Opinion ID: 749306
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Directorship of the Spanish Language Program

Text: 11 In mid-1991, the then-Director of the Spanish Language Program, David Barnwell, resigned. Barnwell recommended that Stern be his successor; the Department's faculty unanimously concurred. The University's affirmative action plan permitted a department to fill a position following a limited search, or no search, in certain circumstances, such as when a position was left open due to an unforeseen occurrence. In those circumstances, the Plan required the department to seek from the University's Provost a waiver of the Plan's affirmative-action search requirements. In the wake of Barnwell's unanticipated resignation, the Department's Chair recommended to the Provost that Stern be appointed to replace Barnwell on an interim, part-time basis for the 1991-1992 academic year. 12 The Provost granted the Department emergency affirmative-action clearance for Stern's appointment; he notified Martin Meisel, the University's then-Vice President for Arts and Sciences, that Stern should be informed that the appointment is interim and not considered renewable without a complete search in accordance with the University's Affirmative Action Program. (Letter from Provost Jonathan R. Cole to Meisel, dated May 2, 1991, at 1.) In June 1992, the Department received permission to reappoint Stern for a second year on the same basis. 13 On October 1, 1992, after it was decided that the Program should have a full-time director, Felix Martinez-Bonati, the Department's Chair, wrote to Meisel, requesting authorization to announce the position, conduct the normal search, and select the best candidate. The University, however, had identified the Spanish Department as one of three departments in the Humanities that were to be targets for selective recruiting of minority faculty. (Recruiting Tomorrow's Faculty: Minorities in the Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School at 2.) Further, it considered direct intervention by Meisel, in the form of communications to department chairpersons and participation in negotiations with prospective faculty, to be the most effective way of increasing the number of senior female faculty members. (Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action, Annual Review and Evaluation, dated September 1990, at 6.) Therefore, instead of granting the Department's request to advertise the director position and conduct a normal search, Meisel informed the Department that he planned to appoint Frances Boyd, a Senior Lecturer in the American Language Program who had consulted with the Department concerning its Language Program and had performed a study on the effectiveness of the Program, to the director position for a period of three years. Her qualifications for the position included an M.A. in Spanish language and literature, an Ed.D. in Adult Education Curriculum, and one year of teaching Spanish at the college level. In proposing to appoint Boyd, Meisel made no mention of the University's normal search procedures. 14 The Department strongly opposed the appointment of Boyd as director (though it valued the study she had conducted) and praised Stern's work as interim director of the Language Program:The faculty and the graduate students of the Department ... think with rare unanimity that the job [Stern] has done as director of the language program since 1991 has been extraordinarily successful and indeed impossible to top. Our Department's language program is now a model for instructors of other Departments and Dr. Stern is being consulted by some of them to help them improve their language teaching.... We think that [Stern] can be said to be a true professional of language teaching, even if he did not obtain a Ph.D. in methodology or pedagogy but in literary studies.... 15 Several of our graduate students are taking courses of language at various other Departments of the University .... [and have] told me that the courses that they are taking at those Departments are far inferior in materials and methodology to the ones they themselves teach. The language program in Spanish and Portuguese has never been done better.... 16 (Letter from Martinez-Bonati to Meisel and Dean Roger Bagnall, dated October 25, 1992, at 3-4.) The Department recognized that existing procedures prevented the appointment of Stern on a full-time basis without a search, and it stated that [t]he faculty thinks that, if Stern cannot be directly reappointed, a formal search has to be done to fill the position. (Letter from Martinez-Bonati to Meisel, dated October 25, 1992, at 1.) 17 Meisel retreated from his attempt to appoint Boyd summarily to the director position and agreed that, in conformity with the University's affirmative action policies, a search should be conducted. Normally, the search for candidates for a position in a single University department, such as the director position at issue here, would be conducted by a search committee comprising members of that department. In a departure from the University's past practices, however, Meisel appointed an interdepartmental search committee (the search committee). The interdepartmental committee was created in the belief that the Spanish Department would have appointed Stern if left to its own devices. (Draft letter from Search Committee to Meisel, dated April 27, 1993, at 1.) The five-member committee Meisel appointed was headed by Department Professor Patricia Grieve and included only one other member from the Department. The other three members were in other language departments of the University (respectively, Russian, Italian, and East Asian Language); they did not speak, read, write, or understand Spanish. 18 After the completion of its initial screening process, the search committee determined that its first choice was Kenya Dworkin y Mendez, a Hispanic female, but she accepted a position elsewhere before an interview could be arranged. The committee subsequently interviewed three applicants: a white American woman, Puleo, and Stern. Stern's candidacy was supported by the Department's Chair, who wrote a letter of recommendation again praising Stern for his work as interim director of the Program: 19 Stern has directed the program with insuperable dedication, attention to every detail, and prompt response to all the usual emergenc[i]es generated by illness of instructors and the like. Moreover, he has given intense and sustained attention to the methodological improvement of the program, both in its overall conception and in its execution by each of the [teaching assistants] and Preceptors. He has inspired a strict sense of duty and discipline in our graduate students and has been uncompromising in observing these standards. It is a testimony to the quality of his work that the strict standards he demands of the graduate students (enforced with serious measures when needed) have resulted in his great popularity among them. The students respect and like him and emphatically approve of the way he conducts the program. 20 In the last one and a half years a growing consensus has emerged in the Department regarding Stern's work. As I expressed last semester to Vice President Martin Meisel in a letter, we think that the language program of the Department has never been better conducted than under Stern's direction, and that it is impossible to top his performance. 21 (Letter from Martinez-Bonati to Professor Patricia Grieve, Chair of Search Committee for Language Coordinator, dated January 23, 1993, at 1.) 22 In addition to interviewing the three final candidates, the search committee required each of them to teach a class (model class), observed by members of the committee. After observing the model classes, the search committee hired Puleo. The search committee reported that Puleo had demonstrated excellence in teaching and that Stern's teaching was weak. The offer to Puleo was extended approximately 1 1/2 weeks after his interview; the University's ombuds officer, to whom Stern complained about the denial of his own application, viewed the search committee's final decision to make the offer to Puleo as having been made with unusual rapidity. 23 Stern's complaint to the ombuds officer was referred to the University's Associate Provost, who in turn referred the complaint to Meisel. Meisel found no merit in Stern's suggestion that the decision had been made on the basis of national origin.