In her contentious decision to rescind a job offer to a controversial scholar, Phyllis M. Wise has exposed the ramifications of a leadership style that some professors and students say is consultative on its surface but ultimately uncompromising.
Ms. Wise, who has been chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for three years, has come under fire in recent weeks for pulling a tenure-track job offer made to Steven G. Salaita, a scholar whose vitriolic tweets about Israel drew criticism.
The chancellor says she stands by her decision and shows no signs of reversing herself amid complaints that she unilaterally trampled Mr. Salaita’s free-speech rights. Her critics have suggested that Ms. Wise’s actions were part of a larger pattern of autocratic decision-making. Supporters, however, cast her as having made a difficult decision in a situation that necessitated quick action.
Ms. Wise concedes that she failed to consult faculty members and subverted standard personnel procedures before making her decision not to submit Mr. Salaita’s appointment to the Board of Trustees for final approval. But, in an interview this week, the chancellor pushed back against any suggestion that her actions demonstrated a broader lack of appreciation for the views of others on the campus.
“Consultative doesn’t necessarily mean that you end up with the decision that they want you to make,” Ms. Wise said on Tuesday as Mr. Salaita spoke on the Urbana-Champaign campus about his ordeal. “That’s very important for me to emphasize. I will take responsibility for taking people’s advice very seriously and then coming to a decision.”
In a letter emailed to Mr. Salaita on August 1, two weeks before he was expected to start teaching at Illinois, Ms. Wise informed the scholar that she would not submit his appointment to the board. The chairman of the American Indian studies program, where Mr. Salaita was to have had a job, received notice of the chancellor’s decision only moments before she sent the email to Mr. Salaita.
Those facts, which Ms. Wise does not dispute, have raised larger questions about the chancellor’s leadership style and respect for faculty views. Ms. Wise said the board was unlikely to sign off on the appointment, so she acted quickly to reach Mr. Salaita before he uprooted his family from Virginia. In so doing, however, she circumvented a university statute that allows for a dean to appeal such decisions to the system’s president and the board.
Ms. Wise admits that was an error.
“I was worried for Dr. Salaita because I knew his move was imminent,” she said. “But that was a misjudgment on my part.”
Robert Warrior, director of the American Indian studies program, said he is not convinced that the chancellor had made a simple and isolated mistake. Rather, he said, it illustrates Ms. Wise’s tendency to bypass professors altogether or to merely pretend to value their opinions.
“It’s a noncommittal kind of listening that she’s doing,” he said. “It’s a kind of a pretension of pondering issues that are very hard when in fact she is waiting to see which way the wind is blowing. I’ve heard many people say, ‘She said she wanted to listen to us, but I’ve never felt so unheard in my life.’ She is there so she can cross off a list that she listened to you.”
Criticism of Ms. Wise’s decision to revoke Mr. Salaita’s job offer has been harsh and widespread. But the chancellor also enjoys the support of some professors and students, who say that she rightly calculated that Mr. Salaita had crossed lines of civility in a manner that would have alienated some of his future students and colleagues.
One of Mr. Salaita’s many tweets said, “If you’re defending #Israel right now, you’re an awful human being.”
Early Victories
Before this most-recent controversy, Ms. Wise had built up a fair amount of political capital at Illinois for her deft handling of potentially difficult situations.
Early in her tenure, Ms. Wise clashed with Michael J. Hogan, the system’s president at the time. Mr. Hogan, who had pushed initiatives that critics said would infringe on campus-level autonomy, resigned under pressure in 2012.
Ms. Wise, by contrast, emerged from the affair looking like a stalwart defender of the flagship’s high academic standards. In an email that became public, Mr. Hogan told Ms. Wise that he was “not happy” because she had not rallied behind his plan to give the system office a more substantial role in campus-level admissions. On Ms. Wise’s campus, that was grounds for applause.
Last winter Ms. Wise received an outpouring of support after students personally insulted her on Twitter for her decision to hold classes on a particularly cold and windy day. The comments were widely viewed as sexist and racist attacks on the chancellor, who is Asian-American. She used the troubling episode to promote more civil discourse on the campus.
