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Can refusing to attend mandatory Title IX training be grounds for suspending a tenured faculty member?
In the US all the universities that receive federal funding must ensure (or so I heard) that all their employees and students take one class about the Title IX law, concerning sexual harassment and related subjects. Can refusing to attend these classes be a motive for firing or suspending a tenured member of faculty? Is there precedent of tenured faculty being fired for this?
[I ask the question not for myself, but because at my university (Brandeis), the administration has decided on its own to add to include in the title IX course a new "racial awareness" training that I find highly objectionable. Before encouraging others to boycott these trainings, I would like to know what I expose them to.]

Not for anything, but is there a purpose to the second paragraph?  It doesn't really add anything to the question.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

Put yourself in the shoes of a university administrator. The federal government has made a law requiring your university to do certain things if it wants to maintain its federal funding. Those things are to some extent subject to interpretation, but according to legal opinions of your university's lawyers (e.g., the general counsel or other high-ranking legal advisers) requiring your faculty to undergo Title IX training about race is a good way to comply with the requirements and minimize the risk to your institution. So, you institute these requirements as mandatory. Some months later you are informed that a tenured faculty member is refusing to take the training.
What do you do? Select the answer that applies:

A. Invite the faculty member over for a chat in your office, where
  over cigars and a glass of scotch you both joke about the silliness of
  the federal requirements. You congratulate him on his good sense in
  objecting to these requirements, ask him to keep quiet about not
  taking the training so as to not make trouble for your university, and
  jovially send him on his way with an invitation to meet soon for a round of golf.
B. Invite the faculty member over for a chat in your office, where you
  tell him that you are dissatisfied with his disregard for university
  policy, but that you understand that he is objecting to the training
  on principled, conscientious grounds, and confide that you even agree
  with him to some extent. Taking that into account, and taking into
  account the fact that he is tenured and that you value his research
  contributions, you tell him that you have decided not to take any
  disciplinary action. You caution him to keep quiet about not taking
  the training and not encourage others to follow in his footsteps so as
  to not make trouble for your university, and send him on his way.
C. Send the faculty member a sternly-worded memo, with a copy to his
  dean and department chair, where you inform him that following his
  refusal to follow the mandatory requirement to undergo Title IX
  training, you are initiating disciplinary proceedings against him.
  You caution him that disregard for university policies on Title IX
  will not be tolerated under any circumstances, and that such
  proceedings could lead to various sanctions up to and including his
  termination. You conclude the memo by saying that until the
  proceedings have been set in motion some weeks from now, he has one
  last chance to satisfy the training requirement.

Now, it may be that you are the kind of person who would select answer B, or even A. I'm not saying it is unreasonable or wrong to be such a person, but if that is the case, I maintain that that would be in strong correlation to the fact that you are not a high-ranking university administrator -- let alone a successful one -- and probably never will be (I say this as a completely neutral statement, which I consider to be neither an insult nor a compliment). In practice, answer C is the only answer that a REAL university administrator (and certainly a successful one, who has a good ability to weigh the consequences of each of the different options on his/her own career and institution) will realistically choose.
To summarize, the answer to your question is an emphatic Yes: refusing to take mandatory training not only can lead to suspension or termination, but that is in fact the most likely outcome of such an action, by an overwhelming margin.

Thanks, that's very clear, and well-written. To be sure, I would answer B, and I consider your assertion concerning my prospects of becoming a high-ranking university administrator to be a compliment.

I suspected as much...

I think this answer is essentially correct, except that the version of answer C. that would appear in practice might be as ambiguous as possible while fulfilling the legalistic requirements. E.g., they wouldn't promise to initiate proceedings, but more likely threaten, ... and in an evasive way, so that you would have no grounds for a counter-grievance. Administrative-legal types don't really care about what the rules are that they're enforcing, or even the literal enforcement, but that they appear to be enforcing, blah-blah-blah. And many, many federal dollars riding on that appearance.

@paulgarrett Administrative-legal types don't really care about what the rules are that they're enforcing: that is a rather cynical view that I find disrespectful to a large number of administrators who do not conform to your negative stereotypes. I'm sure this is true of some administrators (and I sympathize with you if it's true for the administrators you've had experience with), but you could have worded things a lot better.

@DanRomik, you're right that it is cynical, but it is less clear that it is disrespectful to "bureaucrats" any more than your observation that "C" would be the universal choice of "successful" such. Having been in some just-slightly administrative situations myself, I would think there's scarcely room to care about what rules have been handed down. Institutions seem to have a life of their own, so will discard those unwilling to be cats'-paws. It's not necessarily immoral to be in such a role, since some good can be done, but (to my perception) "the rules" are a given, not often negotiable.

