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Professor Wins Tenure Battle Without Publishing Any Research

Tenure is tested at Florida Atlantic University

By  Mary Crystal Cage
December 8, 1995

Boca Raton, Florida -- It was easy to evaluate the published work of Cecilia Campoverde when she came up for tenure at Florida Atlantic University. She had none.

Such a record would have killed most promotions on the campus, but it didn’t stop Ms. Campoverde’s. After a bitter fight, she won tenure last spring on the strength of her community service and teaching. She began this academic year as an associate professor of social work.

Across the country, critics have been pressing colleges to place more emphasis on teaching and service -- and less on traditional scholarship -- in promoting professors. In Florida, hers became a test case. Her experience touched a nerve and has raised questions here about the standards for tenure.

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Boca Raton, Florida -- It was easy to evaluate the published work of Cecilia Campoverde when she came up for tenure at Florida Atlantic University. She had none.

Such a record would have killed most promotions on the campus, but it didn’t stop Ms. Campoverde’s. After a bitter fight, she won tenure last spring on the strength of her community service and teaching. She began this academic year as an associate professor of social work.

Across the country, critics have been pressing colleges to place more emphasis on teaching and service -- and less on traditional scholarship -- in promoting professors. In Florida, hers became a test case. Her experience touched a nerve and has raised questions here about the standards for tenure.

Community service is more relevant to her field than traditional research, Ms. Campoverde says. “A book is read by you, my students, a few of my colleagues, and that’s it.”

Her only contribution to traditional research is a 25-page paper on community policing that she co-wrote. It is scheduled to be published in the March issue of the Journal of Community Practice.

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She calls the kind of scholarship she conducts “action research” -- in which, she says, small efforts can produce big results.

During her six years on the faculty here, Ms. Campoverde has helped start three service organizations for migrant farm workers and has worked with autistic children and their parents.

To the people she serves, the Ecuadorian-born professor is a hero. Indeed, several newspapers, including The Miami Herald, published editorials urging the president of Florida Atlantic and the Board of Regents of the State University System to ignore faculty complaints and grant her tenure.

Her case has fueled a campaign by some regents to revamp tenure policies statewide. Some changes have already been made. For example, the regents have allowed Florida Gulf Coast University -- which will open in 1997 -- to offer professors the option of going on the tenure track or working under a multiyear contract.

The regents are considering other changes that would affect all of the state’s public institutions, such as placing more emphasis on teaching in the tenure process. Some observers predict that Florida’s public colleges will soon offer a two- track road to tenure. Professors who choose one track would balance scholarship, service, and teaching. Those on the other, less-traditional track would be promoted solely on the basis of their teaching and service.

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Ms. Campoverde’s champion on the governing board was Steven J. Uhlfelder. He says he is “not a big fan of tenure.” But if Florida is going to have tenure, he says, he wants to be sure that it is awarded equitably.

His interest in her case was piqued by a 1994 newspaper article about the university’s initial decision not to promote her, despite the accolades she had received from students and the community. Good teaching and service should count more heavily in tenure decisions, he believes. The decision to deny tenure to Ms. Campoverde “made me question who’s driving the bus,” he says.

Many professors here asked themselves the same question last May, when Anthony J. Catanese, president of Florida Atlantic, changed his mind and announced that he would recommend to the Board of Regents that Ms. Campoverde be tenured.

James S. Fisher, dean of the College of Social Science at Florida Atlantic, says the promotion-and-tenure panel had twice rejected Ms. Campoverde’s promotion. The move to tenure her sent “shock waves” through the committee, he says.

Nicholas D. Richie, an associate professor of health administration, resigned from the committee two days after the regents granted Ms. Campoverde tenure last May. In his resignation letter, he wrote: “Does anyone seriously believe that this outrageous decision was not influenced by some weird and wonderful conflux of old-time Florida politics and currently in-vogue political correctness?”

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In an interview, Mr. Richie calls Ms. Campoverde’s promotion “a betrayal of academic integrity.” He believes her gender and ethnicity were critical in securing her tenure. “Promotions should be awarded on merit and not on an accident of birth,” he says.

When Ms. Campoverde first came up for tenure, at the beginning of the 1993-94 year, Mr. Richie says, she “lacked any evidence of research or scholarly activity.” The tenure committee told her how to improve her record for her next review, he adds. Two years later, she had written only the yet-to-be published article on community policing, and that was with another author.

Dean Fisher, who had recommended denying Ms. Campoverde tenure, would not discuss her case. He does say that he meets annually with untenured professors to discuss expectations of them. “I am looking for clear evidence of scholarship in the classroom and scholarship outside the classroom.”

Ms. Campoverde’s lack of published work irks many professors at Florida Atlantic, including J. Timothy Lightfoot, head of the department of exercise science and wellness education. When he first came up for tenure, he says, he had eight articles in international journals -- “and I was told I didn’t have enough publications.

“We were all told that you have to do research and you have to do service and you have to teach. That seems to be the standard for everyone but Cecilia Campoverde.”

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Ms. Campoverde was a non-traditional student in college, and she is a non-traditional scholar now.

She came to the United States as a teen-ager in 1956 to live with an aunt. She married, raised a family, and worked as a secretary and a hairdresser before going to college. In 1983, she earned a Ph.D. in education from Hofstra University. Her dissertation, on how children learn to understand language, was not published. She worked for a New York State training center for social workers and she joined the faculty at Florida Atlantic in 1989.

Scholars only get a true picture of social issues if they go into the community, she says.

In 1992, she went to Guatemala to find out for herself what it was like to cross the border into the United States illegally. She kept a diary about her experiences and made a dozen videotapes but has never published any scholarly work about the trip.

She concedes that her failure to publish even frustrates her supporters. “One colleague of mine wrote a sign and put it on my office door. It said, ‘Dear student, I will not get tenure unless I close my door.’ I left it up there for two hours and then took it down.”

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Ms. Campoverde says her critics are wrong to “suggest that the only valid way to disseminate knowledge is by publishing in peer-reviewed journals.” Because her work is pragmatic, she says, it “may be better suited to the values espoused within social science” than traditional research is.

Mr. Catanese, the university’s president, knows that this argument won’t persuade many professors. Even so, he decided to promote her. “She has a long record of rendering meaningful community service in addition to excelling in classroom teaching,” he says.

At least one professor here agrees. “Without reservation, I think she should be given tenure and promotion,” says Michael D. Wiatrowski, an associate professor of criminal justice. He co-wrote the one paper with Ms. Campoverde. “She is a spectacular teacher. And her work in the community is the best kind of service.”

To make it easier for more professors like Ms. Campoverde to be promoted at Florida Atlantic, Mr. Catanese has appointed a committee to develop a policy on alternative routes to tenure. In a preliminary report, the panel suggested that professors could be promoted for their distinguished teaching if they demonstrated competence in scholarly and service activities.

Florida Atlantic’s rapid growth has made tenure a major issue. Five years ago, the university had an enrollment of 13,000 students. Now it has 18,000. The university has hired about 60 professors a year to keep up with the growth, Mr. Catanese says. “Cecilia became the test case that proved that I am serious about alternative paths to tenure,” he says. “The problem is that she came in under a system that values research.”

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Even though Mr. Catanese says he is “going to try to break the mold” for tenure at Florida Atlantic, he is reluctant to de- emphasize research too much.

He has urged Ms. Campoverde to start writing about her work -- not for the benefit of her discipline or because it is expected of professors, he says, but because “it would be a great shame for the insights that she has gained over the years to leave the profession with her when she ultimately retires.”

This message seems to have carried some weight. Ms. Campoverde says she has seven papers in progress.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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