Next: A Position at Oxford Up: Fighting for Tenure The Previous: History of the Case

Grievance about the Tenure Review

At Berkeley, tenure review is a complex, multi-step process. It starts with a review committee of about half a dozen faculty members from the department, which solicits letters of evaluation from experts in the candidate's field and examines his or her papers and other background material. The candidate can suggest reviewers as well as request that certain individuals not be asked to write. After the letters are received, the candidate can obtain a summary of the information in the tenure file and can add material to the file in order to rebut information he or she considers unfair or incorrect.

The review committee votes on whether or not to recommend to the department that the candidate be given tenure and presents the result at a departmental meeting. After hearing any other comments by the faculty, the department votes. In Harrison's case, the review committee's vote was four against and one for, with one abstention; a little over half the department participated in the departmental vote, with nineteen against, twelve for, and an unusually large number (seven) of abstentions.

The departmental vote is generally the deciding factor in a tenure case, but there are also a number of other stages of review, involving the dean, the campus-wide Budget Committee, and an Ad Hoc Committee consisting of two members from the department who were not on the departmental committee, and three from outside the department. The chancellor makes the final decision on whether or not to grant tenure. At each step of the process, the decision went against Harrison.

Grievances with these procedures are heard by the Privilege and Tenure (P&T) Committee. Made up of faculty and functioning independently of the administration, P&T examines all kinds of complaints, from such matters as laboratory space being taken away, to discrimination cases like Harrison's. P&T's recommendations go to the chancellor, who nearly always accepts them. According to Berkeley provost Carol Christ, there have been many cases in which P&T ruled in favor of faculty members and ``it's not at all true that the committee [usually] rules against the faculty'' and in favor of the university.

According to the current P&T Committee chair, Berkeley historian Richard Abrams (who was not on the committee when Harrison's grievance was reviewed), P&T is not charged with examining the substance of departmental tenure reviews, but only with finding out whether or not procedures were properly followed (this includes examining whether nonprofessional or nonacademic criteria entered into a decision about a case). Abrams says that because the procedures for deciding tenure are complex and have many steps, it often happens that faculty unwittingly break the rules. Such errors may or may not affect the outcome of a tenure decision. Abrams says P&T tries to ``get to the heart of the matter'' and judge whether mishandling occurred, and if so, whether it had any substantive effect on the case. By contrast, in a court of law, a technical infraction, such as when a police officer does not read the Miranda rights to a suspect, often means that a case gets thrown out of court.

The P&T Committee reviewed a number of complaints by Harrison about procedural mishandling of her tenure review and about gender bias in the mathematics department. After eighty hours of testimony from twenty-five witnesses, P&T found all the charges to be without substance or impossible to prove. Harrison's opponents have pointed to the P&T report as the most exhaustive analysis of the case that's been done, saying it ``exonerated'' the department. Harrison has said that, because she did not have access to university documents that would support her case--in particular, her own tenure file and those of the men who had recently been promoted to tenure--she could not present to P&T the information she believed was most crucial to her case. A few months before P&T began its hearings, the university administration did give Harrison a summary of her own tenure file, consisting of forty-seven pages of material that had been cut into about 250 pieces and scrambled in random order. The university lawyers and staff had open access to all university documents, confidential or not. Unlike in a court of law, subpoenas could not be issued, so those who did not wish to testify could simply not show up, regardless of the importance of their testimony.

The P&T Committee examined a range of procedural issues in Harrison's case, such as whether or not Harrison had had the opportunity to add material to her file, whether a letter had been missing from her file, and whether she had received an adequate summary of the conclusions of the tenure review committee's recommendation. One item that P&T investigated has since become quite famous. It involves a letter sent by then-chair John Addison, in which he asked for an evaluation of Harrison's work, adding that the Berkeley mathematics department aspires to become ``the top center for mathematics research in the world.'' The letter was sent to only one individual, at the request of the campus-wide Ad Hoc Committee, after the department had already made its decision against granting Harrison tenure.

Harrison's side argued that the letter was unfair because ``best in the world'' standard was not invoked in solicitation letters for male candidates. Of all the issues it looked at, the P&T report devoted the shortest analysis to this one, saying, ``We find no basis for a violation of Dr. Harrison's rights or privileges as a result of this statement in one letter, written to a friend of the Chair, in an attempt to be humorous.'' (Many mathematics departments, to avoid exactly this kind of difficulty, use a standard letter to solicit all evaluations. One chair of a research-oriented department was amazed to hear that Berkeley did not use a standard solicitation letter. ``You're asking for trouble,'' he said to a Berkeley faculty member, who replied, ``And we got it!'')

P&T did find that a rule was broken in one instance: After the campus Ad Hoc Committee solicited three additional letters from external reviewers, Harrison was not informed of the contents of the letters. Although it found university rules about tenure evaluations were technically violated, P&T said, ``We do not find that the violation warrants a reconsideration [of the tenure decision] nor that a plausible case can be made that it caused harm.'' After the P&T review ended, Harrison continued to maintain that this incident, and others deemed harmless by P&T, contributed to the negative outcome of her tenure review. In addition, much to the chagrin of her opponents, she continued to repeat the charge of gender discrimination, presenting much of the same evidence that P&T had examined and rejected.

The P&T report, submitted to the chancellor in September 1989, was confidential until it became part of the court record. The report is methodical, well reasoned, and quite persuasive. On the other hand, Harrison's frustration over her inability to secure important documents is understandable, as is her feeling that the whole process was an instance of the ``little guy'' fighting the big institution. When a grievant feels that such procedures do not function well, a court of law is the next logical step. But beyond disagreeing with the conclusions of the P&T Committee, Harrison called the entire process ``Kafkaesque'' and a ``kangaroo court''. Her critics have bridled at accusations that this trusted faculty committee was unfair.

Later on, when Harrison filed her lawsuit against the university, the Legal Defense Fund of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) supported her case and made a contribution toward her legal expenses. The attorney at AAUP who dealt with her case no longer works there and could not be reached for comment. However, AAUP counsel Ann H. Franke is familiar with some aspects of Harrison's case. ``The AAUP did make a small grant, occasioned by concern over some of the procedures used by the institution in reviewing allegations of discrimination,'' says Franke. The AAUP ``is zealous in pursuit of adequate internal mechanisms'' to handle grievances about discrimination, she says. When these mechanisms don't function adequately, AAUP will in some cases help grievants seek legal means of addressing their complaints. Franke makes it clear that the AAUP did not take a position on whether or not Harrison should have been granted tenure, but only supported Harrison's contention that the appeal mechanism within the university was inadequate for addressing her grievances. The Legal Advocacy Fund of the American Association of University Women, for similar reasons, also supported Harrison's case and contributed a grant toward her legal expenses.

Next: A Position at Oxford Up: Fighting for Tenure The Previous: History of the Case