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April 13, 1995

O'Connor resignation causes Senate's Tobias to rescind his

Chancellor J. Dennis O'Connor's resignation has inspired English professor Richard Tobias to withdraw his own resignation from University Senate activities.

Tobias, one of the Senate's most respected and longest-serving members, had resigned from Senate business March 31. He cited his frustration at recent Pitt administration decisions to drop HealthAmerica and take no action on an alleged violation of faculty rights in the medical school.

At the April 10 Senate Council meeting, however, Senate President James Holland announced that Tobias had withdrawn his resignation "after much arm-twisting" and Holland's refusal to accept the resignation.

But Tobias, asked after the meeting why he had decided to continue with the Senate, said, "His (O'Connor's) leaving, of course." Tobias served three terms as Senate president — the maximum a Pitt faculty member may serve — during the 1982-83, 1983-84 and 1991-92 academic years. He co-chairs the Senate's tenure and academic freedom committee, a committee he has served on, with some breaks, since 1960. Tobias also serves on the Senate executive committee, as a pro tempore member and secretary of the Senate anti-discrimination policies committee, and as a faculty representative on the Board of Trustees academic and library affairs committee, among other duties.

In his resignation letter to Holland, Tobias had cited two recent incidents:

* Chancellor O'Connor's decision last month to give Blue Cross of Western Pennsylvania exclusive rights to Pitt's employee health insurance business beginning July 1, thus eliminating HealthAmerica — contrary to the advice of Faculty Assembly, Senate Council, the Staff Association Council and the Medical Review Committee; this last group includes faculty, staff and administrators well-versed on medical insurance issues. Tobias called O'Connor's decision "probably irresponsible" fiscally, and "inexcusable" in terms of ignoring input from faculty and staff.

* The Pitt senior administration's inaction regarding a grievance by a medical school faculty member who alleged that her department chairperson reneged on a promise to change her appointment from year-to-year to a tenure stream position. She has since left Pitt.

Tobias estimated that the Senate tenure and academic freedom committee worked 150 hours on the case. Senate policy forbids committee members from publicly identifying faculty involved in tenure and academic freedom cases, but Tobias called the grievant "reportedly, one of the best oncological radiologists in the country. The problem was that she proved to be a rather independent and outspoken woman.

"Her department chairman assigned her duties outside the city, gave her an office facing a men's room that didn't have a door, and did a whole series of things that made it impossible for her to qualify for a tenure stream position," according to Tobias. "She never received evaluations of her work, yet she was summarily terminated after five years.

"In its report on the case, the [tenure and academic freedom] committee was very careful not to upset the department chair or the dean of the medical school. We didn't slap any hands. We on the committee thought it was an open and shut case, but after meeting with the provost [James Maher] and explaining the case to him, he just said there was nothing he could do. And that was that," Tobias said.

Discussing the case with Tobias and a University Times reporter following the Senate Council meeting, Provost Maher pointed out that the faculty member "was a clinician who was never actually in the tenure stream. She had a year-by-year contract. Whether or not promises had been made to her, there was no paper trail. Based on those conditions and the legal advice I received, there was nothing in my purview that I could do.

"Basically, what it comes down to," Maher continued, "is that there are many, many year-by-year clinical appointments being terminated over in the medical departments right now. So there are an awful lot of employment issues that are being dealt with that hospitals are used to and universities aren't. That, I think, is a fair statement." Tobias smiled ruefully and nodded in agreement when Maher said the faculty member had no written proof that she had been offered an opportunity for a tenure track job. "She had certain promises, she felt, that had been given to her by the department chair, and then conditions were imposed [by the chairperson] that made it impossible for her to fulfill the requirements. We [on the Senate committee] feel powerless to do anything in such cases," Tobias said.

— Bruce Steele


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