Professor’s pay cut to $0 for ‘failing to prepare lectures’

Mathematics professor Harold Donnelly is still listed on Purdue University’s website – but fellow mathematics professors have shared something odd about his salary.

It’s $0, after the university began reducing it in autumn 2021, according to emails these professors provided.

“I have carefully considered your career of contributions to mathematics and to our department, college and university,” says a July 2021 email from a mathematics department head, whose name is redacted, about the first salary slash, a 20 per cent cut. Irena Swanson, who was the department head then and now, did not respond to requests for comment.

“Those contributions are well-documented and beyond dispute,” the email says. “Still, I must also take into account your most recent effort in the areas of teaching, research and service as I consider how to allocate the scarce merit pay resources our department receives. I also took into account your teaching in the spring, and your subsequent unsatisfactory completion of the communicated conditions to teach in the fall.”

Later, in early 2022, the department head wrote: “For more than a year, the Department of Mathematics and the College of Science have warned you that your failure to meaningfully prepare for and adequately deliver instruction could result in disciplinary sanction. We have provided helpful resources and feedback to you, which you have largely ignored.”

That email says: “We have provided explicit examples of what successful preparation and delivery of instruction entails. Your failure to meet any of the four criteria that were due on 24th of January, together with unsuccessful completion of two prior iterations of criteria, demonstrates that you have no desire or intention of providing adequate instruction.”

The email then says this to Professor Donnelly, who is in his early seventies: “You will not be assigned to any teaching for Mathematics during the 2022/2023 academic year. In addition to working with you on instruction, we have discussed with you incentives for retirement, which the college has authorized, and which several faculty in our college have embraced. You have intermittently been open to retirement discussions, but ultimately decided against pursuing an incentive. That is, of course, your prerogative.” Professor Donnelly did not respond to requests for comment.

That early 2022 email suggested speaking to Leonard Lipshitz, a Purdue mathematics professor emeritus, who had “volunteered to be a sounding board to anyone who is contemplating retirement”. But after Professor Donnelly contacted him, this “sounding board” began fighting on Professor Donnelly’s behalf against the university.

“Harold shared a number of memos and e-mail messages,” Professor Lipshitz wrote in a June memo to colleagues. “The problem had nothing to do with the legalese in a retirement incentive package. The problem was that [department head] was pressuring Harold to retire, and he did not want to. To say that I was shocked by both the content and the sometimes contemptuous tone of [department head]’s communications would be an understatement.” Professor Lipshitz did not respond to requests for comment.

Charles Fefferman, a Princeton University mathematics professor who worked with Professor Donnelly in the 1980s, shared these emails in a December letter to the editor to the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, calling attention to the situation. The Exponent student newspaper has also reported on the situation.

The emails do not include the names of department heads and other officials – at the request of Notices’ editor, the documents say.

Professor Fefferman said he heard about the issue from Professor Donnelly. “When I heard what had happened, it made my blood boil, and so that’s how I came to be involved,” he told Inside Higher Ed.

“He has taught over the years a wide variety of courses,” Professor Fefferman said of Professor Donnelly. “There is one particular course that he taught, this is a service course for engineers, and during the pandemic it involved the use, of course, of technology…He completely screwed up remote teaching, and he screwed up this particular course.”

But, Professor Fefferman said, instead of the university assigning Professor Donnelly to teach a different course, he was told he would be teaching only that one.

“Furthermore, he was required to produce a set of notes, of lecture notes, so detailed as to require no ad-libbing – that is extremely unusual,” Professor Fefferman said.

Alongside saying that Professor Donnelly’s treatment was “grossly unfair”, Professor Fefferman said it seems “that because Donnelly is 71 years old, that he is going to be a poster boy for pushing people out when they get old”.

Purdue’s College of Science was given a chance to respond to Professor Fefferman in the same issue of Notices.

Its response was almost word for word the response a university spokesman emailed Inside Higher Ed. The university did not provide interviews.

“Without commenting on an individual case, we can assure that each faculty member in the College of Science receives regular feedback from departmental leadership about their work performance,” the spokesman said in the email. “Full professors are evaluated every three years, and leaders strive to provide clear, objective and workable guidelines and resources for performance improvement when a faculty member’s review indicates they are not meeting expectations.”

The email also says employment decisions “are all subject to a robust Faculty Grievance Procedure, whereby faculty can have specific employment-related issues heard and evaluated by a committee of faculty peers, with further review by the vice provost for faculty affairs and provost. The College of Science regrets that some have chosen to release incomplete confidential personnel files related to a faculty member with a long and valued career. Purdue respects the privacy of our faculty members and will not comment on any specific personnel actions.”

A July email from the mathematics department head suggested that, even with his pay at zero, Professor Donnelly’s tenure might be a target.

“You are not teaching in 2022/2023 and you have not submitted the required outline of your research or other engagement,” the email says. “I am very sorry that we cannot establish that you will be doing any work expected of a faculty member. Thus we cannot pay you…if you exhibit no plan for improving upon your current level of effort for the entire fall semester, the department will recommend to the college that your tenure be terminated for gross neglect of your duties as a faculty member.”

Manushag Powell, Purdue’s secretary of faculties, said Professor Donnelly’s situation “is not a matter that has come before the [University] Senate”.

This is an edited version of a story that first appeared on Inside Higher Ed.