The Griffin Editorial: Our Flawed Tenure System

Last week, The Griffin learned that our advisor, Dan Higgins, has been denied tenure here at Canisius. He is also the head of the journalism department. Considering how many of us on The Griffin staff are journalism majors, this is obviously a big deal to us. Writing from a personal perspective, the first college class I ever walked into was a Dan Higgins class, and I have had at least one class with him during all but one semester. This news was also a big shock to us, and that he would be denied tenure when he’s such a huge part of the campus — and the journalism department — came completely out of the blue.

I personally hold Dan Higgins in the highest regard. When I was deciding on colleges, I remember having a conversation with my parents that tipped the scales in Canisius’s favor. They talked about the smaller class sizes and the personal connections you could make with professors through that, and I bought into it and decided to come here. Now having completed three years here, I know that my parents were right in their pitch: none of my professors are more proof of that than Dan Higgins is. Every fellow student I’ve had the chance to talk to so far feels the same. Needless to say, we feel that if anybody here deserved their tenure application to be accepted, it was certainly Dan Higgins.

The faculty body evidently also holds Higgins in high regard. To earn tenure at Canisius is a long process, one which requires much fellow faculty input. Our understanding is that a tenure application passes first to the department, and then to the tenure board. Dan got approval from these groups twice: first when his tenure application was initially accepted and sent to the Office of the President for approval, and second — when that application was denied — he appealed it to a board of faculty members who judge such appeals and won.

Why, then, did his tenure application get denied, if it had passed all of the other levels of approval? It was vetoed by President Stoute. This veto means that Dan has to figure out his next professional step, because he’s being forced to leave Canisius in one year.  

We will not speculate on why the groups that know Dan and his work best approved his tenure but President Stoute did not. We do, however, question the wisdom of not only the veto of Dan Higgins’s application itself, but also the wisdom of giving a school president this kind of veto power in general. We wonder at how Stoute, walking into the position just two years ago, has the power to end the seven-year career of a department director who is clearly loved and highly respected. The job of a school president is naturally a busy one. It is hard to imagine that the president of any school has a perspective on the in-and out-of-classroom learning environment of their school so superior to that of multiple panels of the school’s faculty as to possess a veto over them. That environment must be the top priority of Canisius, because the main reason for Canisius’s (or any school’s) existence is for students to learn. 

Any learning environment that has Dan Higgins in it is exponentially better for it: Higgins’s students see it, his fellow faculty see it, the tenure committee sees it, the school president does not. That is a shame. Dan Higgins will be fine, but the whole of Canisius University, especially the students, are much worse off because of this decision.

-JPD