... and, when the situation is more extreme, there is always the question of whether one will have been complicit, by passivity or other inaction, to bad things. It's not always so easy to see "bad things" on the horizon, to my perception, nor tell whether the "change" on the horizon is good or bad, or what mixture... and there is "horse-trading": giving up a good to gain a greater. Much hubris available in these considerations.

@paulgarrett much of what you say is true, and I guess I see where you're coming from. Nonetheless, I asserted what the administrator's actions would be, and you are making a (much stronger, and as I said a bit disrespectful in my opinion) claim about what they care about. The rules may be a given, and successful administrators will obviously be good at negotiating them, but many of them will still care about doing the right thing if that's an option, or doing the least bad thing if that's all that's possible to do within the rules.

... I do agree with "institutions seem to have a life of their own" - an important and very true observation.

I agree that "C" is in the right direction, but I'd guess it will escalate from more informal contacts, i.e., via the department chair or direct, before it comes to an direct admonition.

I'd argue that in each of your cases above a good administrator would also emphatically make the point that their refusal to take the training threatens everyone's federal funding, not just the professor's. It's incredibly arrogant to put others at risk and unless you can articulate some fundamental objection then you're clearly not being a responsible steward of the university.

The short answer is yes, employees can be fired for not attending Title IX training.  One example from Ohio State is here (the band director was fired).  I could not find any examples in which a tenured professor has been fired for this.  Failure to comply with Title IX is serious for any university receiving federal funding (which is essentially all universities in the US), so it would be an extremely serious situation.
Also, the premise of the question is misleading.  It is not true that all university students and employees are required to attend Title IX training.  From the US Department of Education's document on this

What type of training on Title IX and sexual violence should a school provide to its
  employees?
Answer: A school needs to ensure that responsible employees with the authority to address sexual violence know how to respond appropriately to reports of sexual violence, that other responsible employees know that they are obligated to report sexual violence to appropriate school officials, and that all other employees understand how to respond to reports of sexual violence. A school should ensure that professional counselors, pastoral counselors, and non-professional counselors or advocates also understand the extent to which they may keep a report confidential. A school should provide training to all employees likely to witness or receive reports of sexual violence, including teachers, professors, school law enforcement unit employees, school administrators, school counselors, general counsels, athletic coaches, health personnel, and resident advisors. Training for employees should include practical information about how to prevent and identify sexual violence, including same-sex sexual violence; the behaviors that may lead to and result in sexual violence; the attitudes of bystanders that may allow conduct to continue; the potential for revictimization by responders and its effect on students; appropriate methods for responding to a student who may have experienced sexual violence, including the use of nonjudgmental language; the impact of trauma on victims; and, as applicable, the person(s) to whom such misconduct must be reported.

So, the training is to teach employees likely to be confronted with sexual misconduct or receive reports of sexual misconduct how they should deal with that, including to whom at the university they should report the incident.
In particular, Section J deals with what training universities should provide.
Of course, you are free to do what you like, but I don't think you should advise people to refuse this training.  They are putting themselves at risk of being fired over sessions that are designed to give them information on how to deal with a potentially traumatic situation.  It seems a bit like refusing CPR training if the university decided to make that mandatory: I suppose the session is a bit of a pain, but is designed to help you deal with a situation in which responding appropriately could be critical.

Interesting. It is my university who said that this training is mandatory by law, and I was skeptical. Thanks for reminding that it is their interpretation of the law. The example you provide of the band chief is very interesting.

@Joël - A school should provide training to all employees likely to witness or receive reports of sexual violence, including teachers, professors, ... That seems to qualify it as mandatory by law.  Where do you see your school's "interpretation of the law" present?

@tonysdg I don't read it the same way as you do. I read "including teachers, professors" who are likely to witness or receive reports of sexual violence. Since I have not received such reports in 7 years at my university, I think I can be considered not likely to receive some in the near the future.

@tonysdg There are multiple ways to interpret that.  One might assert that the set of professors likely to witness or receive reports of sexual violence may not equal the set of all professors.  Of course, it might also mean that anyone likely to witness or receive reports of sexual violence plus all teachers, professors, etc.  Welcome to the wonderful world of trying to interpret government regulations...

@Joël and Rori: I suppose in my mind the fact that you are in an authority position on campus and may be approached by a student at any time is reason enough to require such individuals to attend this training.  Nevertheless - I concede that you are both right and that there are multiple ways to interpret the statement.

To my perception, the fundamental ambiguity is in "provide": does it mean "make it available, upon request"? Or does it mean "compel..."?

@Joel - so using the not likely excuse, you should be able to get out of anti-terrorism training since you probably won't encounter any.

