Jul 26, 2006

Strange Doings in Fredonia

by Cliopatria

FIRE has issued a public release, picked up this morning by Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle regarding the bizarre decision by SUNY-Fredonia's president to deny promotion (to full professor) to philosophy professor Stephen Kershnar. The university admitted that Kershnar was an excellent teacher and had sufficient shcolarly publications to merit promotion. His offense? Publishing articles critical of the administration's policies, thereby, according to Fredonia's spokesperson, failing the University's" community service" requirement. According to both stories, the two sides are in agreement about Kershnar's alleged offenses.

FIRE has reproduced an op-ed column by Kershnar that's one of the incidents cited by Fredonia--it's a standard right-of-center critique of affirmative action. One certainly can disagree with its conclusions, but it contains nothing that could constitute"deliberate and repeated public misrepresentations of campus policies and procedures" (unless, I suppose, the University is claiming it doesn't follow affirmative action policies).

Comments section at IHE are, as usual, revealing. One commenter suggests that because Kershnar was critical of the administration's policies, he shouldn't have even applied for promotion--quite a remarkable argument. IHE mainstay UnApologetically Tenured--last heard from denouncing the investigation into Ward Churchill's scholarly misconduct--suggests that there's something"weird" about this case, and fears that it might be used to weaken support for the" collegiality" criterion. After all, he/she suggests, departments always need that trump card as a cover to get rid of colleagues with whom a majority disagrees. There also is a statement from a"Roger Bowen" criticizing the professor for trying to work out a compromise with the University before it went public, but I'm assuming this wasn't the AAUP general secretary.

SUNY's trustees should step in and end this embarrassment now.

More Comments:

Robert KC Johnson - 7/26/2006

I agree completely, on both points. The idea that "service," in any way, could constitute grounds for denial of promotion to full professor is absurd at a university that values research and teaching.

And definitely yes on the second point--this is something I learned very quickly in my tenure case. I made one (much more minor) Karshner-like mistake at the very early stage of the process, and then was told bluntly by by a friend that I wasn't competent to do labor negotiations, and needed a lawyer. He was right--there's nothing in the training of academics (except for people who are, say, AAUP heads on their campuses) that trains them for handling such issues.

Sherman Jay Dorn - 7/26/2006

This looks like a complete flamingo-up on the part of the Fredonia administration, but there are a few other things that struck me. One is the use of service as a reason to deny someone promotion. This is the saddest excuse for a pretext I've seen in my life. Couldn't they come up with something that was unprofessional but at least had been used before, like collegiality? Oh, wait, the department supported Kershnar.

The other odd bit is this quasi-negotiation that fell apart. Kershnar never should have tried proposing prior restraint, but it's a fairly common problem that academics think they can negotiate with administrators on their own. Sometimes, yes. But few of us are trained at negotiations. Kershnar's proposal led to the coup de grace on Fredonia's reputation, but he would have been in a fine position complaining just about the tenure letter (which FIRE has up somewhere, I think tied to a blog entry).