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EDUCATION: Flunking Out at UNT

Provost Howard Johnson was hired to bring attention to the university. After rejecting an inordinate number of tenure applications and being accused of plagarism, he’s done just that.
By Brent Flynn |
DENIED: Johnson shot down a surprising number of tenure applicants, prompting several appeals.

I HAVEN’T
THOUGHT ABOUT MY ALMA MATER MUCH IN  the 10 years since my
graduation, except when a craving hits for pizza from the Tomato, a
Denton institution strategically located next to the University of
North Texas campus. So when I began looking into the controversy
surrounding the new provost there, it was as if I were discovering a
school I hardly knew.

Of course, that’s part of the problem.
Nobody knows much about UNT; even worse, nobody seems to care. Despite
being the fourth-largest university in Texas, it generates as much buzz
as a community college. UNT has taken some impressive steps. It opened
a campus in South Dallas, expanded its nationally recognized school of
engineering, and unveiled plans to create a law school. But it has also
suffered from a series of embarrassing incidents, including a professor
who was caught cooking methamphetamines and a longtime administrative
assistant who was arrested for cheating the university out of $240,000
in a time-sheet scandal.

In late 2003, after a 30-year career at
Syracuse University, Provost Howard Johnson was hired to help transform
UNT into a top-flight research institution. By all accounts it was a
coup to bring him to Denton, but it wasn’t long before his decisions
about the promotion of faculty had the school ready to revolt.

One
of Johnson’s first duties was to review tenure applications. Professors
who are granted tenure are essentially guaranteed a job for life, and
that security allows them to pursue their research without fear of
interference from the administration. For professors who don’t make
tenure, it’s a sign that they should get packing. Johnson reviewed 32
cases and rejected 12—more denials by a provost than the previous six
years combined.

That’s when the usually laid-back campus went
ballistic, sparking a feud between faculty and administration. Seven
tenure candidates filed appeals, and the Chronicle of Higher Education
weighed in with an article questioning the stability of UNT’s tenure
process. But I was glad to see that Johnson was knocking heads. Big
changes often cause strong reactions. Tenure plays a huge role in the
quality of a university’s professors, and I hoped his decisions marked
a turning point for UNT. Higher standards would mean better faculty.
And better faculty means a better university.

Unfortunately, my
optimism was misguided. The administration began sending mixed
messages, and fresh allegations directed at Johnson suggested a pattern
of intellectual laziness, if not outright dishonesty. My alma mater was
making news, all right, but for all the wrong reasons.

So I
drove to Denton to have a slice of what is probably the best pizza in
the state and talk with the new provost. In person, Johnson looks
exactly like a lifetime academic. He has a salt-and-pepper beard and
wears scholarly reading glasses, and his demeanor is thoughtful and
sophisticated, maybe even a little haughty. When I ask him about the
tenure controversy, he casually dismisses it as a nonissue. He gets up
from his chair, retrieves a stack of papers, and drops them on the
coffee table in front of me. “I think this is the story,” he says.
“These were the individuals that were successful in receiving tenure,
and that’s where the attention should be.”

As for the denials,
Johnson says that many of those rulings were based on recommendations
from the college deans, so he was rubber-stamping decisions made at
lower levels. “When you take out those cases, the numbers aren’t as
striking,” he says.

According to Norval Pohl, UNT’s president,
part of the confusion may be that Johnson’s predecessor, David
Kesterson, had extensive contact with the deans of the various colleges
to weed out weak tenure cases before they were formally submitted to
him. “That apparently did not take place to the same extent [under
Johnson],” Pohl says. “The number of, quote, denials didn’t change from
one provost to another. The number of people that officially went up
for tenure may have changed.” But that doesn’t make UNT’s 37.5 percent
failure rate, which was the highest of any public university in Texas
last year, any less painful. And if part of the problem is that the
faculty expected Johnson to handle the process in a particular way,
then that seems like an important nugget of information for Pohl to
pass along to Johnson. But that never happened.

Johnson says it
doesn’t matter what informal communications used to take place.
Kesterson had his style, and styles vary from provost to provost. But
wouldn’t the faculty have expectations about the process? “There are
lots of expectations people have on campus,” Johnson says. “If I’m
going to sign something, I’m going to evaluate it and feel good about
it. It’s an evaluation, and I know how to evaluate tenure candidates.”
However, when I ask him how much time he spent reviewing the 32 tenure
cases, Johnson becomes evasive, taking a long time to answer. “It’s
hard to say,” he finally says. “Once the semester starts, then you’re
working a lot from home … etc., etc.”

Roddy Wolper, UNT’s
director of news and information, is sitting in on the interview and
must sense that Johnson is on the ropes. He interrupts the provost and
answers for him: the evaluations took place roughly during a
three-month period, starting in February 2004.

Exchanges like
that are why Don Smith, an associate professor of biology and the
president of the UNT chapter of the American Association of University
Professors, is questioning Johnson’s methods. Smith refutes the
provost’s assertion that some of the rejected candidates were denied at
the department and college levels. He also notes that although the
provost may have the power to deny tenure, he should do so sparingly.
“At no institution do you find large numbers of denials,” Smith says.
“So, it is on its face drastic when the [provost] denies 12.”