“The negative comments, as offensive as they were, are protected speech,” Ms. Wise wrote in a column for Inside Higher Ed. “But what is protected expression and what is the level of discourse we as educators expect from our students can be very different things. And the size of that gap—so evident this week—is what has been most disappointing. Racist, intimidating, or culturally derogatory epithets have no place in any debate in any circumstance.”
Matthew B. Wheeler, a former chair of the campus’s Senate Executive Committee, described Ms. Wise as a “breath of fresh air” for a university that had gone through a rough patch before she arrived.
When Ms. Wise was named chancellor, in 2011, the university was still wounded by an admissions scandal that had cost top administrators their jobs.
The chancellor, Mr. Wheeler said, set a new tone by spending about nine months on a listening tour of the campus. Ms. Wise, a researcher of women’s health and biology, demonstrated a sincere interest in learning how things worked at Urbana-Champaign, Mr. Wheeler said.
“She’s a good scientist,” he said. “Good scientists get all the evidence.”
Sore Spots in Seattle
How carefully Ms. Wise weighs that evidence, however, is a matter of debate. In her previous positions as provost and then interim president of the University of Washington, Ms. Wise had plenty of evidence that students and some professors objected to her decision to join the board of Nike, a company whose labor practices have been criticized. But she did it anyway, saying she thought she could change the company from within.
She also heard from students who were concerned about the university’s contract with Sodexo, a food-service provider whose record on workers’ rights has come under scrutiny. The university’s contract with the company remained in place until after Ms. Wise left.
Garrett S. Strain, who led Washington’s chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops during Ms. Wise’s tenure there, sees some similarities between her handling of the Salaita case and her record in Seattle.
“Wise is choosing to disavow the will of the campus and the larger academic community, which falls into the exact pattern of behavior we saw at the University of Washington,” said Mr. Strain, who is a graduate student in Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs.
Ms. Wise would hardly be the first administrator to disappoint activist students, but some professors in Washington are similarly critical. Robert E. Breidenthal, an aeronautics professor, said that he found Ms. Wise to be relatively dismissive of the faculty’s role in university governance.
During Ms. Wise’s time as Washington’s provost, the university engaged in a years-long investigation of possible academic misconduct by a blood researcher. Ms. Wise and Mark A. Emmert, who was then the university’s president and now heads the National Collegiate Athletic Association, rejected a faculty panel’s findings that Andrew Aprikyan, the researcher, had not committed fraud. He was fired in 2010.
“I wouldn’t accuse her of being uniquely guilty of this,” said Mr. Breidenthal, who was on the faculty panel, “but I have the impression that there was a lack of respect for due process and faculty opinion.”
A federal inquiry later determined that Mr. Aprikyan had in fact falsified data. But even some professors who believed Mr. Aprikyan was probably guilty of misconduct say that Ms. Wise showed a disregard for the role of faculty members in such cases, as defined by the university’s faculty code.
Stephen M. Schwartz, a professor of pathology at Washington, said that administrators, including Ms. Wise, ignored the judgment of competent professors who made a reasonable ruling after a thorough review of the facts.
“The process was horrible,” Mr. Schwartz said.
Fixing Policies
On Thursday the University of Illinois’s Board of Trustees will hold its first meeting in the wake of the controversy involving Mr. Salaita. Ms. Wise said she was not sure whether the board would discuss the case at all.
Nonetheless, Ms. Wise said, it is clear that Illinois needs to re-examine its hiring practices and policies. As it stands, the board signs off on professorial hires—usually a rubber stamp—but sometimes not until after a faculty member begins teaching. That needs to change, she said. “We are obviously fixing the process so this never happens again.”
For her part, Ms. Wise said, she wishes she had followed the guidelines the university already has in place, no matter how flawed they may be.
“If I had done that, I’m not sure whether the end result would have been any different,” she said. “But I would have felt more comfortable with my own handling of it.”
As for the larger question of what this case says about her leadership, Ms. Wise said she is comfortable with her record.
If she were to define her own legacy, Ms. Wise said, she would “hope that it is that I have always strived to include everyone in pushing this university and pulling this university forward.”