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Reactions in the Department

After Harrison's appointment to the department, inflammatory e-mail circulated within the department, some of it decrying the university's handling of the matter, some of it accusing Harrison of conducting a ``propaganda campaign'', some of it deploring the bad publicity for the department and for mathematics. However, Harrison says that the vituperative e-mail has been confined to a minority of the faculty and that about two dozen faculty ``warmly'' welcomed her back to the department. Much of the criticism was directed not so much at Harrison herself but at the process used to resolve her case. The use of an outside review committee is not unheard of on the Berkeley campus; the same procedure was used to resolve tenure disputes in Berkeley's law school and in its art history department. In each of those cases, a candidate who was denied tenure was reinstated after the review. But the mathematics department did not take much comfort in these precedents. Many were unhappy that a new faculty member was appointed not only without a departmental vote, but also with no information presented to the department about how the review was conducted. This put the department in the position of having to rely on press accounts and its own speculation about what the committee did. It was this aspect of the case that brought out criticisms by many in the department who had not voiced opinions about the Harrison case before.

A group of nine faculty sent a letter to the UC Berkeley Academic Senate complaining about the procedure used. ``[T]he procedure used in appointing Dr. Harrison $\ldots$ was in violation of virtually all of the regulations for making such appointments,'' the letter says. ``We are not here questioning the wisdom of [the decision to settle] but we do have very strong objections to the procedure used in implementing it which we feel has done substantial damage (A) to the Berkeley mathematics department and (B) to the cause of due process at Berkeley.'' The letter does not ask the Senate to look into reversing the decision, but only to consider issuing some kind of statement or censure that would help to insure, as the letter puts it, ``that nothing like this will ever happen again on the Berkeley campus.''

Some faculty maintain that, throughout the years of legal wrangling between the university and Harrison, they bowed to the university's wishes and kept their views on the case more or less to themselves. Although the university says it upholds the department's original 1986 decision and the conclusions of the P&T Committee, many in the department felt that the settlement made it appear that the mathematics department had done something wrong. On the other hand, given the set of choices the university was faced with--settling or going to court--most seem to agree with what Grunbaum told Science magazine, that settling was the ``least undesirable path.''

Christ says the 1986 decision to deny Harrison tenure was ``supported by the chancellor and not altered.'' (This may seem paradoxical, but Christ points out that the two committees that reviewed Harrison's case for tenure in 1986 and in 1993 were looking at different sets of evidence, because the later review examined all of Harrison's work up to 1993.) Furthermore, says Christ, the P&T Committee ``worked conscientiously and felt that the evidence did not sustain a complaint,'' and the university backs that conclusion. But if the university felt it had not wronged Harrison and that the denial of tenure had been just, why did it settle? ``The motivation to settle is complex,'' Christ says. ``The university felt it wasn't in its best interest to have a long, expensive, divisive trial. The university was also concerned about setting a precedent that tenure decisions would be made by a jury trial. And we felt it would create more divisiveness in the mathematics department.''

The university's reluctance to turn a tenure case over to the courts is understandable. At the University of California at Irvine, a man who was an assistant professor in the mathematics department recently sued the university when he was denied tenure, saying that the mathematical judgment in his tenure case had been wrong. The case never came to a jury trial. A lower-court judge who reviewed the evidence said that one of the negative reviews of the candidate's work should be disregarded because the reviewer worked in probability theory, while the candidate worked in martingale theory. The judge was clearly unaware that martingale theory is a subfield of probability theory. The judge ruled that the man be reappointed to the department, as an assistant professor, and that his tenure case be reviewed again in two years' time.

Next: The AWM's Position Up: Fighting for Tenure The Previous: The Review Committee