MathOverflow will be down for maintenance for approximately 3 hours, starting Monday evening (06/24/2013) at approximately 9:00 PM Eastern time (UTC-4).
46

7

When a math department lays off tenured staff, people cry out loud. But, 10 years later, such memories are no longer popular discussion subjects, and so the information doesn't always spread.

Those who lived through it will of course remember. But will the younger get to know of the troubled past of a given university?

I would like to record incidents of universities laying off tenured math faculty for financial reasons. If you know of such an event, please write the name of the university, the year when it happened, and the number of tenured faculty that got laid off. Other relevant information, such whether or not there was a lawsuit, aggravating circumstances, etc. should also be included.

(This is a follow up on this discussion about the VU Amsterdam laying off people.)

flag
17 
 Seems appropriate to me. I don't think Andre's plan will work as well as he hopes, but it's the sort of data that it is important to academics, and is hard to find in one place. Inside Higher Ed lists several schools that have recently done this insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/02/exigency , but they don't have a historic list. – David Speyer Apr 28 2011 at 21:45
16 
 I also think it's an appropriate question. – Andy Putman Apr 28 2011 at 21:46
9 
 "name and shame" = retaliation, I really don't think that's appropriate for Mathoverflow. Even if such a list can be viewed as providing useful and important information to people – Michael Greenblatt Apr 28 2011 at 21:47
9 
 Voted to close. No math content. – Mark Sapir Apr 28 2011 at 21:57
19 
 Meta thread: meta.mathoverflow.net/discussion/1030/… – David Speyer Apr 28 2011 at 22:16
show 9 more comments

6 Answers

37

Two tenured professors at the University of Uppsala, Oleg Viro and Burglind Joricke, were forced to resign in 2007. The reason seems to have been a disagreement with the rector of the University, Anders Hallberg, over an appointment of an applied maths professor. (As far as I know, there weren't financial reasons involved, but still I thought it might be worthwhile to mention this here.)

More details can be found here http://www.pdmi.ras.ru/~olegviro/Uppsala-8-2-2007.html

link|flag
27 
 I don't say this very often, but: OMG. The linked-to document is not for the faint of heart. It may give me nightmares... – Pete L. Clark Apr 29 2011 at 2:44
6 
 Wow. Pete Clark is not exaggerating. – David Roberts Apr 29 2011 at 6:08
9 
 I am not trying to defend the way the actions of the rector, but it seems disingenuous to say that they were fired over a disagreement over an appointment. I don't feel comfortable making any public allegations since I only have second hand knowledge of what went on at the UU, but if you read Swedish or put up with Google translate, there is a more impartial account (still strongly critical of the university) in this issue of the newsletter of the Swedish Mathematical Society: math.chalmers.se/~olleh/U18.pdf – Dan Petersen Apr 29 2011 at 6:56
4 
 Yes, the transcripts are real and accurate. Re: evidence, that's sort of the crux of the matter. About a month before the transcribed meeting, the rector had a similar surprise meeting (i.e. announce a meeting about X, it's actually about Y) with the entire department where he brought lawyers and announced that: (a) if there would be any more misconduct, he would try to have people fired and/or shut down the whole department; (b) there would be an external committee investigating the work environment at the department and interviewing staff members. The decision to force Viro and Jöricke to... – Dan Petersen Apr 30 2011 at 10:46
6 
 ...resign was then taken on the basis of the report of this committee. This report was never made public, though, allegedly out of respect for the privacy of the people involved. (This makes me a bit uneasy but it is hard to argue against the principle that workplace conflicts should be handled discreetly.) But what makes it a real scandal is that the findings of the report were never made available to Viro or Jöricke either, so they found themselves in the Kafka-like situation of having to respond to accusations that they weren't themselves privy to! (I agree about the analogies this evokes.) – Dan Petersen Apr 30 2011 at 10:46
show 6 more comments
19

The maths department at Bangor university in Wales was closed in only the past 10 years. This was, if I recall rightly, because they scored relatively poorly on a national 'research quality' exercise, one that has since been redesigned somewhat (though perhaps not so much, as Jose points out in the comments, for mathematics).

