Can this be true?
UD has ridiculed Southern Illinois University on this blog for years. Put “Poshard” in my search engine for scads of posts about the place. But she had no idea it got as bad as this…
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Well, here’s the faculty page. All boys! ‘cept fer one girl that the dean done dumped. Laura Hatcher is suing.
I must say. It takes a special commitment to femicide to sustain absolute gender purity for over half a century. I trust the department has taken advantage of this distinction to forge relationships with its brother institutions in Saudi Arabia.
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UD thanks Wendy.
May 3rd, 2013 at 5:18AM
This is an odd one. Obviously, the Department’s record on hiring–much less tenuring–women is abysmal. There’s a real problem there, and if I were dean, I wouldn’t approve any shortlist without at least one or two women candidates for at least the next 10 years (and I would carefully scrutinize any hiring decision in which a man was chosen over a woman).
On the other hand, the Department apparently voted to support Prof. Hatcher, after which she was rejected by the Dean, Provost, and Chancellor. In my experience, this sort of thing happens for one of three reasons. Either a) the assistant professor has done or said something to piss off the administration (no hint of that in the article); b) money’s tight (apparently not: they seem to have tenured other professors during the same period); or c) the dean thinks the Department has been too lenient in its judgment of the candidate’s credentials (maybe the outside letters were lukewarm to scathing).
It’s hard to know from the information provided, but I suspect the answer might well be “c”. That would put the dean in quite a bind: either reject for tenure the only woman in a department with a dreadful history, or approve someone who would not otherwise make the cut. That’s a tough call, and I wouldn’t want to be the person who had to make it.
May 3rd, 2013 at 7:27AM
TAFKAU: I think you’re likely to be right about all of that. I’d only differ in this respect: Although of course one can’t be sure without reading her work (I’ve not done that), this woman seems to have been a plausible candidate for tenure. And if you have SIU’s record on hiring/tenuring women (an appalling one), AND if the department has strongly supported her (which it seems to have done), the wise thing to have done would have been to grant her tenure. Even if you take a perfectly cynical, self-interested approach – such a person may well sue, may well generate significant expense and negative publicity for the university (a university already in the pits for many reasons), and may indeed win her suit – tenuring is the way of wisdom.
And the event, having become broadly known, may well discourage other women from considering offers — so SIU can go another fifty years with no tenured women.
If the event generates real attention (the details are shocking enough to do that), SIU will also have to weather unwelcome scrutiny of the larger intellectual integrity of the place. A plausible candidate turned down for tenure at an institution whose president plagiarized his dissertation!
May 3rd, 2013 at 12:58PM
Thanks to the above for insider skinny. This is where a non-prof (as I am) gets the hell out of Dodge. On the other hand, I know personally a prof who brought unique academic skills to his department who was denied tenure as a result of a quarrel between his dean and the university president. He was the designated chump, and, yes, he threatened suit. The professor moved on where he was named department chair and extended tenure right off the bat at a school roughly the same as the one he’d been booted from.
May 3rd, 2013 at 2:41PM
Wow.
If there’s ever been a poster child for some targeted senior hires with tenure that’s the department.
May 4th, 2013 at 7:26AM
That department is pretty colorless, too, and lacking any reference to the global south.
May 4th, 2013 at 11:22AM
By the by, Glenn Poshard was within a whisker of being our Gov here in IL about a decade ago. It was a tight race. He lost to George Ryan who went straight from the smokey back room to the pokey (just finished his stint in the Big House). It’s fair to say Poshard lost by a hair or hairs. A few voters couldn’t get over the goatee that made him look like Col Sanders. A razor may have may have put him in the governor’s chair. Despite his troubles at SIU, he was by far the best candidate. Such is IL.