Also in this week's C&EN, an amazing story from Sam Lemonick:
Kristie Koski is waiting to make tenure. Like many academic chemists, she submitted her tenure package in her sixth year as a professor. That’s when professors “are expected to be ready for promotion,” according to the personnel manual at the University of California, Davis, where Koski is a physical chemist. The traditional expectation in academia is that a professor makes—or is denied—tenure in their seventh year.
Koski submitted in 2019. It wasn’t COVID-19 that disrupted her progression, as it has for others. The university denied Koski tenure for alleged violations of the faculty code of conduct related to two of her trainees. Koski denies she did anything wrong. A faculty senate committee and a California state court both found that the university had not proved some of its charges. But UC Davis didn’t restart her tenure process until this past summer.
Four years on, Koski is in a kind of limbo. Her career advancement at UC Davis is stalled. The absence on her résumé of promotion to tenured professor is more prominent with each passing year. It would presumably complicate any attempt to find a new job. Some of Koski’s colleagues say that, regardless of the eventual outcome, she has already paid dearly, both emotionally and in her professional reputation.
A full explanation of why this happened to Koski remains out of reach. She and several other UC Davis employees declined C&EN’s requests for interviews, through a lawyer and a university spokesperson, respectively. Citing confidentiality rules, the university also refused to release records relating to Koski’s tenure application and its investigations of her alleged wrongdoing.
Through interviews and public documents, C&EN has pieced together a partial picture of what happened, although many details cannot be verified independently. What does seem clear is that Koski got stuck in a web of bureaucracy, power dynamics, and personal relationships. It’s a tangle that seems easy to avoid for some but impossible to escape for others.
I don't think I can summarize the story well enough. Read the whole thing.
(only in academia)
I am an alumni from UC Davis, so this was an interesting read for me.
ReplyDeleteUnbelievable that they would punish a faculty member for making a mandated report... especially in a department where they recently fired a professor over rape charges...
ReplyDeletehttps://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2023/01/ting-guo-fired-by-uc-regents.html
The C&EN article is severely lacking in details to the extent that I do not think it should have been published. None of the parties involved provided comment, including Koski herself, and there's not enough information presented for the reader to understand the situation. For example, the anecdotes about the student subject to a sexual harassment complaint are extremely vague: some ways of reading the anecdotes would clearly paint a picture of a student in need of reprimand, but other ways of reading the anecdotes would support the idea that Koski was really out of line for raising that as an issue. For example, if the grad student was encouraging undergrads to watch sexually explicit material AT WORK that would clearly be inappropriate, especially if the grad student supervises those undergrads as researchers, but the article has none of those details. It would be extremely inappropriate for a professor to harass students over what they choose to do in their personal lives. Likewise, the incident in the laser lab seems much more obviously to be a violation of safety protocols than anything else, unless there are details that are missing. This is a real failure of reporting by C&EN.
ReplyDelete