Minority Professors Denied Tenure at Depaul University

As many Americans continue to celebrate the election of America’s first half-African-American president, Barack Obama, many more battle to resist tyranny and the daily assault on civil rights and equality in Obama’s “home town” of Chicago, where faculty members at the Catholic DePaul University are demanding an external investigation into the University’s tenure process in which all of the institution’s White candidates were approved for life-time positions, but none of the minority applicants were.

Depaul, which found itself in the center of controversy in 2007 over the tenure denial of a high-profile Israeli-Palestinian scholar, now faces charges of discrimination after it denied tenure to two African-Americans, two Asian-Americans and two Latinos, while giving all of the White tenure applicants life-time teaching positions. Two of the minority tenure candidates appealed Depaul’s decisions and won a reversal: Dr. Namita Goswami, an Indian-born philosopher, and Assistant Professor Dr. Quinetta Shelby, an award-winning African-American chemist. But the battle for equality for these beleaguered academics is not over, as Depaul’s president refuses to budge in the face of obvious racism and oppression.

University President Father Dennis Holtschneider said there’s no evidence of racial bias in any of the six denials this year, but that the school is reviewing the process because the numbers are so skewed. “In June, I sent a letter to the provost saying I want you to look across the United States and find the universities that do the best job of helping people achieve– people of color, all faculty — and lets see if we can put that in place at DePaul,” he said. “So we have a committee of faculty working on that right now, so we make sure that what happened in one year at DePaul never happens again.” He says that in past years, the approval numbers for applicants of all races who were seeking tenure were the same: 84 percent.

Dr. Shelby, in speaking with Fox News Chicago in late December 210, said: “It appears that this academic year will be my last at DePaul. I have invested the better part of my life building my career at DePaul.” But there are calls for Shelby and her colleagues to stand and fight. The faculty senate last month passed motions calling on Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider to take a deeper look at Goswami’s and Shelby’s cases and adhere to faculty handbook guidelines regarding tenure appeals, reports Diverse Issues in Higher Education. “Specifically, the senate asked for a hearing into violations of academic freedom in Goswami’s case and for an investigation into bias in Shelby’s case. An earlier external review board determined that bias had played a role in the denial of Shelby’s tenure application.”

Holtschneider, who is the final arbiter on tenure decisions, says he stands behind the denials but will take the faculty’s motions “under careful advisement.” He is a member of the Congregation of the Mission, an order of Catholic priests founded by St. Vincent de Paul and commonly referred to as Vincentians | USA Chapter, whose mission is to address poverty and disadvantage by providing direct practical assistance to anyone in need. He received as a doctorate in Higher Education Administration from Harvard University.

Sumi Cho, a tenured DePaul Law School professor specializing in race theory and employment discrimination, told New York Times that a subtle form of racism was at work in the tenure denials for Ms. Goswami and Ms. Shelby, who were both popular with students and had high public profiles. “If these two women had been more mediocre, maybe they would have had an easier time,” Ms. Cho said. “Their problem may have been not that they weren’t good enough, but that they were too good.” Racism often does not involve excluding minorities but rather favoring those who are “sufficiently deferential” and “don’t steal the limelight.”