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PEER REVIEW
Stanley Fish Offers Deanship at U. of Illinois at Chicago to Gerald
Graff; Leading Chemist Is Leaving Case Western Reserve for Penn
By ALISON SCHNEIDER and VINCENT KIERNAN
Gone fishing.
Just 12 weeks after leaving Duke University for a deanship at the University
of Illinois at Chicago, Stanley Fish is getting ready to reel in
his first catch. The new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences just made
an offer to Gerald Graff, a professor of English and education at
the University of Chicago.
The two men go way back. In fact, Mr. Graff tried to persuade Mr. Fish to
take the job at Illinois in the first place. Mr. Fish says he'd like to
return the favor.
He's offered Mr. Graff a deanship to oversee curricular innovation, teacher
training, the freshman experience, and aspects of the writing program. "These
are areas that are important to the college, but no one was really attending
to them," Mr. Fish says.
Mr. Graff has spent much of his career studying issues of pedagogy and the
academic profession. He cemented his reputation with books like Professing
Literature: An Institutional History (University of Chicago Press, 1987)
and Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize
American Education (W.W. Norton, 1992). For the last few years, he's
focused his energies on Chicago's new master's program in the humanities.
"Jerry is one of the few high-profile scholars whose interest in teaching
and the relationship between the academic work at universities and secondary
schools is not occasional but absolutely central to what he does,"
Mr. Fish says. "That makes him a natural hire for us."
Just how natural remains to be seen. Leaving the high-toned ether at the
University of Chicago for the grittier realities of a commuter institution
is a pretty big leap. But Mr. Graff seems to be leaning in that direction.
"It's an exciting prospect to work with Stanley Fish, to work in public
education, to work with a different kind of student than we have at Chicago
-- students who might need me more," Mr. Graff says.
Still, he's not prepared to jump in blindly. He's waiting for Chicago to
make its counteroffer. But Mr. Graff doesn't seem to hold out much hope
that it will match the carrot that Illinois is dangling in his face. "Chicago
can duplicate the money," Mr. Graff says, but creating a deanship for
him is another ball of wax. "This is a whole new kind of position for
me," he says. "That's not something Chicago can really duplicate."
* * *
Case Western Reserve University has lost a leading chemist to the University
of Pennsylvania.
And Virgil Percec is leaving Case Western on a sour note. He says
that when campus officials couldn't keep him, they sought to keep his grants
and laboratory equipment. A university official denies that ever happened.
Penn is a better scientific match for him, says Mr. Percec, who has been
at Case Western for 17 years. His department there is focused on polymers,
while his own research crosses the border between polymer chemistry and
biology. He says Penn is home to much interdisciplinary work in that area.
"He can find a lot of collaborators," agrees Hai-Lung Dai,
chairman of Penn's chemistry department.
Case Western will miss Mr. Percec, who is an unusually productive scientist,
says James W. Wagner, dean of engineering there. "In a bad year,
he published 32 papers," says Mr. Wagner. "In a good year, he
published more than 100." Mr. Percec also edits the Journal of Polymer
Science Part A: Polymer Chemistry.
But after Mr. Percec gave notice that he was leaving, he says, Case Western
officials began questioning whether they could retain his laboratory equipment
and grants -- including money from the National Science Foundation, which
permits researchers to take grants with them if they change institutions.
All told, he says, the money in question amounts to about $1-million annually.
Mr. Percec sounded a clarion call to his colleagues. Jean Frechet,
a professor of chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, dispatched
an e-mail message to other chemists, warning that Case Western's "strange
and perhaps newly expressed 'policies'" could violate academic freedom.
But Mr. Wagner says that Mr. Percec pressed the panic button prematurely.
"In terms of equipment and current grants, it's all going to go with
him," he says.
What the university will retain is $146,016 in a discretionary account that
was designated for Mr. Percec's use. The money in that account differs from
grants because it was presented as gifts rather than to support specific
research, even though the donors might have given the funds expecting that
Mr. Percec would use them, says Mr. Wagner.
Mr. Percec says that he himself provided much of the money in the account,
from awards and other grants that he received.
Mr. Wagner says he checked how the issue would be handled by institutions
such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University,
and Vanderbilt University. "We can't find any schools that do it any
other way," says Mr. Wagner.
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Section: The Faculty
Page: A53 |
