What Happened at Penn State

It is a time of year when tenure and promotion announcements are beginning to flood academic Twitter and other public spaces where academics dwell. As gratifying as it is to learn about the extraordinary successes that surround me, it is also an occasion to reflect on what tenure means and what it has become. It is hardly news that right-wing panic over scholarship on race, gender, and sexuality have placed tenure under assault from political forces. Those threats are cause for grave concern, but overlook the increasingly commercial logics of universities themselves, and the extent to which university governance at some schools has come to resemble corporate governance: vertical, autocratic, and distressingly opaque.

In other words, even without the external political pressure that looms over tenure, and even with “free expression” codified in terms that satisfies the center-left, and even with ideal processes and procedures in place to tenure and promote good scholars, decisions on whom to tenure and promote are guided by an administrative culture often dislocated from scholarly judgement. Despite its characterization in popular media as a “lifetime job guarantee” (it is hardly that), tenure is also more than protection from political recrimination. It is, in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars. Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. But, tenure so-conceived has at least the advantage of protecting faculty from the incursion of professional strangers swooping in on a vertical axis of untempered power, which is basically what happened to me.

Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts denied me tenure in March 2020. For about a year, I believed that the facts surrounding my tenure case mattered little to anyone but me and those who personally care about the fate of my career. Admins and lawyers at Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts, I am certain, hoped that I would internalize their decision to deny me tenure as an individual failure (which I did, at least for a little while), instead of noticing how my case fits into the College’s dismissive, contemptuous treatment of its academic labor. What happened to me, in other words, didn’t just happen to me. It happened to the faculty of the African American Studies Department and the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences (the two units in which I was appointed). It happened to other pre-tenure faculty in the College who gleaned an object lesson in the absolute and arbitrary authority of a malevolent Dean. And as the documents linked below demonstrate, what happened to me also happened to the very notion of faculty governance itself, as the institutional body tasked with defending my interests was overcome by agency capture. I do not believe my story is generalizable to all of higher ed, or even my field of study, but its central lesson is: At least at Penn State, power is as power does, and no regulatory regime or benevolent decree can prevent the admins from doing what they want. The state of exception is politics. Rule always bends to power’s will.

The ease with which universities are increasingly willing to discard tenured faculty is linked to a surging reliance on contingent faculty, who work under conditions defined by astonishing levels of precarity, a fact which illustrates at least two points for the story I tell below: (a) the expectations for tenure and the processes by which tenure is awarded become more opaque as elite universities shift the burden of academic labor onto those they can underpay and fire at will, and (b) to put it bluntly, if they can do to me what they did to me, imagine what they can do to faculty for whom tenure is not even an option. A fortiori, who’s next?

So it’s time I tell my story, the details of which story are spelled out below. In particular, I’ve linked to a letter from my attorney to PSU, sent last summer, that documents the extent to which Penn State casually ignored its own rules. Before I get to that, however, let me be explicit about my motivations for sharing this story now.

1. It is important to me to address my reputation. I am not a particularly famous public scholar. I have just over 600 Twitter followers. My case has little bearing on electoral politics, and probably will not graze the national discourse on labor in higher ed. But I do have a reputation in my field as a scholar of race, sports, and rhetoric. As best I can tell, I am the only recipient of the National Communication Association’s Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award to be denied tenure after receiving it. And though I find it hard to imagine that others think my personal professional circumstances are very interesting, I am not naive to conference gossip and the like. So in addition to acknowledging that I was denied tenure at Penn State, I wanted to confront rumor with fact, regardless of how kind or unkind the rumors might be.
2. I want to defend my CAS colleagues at Penn State. For better or for worse, Penn State harbors a unique reputation in my field, Communication Studies. The Department of Communication Arts & Sciences (CAS) at PSU lays claim to one of the finest — if not THE finest — communication faculty in the US, a reputation that is well-earned, in my view. Everyone (as far as I know) in the department at Penn State (including Department Head Denise Solomon) supported me enthusiastically, and expressed their profound disappointment not only with the college’s decision, but with the way I was treated by PSU for a year after that. If you have heard that I was denied tenure at PSU, and you are familiar with their CAS faculty, please exclude them from my assessment of the institution. CAS at PSU is filled with wonderful, brilliant people. I remain grateful for the time I got to spend with them as colleagues, and I remain proud to call them friends.
3. I want to defend African American Studies at Penn State directly. In my first three years there, the African American Studies department had basically doubled in size, and become, under the leadership of Cynthia Young, one of the largest, most intellectually diverse Black Studies departments in North America. Dr. Young oversaw the hiring of 11 new tenured or tenure-line faculty members, a growth spurt unprecedented in any field, let alone African American Studies, a department which at most universities lives its institutional life under siege. Soon enough, however, as the College found a new Dean in Clarence Lang in Fall 2019, the siege would eventually come. As the College’s first Black Dean, and one whose faculty appointment is officially in the African American Studies Department, hopes for the future of the department ran high, but three years after the cluster hire, the department is shrinking under the weight of College leadership which seems to treat African American Studies with malign neglect. Two of the professors hired during the cluster surge in ‘18–’19 have already left. One more has been placed on leave pending a grossly unjust termination (see below). Others who preceded me or arrived with me have also left. This year alone, the College of the Liberal Arts will lose 4 Black faculty members either in African American Studies or affiliated with the department. Their stories are theirs to tell, but it’s fair to say that my abilities as an interdisciplinary Black studies scholar were enhanced by orders of magnitude because I shared space with them, and to observe from afar what appears to be that department’s systematic dismantling by the Dean is as infuriating as it is heartbreaking.
4. I want to invite others to see the pattern. The argument from institutional racism is always difficult to make convincingly, a problem that has to do with whom we absolve through the language of intent and how we connect intent with material effect. What seems clear, however, at least with respect to African American Studies at Penn State, is that university admins will not just let the department wither on the vine or fail to defend its faculty, but will continue to persecute its faculty even as the legal system absolves them of wrongdoing. If you haven’t heard of the case of Oliver Baker, then please read this. (If that’s behind a paywall, this is a decent recent piece from State College’s Centre Daily Times, and if that is also behind a paywall, this links to an open letter to PSU Admins, including Dean Lang, from Dr. Baker’s supporters.) I sat in on meetings that brought Dr. Baker to Penn State, and though the pandemic hit before I got the chance to spend much time with him, I know he’s the best of what Penn State has to offer not only as a critical scholar, but as a member of the actual community. Oliver Baker is better attuned to labor politics than I am, and I don’t know how or if I can help him (although, money always helps), but I share the details of my story in solidarity. Because he’s not alone, and neither am I, and what I hope above all is that the pattern of malevolent secrecy at PSU becomes visible. If Dr. Baker is ultimately forced to leave Penn State, it will be for a different pretext than I was, but the same autocratic and inscrutable processes will be responsible for the way Penn State is willing to blithely abuse its labor.

