|
« AAUP Homepage
|
Department Chair Removed For Failing to Discipline TAs
Barbara Bono, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was removed from her post as English department chair in May because she refused to sign a letter of warning to teaching assistants in her department. The letter informed them that withholding the grades of undergraduates would not be tolerated and might be illegal under New York law; it noted that those who failed to submit grades by the specified deadline would lose their eligibility for reappointment. Dean Charles Stinger asked Bono to sign the letter after he discovered several hours before the deadline that a large proportion of the department's TAs had not turned in their undergraduates' grades and might have been withholding them as a protest against low stipends.
Bono, who calls the whole incident "scandalous," refused to sign the letter because she viewed it as "inappropriate, uncollegial, and even potentially illegal," she says. But Stinger says that "it was the responsibility of the department chair to indicate in firm and unequivocal terms to the TAs in the department that their actions would not be tolerated. Refusal to do so made her continued functioning as chair untenable." Bono's tenured professorship was not affected.
Noreen O'Connor, president of the Modern Language Association's Graduate Student Caucus, wrote a letter to Bono thanking her for taking a stand and criticizing "the managerial logic of the corporate university, which demands that faculty behave as managers of their own and (more importantly) of other people's labor."
|