The Faculty Senate voted against a resolution Wednesday that, if passed, would have encouraged incoming Chancellor Sean O’ Keefe to turn down an offer for full professorship with tenure.
The Board of Supervisors offered O’Keefe — former head of NASA, Secretary of the Navy and professor at Syracuse University — tenure as part of his hiring package. But some faculty members opposed the offer because they said awarding tenure to an administrator without a Ph.D. undermines a privilege professors must work years to achieve.
The resolution did not ask for formal action from the Board of Supervisors.
“We are not asking anyone to take the money or tenure away,” said Andrew Christie, Faculty Senate member-at-large and accounting professor. “We are asking [O’Keefe] to turn it down.”
Many professors view tenure as a privilege — and a guarantee of job security. Universities grant tenure after professors demonstrate significant research, teaching and public service. Tenure is difficult to get and lose.
The resolution stated O’Keefe’s scholarly record was inconsistent with University policy statement 36, which regulates tenure. The policy states that faculty members who do not have a Ph.D. cannot receive tenure without having previously received tenure from a comparable university or by maintaining a record of exceptional accomplishment.
O’Keefe is the first University chancellor who has not had a Ph.D.
Resolution authors also cited what they called O’Keefe’s “limited teaching record” and insufficient amount of publications in scholarly journals.
At the meeting, Robert Sumichrast, dean of the School of Business Administration, said the University would be following proper procedure by offering O’Keefe tenure, because the new chancellor received what Sumichrast called an equivalent of tenure — an indefinite contract — while he was a professor at Syracuse.
But Sarah Pierce, Faculty Senate vice president and associate professor of child development, said she spoke with Syracuse officials who said O’Keefe did not have tenure.
Claire Advokate, Faculty Senate president and psychology professor, encouraged senators to move that the meeting go into closed session — during which anyone who was not a member of the Senate must leave — after the initial reading of the resolution because it presented “personal, sensitive information.”
But the session remained open.
After two recounts of a final vote that was taken by show of hands, the senate voted against the resolution 25 to 18. Discussion and voting on amendments lasted 2.5 hours.