Here are the facts of the case: Just as my courtesy year was coming to an end, In June 2021, I made the decision to contact an attorney and dear friend, Paul Skiermont, who instantly recognized Penn State’s violation of their own binding labor policies. At the end of June, we sent this letter to the University President and Provost, Dean Clarence Lang, the Vice-Provost for Faculty Affairs, and the Chair of the Faculty Senate’s Faculty Rights and Responsibilities Committee. The letter addresses both substantive problems with the College’s assessment of my tenure dossier and the egregious process violations committed by Dean Lang, the College’s P&T Committee, the Vice-Provost, and the Faculty Senate committee who had initially agreed to investigate the violations of my procedural rights. The first page is reproduced below. The entire 10 pp. letter can be accessed by clicking the link above.

In July 2021, we received this response from PSU’s lawyers. It is devoid of substance. In one empty paragraph, they asserted a “different view” and told me to get lost.

Those letters comprise the heart of what I want to communicate publicly. Here’s the tl;dr, though:

My tenure case had the support of the African American Studies departmental P&T committee and the enthusiastic support of the Heads of both African American Studies and Communication Arts & Sciences.

In March 2020, The College of the Liberal Arts’s P&T Committee came to a bizarre and quixotic reading of my research credentials and recommended — without consulting either of my Department Heads, both of whom had recommended I be tenured— to Dean Clarence Lang that I be denied tenure. In a sorrowful letter reeking with bad faith, Dean Lang registered his concurrence, and that was that.

In October 2020, I filed a petition with the Faculty Senate’s Faculty Rights & Responsibilities Committee to have my case re-reviewed. Citing Penn State’s AC23 Promotion and Tenure Guidelines, and Penn State’s Administrative Guidelines covering AC 23 (bottom of p. 21), I argued that the College had violated provisions which required its P&T Committee to seek a reason-giving exchange with my Department Heads, whose recommendations differed from that of the College Committee. It was not my only argument, but it was the argument with the best chance of prompting a re-review of my dossier. In November 2020, the Faculty Senate Committee agreed in a written letter that I had a prima facie case and promised me an investigation and a report of their findings.

Six months after I filed my petition, in April 2021, the Vice-Provost for Faculty Affairs informed me that the Faculty Senate Committee had canceled its promised investigation after receiving an assurance from… wait for it… the Vice-Provost that the reason-giving consultation in question had in fact occurred. If that development strikes you as unremarkable, consider that the Vice-Provost was supposed to be the recipient of the investigation’s report, not its sole source of evidence in generating the report.

No one told me that my petition had been denied. Radio silence for six months. An inquiry to the Faculty Senate committee went unanswered for 48 hours before the Vice-Provost deigned to inform me that a flimsy email she gave to the Faculty Senate absolved that body of its obligation to check the absolute power of the Dean. Apparently these behind-the-scenes machinations did not merit the courtesy of a mere email to let me know my petition was dead on arrival. That’s when the lawyers got involved. It’s worth noting that in our letter to PSU, my attorney and I did NOT ask I simply be tenured; we merely demanded a re-review of my tenure dossier in ways that conformed to PSU’s own binding policies. They told us to buzz off. Rule had bent to power’s will.

When I heard about Nikole Hannah-Jones’s case last year, I recognized the broad pattern into which my case fit. Now, I by no means intend to liken myself to Hannah-Jones, but if her credentials for tenure can be questioned by the admins of a flagship research university, it’s fairly obvious what they can do to a relatively obscure Assistant Professor, especially one who studies race politics in the US, and one who openly advocates for labor reform in college sports at a university whose political economy is underwritten by the labor of Black athletes.

I am a sport scholar, and I’ll end by crediting a development in professional sports with inspiring the will I’d need to tell my story and share its key documents. Even if you don’t follow sports, you may have heard of Brian Flores, formerly the Head Coach of the Miami Dolphins. After he was fired, and while he was still on the job market, he filed a class-action lawsuit accusing the National Football League of racial discrimination. Even his supporters worried that the NFL’s reactionary recalcitrance would spell doom for the rest of his coaching career. But Flores’s purpose was to crack the institution open, to announce that he’d had enough, and to use the power of sunlight to bend the institution’s trajectory for those who would follow. I don’t have Brian Flores’s courage — he went public when he was still looking for a job, and I’ve already found one — but if he can expose the National Football League, I ought to be comfortable in sharing how secrecy, pettiness, and a shocking disregard for shared governance shape the administrative culture in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State.

Abe Khan — May 2022