I was thinking the other day about tenured faculty who don’t do their job or who do the absolute minimum: I’m talking about professors who never show up to work, do no research, and whose teaching is at the absolute minimum level of quality. Such people can actually be a negative in that they give students a substandard level of education and can make it more difficult to institute changes. Because of tenure, it’s difficult for such people to be fired. In theory, the administration should be able to take away their offices (no need for an office if you never come in) and reduce their salaries; instead, there’s a default to just keep giving everyone something close to the same annual salary increase. I can understand these constraints—performance in teaching, research, and service can be difficult to judge, and if it were too easy to take away office space and reduce salaries, then the admin could do this for all sorts of bad reasons. Indeed, universities can have non-tenured deadwood faculty too (for example, this guy): once someone’s on the inside, he can stay there for a long time.
Ultimately, we just accept this as part of the cost of doing business—just about every organization ends up with high-paid employees with negative value. Think of all the business executives who extract massive rents while at best pushing paper around and wasting people’s time, and at worst making bad decisions that drive their companies into the ground. The problem of faculty deadwood is just particularly salient to me because I’ve seen it as a student and teacher.
I’m just complaining here; I have no solutions to offer. A few years at Columbia we had a longtime professor of astronomy who opposed the tenure system in principle: he would’ve been tenured had he wanted to be, but he chose to be on five-year contracts. Maybe that would be a good idea for everyone. I’m not sure, though: I have a feeling that, if we were to switch to five-year contracts for the permanent faculty, that it would either be a rubber stamp (so that the deadwood guys would stay around forever anyway), or that it would be a huge paperwork hassle (an endless cycle of forms and committees for the faculty), or perhaps both, the worst of both worlds. The must unproductive faculty would be impossible to get rid of, and the most productive would just quit because they wouldn’t to deal with the reviews.
P.S. Another solution would be that the deadwood faculty would feel bad about drawing a salary while not doing their job of teaching/research/service, but it would take an exceptional person to quit a job where they pay you a lot and you don’t have to work or even show up to the office. Especially given that, if you don’t quit, you can wait for enough years and then retire with excellent pension benefits.
I have the same thoughts and frustrations. One thing that puzzles me, though, is that as faculty our job descriptions* state that we’re supposed to be doing research, teaching, and service, so it should be possible to fire tenured people who are not doing at least one of these things. Research is the clearest category: someone with zero papers in the past dozen years, zero other output, and zero engagement with the research activities of others is not fulfilling this part of the contract. Yet, there is zero will to take action, though that salary could instead be used to hire someone more capable. Why?
On the plus side, I find it encouraging that the fraction of deadwood is small (< 5%, I'd say), despite the lack of any policing.
* At least I think they do. I have no idea what's in my contract or where it is, and I don't remember signing anything after tenure / promotion.
Raghu:
I think the only part of the job that is absolutely required is teaching (unless formal arrangements are made to set the teaching aside, through “buy-out” arrangements). Research and service can be part of the job but are not necessary.
If you do wonderful teaching, you can do zero research and service and that’s fine, and I would not label you as deadwood.
If your teaching is mediocre or even bad, then you’re expected to excel in at least one of research or service. One problem here is that “research” can be beyond bad (recall the story of the dean of engineering at the University of Nevada); another problem is that lots of things can be characterized as “service.” I think that maintaining this blog is a great service to the university as well as the community as large, but professors who don’t blog might disagree.
I’m guessing that, with rare exceptions, deadwood faculty don’t think of themselves as deadwood. They probably think that they’re great teachers (whose students just don’t appreciate them), great researchers (just stymied at the moment by lack of funding), and paragons of service (even if all they do is sift through paperwork).
Andrew, you wrote “If you do wonderful teaching, you can do zero research and service and that’s fine, and I would label you as deadwood.”
Did you mean, “If you do wonderful teaching, you can do zero research and service and that’s fine, and I would not label you as deadwood.”
Fixed; thanks.
You’ve spurred me to ask to see my actual contract! Who knows what surprises I’ll find?
Raghu:
While you’re at it, could you look for my contract too? I can’t find it anywhere in my files!
This is turning out to be difficult! So far all I’ve gotten is a link to a HR page that doesn’t have a job description and also doesn’t have my current job title — it seems not to have been updated since before I got promoted in 2017. I also have a list that informs me that my “typical work functions” don’t involve:
Balancing
Carrying
Climbing
Crawling
Crouching/Stooping
Driving
Feeling/Handling
Keyboarding/Computer Use
Personal Protective Equipment
Pulling/Pushing
Reaching
Regular Interaction with Customers
Repetitive movement
Sitting
Speaking
Specific Work Schedule
Squatting
Standing
Telephone Use
Twisting/Bending
Walking/Running
Writing
The last one is surprising, since I spend a lot of time writing.
