Assessing the Tenure Controversy: A Complicated Issue Should Be Treated As Such

The recent uproar over the Government Department’s decision to deny Professor Melanye Price tenure has raised some pertinent questions about the nature of academic diversity, both in terms of the race of the faculty, and of the ideas that they espouse. We regret that Professor Price’s particular case has been politicized in this way, and we offer her our encouragement during this tumultuous time. The questions that were raised in the original Wespeak (“Diversify the Faculty of Diversity University”), and in the comments that it has spawned on Wesleying, however, merit rational, frank discussion. We as a University, and Professor Price more specifically, deserve an unclouded discussion about the polarizing issue of the diversity of the faculty; unnecessarily negative anonymous comments, however, not only hinder this process, but also represent cowardly and childish behavior that we should be embarrassed to broadcast publicly.    

With all of this in mind, we would like to stress that we have very little information regarding Professor Price’s particular case: as far as we have been told, she is still in the beginning stages of the process. While her department has denied her tenure, both the Dean and President Roth must still review her application. Tenure is an extremely complicated process, which involves not only a required amount of scholarly work and publication, but also student evaluations and the smoke-filled room politics of alliances and disputes. Nobody other than the people involved in this decision can know which standard Professor Price did not meet—or if there were any other motives behind this decision. 

At the same time, the authors of the Wespeak raise probing, important questions about the distribution of faculty of color. Why is the faculty of color clustered in a few departments? Is this trend indicative of larger sociological issues, or of deep-seated institutional racism, or both? Is the Government Department, which just hired Erica Chenoweth, a phenomenal new Professor specializing in international terrorism, more focused on being fashionable than in being a group of scholars that reflects both the diversity of race and of opinion that characterizes this University? What is certainly clear, however, is that this question is more sophisticated than “Is Wesleyan racist?”

These questions must spark levelheaded discussion, not the shallow, inarticulate opinion-sharing that permeates Wesleying and the Anonymous Confession Board. Rather than cowardly crouching in the shadow of anonymity, students and faculty alike must be confident enough in their opinions to publicly attach their names to them. Anonymity breeds resentment, and the mean-spirited comments about Professor Price not only demean our institution, but in addition could potentially harm her professional reputation. As it stands now, the Wesleying post, featuring all 112 comments, is on the first page of a “Melanye Price” Google search. It is easy to imagine potential employers scrutinizing the post if Price were to apply to another position. We encourage students to throw off the gutless veil of anonymity and confront this issue as adults.