The way Pietro Bortone sees it, he had a great faculty position at the University of Illinois at Chicago, but no one there ever bothered to tell him about it.
In interactions with a local Greek philanthropy that had donated funds for his position, administrators and faculty members at his campus described him as its “chair of modern Greek studies,” in charge of an academic program and outreach to that ethnic community.
For all he knew, however, Mr. Bortone had been hired only as a tenure-track assistant professor of modern Greek studies, with a modest salary and the job expectations of any other junior faculty member.
Misunderstandings about performance expectations are common in tenure disputes. Mr. Bortone’s case is unusual in the degree to which it involves allegations of deliberate deception.
Mr. Bortone was hired in the fall of 2003. He says he did not learn about the endowed-chair position that he had purportedly been hired to fill until years later, after the philanthropy, the Foundation for Hellenic Studies-Illinois, began to complain that he was shirking his duties. The university, he alleges, then denied him tenure in 2009 to appease the foundation’s president, Constantine P. Tzanos, and keep funds from the philanthropy coming in.
Mr. Tzanos had complained to the university that Mr. Bortone had, among other things, failed to nominate students for a scholarship in modern Greek studies, to organize a Chicago conference of scholars in his field, and to fill out annual reports on community-outreach activities financed through the foundation’s endowment gift.
Misunderstandings about performance expectations underlie a large share of academe’s tenure disputes, says Gregory F. Scholtz, director of the American Association of University Professors’ department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance. “People need to be told upfront what it is they are expected to do,” he says.
Mr. Bortone’s case, however, is unusual in the degree to which it involves allegations of deliberate deception. In a lawsuit filed in state claims court, he has accused the university system of breaching his contract and fraudulently misrepresenting the nature of his position when he took it. The system, for its part, says it refused to grant Mr. Bortone tenure solely for his failure to meet clearly stated performance requirements.
In a separate lawsuit in state Circuit Court, Mr. Bortone has gone after two former colleagues and a professor who oversaw him as head of the campus’s department of classics and Mediterranean studies. He argues that the three professors of classics personally owe him damages for going well beyond the scope of their own jobs to sabotage his relations with the foundation and his tenure bid. His lawsuit accuses them of conspiring to snatch away the foundation’s financial support for his salary to pay for their own programs.
John T. Ramsey, the former department head, and the two other professors, Nanno Marinatos and John Vaio, declined to comment on the dispute, referring questions to the university system, which is providing their legal representation. Thomas P. Hardy, a spokesman for the university system, said in an email last week that the system and the three professors “deny the allegations made against them and plan to continue to vigorously defend both lawsuits.”
In a written statement vetted by his lawyer, Mr. Bortone last week described as “a travesty” how the university had characterized his job to the Greek foundation, which had donated $1.25 million to endow a program in modern Greek studies and the chair position. He said, “I was certainly no chair, but only an assistant professor who had been left at the receiving end of the misled donor’s wrath.”
Career Curse
Mr. Bortone’s claims of undue donor influence in his tenure denial come as the University of Illinois system continues to suffer repercussions for its handling of Steven G. Salaita, who in 2014 accused its Urbana-Champaign campus of revoking an offer of a tenured professorship partly in response to donor objections to his criticism of Israel. The system’s Board of Trustees voted in November to pay $875,000 to settle lawsuits Mr. Salaita had brought against it. The AAUP censured the Urbana-Champaign campus over its handling of his case.
Unless the truth of the motives of those who deny you tenure is revealed, you are left not only jobless but discredited.
The dispute between Mr. Bortone and the University of Illinois at Chicago does not involve the same sort of divisive questions over the limits of academic speech. The AAUP has nonetheless weighed in on Mr. Bortone’s behalf, telling campus administrators soon after they refused him tenure that they were denying him sufficient due process by not letting him appeal the decision to a faculty panel.
In his emailed statement, Mr. Bortone, who is now unemployed and living near the University of Oxford, where he earned his doctorate, said the fellowship offers that came easily while he was working at the Chicago campus dried up after his tenure denial. A native of Italy, he said he had been unable to get more than short-term academic positions in Europe since leaving Chicago.
“Tenure denial,” he said, “is not like losing a job when the firm or factory where you worked closes down — which is problematic but no reflection on you. Tenure denial is supposed to stem from a judgment that your work was not good enough. Unless the truth of the motives of those who deny you tenure is revealed, you are left not only jobless but discredited.”
Mixed Votes
Mr. Tzanos, of the Foundation for Hellenic Studies-Illinois, last week described Mr. Bortone’s litigation as “exclusively something that has to do with the university, and has nothing to do with the foundation that established the modern Greek studies program” on the Chicago campus. The foundation’s agreement with the university clearly “states that the university should have a chaired professor,” he said, but “the university has a right to choose the professor who is going to fill that position.”
The Chicago campus has not hired a replacement for Mr. Bortone since he left.
For its part, the university system has argued that it was upfront with Mr. Bortone about its tenure requirements. It court filings say reviews of his performance were mixed, with faculty members or administrators expressing concern not just about donor dissatisfaction but also about the quality of his classroom teaching, the amount of scholarship he produced, and his failure to produce a book that did not substantially overlap with his doctoral dissertation.
Although his department’s vote on granting him tenure was evenly split, and a campuswide privilege-and-tenure committee voted 19 to 5 in his favor, his college’s promotion-and-tenure committee unanimously rejected him. Upper-level administrators also refused to endorse him.
Judge John C. Griffin of the State Circuit Court for Cook County last month denied a motion by the three professors to dismiss Mr. Bortone’s lawsuit. Judge Griffin held that Mr. Bortone had offered enough backing for his claims to justify a trial to determine the facts.
In his email, Mr. Bortone said that despite his clashes with a foundation that “appeared to think that I had powers and resources that I did not have,” he nonetheless enjoyed working with Chicago’s Greek community. “After all,” he said, “I love Greece.”
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
