in education, English, theater, and undergraduate psychology, said Mr. Castiglione.
Donald J. Moores, an assistant professor of English at Kean, said he had been shocked when he received a letter in late October from the provost, Jeffrey Toney, saying he would not recommend Mr. Moores for tenure. Mr. Moores said he had already received unanimous recommendations both from his department and from a panel within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
The provost’s letter did not give a reason for the negative decision, said Mr. Moores. When Mr. Moores met with Mr. Farahi to ask why the president, too, would recommend against his tenure bid, Mr. Moores said the president did not state a reason either.
“He told me the provost found some kind of fault with my application, although he would not specify what,” said Mr. Moores. “Then he gave me an opportunity to refute the provost’s reading of my application, but he never told me what the problem was.”
‘Abundantly Clear’ Standards
In his email to The Chronicle, Mr. Farahi called the university’s tenure requirements “abundantly clear.” Before the tenure decisions he made this year, he said, each candidate had received “detailed information about what area they need to improve to earn tenure.”
Mr. Moores said he planned to attend the December board meeting to appeal the negative recommendation. He is in the process of publishing his sixth book, and his work on eudaimonics—the ancient Greek concept of well-being—has attracted the attention of Ivy League researchers. Mr. Moores is the lead editor of his forthcoming book, an anthology of eudaimonic poetry, which he is editing with professors at Harvard and Princeton Universities.
Mr. Moores also has won four competitive research grants the university awards to faculty members. And he calls his teaching evaluations “stellar.” He suspects his tenure case is part of the continuing fallout between Kean’s president and the faculty, which has twice voted no confidence in Mr. Farahi.
The faculty union also has conducted votes on measures expressing no confidence in the university’s board, and as a result of the pending tenure denials it is now holding a no-confidence vote on the university’s Office of Academic Affairs, which Mr. Toney leads. The voting is slated to last through Wednesday.
The union has been battling with Mr. Farahi for years. The president, who took office in 2003, has required faculty members to be on the campus at least four days a week, increased their required office hours, and eliminated academic departments led by professors, creating new schools with administrators in charge.
The tensions come in the midst of other turmoil at the university, whose associate vice president for academic affairs recently left after being accused of plagiarism.
“The tenure cases speak to the general mismanagement of the institution and the lack of integrity,” said Mr. Castiglione. “In taking so many unanimous faculty votes for tenure and ignoring them, what the administration has done is effectively undermine the integrity of the peer-review process for tenure.”
