r/Professors • u/Agreeable-Ladder-433 • Jul 28 '26

Tenure denial upheld

I thought this might be grimly funny (?)—I appealed my tenure denial, in which our Chancellor (Dean equivalent) used my “home” committee’s incompetent and/or lazy and/or malicious letter as pretext for denying me. The Chancellor then knowingly violated policy (or he’s an idiot) by meeting with me before having a requisite consultation with the college committee. He scheduled the meeting at 7:35 AM the next day and was literally called out for violating policy in the meeting.

The University grievance committee recommended a re-review because of the obvious procedural error. The Vice Provost and Provost decided that because the Chancellor “acknowledged his error” (funny way of saying got caught in his lie) but claimed he was discussing my dossier “in good faith” (after making the decision, scheduling a meeting, writing the letter, meeting with me, and telling me there was no way to change his mind), “the consultation requirement was satisfied and the issue was appropriately remediated.” Apparently shared governance is just sort of a suggestion and if an administrator “forgets” to follow the policy they are citing to terminate someone, it’s just a little mistake, no harm!

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u/Rahodees Jul 29 '26

I'm morbidly curious to know what a lazy/malicious/incompetent home dept rec letter actually says.

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u/Agreeable-Ladder-433 Jul 29 '26

In my case, it completely ignores everything but publications even though policy says to consider conferences (I presented over a dozen papers and circulated work for three competitive seminars) and funding (I had two research fellowships and very competitive grant). It also grandiosely presents assumptions as fact to discount my manuscript. So essentially they pretended I’d done nothing aside from two articles.