Why Lorgia García Peña Was Denied Tenure at Harvard – The New Yorker
García Peña felt that she had been turned into “a stranger” on Harvard’s campus, she told me. “I existed in discomfort, and my presence made many of my colleagues feel uncomfortable.” And, though she felt appreciated by most of them, her relationships with others proved complicated. Since the beginning of the fall of 2019, she had been participating in a search committee looking to hire three to four scholars on Latinx, Asian, and Muslim American studies. A tenured professor on the committee recalled that García Peña and others saw it as a big step toward the creation of an ethnic-studies department, but after a few meetings it became clear that the committee was divided around it. The Latinx-studies position, García Peña argued, should go to a scholar with an ethnic-studies background. The chair of the committee, Mary Waters, a sociologist with a focus on migration, favored candidates who weren’t ethnic-studies scholars. One after another, the professor recalled, García Peña proposed candidates, and Waters expressed concerns about them; discussions became contentious. “The power dynamics in the room needed to be recognized,” the professor told me. On one side, there was “a powerful tenured member of the university with a fancy endowed chair,” and, on the other, García Peña, “who was going through the tenure process at the time.” (Waters declined to comment for this story.)
There is an unwritten rule in academia that says that, while you are up for tenure, you stay away from anything resembling conflict. García Peña, to some colleagues’ shock and to others’ admiration, did not abide by this law. “Lorgia always spoke her mind and stood her ground, which, to be honest, was something that made me worry about her,” a colleague who worked closely with her said. “Many Harvard faculty consider themselves to be good liberals, in favor of social justice, in opposition to racism and inequality,” Weld pointed out. “Lorgia is not part of that baseline liberal consensus.” Her politics, Weld said, are more radical, and, when her students said, “This is not working for us,” she stood by them. “And, just by virtue of her existence and who she is, she was always violating this sort of unspoken norm on the campus. ‘You are not supposed to be political before you have tenure.’ ‘You are not supposed to speak out against the university unless you are already under its protection.’ And she didn’t care about those norms because she correctly diagnosed a set of inconsistencies between the institution’s stated principles and the actual lived experience for people.”
In spite of García Peña’s occasional clashes with colleagues, she thought that her work was valued at Harvard. Her undergraduate courses were packed, and in 2019 she was advising twenty-four doctoral candidates. She had been given a named chair. More important to her, she had successfully pushed for the creation of an ethnic-studies concentration in the History and Literature program, and a Latinx-studies undergraduate area of focus and graduate secondary field at F.A.S. After the incident with Sommer, she had moved swiftly through the tenure process, receiving glowing evaluations on her second- and fourth-year reviews, after which she had been promoted from assistant professor to associate professor. She had finished her first book just in time for the second-year evaluation, and her second book, a study of Black Latinx diasporas on three continents, was progressing according to the Harvard “clock” to be ready in time for the seventh-year final review. In early 2019, one semester away from her tenure application’s deadline, García Peña told Siskind that she had received an offer for a tenured position at another élite university. He asked her to submit her tenure file ahead of time, by April 30th. She was reassured by all of her supervisors, she told me, that she “exceeded the expectations for tenure.”
García Peña submitted her dossier on April 15th. She had spent six and a half years preparing for this moment: this would be her final review. Once a professor obtains tenure, unless she commits a crime or another severe transgression, her position is secure until retirement.
Many professors who have successfully gone through the tenure process at Harvard describe it as a harrowing experience. Still, the current procedure is considered a great improvement: until 2005, there was no system in place for junior faculty to apply for tenure at F.A.S., which was usually offered to outside, widely recognized scholars with long careers. Nowadays, the process starts at the candidate’s department, where a group of tenured colleagues evaluate the applicant’s dossier, which includes her résumé, published materials, student evaluations, and teaching and research statements. The committee then requests the written opinions of about a dozen leading scholars in the candidate’s field, according to the F.A.S.’s Tenure-Track Handbook. Based on the dossier and the letters, committee members vote on the candidate’s promotion. García Peña received extremely positive letters from outside scholars. Her case, an eminent scholar in the study of American urban culture, George Lipsitz, wrote in his letter of recommendation, “is one of the most impressive that I have seen in my four decades as an evaluator of personnel cases.” On September 17th, the committee voted unanimously in her favor.
