When Tenure Denials Go Public

When an academic receives tenure, it’s often a public matter. There might be an announcement on the university’s website or in a faculty newsletter, a ceremonial updating of the CV, a flurry of congratulatory tweets.

If tenure is denied, though, there is no fanfare. Instead, scholars who don’t clear the bar face a much different reception from colleagues in the office hallway.

“They always look at you with that look in their eyes, like, ‘She’s contagious. If I go near her, this could happen to me,’” said Natasha B. Barnes, who was denied tenure in Emory University’s English department in 2001. Barnes, now an associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, believes one senior faculty member influenced the decision to block her tenure at Emory.

For many, the denial of tenure may come as a surprise, especially if their bid is approved within their department. Their yearly reviews were positive, their publication records on track or exceeding expectations. “You think, all your career, that if you just do the right things, the right things will come to you,” Barnes said. “At tenure time, all of that can go up in a puff of smoke.”

The prevailing attitude when discrimination is suspected in tenure denial, many scholars say, has been one of quiet fortitude — exhaust whatever appeal options may be available, but then move on.

All that may be changing.

The high-profile tenure battles that made headlines in recent weeks — Nikole Hannah-Jones‘s at the University of North Carolina, Cornel West‘s at Harvard University — have come alongside an apparent rise in professors of color sharing their own injustices publicly. Some have taken to the courts — suing their institutions for discrimination, for instance. More often, they’ve fought their tenure denials through the court of public opinion.

No matter the avenue they choose, scholars told The Chronicle, those who are denied tenure now have more agency to control their own narrative.

After Paul C. Harris was denied tenure at the University of Virginia last year, one former student’s open letter advocating on his behalf accrued more than 4,000 signatures. Another student designed a website making Harris’s case. Several prominent academics amplified his cause on Twitter with the hashtag #TenureForPaul, and Harris himself tweeted about his experience. Eventually, his tenure denial was overturned, an outcome Harris doubts would have been realized without the public support built online.

Even a decade ago, a story like Harris’s wouldn’t have happened, said Patricia A. Matthew, an associate professor of English at Montclair State University and author of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure.

“I think we’re in a confessional period, where people talk about everything about their lives on social media,” Matthew said. “Whatever trials they’re facing, whatever’s happened to them, then people have an outlet.”

And although Harris was initially hesitant to use that social-media outlet, he’s now glad he did. Since his case went public last summer, he said, more than a half-dozen scholars have reached out to him, saying they too had been denied tenure, for reasons they suspected had to do with their race.

Since the advent of social media, “it’s easier to recognize that the thing that you’re experiencing is also being experienced by other people,” Matthew said. And in part because of the actions of scholars like Harris, Matthew said, “the stigma of tenure denial is not as great as it used to be.”

Decisions like Harris’s have another result, Matthew said: bringing more public attention to the particular conditions that faculty members of color face. That’s been especially true given the recent tenure travails of Hannah-Jones and West, which prompted many in the academy to ask questions about the way the process works — or, as some scholars say, doesn’t work.

It’s impossible to know whether scholars of color are more likely to be denied tenure, since no national database tracks denials. The closest analogue may be an analysis of 15 years of tenure rates at one institution, the University of Southern California, done by an assistant professor who’d been denied tenure there. (From 1998 to 2012, 81 percent of white faculty members were awarded tenure, Mai’a K. Davis Cross found, compared with just 48 percent of minority professors.)

Reporting information on tenure denials could violate individuals’ privacy, said Kimberly A. Griffin, a professor and associate dean of graduate studies and faculty affairs in the University of Maryland’s College of Education. “Because we’re so often dealing with really small numbers of individuals, if you say, ‘A Black woman in such-and-such college didn’t get tenure’ … it would almost name them, instead of being anonymous institutional data.”

Photo illustration by The Chronicle. Photos by Karsten Moran, Redux; Annemarie Mountz, Penn State U.; and Philip Keith, Guardian, eyevine, Redux.

Numbers on tenure denials would inevitably be skewed, she added, because some faculty members are forced out of their institutions, or choose to leave, before even becoming eligible for tenure. Scholars could be “counseled away” by allies who sense tenure would be an uphill climb, Griffin said, or they might encounter bias and marginalization that make getting support for tenure seem unlikely.

Even without data, the notion that scholars of color are more likely to be denied tenure bears out in the literature, said Leslie D. Gonzales, an associate professor of higher education at Michigan State University. Decades of scholarship, she noted, demonstrate that scholars of color “spend an inordinate amount of time” working with students and doing interdisciplinary, novel, and team-based research.

“On the one hand, institutions will say, ‘We want innovation, we want novelty, we want interdisciplinarity,’” Gonzales said. “That kind of work takes a lot of time. We see that the scholars that do that kind of work often suffer consequences, like poor reviews, like tenure denials, at worst.”

Social media can show scholars that tenure denial for discriminatory reasons “does happen, and it’s been well documented,” and help them “understand that the tenure and promotion” process “is not a pure meritocracy. That it’s a process that bias does enter into, that it’s very much based on individuals’ perceptions of fuzzy criteria in many cases,” Griffin said.

The internet has provided another source of affirmation, too — the ability of scholars to compare their own unsuccessful tenure dossiers with the CVs and publication records of colleagues who were granted tenure, Matthew pointed out.

