The Academic Affairs Committee of the board of trustees concluded that assistant professor of English Eleanor Branch’s tenure case contained no procedural violations.”It is notable that consensus was achieved at each level of decision making,” said the college’s official response. “(This is) the final appeal available to Eleanor Branch and the end of a College process that began in November 2005 and has lasted more than a year.”

The Faculty Affairs Committee denied Eleanor Branch tenure in March 2006. When a faculty appeal failed to overturn the decision, Branch appealed to college president Kent Chabotar with the complaint that Guilford’s tenure process leaves room for racial bias to enter decisions. “My perception of myself as a black person is not in line with how people perceived I should be as a black person,” Branch said.

Chabotar hired civil rights attorney, Julius Chambers, to investigate Branch’s charge, a move that the tenure process did not require. Chambers concluded racial bias had not played a legal or deciding factor in Branch’s case. However, Branch and others have said Chambers also called Guilford’s tenure process “broken.”

“The decision not to award tenure (to Branch) resulted from a process that incorporated Chambers’ advice,” vice-president for academic affairs and academic dean, Adrienne Israel, wrote in a March 16 letter in The Guilfordian. “The college community should be reassured that a noted civil rights expert reviewed the process and concluded that the decision not to recommend tenure was not racially motivated.”

Based on Chambers’ report, Chabotar denied Branch’s appeal. So, Branch took her appeal to the Academic Affairs Committee of the board of trustees. Branch’s hearing with the trustees ended in January when they interviewed her briefly.

“It was a 10-minute hearing but a hearing nonetheless,” Branch said. “At the end of it, they thanked me for being ‘articulate and dignified.'”

Assistant professor of philosophy, Lisa McLeod, said, “Guilford is losing someone with the ability to make us all think harder about racism and other forms of oppression, in teaching and in our curriculum, and who was really up on current scholarship about all this stuff.”

Students who have taken classes with Branch reacted to the conclusion of Branch’s appeal largely with sentiments similar to McLeod’s.

Sophomore John Douglas said, “She’s an amazing teacher who gets me thinking and questioning the world around me.”

Juniors Tim May and Caryn Washington described Branch’s teaching style and her role in class discussion.

“Sometimes she just calls on people in class to see what they’re thinking,” Washington said. “It’s intimidating at first, but it’s a good technique. It helps your brain respond faster to ideas.”

“Eleanor doesn’t tell you what to think but engages what you already think and calls you to question yourself,” May said. “It’s a productive challenge that gets under your skin and sometimes catches you off guard.”

Branch said she still believes Guilford’s tenure process is broken and needs reevaluation.

“This is a prime example of how institutional racism operates,” Branch said, “a system that does not account for biases in evaluations by either (a faculty member’s) students or peers.”

“Tenure is a personnel matter, and the College generally says little in order to protect the privacy of those involved,” said the college’s response.

“Our comments about each other are held in strictest confidence,” McLeod said. “This is meant to inspire honesty, of course, but it has a way of bypassing accountability. I’d like people to recognize how often ‘confidentiality’ works against anti-racism efforts.”

The college’s response explains that Guilford is “a diverse community that is working to be anti-racist.”

“Unlike many educational institutions, it has an Anti-racism Plan and a team actively working to implement it,” said the response. “And Guilford has done more than just develop a plan. The College has funded these efforts within its strategic long range plan for 2005-2010.”

Branch said that if Guilford values diversity, we need to make sure people can be comfortable expressing their differences without fearing punishment for those differences.

Branch said, “It shows a fundamental hypocrisy around values.”

“We want feminists, and queer kids, and faculty of color,” McLeod said, “but we want them to be different in the way we are or else we won’t respect them. People draw lines so hard and fast and refuse to talk across them when, really, they could be good allies.”

Ty Buckner wrote Feb. 24 in Guilford College’s response to the trustees’ decision that college leadership recognize that many are disappointed about Branch not receiving tenure, but they “accept the fact that differences of opinion will persist over this decision.”

Jonathan Malino said in a letter he e-mailed to faculty, “Guilford’s Quaker ethos confers upon all of us an obligation to speak out, from the heart, regarding matters of deep conscience and community.”

“At Guilford, people don’t talk enough about differences,” May said. “We pretend we’re OK because we’re a Quaker community, but Quaker doesn’t necessarily equal utopia. We need to talk and engage what’s wrong with our own community.