And, given our tuition-driven university, one could make a case for “Regular Interaction with Customers”
I’m not sure what to think about not being required to feel.
Raghu I would bet by “writing” they mean hand-writing with a pen. All of those things are kind of in the category of “physical dangers from acute or repetitive motion” so I’m guessing they mean you don’t have to spend all day with a pen in hand taking notes
@Daniel: Yes, I know this.
Daniel > by “writing” they mean hand-writing with a pen
Note that his job doesn’t involve using a keyboard either. It wouldn’t be practical anyway without sitting or standing. (Maybe he’s directly connected to a computer lying in a matrix-style pod.)
Raghu > given our tuition-driven university, one could make a case for “Regular Interaction with Customers”
Hopefully that would be mostly done in the form of “speaking”.
I mean the whole thing is ridiculous. It’s complete cover your assery. But I thought somehow Raghu was being sarcastic and confused rather than merely sarcastic and humorously intentionally obtuse.
@Daniel (Amending my last comment): Yes, I know that the list in general is focused on repetitive / difficult manual tasks, so my commenting on them is tongue-in-cheek. I don’t think ‘writing’ is meant to apply only to pen-and-paper writing, though, and not typing, which can also be physically challenging.
@Daniel
The real hazard of my work is that I have to see graphs like this, https://imgur.com/a/abCpxG9 (note the linear fit showing the “significant correlation” with time, p = 0.0014), from published papers by people at fancy universities, without gouging my eyes out.
Yuck. Where are the data points? And why is this linear if I’m assuming they “ramped up” some treatment in the ramp period, held it constant in maintenance … There should be nonlinearity in time. And yet if you look at the median lines it looks like nothing much is going on. That’s pretty appalling. Just loess the data and call it a day!
A dozen years to get rid of someone who contributes negative value? Where else would that seem reasonable? Surely your colleagues should be able to determine that in a much shorter amount of time.
I think you nailed when you described it as the cost of doing business.
I have many similar discussions with friends of opposite political leanings (I’m middle-left) about problems with government programs. Is there “waste, fraud, and abuse”? Sure. Are there people taking advantage of welfare, food stamps, etc…? Sure.
But, what is the alternative? Let the corporate world manage things? Yeah, right. Every person for themselves in a Hobbesian nightmare world? No government oversight and let scammers and amoral people do as they wish?
It’s easier to be a critic than a carpenter. Many of the frustratingly imperfect systems we have are actually pretty good solutions to very complex problems.
As Andrew pointed out regarding this specific situation, rolling 5 year contracts are likely to be gigantic bureaucaratic nightmares (think back to your tenure/promotion dossier preparation and review), and probably be minimally effective at weeding out deadwood anyway.
I think the old saying “don’t let perfection be the enemy of good” applies to this situation and many others. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work towards perfection (continuous quality improvement, or whatever it’s called nowadays). But that can be done while not throwing out the baby with the bathwater (yet another super-common saying that all applies to this exact kind of scenario).
The opposite of faculty “Deadwood” would have to be Einstein and his1905 publications
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis_papers
He published groundbreaking explanations for the (1) photoelectric effect, (2) Brownian motion, (3) special relativity, and (4)mass-energy equivalence. I do not know what he did the following year, 1906.
I fantasize as to what the head of his university department would decide about his faculty increase should therefore be for that coming year, or for the year after that when his output presumably did not come close to that annus mirabilis. Would the head of his university department suggest that Einstein engage more with other aspects of university employment such as fund raising, interaction with his students and being a role model in general?
However, as is well known, he was not at a university but was merely an employee of the Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland.
I mean, to be fair, Einstein is considered a role model by many, and his presence at a paid event would probably bring in a lot of revenue.
More fantasizing: Einstein was actually far more clever than his unkempt appearance would indicate. He more than likely realized that supervisors have a fallback position, namely that more is better than less. He could have combined those four groundbreaking publications into one mammoth paper. Instead, he separated them and thus, gets head of the department/dean credit for four publications instead of just one. Of course, he might still be admonished for his style of dress.