“If you’re a Black woman and you’re denied tenure, and they tell you you haven’t published enough, and your colleagues have websites or their CVs are listed on the university website,” Matthew said, “it’s just very easy” to do the math in order to make one’s own case.

That kind of information also makes it possible to mount a quieter rebuttal to a tenure denial — say, a letter-writing campaign taken up by a faculty member’s students and colleagues — or even to stage a legal argument.

Taking a tenure denial to court is an especially fraught decision, said LaWanda W.M. Ward, an assistant professor of higher education at Pennsylvania State University who has studied such lawsuits.

“When a Black faculty member is denied tenure, that person really has to make a decision about, ‘Do I have not only the economic resources, but the emotional, the psychological, the familial and community support, to take on an institution?’ Because it’s a lot,” Ward said.

In many cases, the answer to that question is no. If a scholar is already disillusioned with her institution and knows she’d like to work elsewhere, waging a legal battle could seem unwise. “It’s not likely someone’s gonna say, ‘Don’t hire LaWanda. She sued Penn State.’ But that’s going to get around about me,” Ward said. “I could potentially be seen as a troublemaker or someone who didn’t accept that my work wasn’t quality, so I just didn’t move on.”

Lisa B.Y. Calvente has experienced that firsthand. The communications scholar sued DePaul University last year after being denied tenure there, a decision she says was based on racial discrimination and retaliation (Calvente is Latina). Most faculty members who don’t get tenure, she pointed out, “know that we’re terminated before we end our position. So you have to deal with everyday interactions with people who are potentially your aggressors. You have to see them every day.”

Calvente has spent countless hours and more than $12,000 on her legal case. But the worst part of the tenure-denial experience, she said, was that “these same people who wanted me gone smiled at me and said hello after the fact, and then were visibly upset when I wouldn’t say hi to them in return or smile at them in return.”

Still, Calvente said she would have stayed at DePaul, if given the chance. She felt she owed that to her students, who started a petition and even a racial-justice coalition at DePaul on her behalf. They were, she said, living out the principles she’d taught them in class: to exercise their own agency, to use their voices.

Calvente felt that she, too, was obligated to speak up about what had happened to her. It’s why she sent a mass email to current and former students at DePaul to announce she’d been denied tenure, and why she decided to pursue a lawsuit. “I did what I had to do, what I felt that I had to do, which was fight. One of the things that I kept coming across was this question: Why do you have to fight this fight? Why not go somewhere else?” For her, the answer was simple: “If not me, then who? If I don’t fight, then who?”

Several scholars have been successful in their own recent legal battles. A Black faculty member brought a federal workplace-discrimination suit against Clark College, in Vancouver, Wash., after being denied tenure there in 2015, and was awarded $80,001 in 2019. In another case, an appeals court upheld a decision in 2019 that San Francisco State University had retaliated against Rashmi Gupta, who is from India, by denying her tenure after she complained about the climate for minority women.

But those kinds of successes are rare. “The courts don’t tend to want to hear a lot about the historical legacy of discrimination,” Ward said. Instead, they “pretty much like to see direct evidence” — a smoking gun — and it’s unlikely that a tenure committee would ever put into writing that, say, it was denying someone tenure because of their race. For that reason, Ward said, the court of public opinion is in many cases a better bet.

Coming to those conclusions in her research — and deciding to study tenure-denial cases among Black scholars, as a Black woman who hasn’t yet gone up for tenure herself — has been a surreal experience for Ward. Some friends, when she announced her new research focus, questioned whether it was a good idea. But now, she said, she feels better informed.

“I know that even with my best efforts” toward tenure, “there could still be some challenges that don’t have anything to do with me and are more so related to unresolved gendered, racist, inequitable ways of how things happen,” Ward said. ”If for some reason I was denied tenure, then I wouldn’t feel like I’m alone, because I know that lots of others have been on that path.”

A broader audience, in academe and in the public, may be coming to the same realization in the wake of West’s and Hannah-Jones’s headline-grabbing cases.

But Ward isn’t optimistic that public outcry will improve the situation. Unless concrete policy changes occur, she said, promotion-and-tenure committee members will be inclined to continue business as usual.

One such change, said Griffin, of the University of Maryland, could be a re-examination of tenure-and-promotion criteria. As it stands, she said, “individuals get to decide what’s rigorous, or what has an impact or what hasn’t, unless there are criteria laid out there for you to make those assessments and for you to do them in clear, consistent ways” that don’t allow bias, even of the unconscious sort, to seep in. “Without taking a close look at that, we’re going to continue to hear these stories over and over again.”

It’s worth pointing out, though, that an overturned tenure denial, or a scholar’s success in securing tenure elsewhere, often isn’t the end of the story. Though his dean at the University of Virginia ultimately recommended tenure for Harris — over six months after his initial denial — Harris thought it best to move on. He is now an associate professor — with tenure — at Penn State.

Calvente landed a new job as an assistant professor of performance studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — the very campus that has been roiled by the Hannah-Jones debacle, she acknowledged with a wry laugh. In the future, she’ll have to go through the tenure-application process there.

And Barnes had a job offer from her current institution, the University of Illinois at Chicago, in hand when she was denied tenure at Emory. But nearly 20 years later, she hasn’t forgotten the pain of that experience. She recently added a new line to her email signature, rendered in boldface.

“#ME TOO: Denied Tenure: Emory U, English 2001.”