There is a situation in which the training might be legally required -- if the school were under specific orders by the Office for Civil Rights as the result of an investigation.

I would categorize the OSU band leader case as being fired for actual sexual harassment and assault under his watch. He actually did take the Title IX training: "Waters mishandled a report of sexual harassment in the band in 2013. University officials then urged him to schedule Title IX training, but he didn’t take it until later that year — after a student in the marching band was expelled for sexually assaulting a female band member."

I want to begin by saying that I don't have any direct experience with the firing of tenured faculty, nor am I intimately familiar with Title IX issues.  In particular, the requirement mentioned by the OP regarding Title IX training for all faculty are not in place at my (public, US, research) university.
But I do have experience with the way universities and university administrators work.  For instance, I had a colleague who in his first year did not want to sign a standard intellectual property agreement (which I have no memory of signing upon my arrival two years before, but I assume that I must have done it).  It seems like a somewhat analogous question to ask: would the university fire this (untenured) person?  The answer that I would give to that is "Eventually perhaps, but there would be a lot of intermediate steps, and the professor would have to be durably intransigent in a way that tired out the higher administration and their lawyers."  In the particular case at hand, this issue went on for several months, and my colleague was satisfied by being permitted to sign an earlier version of the intellectual property agreement that he found more favorable.
As another example, every once in a while I am required to take an online test to make sure I am sufficiently cognizant of certain current laws: not related to Title IX but rather to FERPA.  How does this work?  In many stages: there is some announced deadline, and as it approaches I get reminders from someone in my department. If I miss the deadline I will get more personalized, urgent reminders.  If I were durably unresponsive then (I am told) I will get locked out of access to certain student records: e.g. I would not be able to look up any student grades online.  The idea here is that if my lack of training is viewed as a liability, the university will take steps to remove me from the specific situation that is causing the liability rather than suspending me generally.  Of course, being removed from that situation may cause annoyance or hardship for me, and it may even interfere with my job.
Coming back to the question asked: in my own opinion it is very unlikely that a tenured faculty member would be suspended or fired for not complying with a Title IX training course...at least not as a first or even fourth step.  Rather the university would on the one hand take steps to assess the liability involved in that specific faculty member not having the training, and if that liability feels considerable to them then they will try to reduce that liability while keeping the faculty member and/or squeeze the faculty member in such a way as to make carrying out the training preferable.  By the way, there are many ways that an administration which is unhappy with a tenured faculty member can make that faculty member's life less pleasant which completely circumvent the expectations surrounding tenure: e.g. they could mess with the teaching obligations of that faculty member, regulate or limit their access to certain groups of students, give them less of an annual raise or no raise at all, and so forth.  If the administration really thinks it is dead right and you are dead wrong, I think that they can, while keeping you around, make life more miserable for you than you can for them.  In the case of the OP, he says that he will just leave.  Exactly: that's a much more likely outcome.
I think that in order to consider suspension or firing in the short term, the administration would have to find some specific, actual legal liability rather than just a potential one.  If a university fires a tenured faculty member for their own interpretation of a federal law, the probability of a huge fuss including censure from faculty associations and unions and/or a big lawsuit seems rather high.  I would expect them only to risk that in the face of some other similarly proximate scandal or lawsuit.  Another answer contains a link to a university band leader (untenured) who was fired for refusing Title IX training until after he mishandled a sexual harrassment / assault case between students under his direction.  In that case they pretty much expect legal action either way, and they're weighing one lawsuit against another.  If the OP has not had any actual dustups or issues with students, I would be absolutely flabbergasted (note: this could happen, obviously!) if he were fired rather than squeezed or forced out in a more subtle way.

+1 This excellent answer demonstrates a deep understanding of the way that university administrations actually behave.

This is a good answer that captures some of the dynamics of the situation, but I think you're missing something about the consequences for the university of the faculty member's refusal to cooperate. It's not just that he is potentially causing a liability, but that if they let him get away with such behavior there is a real danger that other faculty will follow his example. A sensible administrator will see a need to send a very clear and strong message that such blatant disregard for policy cannot be tolerated. Sure, firing will not happen immediately, but eventually - a very safe bet IMO.

@Dan: We don't know of any tenured professor who has ever been fired for anything like this.  Tenured professors being crochety and/or stubborn about university regulations is much more commonplace.  On the other hand, why would someone, after months or years of dealings with the administration, insist on being fired rather than attending a single meeting?  It all seems a bit hypothetical.  (Also: the vast majority of faculty are only boundedly stubborn: I know I am.  The intermediate annoyances levied would probably dissuade most faculty fellow travelers.)

