Hiring Doesn’t Always Follow Same Route

Ordinarily, getting hired as a university professor involves a lengthy process of national advertising, long and short lists of candidates and a momentous decision by a dean.

The cases of two professors now teaching classes once taught by Cynthia Christie suggest there are faster roads to coveted Washington State University professorships.

Namely, being the spouse of a sought-after employee, or being a member of a minority group.

After Christie was let go in May, the College of Education conducted searches for instructors in both health education and first aid. At the same time, Gerdean Tan, a recent WSU doctorate recipient, and her husband, School of Communications Director Alex Tan, were offered positions at the University of Alabama.

WSU countered the offers via its “partner accommodation program” aimed at recruiting and retaining highly touted couples.

At a time when faculty were getting an average 4 percent pay raise, Alex Tan got a 12 percent raise to $94,999 a year.

Gerdean Tan skirted the search process and got a joint appointment to the departments of Human Development and the education college’s Teaching and Learning Department.

The partner accommodation program, which also drew College of Education Dean Bernard Oliver and his wife Eileen, an English professor, here in 1991, is often labeled nepotism by other faculty.

“To give a position to an individual who is less qualified only because his/ her partner is offered a position is totally dishonest and immoral,” was one response in a 1992 faculty survey on the program. “This whole concept is absolutely ludicrous.”

In spite of how she was hired, Tan said, she has a strong health background. “I know I’m qualified for this position,” she said.

Like Tan, Keith Harrison was hired outside the university’s ordinary search process of advertising and interviewing, Oliver said. Two or three candidates were interviewed for Harrison’s position, Oliver said, but none was considered “the best.”

Oliver said he tapped Harrison, an African-American, from a “teaching fellows” program in which minority doctoral candidates are brought to WSU and groomed for professorships.

Oliver said he hired Harrison to teach physical education for grades K-8, but then decided in August, just days before the start of school, to have him teach first aid as well. His course outlines say he is qualified to teach the first aid classes, but the American Red Cross in October said it could not approve or certify students taught in his classes.

Efforts to reach Harrison were unsuccessful.

, DataTimes