Smith
suspects there is something wrong with Johnson’s evaluation method. As
faculty members make their way through what is usually a six-year
probationary period, they are subjected to four levels of review every
year. If they need to improve, they are told a year before they are up
for tenure to correct the problem. Johnson’s denials occurred without
warning, and he offered the candidates little or no explanation for why
they had been turned down. Indeed, university lawyers counseled Johnson
against giving the rejected candidates written explanations for his
decisions.

As a result, the campus doesn’t know what to believe.
Some theorize that the standards for tenure changed without notice, a
violation of university policy. Others fear that the denials represent
cutbacks. Johnson denies all of this, but he clearly hasn’t done a good
job of addressing the faculty’s concerns.

Looking for answers, I
attended a Faculty Senate meeting in November. I found a group of
professors who were completely in the dark about what was happening at
their university. Bruce Bond, a faculty senator and English professor,
believes that the provost’s decisions are driving away good professors.
He says in more than one case, faculty members in his department are
looking for jobs elsewhere, and prospective job candidates have
withdrawn their applications in response to the news of the denials.

Assistant
professor Darwin Koch, who coordinates UNT’s rehabilitation studies
program, was planning to apply for tenure this year. Now he’s not so
sure. “I have an 18-month window to deal with dramatically different
criteria,” he says. “I don’t feel like there’s time to point the wagons
in a different direction. There is a lot of fear among nontenured
faculty out there.”

Jesse Davis, president of the Student
Government Association, best sums up the haplessness of the situation.
“I don’t know the value of my education when I don’t know how my
professors are being evaluated,” he says. “It’s very troubling to me
that this body doesn’t know either.”

However, answers have begun
to trickle out of the University Tenure Committee, a group of 11 senior
tenured professors elected by their peers to handle the appeals
process. Smith, who is an advocate for Dan Peak, a professor who was
denied tenure, cites testimony presented at Peak’s hearing to support
his contention that Johnson not only changed the evaluation standards,
but he also performed a superficial analysis of his credentials.
According to Smith, Johnson told the panel that Peak’s scholarly
publications lacked focus and a clear agenda. Smith was shocked at what
he heard next. “Under questioning, Johnson was asked whether he had
read all the papers,” Smith recalls. “He had not. Had he read half of
them? He had not. Did he read at least one of them? He had not. He was
then asked upon what basis he had drawn his quite derogatory
conclusions. He replied that he read only the titles.” (Johnson and
Pohl aren’t commenting on the cases.)

Journalism professor
Richard Wells sat in on the appeal hearing of Jacqueline Lambiase, who
also was denied tenure. He was surprised to learn that Johnson based
his decision on one specific article that Lambiase had written. Even
worse, Wells believes that Johnson didn’t evaluate the piece correctly.
“Frankly, I was astounded,” Wells says. “He completely missed the
point.”

More troubling still, the chair of the tenure committee,
associate history professor Gustav Seligmann, acknowledged that after
reviewing the appeals and presiding over the hearings of five of the
seven tenure applicants, he agrees with Smith’s version of events.
While he would not comment on the provost’s alleged testimony that he
read only the titles of Peak’s papers, he did offer this: “The actual
publications were not forwarded from the dean’s office to the provost’s
office.”

For his part, Johnson says it would be irresponsible
for him to comment on specific cases, but he insists that he reviewed
all of them thoroughly. But now it’s clear that the storyline I was
hoping for—provost meets university, provost makes tough decisions,
university improves, and provost and university fall in love—isn’t
working out. The UNT faculty appears on the edge of a mutiny, with
Johnson walking the plank.

As of press time, the University
Tenure Committee had recommended that tenure be granted in three
consecutive appeals, and now Pohl has the unenviable task of reviewing
the cases, with his decisions expected this month. If he supports
Johnson’s original decisions, the faculty will explode. But if Pohl
goes against Johnson—goes against the provost he hired—he casts a
devastating vote of no confidence.

By December, Johnson needed
all the confidence he could muster. That’s when the school newspaper
suggested that he had plagiarized material from other college web sites
to create the university’s academic plan, forcing him to admit that
some of the ideas in the plan were not his own. Johnson defended
himself by telling the North Texas Daily that he was simply
giving reviewers of the academic plan “something to react to.” Besides
embarrassing the university, he also gave every UNT student embroiled
in a plagiarism scandal a built-in defense.

Now the question is
what long-term effect Johnson will have on the university. Smith says
this controversy has “clobbered the school’s reputation in academia
nationwide.” Pohl still denies that a problem exists and doesn’t think
the dispute will cause any permanent damage.

I hope Pohl is
right. It would be a shame if UNT went from obscurity to notoriety, and
I couldn’t still say with pride that I’m a graduate.

Brent Flynn is a reporter for People Newspapers. This is his first piece for D.

Photo: Randal Ford

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