Yes, actually I was also thinking of commenting that this is all too hypothetical, for the simple reason that anyone crazy enough to risk their job for the principle of not spending an hour watching some video will never make it as far as becoming a tenured U.S. university professor. In that sense the entire question doesn't make sense. However, if we assume the unlikely premise that such a person exists (say, he was normal then became crazy due to brain damage from an accident), I still maintain that he would eventually be fired. But as you say, this claim will never actually be tested.

More importantly, we're talking about a hypothetical tenured faculty member who is seen to be publicly refusing to cooperate with a campus diversity initiative, an initiative instituted as a result of protests at a campus with a longstanding tradition of concern for social justice. That goes well beyond crotchety professor territory and would likely become a matter of significant on-campus protest, if not the subject of media attention. It's hard to predict the outcome of such a firestorm, but it would be incredibly ugly.

@DanRomik and Pete: I agree it seems hypothetical, but the OP does state that he intends to find another "freer" university rather than attend this training session.  Possibly this is a response that will moderate with time, but (outside of academia) I've certainly seen professionals get overly worked up over minor issues.  To their detriment.  Also, +1, very nice answer.

@DanRomik but more generally too: It seems to me OP sees the situation as being forced to participate in an ideological indoctrination. (I do not wish to opine if this is justified,  but this is what I believe is OP's impression of the situation.) To resist against such is, or at least should not be, that unusual for an intellectual.

@quid it is unusual for an intellectual to put so much at stake for something so trivial. Let's just say there are bigger battles worth fighting and sacrificing for. Or, as one of my own university administrators told me recently, "you don't have to get killed on every hill."

@DanRomik  but depending on how one looks at this it is all but trivial.  One can  see this matter as deeply unsettling on at least two levels.

@DanRomik Suppose you were told to attend mandatory training on something you disagreed with... as a silly example, say it was "How to prepare your personal data for easy categorization by the NSA". The implication is that your university will be sending all your personal data to the NSA, and everyone will be expected to help classify it. Would you say "It's just a training class, therefore it's minor", or would you want to protest? (It would also be quite blatant indoctrination into "surveillance culture")

@immibis a. This has happened many times (most recently three weeks ago I had to watch a rather silly training about online data security). b. When this happens, I accept that my employer has a right to ask me to do certain things I don't always want to do, and remind myself how lucky I am to have a job that I love and 99% of whose duties I enjoy. But maybe that's just me.

@immibis by the way, there is one cause over which I would resign, which is if they made it legal to carry guns on my campus. (Fortunately that's not likely to happen.) So I do understand that there are good causes and appropriate times to take a principled stand about something. However, I don't think mandatory training videos are such a cause.

@DanRomik I have to say I find your position very difficult to follow. It ought to be relevant what is the content of the training videos. I mean you cannot consider every form of training video a non-issue. (Now those in the specific case  might be no problem, but you made a general statement.)

This is a great answer, although I'd argue that not proving knowledge of title 9 would make a professor a liability in pretty much any professorial activity, so a bit different than the example provided, I think.

@quid As a general statement, I don't view a requirement to undergo one-hour mandatory training of a sort that I have ever been required to do, or will ever realistically be required to do, as a reason to make a principled moral stand that will risk my career. Obviously there are other trainings that are worth making such a stand for (say, being required to watch a video of children being tortured), but they are not covered by the above general statement, and are too unrealistic for me to consider them worth discussing here.

@DanRomik It feel this is an important distinction. Thank you for the clarification. And personally I tend to agree. It could be important though to keep in mind that different persons have different sensibilities. For example, while for me it is a very unusual idea that it is legal for the general public to carry guns on a campus or in fact at all, I would not see it as a big deal would it be different either. I do have a preference this is restricted, but really it seems  rather like a detail to me.

@DanRomik: well, the questioner says the training contains racist statements of relative racial merit, and he wants to protest this by boycotting that form of the training. If the training contains 19th-century racial theory on intelligence that seems reasonable to protest. If it makes statements like "our campus risk assessments account for certain races experiencing higher rates of abuse than others", then no doubt there are a few racists who would object to that as being racist by distinguishing races: there are wingnuts who criticise any anti-racist measure on that basis.

I intentionally choose extreme examples to illustrate the range of what we don't know! My point is, the questioner is going to have to decide for himself whether the content of the course is objectionable enough to make a stand. And other people are going to judge him by the fact he took a stand. I quite like the fact that the question itself intentionally doesn't reveal whether the questioner is a gross racist, or is facing gross racists, or somewhere in between.