And, he certainly would have gotten in deep trouble if his shocking views of Asians were known back then
https://www.history.com/news/albertin-einstein-racist-xenophobic-views-travel-journal
Actually, I take that back. Today, he would be in deep trouble but back then, such views were more acceptable, indeed probably commonplace.
I was recently reading through Einstein’s correspondence to get an understanding of his initial difficulties with general relativity, and interspersed in them are some interesting tidbits of his life. See here: https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol8-trans
Some of it is quite touching: his letters to Hans-Albert, who was living with his mother in Zurich after Einstein and his wife separated, encouraging the boy to keep up his studies (even if he wanted to be an engineer!) and sending him geometry puzzles to solve. Others fill in the human part of the man: making financial arrangements with his estranged wife, arguing about custody — not very flattering but such is the tapestry of life. It’s quite jarring to move between a discussion of some mathematical argument between professors and then see a minor personal rant laid out in print. And of course, all of this letter writing was going on in the middle of a world war!
Nevertheless, the most shocking piece of writing there is from Ilse Einstein, the daughter of Elsa, Einstein’s cousin and future second wife. She writes to someone — with the instruction that the letter be destroyed upon receipt, of course not followed — describing the possibility of *her* marriage to Albert: https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol8-trans/592. And it doesn’t seem to be a case of youthful infatuation either:
> I have the greatest respect for him as a person. If ever there was true friendship and camaraderie between two beings of different types, those are quite certainly my feelings for A. I have never wished nor felt the least desire to be close to him physically. This is otherwise in his case-recently at least.-He himself even admitted to me once how difficult it is for him to keep himself in check. But now I do believe that my feelings for him are not sufficient for conjugal life. I am just too afraid that then I might not be able to love him anymore and would even perceive him as a fetter. In the end, I would feel like a slave girl who has been sold. Maybe you think differently about this, but I have some doubts about it. I could imagine falling deeply enough in love with any other stranger to be able to live together with him, but my mind balks at the idea with A. I believe that the relationship between him and Mama that exists-in the alternate case, that existed-do not allow the sentiment necessary for connubial life to develop. I have become too used to regarding him somewhat as a “father.”
I actually have a data point on this. I used to teach at a school (Evergreen State College) that didn’t have formal tenure, but instead five year reviews. I can say three things. First, the reviews were an immense time sink, requiring us to prepare multiple binder notebooks of stuff. Second, they were always perfunctory; no one, as far as I know, got anything but an OK for the next cycle. Third, the good thing about them is that they provided a venue for reflection on the state of the institution and how that pertains to the individual under review. This is because, due to Evergreen’s uncommon system of team teaching, reviews included many faculty the reviewee had taught with. It didn’t always happen, but when it did it was useful. My hunch is that if 5 year reviews replace tenure at more normal schools the disadvantages will persist, but not the advantages.
This sucks, but I don’t want to be to judgemental. I probably wouldn’t work either if I could get away with it.
Djonny:
It depends on the situation. I do lots of work that I could get away with not doing because I think it’s important that the work get done or because the alternative, of not doing the work, seems like it would lead to a worse outcome.
@Djonny,
Well then I hope you are in administration, not faculty!
I don’t have experience at the post-secondary level, but I do at the K-12 level, and here is the challenge I see: Suppose someone starts teaching at age 25, and after 30 years of hard work, is burned out. If they quit, what job will they be able to get, at age 55? Moreover (using the California State Teachers Retirement System as an example), if he makes 80K and retires now, he gets a pension of $3200/mo. If he hangs on for 15 years, he gets $7200/mo. And AFAIK that is not a special attribute of CALSTRS. Now, unlike the professor in the example, he still has to show up for work, but nevertheless this seems to be a nearly inescapable problem. PS: CALSTRS calculator is here: https://resources.calstrs.com/CalSTRSComResourcesWebUI/Calculators/Pages/RetirementBenefit.aspx
Gdanning:
But it should be different for a university professor, no? If you’re a K-12 teacher you might have very little input in what you do (possibly teaching outmoded material and doing tons of paperwork). At a university, you’ll typically have some flexibility in what you teach—even if you don’t choose your classes or your textbooks, there’s some leeway in how you conduct the class—and your research directions are up to you. Even if you can’t get funding, there are plenty of ways to conduct research.
And, yes, here I’m speaking of tenured faculty at research universities. When adjuncts are deadwood, that’s a completely different story, and in that case I’d put more of the blame on the university department, not the adjunct, as the department is making the decision to keep renewing the person’s contract.
