Yale professor says she was fired at Alan Dershowitz's behest after criticizing him

[prooftheory]

@navarro

i’m having a really hard time parsing the reasoning behind labeling these as “worse” than what dershowitz has done here.

It is worse in the sense that it demonstrates a lack of protection for all of academia. If a “volunteer” doesn’t have their contract removed, it doesn’t imply that there is no academic freedom whatsoever in the department. It’s “worse” in the sense that it would be considered a “worse” crime to kill the chief of police than to kill a little kid because it implies that the killer could also kill the little kid. Tenure is supposed to be the thing that guarantees any kind of academic freedom for anyone and if it doesn’t do so then there is no academic freedom at all.

The fact that tenure track jobs are being reduced is a symptom of this. They are getting rid of tenure track jobs because states and universities want to be able to fire people because Alan Dershowitz told them to, or Greg Abbott or Fox news or whoever.

Nobody is arguing that non-tenure track academics are somehow less legitimate and less deserving of academic freedom but the primary mechanism for maintaining academic freedom is tenure.

[d_r]

@navarro

i’m having a really hard time parsing the reasoning behind labeling these as “worse” than what dershowitz has done here. given the steep decline in the number of tenured jobs in academia,

In the other cases, his attacks were not only on the individuals but also on the fabric of the institution. Also, in this case the Yale faculty member was a courtesy appointment (this is common in medical schools), not what we usually think of as “adjunct” nowadays; she is not losing her livelihood or career, as she would have had she been an adjunct in an arts&sciences academic field.

Salaita and Finkelstein had to leave academics (as would an adjunct in a field like mine or Mindy’s under similar attack). I’ve been an adjunct, it is a shitty position, you never know if you will be able to remain in your chosen profession.

In any event, I don’t want to derail from the main point, which is that Dershowitz has a long tradition of fiddling around with the lives of academics in universities which should treat him as an irrelevant rando. That’s the reason I put the main onus on them.

[smulder]

@d_r

Both of these are probably worse than the current case, in that they were tenure-stream faculty

#AllCareersMatter

[d_r]

@prooftheory

They are getting rid of tenure track jobs because states and universities want to be able to fire people because Alan Dershowitz told them to, or Greg Abbott or Fox news or whoever.

I think this is an important point.

Dershie has one of the most powerful positions in academia, a senior tenured position at Harvard, what he should be doing is using his position of power to fight for the rights of people without the protections he has. (I consider that a moral imperative in my own position, which is nowhere near as exalted as his.) Instead he’s flitting around attacking people in vulnerable positions, either because he disagrees with them or because his feelings were hurt when they made fun of him in a fucking tweet.

[anon33932455]

@prooftheory

They are getting rid of tenure track jobs because states and universities want to be able to fire people

Some, yes. Not everywhere. At my own university the budgetary constrains, combined with weird enrollment growth in some areas, has prompted an over-reliance on non-TT faculty (generally full-time instructors), especially in GenEd-heavy departments. That said, last I tried to check, my own college within the university is currently hiring 6 TT and 3 lecturers. Not ideal, but not abysmal.

I will add [directed at nobody in particular, but only because I was thinking about this] that tenured faculty can be fired, though it’s not easy. A thought experiment on this (with the caveat that I continue to believe that what Dershowitz did is abhorrent and aside from everything else is its the kind of workplace bullying one sees way too often in academia):

In the case of Dr. Lee (were she a tenured faculty member), her Twitter statements could serve as the basis of a de-tenuring and dismissal. Maybe. While the AAUP gives a lot of leeway for academic freedom, it does also imposes a few “yabbuts.” The relevant section from the 1940 Statement would be:

3. College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.

So, her “remote diagnosis” is certainly a no-no from the standpoint of her professional organization. There are good reasons for that. There are therapy-accreditors and organizations that would certainly yank someone’s certifications for public statements like that. With the added status of being a Yale Professor, Dr. Lee could be accused of speaking in a way that violated her professional ethics, and “that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances.”

So, an over-zealous administrator (but I repeat myself) could get a bug in hir bonnet and decide to de-tenure Dr. Lee. At Yale, the faculty member would appear before the scary-sounding “University Tribunal,” which is composed of faculty and students. And this is why such a dismissal would almost certainly fail. The faculty, for their part, would see this as frivolous, and even those who agreed with Dershowitz would think to themselves “I’ll be next.” Students would be outraged, because that’s what students do. The case would certainly make national news, including the Chronicle, where all sorts of negative publicity would befall Yale and its president. In reality, before it even got to this stage some lawyer would remind Yale’s president that this part of the AAUP statement is so vague and mushy that it rarely if ever gets invoked. If the de-tenuring was somehow successful, the lawsuit that was sure to follow would be a losing game for Yale and so none of it would be worth the effort.

That’s just at Yale. At my own institution, we can’t even rid ourselves of crappy teachers who haven’t published in a decade and rarely show up to campus. We have full-time un-tenured instructors who are bringing in new students to their majors, while (some of) their tenured colleagues bumble along accruing negative student evaluations and yearly “below expectations” annual evaluations.

Anyway, that’s my rant, prompted by thinking about un-tenured instructors, workplace bullies, and the de-tenuring process. lol Sorry if you read this far expecting something profound.

[anon33932455]

Meanwhile, over at Harvard, Professor Martin Nowak has been “punished” for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. He “will be barred from starting new research or advising students for at least two years,” and he “will be allowed to continue teaching during that period, but other contact with students will be limited and his research center is being shut down, according to a memo from Claudine Gay, dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.”

Oh the humanity! I wouldn’t be surprised to see him sue.

[gracchus]

I’m not even pretending that Dershowitz did anything other than cry foul on Nowak’s behalf in the name of “academic freedom”, probably in the same breath he used to call for Prof. Lee’s firing.

[d_r]

@anon33932455

I will add [directed at nobody in particular, but only because I was thinking about this] that tenured faculty can be fired, though it’s not easy.

cf the Salaita case at UIUC I already mentioned (though in that case UIUC tried to argue that he didn’t really have tenure). Or Ward Churchill. These firings are almost always political, and from the right wing, though the official justification (eg, plagiarism in Churchill’s case) is sometimes a genuine academic issue.

At my own institution, we can’t even rid ourselves of crappy teachers who haven’t published in a decade and rarely show up to campus.

At mine we usually deal with them with early retirement or negotiated buyouts. There might be more of them at your institution than you know about, unless you’re a union officer or on the appropriate disciplinary committee.

On top of that, post-tenure review processes are nearly universal, and while such review is supposed to be formative – not summative – assessment, the AAUP has documented many examples of faculty fired after unsatisfactory post-tenure review. Ironically, not cooperating with post-tenure review can itself become grounds for firing (see Wiest v. State of Kansas).

(Edited to remove a repeated phrase a repeated phrase.)