In California, state law (specifically AB 1825, bill text here) requires that

...an employer having 50 or more
  employees shall provide at least two hours of classroom or other
  effective interactive training and education regarding sexual
  harassment to all supervisory employees who are employed as of July
  1, 2005, and to all new supervisory employees within six months of
  their assumption of a supervisory position. ... Each employer
  covered by this section shall provide sexual harassment training and
  education to each supervisory employee once every two years.  The
  training and education required by this section shall include
  information and practical guidance regarding the federal and state
  statutory provisions concerning the prohibition against and the
  prevention and correction of sexual harassment and the remedies
  available to victims of sexual harassment in employment.  The
  training and education shall also include practical examples aimed at
  instructing supervisors in the prevention of harassment,
  discrimination, and retaliation ...

Since a professor is certainly a supervisory employee (for example, when advising graduate students), this legal mandate applies to professors. I have not tested this, but I would imagine that if I took deliberate actions that put my employer in conflict with state law, this would jeopardize my employment; similarly, I would not expect to remain employed if I defrauded the NSF or NIH on my employer's behalf.
As a side note: one might not be aware (as I was not, before this training) that if a student mentions a sexual assault to you, you might be legally obligated to report this to the authorities, even if the student asked you not to tell anyone. If not, one might well commit to the student "sure, I won't mention this to anyone"; especially if you are someone who values your word, you might find it quite difficult to betray this commitment once it is made.
But your ignorance of the law then opens up your employer to liability, no different from a manager who violates labor laws governing overtime pay because of ignorance of the law. In cases like these, an employer is quite wise to make sure its employees are aware of their legal obligations. You may not like your legal responsibilities, but the proper response in that case is to advocate for changes to the law.

This is a very good point. If one were, say, a graduate program director, this would be essential information to obtain.

Per the side note, the answer is definitely you must report it. The only legal solution is that when a student says "Can I tell you something in confidence?" you must reply "As long as it does not involve something I am required to report by law I will keep your confidence." and then see if the student is willing to speak up knowing that. They will ask "Are you required to report harassment/abuse/fraud/etc?" and again you must be honest if you cannot legally keep their confidence. Having said that you also want to encourage them to speak with someone who can listen & help if you cannot.

When people speak about Title IX they are referring to a United States federal law, 20 U.S.C. § 1681(a), which states:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded
  from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to
  discrimination under any education program or activity receiving
  Federal financial assistance.

The law itself, as you can see, is short and sweet.  However, legal decisions and guidance from the U.S. Department of Education have given it a broad scope covering sexual harassment and sexual violence.
It is the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) which enforces Title IX, and it has published a helpful document which outlines what needs to be done to be in compliance with Title IX (see guidance letter), and tells schools how the Department will review and enforce Title IX complaints.
If you are still in doubt about what is objectively required vs. what your own institution has put in place, you can ask OCR for clarification.  The document I referenced guides you in finding the appropriate contact information for your geographical region.

As an additional note for your particular situation:
OCR "is committed to ensuring that all students feel safe and have the opportunity to benefit fully from their schools’ education programs and activities."  The guidance letter explains that when a complaint is filed, OCR is on the look-out for conduct that creates "a hostile environment [and] interferes with or limits a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from [a] school’s program."
I invite you to put yourself in the shoes of a woman in a department where you are teaching.  How would you feel, reading this thread, and contemplating taking a course from the OP?  Frequently, women already feel uncomfortable in male-dominated fields.  Do you think your published remarks will tend to increase or decrease their comfort level in a department where you are employed?
Here's an analogy.  Suppose you are a student from the Philippines.  Now suppose that you are enrolled in a department that has set up a required training session for staff, to remedy some civil rights issues involving people from the Philippines.  If one of the professors publishes things online describing his negative views about a requirement to attend the training session, will that increase or decrease your feeling of being welcome in that department?

@Joël, If there is ammunition to be found for your position, the guidance letter is where you will find it.  Here's some more reading you might find helpful: http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20140320/articles/140329972 (interesting article about a conservative professor vindicated in the courts).

I can't say whether you create a hostile environment for women.  My question was whether you think you do.  Do you think your published remarks will tend to increase or decrease women's comfort level in a department where you are employed?

@Joël without taking a position on any of your views, I think aparente001 makes at least one very good point, which is that some women (and men) are very likely to feel uncomfortable after reading about your views, even if a completely rational, perfectly informed person should in theory not be offended. Certainly the comments here suggest that you are having a hard time conveying some of the nuances in your thinking to people here. So, although I previously praised you for posting non-anonymously, I have to admit that on this occasion an anonymous post might have been more appropriate.

... As for your counter argument that anonymous posting is equally bad or worse, that's a pretty weak one (though I do not suspect you of making it in bad faith). Certainly there is no symmetry here. As aparente001 points out, there are specific women whose access to a specific educational opportunity in a specific place could be be impeded (albeit very slightly) by your posting.