García Peña’s dossier and favorable report were sent to the Committee on Appointments and Promotions at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, a group of fourteen deans and professors from a wide range of disciplines. Confidential letters are requested at this point from all senior faculty members in the candidate’s department—everyone must opine. This is a dreaded moment, a tenured professor told me, because anyone with reservations about your work can potentially end your career at Harvard. In García Peña’s case, CAP recommended that she receive tenure. Robin Kelsey, the dean of Arts and Humanities, later said that the consensus on García Peña’s case was so strong that he “wouldn’t have been surprised if there hadn’t been an ad hoc”—a third committee that is convened in some cases—“and she’d just been given tenure.” Instead, the president’s office decided to convene an ad hoc. Judith Singer, the senior vice-provost for faculty development and diversity, cited “a handful of small concerns,” according to an internal document, including the opinion of at least one scholar that García Peña’s forthcoming book, “Translating Blackness,” was “too narrow,” and a low rate of response to the request for external letters of support. (A spokesperson for Singer declined to comment for this story.)
The ad-hoc committee usually consists of two or three tenured Harvard professors not affiliated with the department that had made the recommendation, plus two or three senior professors from outside the university. Two deans and the president or provost are ex-officio members. The committee reviews the case, hearing from “witnesses,” who usually include a faculty member who has expressed negative opinions about the candidate as well as members of the candidate’s department. No notes are taken, and no votes are cast. None of those participants have any real power over the final decision, which is made by the president in consultation with the provost. This decision is expressed as a simple yes or no.
After she hung up with Siskind on the night before Thanksgiving, Garcia Peña felt numb. When the news sank in, days later, she was devastated. “I am a strong person. I am not normally affected by setbacks. But I felt a great sense of loss,” she told me. “I had been convinced that when I reached tenure a new space for change would open for Latinx studies and Dominican studies. Any sacrifice was worth it if change could be real. In the end, I felt that all the effort had been for nothing.”
In February, 2020, she filed a formal grievance against Harvard. She had found out the name of a Harvard faculty member on the ad-hoc committee, Jennifer Hochschild, and was shocked to learn about her involvement. According to other faculty members and an internal document, Hochschild had repeatedly dismissed García Peña’s scholarship in front of other professors, categorizing her work as “not research, but activism.” (Hochschild declined to comment for this story.)
In her grievance (which I obtained through a third party), García Peña asked why “one of the very few faculty members who was particularly hostile and prejudiced to me as a person, to my field and to humanistic ethnic studies methodologies” was chosen to deliberate on her future. The answer, she believed, could be found in looking back over her years at Harvard—at her encounters with campus security, the note on her door, and the hate mail; her call against racism at Harvard during the Latinx convocation; and the contentious search-committee discussions. These incidents, she alleged, had created a sense of unease within the administration that was reflected in the composition of her ad-hoc committee. García Peña wrote that, “whether consciously or not,” there was “an impermissible bias against my candidacy as well as a discomfort animated by my activities in calling out racism and racist conduct on and around campus.”
Grievances are usually filtered by the F.A.S. docket committee, a small group of professors who deal with procedural rules. In García Peña’s case, the docket committee recommended a full investigation, and to that end a new panel, consisting of three senior professors from departments across F.A.S., was convened. The grievance panel was given access only to redacted sections of García Peña’s tenure dossier and was not offered any explanation for why she had been denied. They could, and did, interview people involved in the process, except those in the ad-hoc committee, because they were not allowed to know who they were.
On August 21st, the panel submitted its report. It was confidential, and the panel members were sworn to secrecy. (I obtained a copy through a scholar outside Harvard who did not take part in the process.) The report offered a harsh indictment of the university’s treatment of García Peña, who, it stated, had been the victim of a “pattern of belittling, reducing, and ignoring.” In describing this pattern, the report included Sommer’s attempt to discourage García Peña’s research, and instances in which senior faculty dismissed ethnic studies as “provincial” and merely “identity politics.” The panel found “a preponderance of evidence that the tenure review process was marred by a pattern of discrimination, which manifested as excessive, seemingly pretextual skepticism about her work, scholarly discipline, and reputation.”
The composition of the ad-hoc committee was particularly troubling to the panel. “Professor García Peña was hired to excel in Ethnic Studies and was evaluated by an ad hoc committee whose members included those who have stated on multiple occasions that Ethnic Studies . . . is so-called advocacy as opposed to scholarship,” they wrote. “Under these circumstances, recognizing excellence in a field becomes impossible.” They named Hochschild, “who had exhibited public hostility towards the candidate’s scholarship on multiple occasions,” and argued that committee members should have been vetted for bias against the candidate, just as they were vetted for bias in her favor. The panel urged “the university to take up our findings, and to redress its actions around this case,” recommending a reëvaluation of García Peña’s tenure application “without prejudice.”