My graduate education was in a geography department that expanded very rapidly after WWII, and by the 70s some of the tenured faculty were on what we called leave of presence. The kind of work they had done was out of style, and they didn’t want to put the effort into learning how to do things differently. The experience made me favor five year reviews, but Peter has pointed out that they don’t work that well, either. So, this is yet another problem for which I don’t have a solution.
Yes, I certainly have less sympathy for a university prof, for the reasons you mention. And K-12 teaching is certainly far more taxing than university teaching. But might it, at least sometimes, be a difference of degree, rather than of kind? And what if your research expertise is on the ethnographic end of things, and you are a bit too old or otherwise unable to spend five years living in a village in the Andes?
Andrew, I have the utmost respect for you as a scholar (and in fact you are one of my favorite people in the discipline I’ve yet to meet). But this post is infected with the elite-university bias of the sort found in the NYT and WaPo: the tippy-top schools are <1% of the story, not the norm.
Why do I say that? Because you act like "pay you a lot," "annual salary increases," and "excellent pension benefits" are what most faculty experience. They're not. Before I moved, I was at a state flagship for almost a decade. During that time, the faculty received one COL increase, and zero merit raises (I was making less adjusted for inflation than when I started, and the retention offer I rejected was a <3% salary increase). And the pension benefits were laughable — something like a 4% contribution to a 401k.
That's far, far closer to the norm for tenure-track faculty in America than anything you've ever experienced.
Rando:
Fair enough. I’m describing the universities that I’ve attended or taught at, which are a mix of elite private universities (Harvard, Chicago, Columbia) and state flagships (Maryland, Berkeley). The University of Maryland is not quite elite—at least not when I was attending, although I got an excellent education there!—but currently I think elite enough that the tenured faculty have high pay and comfortable working conditions. So not at all representative of college teaching in general, even on the tenure track.
Even at elite universities, much of the teaching load in science and engineering is handled by non-tenure-track adjuncts or tenure-track junior faculty. In CS at top research universities, tenure-track faculty often have a 1 + 1 (one class per semester) teaching load of which they buy themselves out of 1, leaving them 1 class/year to teach. At a teaching university, a load of 4 + 4 is not unusual. In large MS programs, like in stats at Columbia, I suspect the teaching as measured by student hours is mostly non-tenured adjuncts (and also some junior faculty).
Andrew volunteers to teach more than he is required to just because he likes teaching and wants to get his message(s) out. I believe he may be unique in that regard—I’ve certainly never heard of it.
What isn’t so clear in grad school is how much management is involved in running a lab of researchers. It’s more like running a small business in an antagonistic bureaucracy than being a high school teacher (high school teaching is bureaucratic in some of the same ways, but you’re usually not fundraising and managing cash flow as a teacher). So all the images people have of elite university professors casually teaching a classroom of 10 engaged undergraduates is as much a fiction as the groovy residences of young people in NY-based TV shows or films. CS profs, at least, are more like harried CEOs of startups, but with zero upside profit potential.
Recently I hear about senior, well-paid faculty in Canada being pressed to take early retirement. That is a risk towards the end of working life as any kind of employee who manages to raise their income but tenured faculty are not immune.
Rando – Andrew’s post doesn’t bother me much, but your general point rings true. Every time there is something in the news about “Universities are doing X…” or “College students did Y…”, it almost always translates to “A few people at Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley did X or Y…”.
Time to put in a good word for university administration: Be sure to read, “To Rise Above Principle: The Memoirs of an Unreconstructed Dean” by Henry Bauer, formerly of Virginia Tech University. It is screamingly funny and you will be hard pressed to put it down. Bauer, now in his 90s, is one of the most interesting person in existence, as can be seen by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_H._Bauer
In particular, although he and I disagree on almost every aspect of existence, scientific or otherwise, as a journal editor, he never censored anything I submitted, no matter how much it clashed with his view.
Thanks for this info – I did find his blog.
Much as I love Andrew’s posts, I think he has bought into a stereotype without doing the research. Based on my working experience as a faculty member and dean equivalent at public institutions in California, “tenure” does not equal absolute job security. Faculty members go through periodic review by other faculty members and administrators. Contracts have minimum criteria for teaching, scholarship and sometimes service. There is a process for removing bad apples as Andrew defines them. The problem is that the process takes a lot of work with accompanying angst. Administrators don’t want to make the effort and faculty despite their avowal of high standards don’t want to take any responsibility for maintaining such standards. The same dynamic applies to the public employee job security stereotype. Public employees can be removed for not doing their job. Their bosses just have to use progressive discipline and document the heck out of what they do. Workers who have pride in their work and place of work have supported language in their contracts that allows removal for nonperformance and are willing to share in the responsibility for applying the defined standards. To me, the post lies in the “Someone (else)should do something” category.
