EMUtalk.org

I came across a couple of articles today I thought that some folks– especially the faculty folk– might find interesting.  First, via Inside Higher Ed comes this Jacksonville.com article, “UNF to fire professor accused of battery.” That’s the University of North Florida, btw.  Here’s kind of a long quote:

UNF Provost and Vice President Mark Workman  signed the notice Tuesday to fire Tayeb Giuma,  an associate professor in the electrical engineering department.

“As a faculty member and representative of the university in the community, it is expected that you, like all other UNF employees, will act in a lawful and professional manner and that your conduct will not place either your reputation or the reputation of the university at risk,” Workman wrote to Giuma.

The letter was included in a 160-page report detailing the internal investigation.

Giuma was arrested Sept. 25 at his Queen’s Harbour home after a contractor said he was attacked during a dispute over work on a gazebo. A neighbor’s security camera captured footage of a man being beaten with a piece of lumber.

“Your behavior on Sept. 25, 2009, demonstrates that your past tendency of threatening behavior and violence toward others continues even to the present,” Workman said in the letter. “The university can no longer assume the risk of retaining you as an employee.”

The Jacksonville.com article features that surveillance camera footage.  I’ve got kind of mixed feelings about this one.  On the one hand, I’m not sure if it is okay or not to fire this guy based on his behavior when he’s not on the job.  On the other hand, Giuma does come across in the article as being a kind of “bad egg” for a long time, begging the question of why it took a decade to fire him in the first place?

The other article I read that I thought I’d share was “Life After Tenure Denial” from the Chronicle of Higher Education. This is part of a series of articles by Peter “not his real name” Ellenbogen about his (mis)adventures being on the tenure-track, being denied, getting another job, and then living happily ever-after, more or less.  This is the part that stuck with me, especially in relation to the guy at UNF:

It’s still mostly a mystery to me why I was denied tenure. Hindsight has not blessed me with many new insights on that front. One certainty is that my dean adeptly choreographed the event, unbeknownst to me until the curtain had already fallen.

I didn’t see it coming, nor did any of my departmental colleages—to my knowledge. Last year I learned some of the details at a wedding reception from an alcohol-addled former colleague who was preparing to retire. She was privy to some confidential deliberations about my file. I heard a bit more about how the dean shifted the decision on my case against the will of my department. I was outgunned and outmaneuvered.

Apparently he had plotted my demise in advance. The extent of his machinations seemed more personal than professional. My best guess is that, two years earlier, he was soured against me when I used a little-known campus policy to request paid family leave after the birth of my son. Or perhaps it was that time when the parent of a particularly petulant student from a philanthropic family complainted to the dean after I refused to alter the student’s grade. Perhaps it was both. Who knows?

The most painful part of the tenure process was the lack of transparency. All kinds of information—and disinformation—were inserted into my file after I had prepared it. I wasn’t even notified about the new content, much less allowed access to it. I only received hearsay.

Both of these examples– especially Ellenbogen’s– made me immediately think of the faculty union.  The best part of the EMU-AAUP is that the process for tenure and promotion is completely out in the open.  Thanks to the “Department Evaluation Document” (or DED, pronounced “dead”), faculty know exactly what they need to do to get tenure, and that process is indeed transparent.

But the bad thing about the EMU-AAUP and the union structure in general is that they basically have no choice but to defend the likes of Giuma.  True, faculty can indeed get fired for gross misconduct, but it ain’t easy at a place that doesn’t have a union, and it’s twice as hard at a place that does.

Don’t get me wrong– I’ll take the disadvantages of the union because the advantages it offers.  But it ain’t perfect.