@Joël - I gave you the link to the conservative professor's jury award news because it's an unusual application of civil rights law that I thought you would find interesting.  (Please don't think I consider your situation to be exactly like his, nor that I think you fit neatly into a particular political category.)  //  Women may feel intimidated by your aggressive stance regarding Title IX, but ironically you felt intimidated by my Answer.  Perhaps the Wilmington prof's experience that I linked to will bring you additional clarity about your feelings of intimidation.

@Joël don't worry, I have no intention of hurting your freedom of speech. But like you, I have a right to express my opinions, so that's what I did. Anyway, best of luck (seriously) trying to improve your university in whatever way you think is appropriate.

From my very limited understanding of labor law, refusing to do something that your employer deems is mandatory is generally grounds for termination. This is in essence the difference between mandatory and optional/recommended. There is of course a grey area related to an employer mandating employees to do things beyond their power. An employer is probably not legally allowed to mandate an employee give them $1000. If that demand was made and you were fired for not complying, you would might be able to sue for damages. Mandating employees undergo training related to sexual and racial awareness seems well within an employers right.

I think an answer in terms of general labor law that does not address the issue of tenure is of limited usefulness here.

Although violating the AAUP guidelines on tenure could get your university censured by the AAUP, in most cases state laws don't enshrine tenure (this was a big issue recently in Wisconsin)- rather, it's simply a matter of contract law with the faculty handbook of the particular university being the contract that protects tenure.  I wouldn't count on tenure protecting you from dismissal in a conflict like this.    For that matter, I wouldn't count on the AAUP to defend a faculty member who refused to attend required Title IX training- it's not really a matter of academic freedom.

@PeteL.Clark tenure will only protect a faculty member who is doing their job (in the broad sense that also includes complying with their employer's various policies and directives, assuming those are legal) so I think it's largely irrelevant to the question. If it's legal to fire an untenured faculty member for not taking the training, it's just as legal to fire someone who has tenure. Do you disagree? (It is true however that there might be differences in the politics of the situation that would lead to a less severe outcome for a tenured faculty than a non-tenured.)

@Dan: Yes, I do somewhat disagree with the framing of the problem, but I have decided that it is more constructive to leave my own answer.

As I am not tenured I can only speak from my non-academia prior employment experience as management (I came late-in-life to academia). I had people in my department who were temps and others who were regulars under contract, so not too dislike academia. When a temp broke a workrule it was a case of simply saying "Please go home, your services are no longer required," and then taking it up with their agency. When a regular broke a workrule we had to begin the long detailed progressive discipline process of documenting everything and building a case for termination.

(...continued) The exception was if the employee (either temp or reg) posed an immediate legal or physical danger to the company -- confirmed theft or vandalism, threats (or use of) physical violence, etc. In these cases we would either escort the employee off the premises or call the police to come on site and make an arrest.

If you just officially boycott the training, there is a good chance that they will fire you after lengthy proceedings. There is also a chance that this boycott will achieve absolutely nothing.
Luckily, in dealing with administrators there are many other ways:

Keep a low profile. There is a good chance that they will overlook you. That is what I did, and they never caught up with me till I (very happily) left academia. If they call you up, just offer to call back and forget about it.
While some administrators really do care, many more that I've met are just drones that would happily enforce any regulation. They might just as well enforce segregation instead of Title IX training without any difference. So it makes absolutely no sense to argue the subject with them. Probably they have no clue what is even going on. To deal with administrators, you have to argue the process itself. Big chance that they violated some of their own procedures, missed deadlines, the wrong person signed the documents, documents are not on the right letterhead (e.g. faculty often uses their personal letterhead for university administrative. How are you supposed to know that a letter by Prof. X from the department of sociology is an official document stating a university policy?)
I assume that the reason you don't want to attend the Title IX training is not because you are against discrimination, but because this 'training' is itself blatantly racist and sexist. Point out how you are feeling 'threatened' by the training, how it is 'creating a hostile work atmosphere', how you feel singled out because of your skin color and so on. Good chance they won't touch you. This is such a hot potato that I see it as the most efficient way to get a more reasonable training class established. If you get the training changed to something neutral and non-racist, you have achieved your goal. This is the right approach IMHO.
Make up some pc reason why the training is highly offensive to someone in your situation.
Often administrators responsible for this very special area are highly biased prejudiced partisans that try to push their own agenda. It is quite possible that the university itself just wants to fulfil the Title IX requirements on paper to avoid possible lawsuits (after all, why do they care). So to check of a box they hire some nutcase who tries to push his own agenda, as are most people offering services in this field. Point out to the university that they've hired a loose cannon that actually puts them more at risk for a Title IX lawsuit, because they force everyone to sit through a racially biased class.