“don’t want to make the effort ”
That makes sense. It costs a university admin or faculty nothing to just let problems slide. There is no penalty for not making the effort, and usually no benefit for making the effort.
It’s not like that in business. When the numbers get slim, managers that don’t take action risk having action taken against them. No doubt there are some useless people around but it’s not common. I’ve been hired in the midst of shakeups in companies a couple of times and a lot of people who apparently thought they were safe wound up out the door. It even happens in coops. A friend who worked for a large ag coop barely survived a purge of mid-level execs – he was knocked down a level but most of the others at his level were let go. Interestingly he had just been promoted and was going on about all the golfing trips. Hmmm…wonder what happened there.
As long as there’s no penalty to leadership for letting people slide in universities, they will keep sliding. You notice in high profile cases of academic cheating, sexual harassement or whatever the social outrage de jour, it’s only when the pain starts to accumulate for the legions of presidents and vice presidents that action happens.
Depends on the size of the business and their level of profits, doesn’t it? Small to middle size businesses that are working on a slim margin will, of course, take action accordingly when events call for it, just like small to medium post-secondary institutions. But large businesses that can pretty much dictate their profit profiles will let the purges be, generally. This is why I always thought the way tenure is invidiously compared to business “competiton” is bs. Most people in private business who survive for over 7 years never get fired unless there’s a real crisis. Instead, they tend to be moved around to where they can do least harm to the bottom line, just like in academia.
Besides, you have to be careful about this. My favorite example is Pierro Sraffa. His major academic accomplishment was to edit the works of David Ricardo. It took him better then 20 years. He had one paper and one small book, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, that fell dead from the press and was ignored for years. But … he was a major influence on Wittgenstein, saved Antonio Gramsci’s papers from the fascists, and founded Neo-Ricardian economics, among other things. Cambridge kept him around (apparently) because so many of their leading lights found him useful to talk to. Today, with that publication record and only an editorial job to recommend him, he’d be dismissed as deadwood.
This post I have a personal stake in – presumably I should be retired and would be considered dead wood on the basis of age. However, I certainly don’t feel that and observe much more “dead wood” in many younger faculty I have worked with. When someone keeps using the same text because it requires little new preparation, that is a symptom of dead wood. When they don’t adapt their teaching methods and cease to learn from their students, that is another symptom. Research activity is harder to gauge, but hopefully should involve a range of activities – peer reviewed publications are increasingly overrated in my view. I see younger faculty (at less than tier 1 institutions) prove their “research” by publishing in journals things that will never be read. I’d rather see them not publish such things but offer course material that is truly up to date.
For some earlier comments about mechanisms for removing faculty for nonperformance, my experience has been that it is rarely used – and when used, is often more political than based on true merit. As some have indicated, the annual reviews (annual has always puzzled me since I continually am re-evaluating my work and the annual milestone seems artificial and actually deters continual improvement) are unduly cumbersome and rarely used in a meaningful way. Academics take great pains to avoid directly interacting with each other in any way that could be considered criticism – except the behind the back criticism that is all too common and destructive. Of course, I am over-generalizing, but I think it is more true than not.
I do attribute part of the problem to tenure. I’ve taught at both tenure and non-tenure institutions and I think there is a difference, but that is only part of the story. It won’t be fixed by eliminating tenure (which comes with its own problems regarding academic freedom), but until post-tenure review is something taken seriously, tenure is an impediment to improving teaching and research practices. Service is a whole different set of problems.
Even professors don’t realize how little protection tenure gives you. See my Cancellings page https://www.rasmusen.org/rasmapedia/index.php?title=Cancellings . Besides the well-known persecutions of professors for political reasons (Amy Wax, Penn Law; Joshua Katz, Princeton Classics), professors are pushed out as deadwood or just as disliked. Harold Donnelly at Purdue Math had his teaching and pay reduced to 0% unilaterally by his Chair, even though 80% of the full profs voted protest and his Fields medallist co-author published an AMS protest. Mark McPhail at Indiana U-Northwest (Gary) Communications had his pay and teaching reduced 70% and shortly after was fired. The committees afterwards supported him; the Admin ignored them and settled the lawsuit with a Nondisclosure agreement, as is standard. Here at IU-Bloomington, 72-year-old law professor Steve Conrad admits he is deadwood (but he teaches a voluntary 6-seminar load and is only paid $130,000) and has been Title IX’d with silly accusations (e.g., he called on a shy woman in class because she was married), apparently because they want his slot.