I'm not sure about the number of staff, but at least two: Tim Porter and Ronnie Brown, both considered senior category theorists (among other things). (Edit by Tim: There were three members of staff Gareth Roberts, Chris Wensley and myself. Ronnie had retired normally a few years ago, but was still research active (very!). The RAE was partially to blame, and its methodology was too open to highly subjective judgements, but the causes were ultimately a shortfall in funding for the overall system together with power struggles within and between universities. The replacement REF (see later comments) will use bibliometrics that are highly contentious and unproven.)

(Since this is CW, I invite Tim or Ronnie to freely edit this answer and supply more details)

link|flag
8 
 Another victim of the same research assessment exercise was the maths department at Hull University. By the way, not that I'm disagreeing, but where is the evidence that the RAE "has since been seen to be quite flawed"? – José Figueroa-O'Farrill Apr 29 2011 at 0:03
7 
 Jose -- well, if one of the outcomes was laying off Ronnie Brown and Tim Porter, the results speak for themselves, don't they? – algori Apr 29 2011 at 2:21
@Jose - as far as I know, the methodology for said exercise in the UK has been completely changed and called something else. I doubt if the government (or relevant department thereof) would come out and say 'it was rubbish', but such actions show that at the very least something 'better' has come along. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… – David Roberts Apr 29 2011 at 2:33
No relation, by the way, to the author of the so-called 'Roberts report' :) – David Roberts Apr 29 2011 at 2:35
1 
 @Jose you ask: where is the evidence that the RAE "has since been seen to be quite flawed". The Roberts report by Sir Gareth Roberts was highly critical of the methodology and suggested some improvements. These seem not to have been accepted by the main research universities and I suspect that is because of their own self-interest. No system is perfect and the old RAE did feed more money into maths. In the process I lost my position ...., but that is not what this comment is about. Probably universities used the RAE as an excuse to settle internal battles. We lost. – Tim Porter May 2 2011 at 17:16
show 3 more comments
19

It would be a mistake to get the impression from these answers that the phenomenon of tenured mathematicians being fired for dodgy political reasons is purely a new thing. For instance in the early 1950s (under McCarthyism) Oklahoma A&M instituted a loyalty oath; Ainsley Diamond, a quaker, refused to sign it and was fired and Nachman Aronszajn resigned in protest. Both moved to the University of Kansas.

link|flag
Chandler Davis is another famous example here. – Josh Shadlen Apr 29 2011 at 17:12
2 
 Chandler Davis, Mark Nickerson, and Clement Markert were fired by the University of Michigan in 1954 for McCarthyist reasons. They firing has not, however, been forgotten: umich.edu/~aflf/history.html – mephisto Apr 30 2011 at 2:30
14

In the early 30s, André Weil was fired from Aligarh Muslim University ostensibly for not cooperating in holding elections to the students' union. Read his own account of the whole episode in his Souvenirs d'apprentissage.

link|flag
10

In the late 1970s Yeshiva University in New York closed down its Math graduate program and fired a couple of tenured professors. I don't recall the details, but I remember that the matter came up before the Council of the AMS.

link|flag
1 
 The details are given here: aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/… – Deane Yang Apr 30 2011 at 2:21
Two of Yeshiva refugees (Leon Ehrenpreis and Don Newman) then came to Temple (I suppose a natural progression from Yeshiva...) Both of them were extremely strong mathematicians. – Igor Rivin Apr 30 2011 at 4:10
5

A Google search of "tenured faculty layoffs" returns several instances in the US, in particular in the state of Florida, where layoffs of tenured faculty were planned. In a number of instances, e.g. Florida State University, these plans were rescinded after public brouhaha and legal fights.

link|flag

Your Answer

Get an OpenID
or

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.