C&EN: "Why hasn’t Kristie Koski made tenure?"

Also in this week's C&EN, an amazing story from Sam Lemonick: 

Kristie Koski is waiting to make tenure. Like many academic chemists, she submitted her tenure package in her sixth year as a professor. That’s when professors “are expected to be ready for promotion,” according to the personnel manual at the University of California, Davis, where Koski is a physical chemist. The traditional expectation in academia is that a professor makes—or is denied—tenure in their seventh year.

Koski submitted in 2019. It wasn’t COVID-19 that disrupted her progression, as it has for others. The university denied Koski tenure for alleged violations of the faculty code of conduct related to two of her trainees. Koski denies she did anything wrong. A faculty senate committee and a California state court both found that the university had not proved some of its charges. But UC Davis didn’t restart her tenure process until this past summer.

Four years on, Koski is in a kind of limbo. Her career advancement at UC Davis is stalled. The absence on her résumé of promotion to tenured professor is more prominent with each passing year. It would presumably complicate any attempt to find a new job. Some of Koski’s colleagues say that, regardless of the eventual outcome, she has already paid dearly, both emotionally and in her professional reputation.

A full explanation of why this happened to Koski remains out of reach. She and several other UC Davis employees declined C&EN’s requests for interviews, through a lawyer and a university spokesperson, respectively. Citing confidentiality rules, the university also refused to release records relating to Koski’s tenure application and its investigations of her alleged wrongdoing.

Through interviews and public documents, C&EN has pieced together a partial picture of what happened, although many details cannot be verified independently. What does seem clear is that Koski got stuck in a web of bureaucracy, power dynamics, and personal relationships. It’s a tangle that seems easy to avoid for some but impossible to escape for others.

I don't think I can summarize the story well enough. Read the whole thing. 

(only in academia)