Good luck!

"because this 'training' is itself blatantly racist and sexist" ... "Make up some pc reason" ... "hire some nutcase who tries to push his own agenda" Perhaps you could rephrase your statement to be a little bit less obnoxious and condescending?

Criticizing the content of a training that you refuse to attend is unlikely to win you a lot of friends either.


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Is it bad to publish a scientific paper with wrong results?
I was working during the last year on developing an approach that determines human age class (young or old), but after I got exciting results I've discovered that I made a mistake when implementing some lines of code. I think that the mistake is a bit critical because I was comparing my approach and literature's ones. The mistake I made was during the classification task, where the data was entered in the right way but the experience was badly managed.
What should I do? Do I have to stay quiet or do I have to fix it? Note that the paper is not yet published nor peer reviewed.

From your question, it's not clear whether your erroneous results have already been peer reviewed and published. Please edit your question to add this information.

The paper is not yet published neither peer reviewed. I will add this information to the question. Thank you @Pont

So, what keeps you from correcting the error before submitting?

If it's wrong and you know it, it is unethical to try to pass it off as fine.  "Negative results", which is in your tags, is a different thing.  Something like "Theory X predicts that Y happens at rate Z, but our data rules out Z as the correct rate" would be a negative result: you had a theory and a hypothesis to start with and end up refuting it.

@damian my exact case is that i am a master student, and as i said i was working during a whole year on developping the mensionned approach. The problem is that after i submitted my master thesis (i didn't present it yet this is programmed to be in the 30 comming days) i discovered that mistake which was accidently confirmed it (he didn't reviewed the code lines). So basing those results we deicided to publish an article. What should I do?

@zibadawa that's not a negative result (which in itself is an helpful term and should be avoided). Proving  a theory wrong is a very useful positive finding.

Incidentally, Retraction Watch had a post about "Retraction relutance" yesterday: http://retractionwatch.com/2015/12/05/weekend-reads-retraction-reluctance-worthless-papers-and-stats-too-many-phds/

@damian: said 'retraction reluctance' linked above. It's a kind of laziness towards retraction, but not really a fraud.

"Is it bad to lie?" Um, yes. Yes, it is.

@LightnessRacesinOrbit in German, the term for scientist is Wissenschaftler, meaning knowledge maker. I guess the point in a scientific context is: Do not make knowledge worse when publishing. Make it better, or else you're not a Wissenschaftler.

Publishing things that you know are erroneous is a good way to get a really bad scientific reputation. Depending on how severe it is, it might go so far as to be labelled fraud and formally sanctioned, basically killing your career.
If it's important, then yes, you need to fix it.
If it's not published yet, then fix it before you publish it.  If it's published, then you will need to submit a correction or possibly even a retraction.  Good scientists do this, and it's much better to acknowledge your errors and retract than to have others expose you as a liar.

I appreciate your answer i will certainly fix the mistake. What should I do about my master thesis that was submited before i discover the issue?

Find out if your university will allow you to submit a correction. Many will allow this. If not, at least make sure you note the existence of the error in the follow on peer-reviewed publication, which will be understood to supersede it in any case.

I think it is better to do so.
Because when you have results which are inaccurate or which are wrong, people who have access to that paper will surely have to redo the results and even the whole paper (study) if necessary.
By doing this, some of the missed concepts of the study may be filled up during the second study.
I had a task to come up with a term paper within a semester. Little did I know that the results were inaccurate. My lecturer instructed me to redo the paper and to my surprise I found new information which I didn't find during the first study.

I disagree. It's nothing more than an act of academic misdemeanor. The OP clearly knows there has been an error and its his responsibility to correct it.
I couldn't understand how you can actually improve our current understanding of a subject by pumping in false information on intention.

Homework assignments aren't really comparable with peer-reviewed publications so I don't see the relevance of your answer.

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Why does the Statistics community publish in journals while the Machine Learning community presents at conferences?
I got my Bachelor's degree in Statistics and I'm starting graduate school to study Computer Science (CS) with an emphasis on Data Mining. One of the big differences that I've noticed between the Statistics and the ML communities is that Statistics tends to publish in journals, while CS tend to publish at conferences.
I've heard people say that conference presentations are preferred to publishing in journals because "things move so fast" in Machine Learning research. However, if you actually look reputable statistics journals are published very frequently.
The American Statistical Association publishes Statistical Analysis and Data Mining every other month and the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics is published quarterly. It looks like they both also have pretty quick turnaround times. The International Statistical Institute even has a journal that was started specifically as a "rapid communication research journal" that published papers monthly.
So, if presenting at conferences isn't actually faster than publishing in a credible statistics journal, how did this division between the two communities start?

