(NAME-MCE) Age, Experience and Bias

[Anselmo Villanueva]

Age, Experience and Bias


When a tenure-track slot opened up, San Francisco State passed over
experienced instructor with a Ph.D. (aged 61) for a non-Ph.D. (aged 31).
EEOC sees bias — and sues.

For related articles, go to:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/06/age

June 6, 2008

Age, Experience and Bias

Talk to long-time instructors who are off the tenure track, and one of the
frustrations voiced time and again is being passed over — time and again —
for tenure-track jobs when they open up. If they are good enough to teach
course after course, many adjuncts want to know, why are they not worthy of
jobs with, say, some job security? Why is the new (young) Ph.D. always
presumed to be better for the tenure-track job?

Rarely do such complaints results in lawsuits, let alone federal
intervention. But on Thursday, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission sued San Francisco State University in federal court, charging it
with age discrimination when it hired a 31-year-old without a Ph.D. over
Lawford Goddard, a 61-year old with a Ph.D. (from Stanford University no
less), with 30 years of teaching experience, 15 of them at San Francisco
State. The position was in black studies, the field of both scholars.

Michael Baldonado, director of the EEOC's San Francisco office, issued a
statement in which he said: "The EEOC's investigation revealed that the
university wanted a younger person in the assistant professor position
despite the fact that Dr. Goddard was the most qualified candidate. That is
a violation of federal law."

A spokeswoman for San Francisco State, Ellen Griffin, said that the suit was
"a complete surprise" and that the university didn't yet have a formal
response. But she denied that there was any discrimination. She first
characterized as "inaccurate" the EEOC statement that the man hired didn't
have a Ph.D., but she then acknowledged that he was in fact A.B.D. at the
time, but finished his dissertation after he was hired.

The suit against San Francisco State is the second in recent years in which
the EEOC has taken up the cause of an adjunct instructor passed over for a
full-time position. The suits are significant because the agency tends to
give colleges considerable leeway in hiring decisions and largely avoids
litigation against them.

In 2006, the EEOC sued Wilbur Wright College, one of the City Colleges of
Chicago, saying that a pattern of hiring decisions and some comments made by
colleagues demonstrated age discrimination against Rosemary Crane, who
taught English there part time for 11 years and was passed over in four
separate searches for full-time positions. In 2004, there were two openings
and Crane didn't even get an interview. She was 68 at the time. The two
people hired were then 29 and 30.

While the college denied wrongdoing, it quietly reached a settlement with
EEOC last year in which Crane was paid $40,000 and offered a full-time,
tenure-track job.

In the San Francisco State case, an EEOC lawyer, William R. Tamayo, said in
an interview that there was considerable evidence against the university.
For starters, he said, there was the fact that someone with years of
relevant teaching experience — and outstanding reviews of his teaching — was
turned down for someone with less teaching experience and without a Ph.D. at
the time.

In addition, Tamayo said that the EEOC has statements from individuals at
the university who witnessed "age bias statements" made about hiring, and
that there was a clear preference for a younger candidate. "This is a very
strong case," he said. "Why would they go with someone without a Ph.D. over
someone who had one, and who didn't have any bad evaluations?"

Kathy Hagedorn, a St. Louis-based consultant on human resources issues in
higher education, said that she is not surprised that people who teach off
the tenure track are demanding full and fair consideration for positions
that open up. "Certainly they feel as if they are being overlooked because
they are spending so much time teaching and driving that they can't do the
kind of teaching and research and writing that a full-time faculty member
can do," she said.

Hagedorn — who said she had no involvement with San Francisco State and
wasn't aware of the lawsuit — said that the trend in recent years has been
for colleges to instruct search committees, and especially committee chairs,
on what may or may not be considered in a hiring decision. She said that
there are circumstances where a committee might legitimately go with a less
experienced, younger candidate. "If they felt that they needed research that
was more recent, or the field may have changed rapidly in the past few
years, that may give a younger candidate [a legitimate edge] over someone
else," she said.

But Hagedorn stressed that such a distinction must be based on relevant
qualifications and a true evaluation of the merits of the two candidates,
not just "because they want a younger candidate" or are "making assumptions
that are not valid" about an older candidate.

— Scott Jaschik