As Tufts moves to cement its standing as a prestigious national research university, one of its best-loved teachers feels he has been left behind.
Gary McKissick, a lecturer in community health who won the Professor of the Year Award in 2006, says he is leaving Tufts this summer after he was forced out by an administration that is putting a greater emphasis on research at the expense of classroom-oriented teachers like him.
McKissick, who was hired as a tenure-track professor in political science and a lecturer in community health, withdrew himself from the tenure track in 2006 because he and his colleagues worried that he had not conducted enough scholarly research to earn tenure at Tufts. McKissick had plans to write a book about American health care, but this project had stalled, and by 2006 he had not completed the book.
Withdrawing from the tenure track helped McKissick avoid receiving a negative review but also meant that the political science department would have to dismiss him so it could fill the professorship with a qualified
candidate.
But to the surprise of McKissick and his colleagues in the Community Health Program, Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg told him he would also not be allowed to keep his community health lecturer position either, McKissick said.
Sternberg refused to discuss McKissick's specific case with the Daily, but he did comment on the university's general policies. "[I]f a tenure-stream faculty member does not reach tenure, then the expectation is that, within a relatively short period of time, he or she will find employment elsewhere," he said in an e-mail. In McKissick's case, Sternberg refused to let him stay at Tufts, even in a position completely separate from the tenured position he had failed to attain. The Community Health Program is now in the midst of a job search for someone to fill the position McKissick is leaving.
"I think I had a very strong record of teaching. I had a very strong record within the Community Health Program, students and colleagues and all that, so there was a sincere desire to make it work so I could stay within the Community Health Program. And that's really the part of the job that I love most - I was really happy to stay full-time in community health," McKissick said.
"What happened was, we kind of had something worked out, it had gone through several layers of bureaucracy, deans and all that, and then Dean Sternberg, who's at the top of that bureaucracy, shot it down."
While Sternberg highlighted a defined university policy when asked about McKissick, the outgoing lecturer says he was a casualty of Tufts' increased emphasis on fostering faculty who pursue research. "This is part of the new Tufts. The move here is to get faculty doing research and getting grants for research and buying their teaching obligations off so they can go out and do research. And that model of a university is not one that's oriented towards faculty spending time with students, and ... I think that's an unfortunate shift for Tufts to have taken," McKissick said.
Sternberg said the expectation that faculty who are denied tenure will leave the institution "holds at other colleges and universities with a tenure system."
But an official from Johns Hopkins University, a respected research institution, said that if an appropriate slot were vacant and university officials wanted to retain the teacher who had been denied tenure, an exception could be made.
"This can happen at Johns Hopkins, though rarely," spokesperson Dennis O'Shea told the Daily in an e-mail. "It's not so much that a person would be automatically 'allowed' to make the choice to step off the tenure track and still remain. It would have to be the desire of both the faculty member and the university and, of course, there would have to be a non-tenure-track slot available."
In addition to being a favorite teacher of many students, McKissick worked to attract more undergraduates to the study of community health. As the community health contact person for undergraduates pursuing Tufts' joint bachelor's and master's degree program, McKissick helped popularize this option.
"He is an outstanding teacher and mentor and has made a substantial contribution to the growth of the Community Health Program in the last five years," Community Health Director Edith Balbach said of McKissick in an e-mail. "It can be hard to keep students engaged when teaching large lecture courses, but Prof. McKissick has consistently done so in teaching his Health Care in America course. The course enrollment has nearly doubled since he began teaching it, now enrolling close to 200 students."
Graduate student Aaron Buchsbaum, who has taken a class with McKissick and serves as a teaching assistant for the lecturer, described McKissick as a standout teacher.
"You watch him and you can tell that teaching, I think particularly undergraduates, is something he loves and reveled in so much. And he just really wants to see the students he works with advance and take in the things that he thinks are important that he's trying to get across," Buchsbaum said.
After McKissick's students learned that he would have to leave Tufts, a number of students approached their teaching assistants with the idea of writing a petition to the administration. But they found out that it was too late to have the decision changed.
"I think, given the circumstances, they decided that it would be a better use of their time to write appreciation letters to him," said Angela Lee, a graduate student and a teaching assistant for McKissick's "Health Care in America" class. "Many, many students took time to write letters to him that they gave to the TAs during the last exam." Lee estimated that between 50 and 60 students wrote letters.
Assistant professors, or faculty members who are seeking tenure, go through a six-year process. In the fourth year, candidates receive a pre-tenure review from authorities within their department and the administration. For McKissick, his pre-tenure review was scheduled to come in 2006, the same year he won the Tufts Community Union Senate's Professor of the Year Award, which honors teachers exclusively for their work in the classroom.
McKissick had come to the university in 2001 under a double appointment in the Department of Political Science and the Community Health Program. He sought tenure in political science because, as an interdisciplinary program, community health cannot give out professorships.
When McKissick withdrew from the tenure track in political science, he worked with the Community Health Program to fashion himself a unique, full-time position entirely within that program, in which he could teach and perform administrative tasks, he said.
McKissick said he later heard from colleagues that Sternberg had refused the community health plan because he did not want to set a precedent in which faculty who fail to attain tenure think that they can fashion themselves alternative positions.
"It was communicated to me that he was absolutely dead-set against continuing my employment here, that he didn't see it as in his interest to find a job for me or to continue employing someone who is a failure," McKissick said. "There was some concern that this would set a precedent ... that anyone who was denied tenure could still be employed at Tufts."
The administration and the Community Health Program then worked to create an interim position for McKissick as the program searched for someone to replace him, McKissick said. Last school year, he held a full-time position in community health; this year he was employed half-time in community health and half-time at the Tufts Medical School.
Sternberg, who has authored over 1,200 articles, chapters and books, has worked to increase the Tufts faculty's involvement in research since his arrival in 2005.
He passed university legislation that took effect in 2006 allowing junior faculty members to take two semesters of paid research leave, as opposed to one. In the two years after this change, an average of 30 faculty members in the School of Arts and Sciences took research leaves; in the four previous years, an average of 22 had taken leaves each year.
"The reason for this change in policy is that junior faculty have a relatively short time in which to earn tenure," Sternberg told the Daily last year. "If they cannot [produce] research of sufficient quality, quantity, impact and visibility during this period, they are not eligible for tenure."
McKissick said he saw a clear shift in the administration's focus.
