Curry School of Education – C-VILLE Weekly

In brief: Protestors push on, police donors exposed, victims speak out, and more

Tenure trouble

UVA’s “Great and Good” strategic plan lists “recruiting and retaining excellent and diverse faculty” as a central goal. But this year, two black scholars who have been denied tenure claim the decision process was significantly flawed, possibly due to racial bias.

Paul Harris has worked at UVA’s Curry School of Education since 2011, studying identity development in black male student-athletes and underrepresented students’ college readiness. For the past six years, Harris’ annual reviews indicated that he was meeting or exceeding expectations. So he was shocked to learn in January that an all-white, college-wide promotion and tenure committee had recommended against giving him tenure. Instead, he was offered a promotion—for a non-tenure-track position.

Harris says the committee claimed his research in the Journal of African American Males in Education in 2016 was “self-published.” (In fact, the peer-reviewed journal has a 23 percent acceptance rate.) The committee also got his citation counts wrong—they’re five times higher than the committee claimed.

Sociologist Tolu Odumosu has been on the tenure track at UVA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science since 2013. He’s co-written and co-edited two books, and helped write a $3 million National Science Foundation grant. After his third-year review suggested he expand his editing experience, he also became an associate editor of two journals.

But the engineering school’s tenure committee did not grant him tenure this year. It claimed that Odumosu hadn’t written enough work by himself, and was not the principal investigator named on the NSF grant. Like Harris, Odumosu had not been warned that his work was not up to par.

Both men appealed the decisions to UVA’s provost, but the appeals were rejected. The scholars are now appealing to the Faculty Senate’s grievance committee—their last option.

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Quote of the week

“This is a moment to step boldly into our future…We have to work together to decide what kind of Virginia we’re going to be. I’m ready for the challenge.”

—State Senator Jennifer McClellan, announcing her campaign for Virginia governor

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In brief

Still on the march

Charlottesville activists continue to mobilize the community to protest police brutality. Large marches and demonstrations have taken place in town at least once a week since the death of George Floyd in late May. Last weekend, protesters marching downtown also directed some of their energy toward patrons of the mall’s outdoor restaurants: The demonstrators chanted “Shame” at diners who were sipping beer and chewing on burgers.

Convention contagion?

Denver Riggleman’s campaign claims that several delegates who participated in the recent drive-thru Republican convention have contracted coronavirus, reports CBS19. The local Republican Party denies the accusation. Riggleman continues to criticize the drive-thru convention format that saw him lose the congressional nomination to challenger Bob Good. “Voter fraud has been a hallmark of this process,” Riggleman tweeted on election night.

Donor debate

Community members have noticed that the Charlottesville Police Foundation—dedicated to fundraising for the “advanced training, new technologies and equipment, [and] housing assistance” that isn’t covered by the department’s $18 million budget—posted a list of donors on its website. The list featured several local restaurants and other businesses, as well as individuals, including City Council members Lloyd Snook and Heather Hill.

Exposing abuse

Tweets about allegations of sexual assault and harassment directed at dozens of UVA students and staff appeared on an anonymous Twitter account last week. The alleged incidents once again drew attention to students’ calls for reform—in April, student advocacy group UVA Survivors created a list of demands for institutional change in sexual assault policy, reports The Cavalier Daily. The list has garnered around 1,700 new signatures in the past week.

Immigration action

UVA will now allow students to enroll and graduate “regardless of citizenship or immigration status,” the university announced last week. Previously, only DACA recipients—not other “undocu+” students—had not been allowed to matriculate. The decision represents a long-sought victory for activists around the school community.

Threat assessment: UVA prof says schools are safe

There are an average of 32,000 firearm deaths in the country every year—and there have been 224 school shootings since 2013.

“Schools are one of the safest places for kids to be,” says Dewey Cornell, a professor at UVA’s Curry School of Education and director of the university’s Virginia Youth Violence Project.

At his June 9 lecture titled “School Safety and Violence Prevention,” Cornell said the majority of homicides occur in residences, followed by parking lots and garages, and then restaurants and bars. There are 10 times as many shootings in restaurants as in schools, he said.

“Why doesn’t the NRA recommend arming our cooks and our waitpersons rather than our teachers?” Cornell asked.

The fear of school violence is costly, he said, with the school security industry raking in big bucks by selling materials to craft bulletproof building entrances with metal detectors and X-ray technologies. Enhanced security and police presence on campuses also costs a pretty penny, he said, and he noted that after the slaying of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, Albemarle County Public School administration asked the police department to place at least one patrol officer in every elementary school.

The professor recounted that, at that time, Chief Steve Sellers said putting one of his women or men in each of the schools would leave none for the rest of the county.

In Albemarle schools, all classroom door locks were recently replaced with ones that lock from the inside. Cornell says the $15,000 used to replace them should have been used for providing mental health services for students, and proper education on bullying and how to respond to it.

County schools spokesperson Phil Giaramita says 75 percent of that project was funded by a state security grant and there were strict parameters on how the money could be spent. Before replacing the locks, teachers would have to go out into the hallway to secure their doors.

“We need to focus much more attentively on prevention,” Cornell said. People have often argued that that’s a complicated task because it’s difficult to tell who could be a perpetrator of school violence, but Cornell argued, “Prevention does not require prediction.”

In 2002, he and his colleagues developed the Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines, which is an evidence-based model that each school in the state uses. From this, he’s found that 97.7 percent of threats in schools were not attempted.

Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development Catherine Bradshaw, another Curry School professor who spoke at the lecture, calls herself a “prevention scientist.” She studies bullying and how to respond to it.

A recent study uncovered 54 incidents in which a grade school student used President Donald Trump’s name or message to harass a classmate, Bradshaw said. In big letters behind her, a slide on her PowerPoint presentation read, “The Kids are Alt-Right.”