The Nevada Sagebrush

University faculty recommended Thursday that campus administrators hire back a professor they feel was unduly slighted out of a job in the budget cutting process.

Valerie Weinstein, a former German professor and chair of the Gender, Race and Identity program at the University of Nevada, Reno, lost her job when the German department disintegrated in June.

The Faculty Senate held a special meeting Thursday to discuss Weinstein’s situation. The body passed two motions: The first suggested that the university hire Weinstein back at her previous rank and pay. The second asked administrators to establish an explicit process for faculty reassignment in such cases that includes Faculty Senate review.

Administrators offered her a position as a lecturer, which president of the UNR chapter of the Nevada Faculty Alliance Glenn Miller said would have meant a much lower salary.

According to Weinstein, campus officials told her the position would never put her back on the track to tenured professorship. So Weinstein, who had worked at UNR for a decade, refused the offer, packed up her belongings, sold her house and moved with her family to Tulane University in New Orleans.

“I fully expected to stay on the faculty at UNR until I retired, decades from now,” Weinstein said in an email. “It was devastating to have to leave, especially when I feel that I still have so much to contribute.”

In September, she noticed the university was offering a tenure-track position in the Gender, Race and Identity program. The move, along with the firing of more than 45 other tenured faculty since the university started facing budget cuts from the state government in 2008, has weakened the protection tenure would normally give a professor from being terminated, Miller said.

Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts Scott Casper said the Women’s Studies department has been planning the tenure-track position in question since 2005.

Miller said the administrators’ actions might violate the Nevada System of Higher Education Code. A section of the Code’s fifth chapter states that if financial duress causes a faculty member to be fired, the university should seek another position for them.

Interim Provost Heather Hardy said the actions didn’t violate the code. As for a violation of the spirit of the Code, Hardy said such an interpretation varies from person to person.

Weinstein said she isn’t sure if she would accept an offer to return to UNR.

“Now, after all that has happened, having relocated my family across the country, and having sold our house in Reno it’s hard to imagine turning around and coming back,” she said.

Ben Miller can be reached at bmiller@nevadasagebrush.com.

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