Brown and White Vol. 95 no. 42

              brown and white lehigh university vol 95 — no 42 bethlehem pa tuesday march 27 1984 215 861-4184 tobak files for more than 835,000 by pete trumbore james tobak assistant professor of law filed suit against the university fri day charging that their refusal to grant him tenure was based in part on his activities on behalf of affirmative action tobak is seeking 825,000 plus punitive damages in excess of 10,000 according to the complaint filed in the lehigh county court the 825,000 is based on 33 years of salary tobak claims he would have received had he been tenured tobak was denied tenure last spring after having been voted to be tenured by the tenured faculty of the department of accounting and law of the college of business and economics the dean's council overruled the faculty on the basis of absence of productive and rele vent scholarship specifically pub lished works tobak said the university'9 procedures rules and regulations pr&r states that there must be compelling reasons for the administration to deny a professor tenure tobak contends that these rea sons did not exist this constitutes a breech of contract under pr&r he said , i didn't publish enough articles according to the administration and i'm maintaining that that's spurious tobak said there were people both before me at the same time as me and following me who were granted tenure whose record of publications was no bet ter than mine tobak said he published four articles two of which were major ones judged to be of very high scholastic caliber according to the complaint his two major publications were considered significant scholarly contributions to the field of law in which they were written he said the real reason behind the administration's decision was his work on the faculty affirmative action com mittee he was actively involved in recruiting women and minorities to the university and the business college in particular he said i guess someone could say that i was something of an out spoken advocate of affirmative action tobak added according to the complaint tobak's work has resulted in the administration edpol postpones discussion of teacher-evaluation issue by rob wengert since last fall's end to a two-year university-wide experiment with stu dent evaluation of instructors and courses the faculty committee on edu cational policy edpol has yet to act on extending the experiment or recom mend a standardized university-wide form of evaluation the university now has no university wide system of teaching evaluation in the fall of 1981 the university faculty approved a spring 1982 starting date for the experiment which required all faculty to use a global question of rating the instructor and course on a scale of one to six and recommended the supplementary use of the instructor and course evaluation system ices or college-wide evaluation questions or individual department systems edpol postponed discussion last semester edpol postponed dis cussion of extending the experiment but formed an ad hoc subcommittee to pre pare a questionnaire that would collect faculty opinion and input on the issue to fill the absence of an evaluation sys tem for this spring provost arthur humphrey sent a memo last semester to department chairmen requesting departments to adopt an interim evalua tion system for the spring semester until the faculty adopts a formal policy in the memo humphrey attributed the edpol delay and reluctance on the eva luation issue their concern of the sizea ble fraction of the faculty in non-compliance with the faculty endorsed experiment and a desire to study carefully and fully the cause of the faculty concern when a proposal to send the question naire to the faculty arose before edpol this semester however a four to three vote tabled it postponing discussion and action on the issue the tabling motion was brought by donald bolle dean of the college of engineering and physical sciences who cited the inadequacy of student evaluations to completely assess a professor's teaching performance bolle said the classroom instruction was only one part of teaching activities related to teaching outside the class room that bolle cited include laboratory exercises writing and selecting course textbooks developing course material seminars workshops and other activi university president peter likins addressed professors at yesterday's faculty meeting at which proposals for the disciplinary code personnel committee policy and writing course requirements were discussed chaser jim flxx author of th complete book of run ning spoke thursday • night on the do's and don'ts of running see story on page 6 and for an exclusive b&w inter view see page 7 b&w photo by dan ryan computer sales stopped contract difficulties cited by alden cushman the university bookstore is no longer offering the international bus iness machines ibm personal com puter pc because of contractual difficulties according to ray jensen university purchasing direc tor the bookstore was originally of f ering the ibm model along with the zenith z-100 microcomputer through the ben franklin consortium due to a change in ibm's corporate policy they have suspended further sales of pcs to the ben franklin con sortium douglas abbott vice pro vost for computing and information services said they originally made an agree ment with the consortium abbott said then they looked at t from a corporate sense and changed their minds he added there were actually two contracts signed one was with the local dealer and the other was with ibm jensen said the ibm contract had addi tional conditions he continued some of which were oral those were the ones they ibm changed which caused the present contractual difficulties several ibm attorneys have noti fied the university that the original agreement with the consortium vio lated corporate policy with local dealerships and outlets abbott said they had been selling pcs to the university of scranton for a long time before we began buying them through the lehigh data system lds . then they simply changed their minds they're ibm they can do that according to h.a stocker campus coordinator of the microcomputer purchase program at moravian col lege their ibm new policy app lies to all of the member colleges in the ben franklin north east tier program the program includes 16 area schools such asßucknell univer sity lafayette college and lasalle college the university will be offering the new zenith 100 percent pc and xt compatibles beginning either this week or next week jensen said the discipline code amendment adds to suspension sanction by tony coppola students violating the university's dis ciplinary code can now be suspended for up to seven semesters due to an amend ment ratified at yesterday's faculty meeting under the old policy students were suspended for up to two semesters or expelled with no disciplinary action between the extremes wayne kraft professor of metallurgy and materials engineering who proposed the amend ment said the change resulted because of feelings that expulsion was too harsh a sanction in some cases the faculty also ratified a new policy for dealing with appeals to the personnel committee on behalf of minority groups as defined by the u.s government barbara frankel associate professor of anthropology proposed that minority groups have a temporary member selected from the affirmative action equal opportunities committee to help with deliberation of the appeal in question a junior-year writing requirement u students in the college of arts and scien ces was proposed and discussed but not approved each student in the college must complete for graduation at least see tobak page 4 see instructor page 9 see ibm page 4 see writing page 4