By Ben Joravsky
In 1991 Lynch was placed on the tenure track. She had six years to prove her worth as a scholar and teacher and earn the ultimate prize in her profession: lifelong job protection for free expression and independent thought.
“President Bienen made some statements about tenure as soon as he got here,” says Newman. “He began talking about how too many people were getting tenure. Then he denied that standards had changed or procedures had changed. But, in fact, in the year after he arrived there was an unusually low success rate and many candidates were denied.”
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Lynch also had more specific concerns. Like Lynch, Bienen’s a political scientist (before coming to Northwestern he was the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public International Affairs). Unlike Lynch, he’s a traditionalist who believes that the area critical to scholarship is the conduct of governments (or states) and their chief strategists and policy makers (the Henry Kissingers and Madeleine Albrights of the world). Bienen considers himself a strategist; in a recent article he called himself a “regionalist, although I believe that America has goals beyond regions.”
On May 1 of last year she and her husband were invited to Bienen’s mansion in Evanston for a reception honoring senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland. “I thought maybe this is a sign Bienen wants to get to know me a little,” says Lynch. “I didn’t attempt to initiate a discussion about international relations. We certainly didn’t talk about my candidacy. He showed me his collection of Chinese and Japanese art. We talked about art.”
Her appeal request charged that she “was not treated on a par with other candidates for tenure,” that her “case was not treated on its merits” and instead was “manipulated” by Bienen and Dumas “to solicit negative views.” Lynch claimed that her academic freedom was violated and that she was a victim of gender discrimination, as “male colleagues with comparable records were awarded tenure and treated in a more favorable manner.”
“I have now spent four hours with the Lynch case, more than any other case aside from [name blacked out],” Bienen wrote in an undated memo to Dumas. “Simply put, her reputation is in the future….This puts a heavy burden on her present book [Beyond Appeasement]….She just has not been a productive scholar.”