To be sure, at the same time many departments do tolerate people who do zero research and service and do not even ask them to teach the 50% higher load a tenure contract allows. Administration is strange.
You can’t even go and make public declarations about how the US would be better off with fewer Asians and should prefer immigration from White countries without the dean sending you a strongly worded letter (but still unable to fire you). Truly, pitiful, minimal protections. It’s not as if another profession would fire you for making derogatory comments about the ethnicities of a large fraction of people you’re overseeing.
Lol I looked up Joshua Katz too and he was fired for diddling a student. I’m sure he wouldn’t have been noticed had he not penned that, in my opinion, relatively even handed piece, and sure the uproar there is a shame, but I’m glad he’s fired because you can’t diddle your students. Poor professors! Can’t even diddle your students without consequences!
I don’t think Katz was fired for “diddling a student”. They found out about his relationship and he wasn’t fired for it. He was fired after he made a controversial statement years later, and was then accused of improper behavior during the investigation of that aforementioned relationship. So the lesson is that professors can indeed diddle their students without much in the way of consequences, it’s other behaviors they have to watch out for.
I don’t really disagree with you. In a formal causal inference sense, he was fired for both in that if either incident had not happened he would not have been fired. It’s pretty gross that the university tried to cover it up the first time, and a shame that it was motivated dirt diggers who ultimately aired it out.
But it’s ultimately a good thing that he was fired eventually, so I find it pretty funny to describe him as a victim of “cancelation” on “rasmapedia.” It’s like describing Richard Nixon as the victim of a ax-grinding muck-rakers and a profiteering tabloid journalists. He did actually do the thing!
But the university didn’t “try to cover up” what he did! It was a known fact that he had a sexual relationship with a student, and a known fact that the university did NOT deem it a firing offense. The correct phrase is not “cover up” but instead “slap on the wrist”. A cover up is what a university does in the case of research misconduct, since they are typically happy with faculty producing garbage research as long as people few notice it’s garbage. Someone given a slap on the wrist might promise not to do it again, which requires admitting they did it in the first place.
Nah that’s just factually incorrect. It was not a “known fact” to anyone but university administration. The only publicly available information was that Katz took a leave of absence. Even other faculty members didn’t know why, and described it as “highly unusual.”
The story was only broke after the student newspaper was put in touch with acquaintances of the student in question
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2021/02/alumni-allegations-princeton-joshua-katz
It was then decried as “hearsay,” “outrageous,” and a “hit piece” by “Princetonians for Free Speech” followed by Katz confirming the allegations in a statement on their website. Then the university gave their confirmation.
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2021/02/joshua-katz-statement-relationship-princeton-suspension
Frankly, it seems less like the university decided the first non-punishment was appropriate and more like it figured it would be the least conspicuous option. If you don’t like the term cover-up, let’s at least agree to “swept under the rug.” But it sounds like a cover-up.
He also did try and do it again, to at least one other undergrad (before the slap on the wrist). The whole thing is disgusting.
Many of us ageing boomers benefited from mandatory retirement – we essentially owe our positions to an older faculty member having to step aside, whether the latter was deadwood or not. I retired in the past year – I wasn’t exactly deadwood but I did realize that my academic “wins above replacement” was clearly negative. And by stepping aside, my department can hire an energetic young person who hopefully will have a productive 40+ year career.
I’m in no position to judge anyone who stays on beyond their “best before” date – I’m very well-off financially and I’m still able to make some extra money teaching and consulting. So not everyone is as fortunate as I am.
You were lucky to work in a field (and at an institution) where the administration let them hire a tenure-track replacement! I know people with tenure who stayed on after they wanted to retire because they predicted that their position would not be replaced if they retired today. That is not great for them or for their students.
Andrew, this isn’t new. I used to send all the incoming faculty at my (small liberal arts) college this link:
https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/baked/micro.pdf
It’s to F. M. Cornford’s Microcosmographica Academica, easily the best handbook on academic life ever written. In 1908, btw. Cornford, a long-time Cambridge don, had every aspect of academic politics down pat. And the little book is a hoot to read as well.
Everybody who posted here should read it right now. And that means you too, Andrew, if you haven’t already.
Btw, I’m a liberal conservative and proud of it.