Duke dean promises to block tenure for faculty who are ‘intolerant,’ undefined

If you want tenure at Duke University, stay current on the latest microaggressions and zip your lips.

Valerie Ashby, the dean of the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, told a campus forum on “bias and hate” earlier this month that it will be closely scrutinizing faculty in their annual reviews, The Chronicle reported:

In addition, she noted that all faculty serving on search committees are required to undergo implicit bias training through the Office of Institutional Equity.

“We will evaluate the entirety of the person—you can’t be a great scholar and intolerant. You have to go,” she said.

Here’s the full video of that forum, and here’s the snippet where Ashby tells faculty who don’t measure up “you have to go,” clipped by Brooklyn College History Prof. KC Johnson:

The transcript:

We’re also really working on the new faculty who step in the door, and really trying to teach them ‘these are our values, this is what’s tolerable here, this is what’s not, this is how we feel about these things’ [President Richard Brodhead interjects: “That’s right”], and at every point of their evaluation, and at every point of a chance where we have an opportunity to make a decision about whether or not you are Duke, we will evaluate the entirety of the person. And so you can’t be a great scholar and be intolerant. You have to go. [applause]

We aren’t adding emphasis to Ashby’s words at the end – she says it like she’s firing somebody, and the crowd applauds.

Johnson of Brooklyn College, whose beef with Duke goes back to its treatment of accused students in the infamous lacrosse-rape case, sees this promise by Ashby for what it is: an undefined threat to untenured faculty. He writes at Minding the Campus:

Tenure at Duke, according to the university’s official policy, “should be reserved for those who have clearly demonstrated through their performance as scholars and teachers that their work has been widely perceived among their peers as outstanding,” with “good teaching and university service” expected but not in and of themselves sufficient. …

Nothing in Duke’s written tenure policy suggests that a “great” scholar’s failing to fulfill a definition of “tolerance” offered by Brodhead and Ashby constitutes grounds for denying tenure. Indeed, Ashby’s emotional concluding line—“you have to go”—suggests that the dean considers it possible to immediately dismiss those untenured professors who fail her tolerance test.

Ashby hasn’t further clarified what she considers “intolerant” and Duke PR hasn’t responded to Johnson’s request for clarification, he said:

For instance, would a junior professor who publicly opposed racial preferences be deemed “intolerant,” especially given Brodhead’s earlier criticism of tenured Duke professors whose research raised questions about the effects of racial preferences? Would a junior professor who urged the university to change course and provide due process to students accused of sexual assault be deemed “intolerant,” and thus worthy of dismissal under the new standards? If the Ashby principles had existed during the lacrosse case, could they have been used to terminate untenured Duke professors who criticized the Group of 88? [those professors who backed false accuser Crystal Magnum] …

At the very least, then since Duke’s new “tolerance” criterion remains appears to be wholly arbitrary, any junior professor who wants to stay employed needs to self-censor.

The Chronicle puts this into another context: student anger that “research professor Jerry Hough—criticized for racially charged comments he made on a New York Times editorial last year—will teach classes next semester without having undergone any bias training.”

We’ve covered what 80-year-old Hough said that so inflamed students: his comment on that editorial (“How Racism Doomed Baltimore”) that Asian Americans have overcome an equally bad plight in America as African Americans because they integrated and “worked doubly hard.”

Read The Chronicle and Johnson’s Minding the Campus post.

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

IMAGE: ostill/Shutterstock