She’s a ‘Star’ Latina Professor. But Not Good Enough for Tenure at Harvard.

Jenny Lu, Harvard Crimson

Harvard University’s decision to deny tenure to a highly regarded Latina/o-studies professor sparked outrage this week among scholars and students, and has thrust the university into a broader national discussion about whether faculty of color are held to unfair standards in promotion decisions. It has also invited skepticism about whether the old guard of the Ivy League undervalues emerging scholarship on matters of race and ethnicity.

Lorgia García-Peña, an associate professor of romance languages and literatures, was officially informed by phone on Friday that she would not be granted tenure at Harvard, according to one of her mentors, who spoke to The Chronicle. News of the decision astonished scholars in her discipline, who took to Twitter with slack-jawed reactions that a woman whom they describe as a prominent contributor to her field apparently wasn’t good enough for Harvard.

Tenure denials like the injustice we’ve just seen at Harvard often have the effect of communicating that the FIELD is perceived as illegitimate. Lorgia García-Peña is at the top of a field she has helped invent. Harvard invested in that by hiring her.

— Rosemary G. Feal (@rgfeal) December 3, 2019

“She is perhaps the leading scholar in Dominican studies of this generation. Period,” said Carlos U. Decena, chairman of Latino and Caribbean studies at Rutgers University. “Her work is ambitious, it’s intellectually audacious, politically on point. This is what Harvard wants. This is what would be desirable to any elite institution of that caliber.”

Part of the reaction from scholars, Decena continued, “is sheer outrage, and part of it is bafflement.”

García-Peña, who did not respond to an interview request, is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke University Press, 2016). Her biography also lists a forthcoming book, which Decena described as “field changing.” (Laura Sell, a spokeswoman for Duke press, said in an email on Tuesday that the book is “under contract based on peer review.”)

The tenure decision struck a particular nerve at Harvard, where students have for decades advocated for the formation of an ethnic-studies department. But it has broader resonance across higher education, where the diversity commitments of some of the nation’s wealthiest institutions have of late been called into question. This past spring, 13 professors at Yale University threatened to quit its ethnicity, race, and migration program en masse if the university did not do more to support the program. The professors eventually agreed to stay, but only after Yale allocated five faculty positions to the program.

In response to the tenure denial at Harvard, about 50 students staged a sit-in on Monday evening in University Hall, The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, reported. By Tuesday evening, more than 2,700 concerned students and scholars had signed an open letter to Lawrence S. Bacow, Harvard’s president, and Alan M. Garber, the provost.

The letter demands that Harvard release documents related to García-Peña’s case and calls for an investigation to identify evidence of “procedural errors, prejudice, and discrimination.” It also demands that Harvard create an ethnic-studies department.

Harvard has so far stopped short of creating such a department. In June, however, the university publicly committed to hiring a cluster of faculty in the area of ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration. Claudine Gay, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said at the time that the disciplines provide a “valuable lens for understanding contemporary American society.”

(Gay, who was not made available for an interview on Tuesday, is a professor of government and of African and African American studies). The Chronicle e-mailed more than a half-dozen professors in García-Peña’s department, including the chairman, and none responded.

García-Peña’s tenure denial sets up a potentially awkward scenario in the cluster hiring effort because she is among the committee members vetting candidates for these positions, several people close to her said.

“To think she is leading this effort to recruit the people who will replace her,” said Decena, the Rutgers professor. “Wow. That’s perverse.”

The letter from students and scholars asked how these searches could be successful, “when an eminently qualified committee member has been denied tenure?”

Mysterious Process

García-Peña came to Harvard, in 2013, as an assistant professor, according to her curriculum vitae. She was promoted, in 2017, to associate professor, which is an untenured rank in Harvard’s Arts and Sciences school. (Harvard has an unusually long tenure approval process).

Candidates for tenure at Harvard are voted on at the departmental level, and reviewed by a school-level committee and the dean, before the president makes a final decision. The president may decide to grant tenure or request an additional ad hoc review, in which “witnesses” from the department and external reviewers are called upon for input.

Judith D. Singer, senior vice provost for faculty diversity and development, once described the ad hoc process as “greatly shrouded in mystery.” It is designed, Singer told The Crimson, to “look at the totality of the evidence and make a dispassionate decision about whether the recommendations that have come up are really in the best interest of the university.”

Harvard officials would not comment on García-Peña’s case, declining to answer questions about where in the process she was denied tenure. But the case has invited criticism of Harvard’s ad-hoc-committee process, which some professors see as particularly opaque and ripe for bad decision-making.

“In this process, there is a lot of possibility for intervention from people who are not experts in someone’s field, and that committee is secret,” said Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel, the mentor who confirmed to The Chronicle that García-Peña’s tenure had been denied.

Martinez-San Miguel, chairwoman of Latin American studies at the University of Miami, said the case has resonated with ethnic-studies professors because it highlights “a structural problem” for people who do not neatly fit into a single discipline.

“Too many of the scholars in these emerging fields end up with joint appointments,” said Martinez-San Miguel, who was a member of García-Peña’s dissertation committee. “They end up having to work more. In order for me to do what I wanted to do, I had to be in two departments. And that was more work, more committees, more meetings.”

Yarimar Bonilla, a political anthropologist at City University of New York’s Hunter College, reacted viscerally when she heard about García-Peña’s case. In a Twitter thread, she described a career of seeing women of color disproportionately passed over or forced to appeal tenure decisions, a practice she described as “violence rooted in plantation logic.”

Let’s be clear: the denial of tenure to minoritized faculty is a form of violence. Most are reversed and/or the candidate moves to a diff institution/life but the scars remain—among peers+ students also. It’s spectacular violence rooted in plantation logic https://t.co/nb4SZNOjKs

— Yarimar Bonilla (@yarimarbonilla) December 3, 2019

García-Peña “is a star and will continue to do incredible work,” Bonilla said in an interview. “This says more about Harvard than it does about her. How can anyone believe they are committed to ethnic studies, when they can’t tenure a star in the field?”

Correction (12/4/2019, 11:43 a.m.): This article originally stated that García-Peña came to Harvard in 2010. She arrived in 2013. The article has been updated to include that correction.

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.

Audrey Williams June contributed to this article.