A provost-appointed review panel has absolved administrators at the University of California at Davis of charges of retaliation against a dissenting medical professor leveled at them by the campus’s Academic Senate.
The review panel’s findings were denounced on Friday by the medical professor, Michael S. Wilkes, who had accused administrators at the Davis campus of retaliating against him for co-authoring a 2010 San Francisco Chronicle essay that criticized the Davis medical school’s promotion of a controversial screening procedure for prostate cancer. Dr. Wilkes said the panel’s findings were based on “huge factual errors.”
But Bruno Nachtergaele, the Academic Senate’s chairman, welcomed statements made by the campus’s provost, Ralph J. Hexter, acknowledging that the campus health system’s chief lawyer had acted inappropriately in his dealings with Dr. Wilkes and pledging to take new steps to promote academic freedom there.
“I would say that today is a good day for academic freedom. I will chalk this one up as a success of shared governance,” said Mr. Nachtergaele, a professor of mathematics who became chairman of the Academic Senate in September, about three months after it passed resolutions rebuking administrators there for their treatment of Dr. Wilkes.
In a summary of its findings that it issued on Friday, the three-member review panel, consisting of a Davis law professor and two administrators from other University of California campuses, rejected nearly all of the conclusions that the Academic Senate had reached following its own investigation of the professor’s retaliation complaints.
Although the Academic Senate’s Representative Assembly unanimously voted in June to demand that two Davis administrators apologize to the professor, the review panel appointed by Provost Hexter characterized the accusations of retaliation as without basis.
‘An Inappropriate Response’
The only Academic Senate finding that the review panel appeared to give any weight at all was a conclusion that the chief lawyer for the Davis campus’s health system, David Levine, had violated Dr. Wilkes’s academic freedom by warning the doctor in a letter of potential legal liability for any factual inaccuracies in his Chronicle op-ed. The review panel, which Provost Hexter appointed in response to the Academic Senate’s demands on Dr. Wilkes’s behalf, stopped short of agreeing that Mr. Levine had actually threatened Dr. Wilkes but nonetheless called the lawyer’s letter “an inappropriate response” that “should not have been sent.”
“While the letter acknowledged Professors Wilkes’s academic freedom and was intended to be advisory only, the review committee agreed that a reasonable faculty member could interpret the letter as threatening,” the panel’s statement of its findings said. In a letter on Friday to Mr. Nachtergaele announcing the panel’s conclusions, Provost Hexter said that “no university communication should convey even the appearance of impropriety with regard to academic freedom.” The letter said Mr. Hexter and Linda P.B. Katehi, the campus’s chancellor, had “confirmed that remedial actions have been taken, which by law are confidential, to ensure that this does not happen again.”
Much of the disagreement between the review panel and the Academic Senate’s investigators over the facts of the case revolves around questions of timing and which events led to which. The investigation conducted by the Academic Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility had concluded, for example, that an e-mail from an executive associate dean to Dr. Wilkes announcing plans to change the doctor’s teaching and administrative assignments appeared to be retaliation for the Chronicle op-ed, which had been published the day before.
But the review panel accused Dr. Wilkes and the Academic Senate of reversing the sequence of those events, contending that the article had been published in print the day after the associate dean sent his e-mail. Dr. Wilkes argued on Friday, however, that although the print version of the article had been published the day after the associate dean sent his e-mail, the article had been published online earlier on the same day as the e-mail.
The review panel similarly said several administrative actions in respect to Dr. Wilkes that the Academic Senate committee had interpreted as responses to the article actually had been in the works long before the article was published. Dr. Wilkes said on Friday, however, that he had heard nothing about such planned administrative actions before his article was published.
The three members of the review panel were Ashutosh Bhagwat, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis; Neal H. Cohen, vice dean of the medical school at the University of California at San Francisco; and Sheila O’Rourke, director of faculty and postdoctoral diversity initiatives at the University of California at Berkeley.
