Tenure for Massad now up to school trustees, critics say
The New York Post features an article by Jacob Gershman on the Joseph Massad tenure case at Columbia. I highly recommend it. Gershman covered this story for the now-defunct New York Sun, and he knows all the ins and outs.
Gershman reports that Massad's file has already passed muster with President Lee Bollinger, and will be presented to Columbia's Board of Trustees for a final decision in about a week. Bollinger "buckled," Gershman writes, rather than face down a determined faculty clique. "The Massad tenure battle," he adds, "is about the failure of leadership of Bollinger—whose job it is to safeguard Columbia's academic integrity." Bottom line:
"Columbia's trustees must decide: Do they attempt to clean up after Bollinger and stop this absurdity—or do they confer academic legitimacy on Massad's ideas and agenda? Hesitant to insert themselves in an academic matter, the trustees would be wise to consider the consequences of silence."
For Massad, of course, Columbia's trustees are just a rubber stamp. This is why he's been telling his friends he's been tenured, even though tenure is only conferred by the Board of Trustees. Rubber-stamping may be the usual role of the Columbia's trustees in tenure decisions. But I'm also sure that whoever invented the system also imagined that one day there might arise an exceptional case, compelling the trustees to veto a recommendation. If not, why require their approval at all? If so, Massad is that once-in-a-generation case.
"I know that trusteeship is now contrived as being as passive as possible," adds Marty Peretz on his blog The Spine, but then asks: "Is the professoriat as a whole so wise as never to be questioned at all? I daresay not. And I know something about universities. At Columbia increasingly, departments and schools in the social sciences behave in the process of hiring like gangs admitting new members." Peretz goes on to compare Columbia unfavorably to "any and all of the universities in the State of Israel," not one of which "is so intellectually and politically inbred as is Columbia University." ...
Read entire article at Martin Kramer at his blog, Sandbox
Gershman reports that Massad's file has already passed muster with President Lee Bollinger, and will be presented to Columbia's Board of Trustees for a final decision in about a week. Bollinger "buckled," Gershman writes, rather than face down a determined faculty clique. "The Massad tenure battle," he adds, "is about the failure of leadership of Bollinger—whose job it is to safeguard Columbia's academic integrity." Bottom line:
"Columbia's trustees must decide: Do they attempt to clean up after Bollinger and stop this absurdity—or do they confer academic legitimacy on Massad's ideas and agenda? Hesitant to insert themselves in an academic matter, the trustees would be wise to consider the consequences of silence."
For Massad, of course, Columbia's trustees are just a rubber stamp. This is why he's been telling his friends he's been tenured, even though tenure is only conferred by the Board of Trustees. Rubber-stamping may be the usual role of the Columbia's trustees in tenure decisions. But I'm also sure that whoever invented the system also imagined that one day there might arise an exceptional case, compelling the trustees to veto a recommendation. If not, why require their approval at all? If so, Massad is that once-in-a-generation case.
"I know that trusteeship is now contrived as being as passive as possible," adds Marty Peretz on his blog The Spine, but then asks: "Is the professoriat as a whole so wise as never to be questioned at all? I daresay not. And I know something about universities. At Columbia increasingly, departments and schools in the social sciences behave in the process of hiring like gangs admitting new members." Peretz goes on to compare Columbia unfavorably to "any and all of the universities in the State of Israel," not one of which "is so intellectually and politically inbred as is Columbia University." ...