Academic controversy embroils Yale's faculty

When you went on your first tour of Yale last year, your ever-so-perky tour guide probably told you all about the great things happening in the University's classrooms—some students were working with their biology professors on original heart disease research, and others were putting the finishing touches on prize-winning poetry that was about to be published by The New Yorker.

FILE PHOTO Criticism arose when History professor Lee Blackwood, GRD '95, was denied tenure by the department.

It's true that over the next four years you'll see a lot of your fellow classmates gain national attention for their work. Yet over the past few months, academic controversies, rather than accomplishments, have been grabbing most of the headlines here at Yale.

In early February, African-American Studies Chair Hazel Carby resigned when University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, lauded Harvard's department above her own. During a dinner in honor of Henry Louis Gates Jr., CC '73—Carby's counterpart at Harvard—Levin said, "We have watched with interest and admiration, and a little jealousy, as you have...built an extraordinary program in Afro-American studies at Harvard." Those comments, along with rumors that Levin was trying to lure Gates away from Harvard's Af-Am department, and delays in departmental status for her program compelled Carby to resign.

In a subsequent interview with the Herald, Carby criticized Yale's Office of Public Affairs for lagging behind Harvard in getting the word out about Yale's already-struggling program. She described a Chronicle of Higher Education study of Af-Am departments at various schools, and claimed that in the article, "Yale was sort of left a sentence or something, and they focused on Harvard because they have a sort of celebrity status."

It turned out that the Yale Corporation had already been considering departmental status for Af-Am and that Carby had not been notified. The status was approved at a Corporation meeting and and Carby decided to return to Yale when her leave of absence ended after the fall.

Just one month later, the history department came under fire for terminating the contract of Lee Blackwood, GRD '95, a popular professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies. In a highly unusual move, the department decided to overturn a unanimous renewal of Blackwood's contract, citing concerns over his dissertation's lack of promise and his deficient "professional service to the University."

Such criticism of Blackwood may have stemmed from a March 1999 memo in which he criticized fellow professor Paul Kennedy for wielding undue influence over the search for a new Russian history professor. Blackwood scolded Kennedy for "abruptly and rather implausibly [injecting]" Stanford University Professor Norman Naimark, whom Blackwood felt was unqualified for the job, into the candidate pool.

The scathing tone of Blackwood's letter and the fogginess surrounding his contract termination triggered widespread speculation that the department based its decision on personal—and not professional—reasons. As a result, hundreds of students and faculty members signed a petition requesting full disclosure of the reasons behind Blackwood's dismissal.

Although the history department never responded to the petition, the case has been turned over to University Provost Alison Richard, who will make the final decision about Blackwood's fate during the next school term.

The history department's woes didn't end with Blackwood, however. All year, history classes have suffered from an acute shortage of teaching assistants, causing many of Yale's most popular history courses—including John Gaddis' Cold War class and Jonathan Spence's History of Modern China—to be capped. Graduate students were even hired from other departments and universities to deal with the problem.

In the coming year, though, such a shortage of grad students may intensify into a far-reaching problem for Yale. Over the past few months, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) has argued that, despite a 1970s ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that TAs are only graduate students, they should qualify as employees.

New York University decided in mid-April that its TAs were, in fact, employees, but Yale has made no such admission. GESO has continued to seek unionization. Collective bargaining could affect both the Yale Administration and students, since it may involve disputes over how much work TAs can assign to their students. And that could mean more late nights and coffee runs for students—not to mention yet another protest on Beinecke Plaza.

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