Dive Brief:
- The American Association of University Professors has voted to censure Northeastern Illinois University, which it accuses of rejecting an assistant professor’s tenure bid as a retaliatory measure.
- John Boyle, a former assistant professor of linguistics, had received strong faculty recommendations for tenure in 2011, but he was associated with colleagues who passed a “no confidence” vote in Northeastern Illinois President Sharon Hahs, who later rejected his tenure bid, in 2010.
- Northeastern Illinois said the AAUP vote has “no practical effect on the university,” and that it rejected AAUP’s report on the case because it included errors, misinterpretations, and assumptions.
Dive Insight:
Censuring Northeastern Illinois sends a message to the university and other schools that tenure decisions should be based on teaching, scholarship, and service — not personal conflicts, said Peter Neil Kirstein, vice president of the Illinois Conference of the AAUP. According to Inside Higher Ed, after an investigation, the AAUP also concluded that Boyle was the victim of a turf battle between linguistics and teaching-English-as-a-second-language professors, with the latter group believing he was unfairly trying to poach students from their field of study.