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Collegiality: Tenure Battleground and Weasel Clause
Gail Gottfried´s case is one of those discussed in a July 12 New York Times article on "ŒCollegiality´ as a Tenure Battleground." Gottfried´s bid for tenure, like others, including Carol Stepien´s at Case Western Reserve (see Spring 2001 Newsletter), was evaluated on the standard three criteria‹teaching, research, and service‹plus a more elusive fourth factor: collegiality. "More and more cases are coming up on some version of the collegiality issue," said Martin Snyder of the American Association of University Professors. "We just saw three cases simultaneously that all came down to the same thing. They´re all male-dominated departments that hadn´t tenured a woman in a long time, or ever, and there´s some language about how the woman Œjust doesn´t fit in.´ What comes through is the sense that these are aggressive women who are seen as uppity."
The AAUP has adopted a statement that urges colleges not to use collegiality as a category in tenure reviews. Part of the statement reads:
The elevation of collegiality into a separate and discrete standard is not only inconsistent with
the long-term vigor and health of academic institutions and dangerous to academic freedom, it is
also unnecessary.
Committee A [of the AAUP] accordingly believes that the separate category of "collegiality"
should not be added to the traditional three areas of faculty performance. Institutions of higher
education should instead focus on developing clear definitions of scholarship, teaching, and service,
in which the virtues of collegiality are reflected. Certainly an absence of collegiality ought never,
by itself, to constitute a basis for non-reappointment, denial of tenure, or dismissal for cause.
Collegiality is one of several "weasel clauses" such as "interests of the department"
and "institutional needs and considerations" that may occur in university handbooks, specifying
that tenure and other appointment decisions need not be based on teaching, research, and service.
"Collegiality and the Weasel Clause" in the November 20 Chronicle of Higher Education
describes how it feels to have your tenure-track career derailed by use of a weasel clause and what may
happen afterwards: a career as an adjunct.
Links to both of these articles can be found at www.fourthbucket.org,
a Web site dedicated to the examination of the appropriateness of collegiality as a criterion of tenure and
promotion at colleges and universities.
-wage@wage.org-