In 1983, Jeffrey Duban (PhD '75) left the classics faculty at Georgia State University, embroiled in litigation over a promotion dispute. During the course of his lawsuit, his attorney suggested that he might make a good lawyer himself. Duban took the remark seriously, and today has a legal practice in New York that includes a specialty in tenure and promotion disputes. He is outspoken in his views about how universities administer tenure, at least as regards his clients.

JHM: What sort of cases are you seeing, primarily?

Higher education has just gone to hell because of political correctness, and a lot of the problems that faculty coming up for promotion and tenure have these days are ideologically motivated. As a faculty member without tenure, you may have had the indiscretion, for instance, to question at a faculty meeting whether a person being considered as a new hire is really qualified for that position, or is simply being chosen because he or she belongs to some particular ethnic, religious, sexual identity group. God help you if you question such a hire, because you're a marked person. The ideologues, when it comes time to promotion and tenure, won't forget.

JHM: On what basis do the institutions deny tenure?

Duban: There is always some ground that someone can point to in withholding your tenure. The typical pattern [of my cases] is where the faculty member has a unanimous or near-unanimous departmental vote in favor of tenure. It goes up to the college committee, which gives it a unanimous endorsement. It goes up to the dean, and the dean says no. So those people most in the position to adjudicate have been annulled, and deans and provosts, who know nothing of the subject matter, nothing of the scholarship, for reasons entirely of their own which are rarely explained, decline to accept these advisory recommendations.

JHM: Are tenure cases difficult for faculty to win?

Duban: Yes, because the courts are reluctant to engage in what the court considers second-guessing the judgment of trained professionals. That's not to say a promotion and tenure case cannot be won, but when they are won it's only after the longest time, the greatest ardor, and [great] expenditure of money. [Even then] the best thing you can hope for is some kind of settlement.

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