ML communities do have a lot of journals, and on the other side, even the stats communities have a lot of conferences

@Dawny33 I know that there are statistics conferences, like the JSM, and I know that there are ML journals, like the Journal of Machine Learning Research. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the preferred method of doing things in the ML community is to present at conferences. It seems like there is more weight attached to a conference presentation as opposed to a publication. Am I wrong?

Yeah, I agree.  The fact that conferences(ML) > conferences(stats) make you think that that the interest in journals is less in the ML community.  The huge number of conferences is due to the wide application of ML in the industries and companies. So, they are mostly abt the applications, etc.

@Dawny33 Agree... inclination is that the answer resides more in who is using and developing in each arena. Stats being primarily academic and ML being primarily industry. Also, the peer review that accompanies a journal may be unnecessary (already proven in the market place) or unwanted (IP).

Off topic. This should goto academia.overflow.

@StudentT Maybe that is a nice reason for closure.  I voted it close as opinion based though

Note that the publication frequencies of journals hardly matter nowadays, as papers are usually published online as soon as possible. The major factors for publication speed are the length of the review process (which mainly depends on the culture of the field) and the speed of copy editing and typesetting.

This came up just the other day in a class - journal vs conference publications.
Background; pros and cons:
I came to CS from neuroscience, a field (like most?) in which journals were the primary currency and some of the larger conferences accepted posters / talks but with only a minor vetting process. Conferences were often used to present preliminary work and get feedback on methodology, journal articles were for the meat of the work. I had many conference posters (and one or two journal papers) on my CV when i applied to CS programs and was surprised at how professors were impressed by that - it seemed pretty common for people in neuro to have a good number of conference posters/talks.
Conference papers have low latency of acceptance/presentation. Typically deadlines are 4-7 months out from the conference, which tends to be quite a bit faster than journal article acceptances / publications. In my relatively short career, i've worked on papers (in neuroscience) that took 2+ years to publish, from intial submission to revision rounds to acceptance and publication. Conferences also tend to give your work more visibility - I recently presented my recent research at an SC15 workshop and had more feedback and potential collaborations come out of it than i ever did from my 1st-author journal article or from poster sessions in neuro conferences.
Journal articles allow for considerably greater depth and treatment of the topic at hand and are much more useful for reproducibility and understanding. Conference papers tend to have hard page limits and if the work is substantial enough, you can be forced to gloss over detail and have the potential to not ever publish follow up papers to explain the missing details.
A good issue around this, and this is what we discussed in class, was Google's Spanner paper, presented at OSDI. The paper is groundbreaking and incredibly impressive work, but due to the limitations of the format (short paper, again), much of the detail and nuance needed to understand the work is left out. The paper even mentions that a follow up paper would be forthcoming - three years later and it hasn't materialized. For such a huge piece of work that encompassed years of principle engineer time at an org like Google, it was probably better suited to a 30~ page journal article, but it may not have had the same impact as it did being presented at OSDI - one of the premier systems conferences.
your question
To answer the question at hand, (why is it like this), many people have written about it (at conferences and journals!). One longer discussion can be found here.
Perhaps it is as simple as "this is how it has been for a long time and change is hard" - not particularly satisfying, but might explain a great deal of the variance here.

authors: Владимир Браженко

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Interested in pursuing a PhD but I graduate in December. Do I have to wait an extra year to apply?
I'm interested in pursuing a PhD program but will not complete my undergraduate degree until December. Most PhD programs require their application to be completed in December. Does that mean I have to wait an extra year to apply (since it could take a few weeks past their deadline to receive my final transcripts)?

Certainly not. Most students graduate in the spring, but apply to graduate school several months before graduation. It is not expected that you will have your final transcript in hand when you apply. However, it is expected that you will have the transcript prior to the actual start of your graduate school studies.

Most PhD admission have a 'provisional acceptance' scheme that would enable you to apply for the degree even if you're in the final semester of the qualifying degree.

Does that mean I have to wait an extra year to apply?

No. Most institutions (at least in Asia) allow PhD applications for every semester. So a year-long wait won't be necessary.


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Applying for an MPhil or PhD in Computer Science at Cambridge University
I am an MSc Computer Science student in UK. I love to study and I would like to apply for a competitive place. I'm interested in Cambridge PhDs, but I have no previous experience in research (except for the BSc Thesis, which I wrote after a 5-months internship in University).
I've found that Cambridge has an advanced degree, called MPhil, which could work as a starting point for a PhD.
Does anyone here know something about MPhils, and their differences with Masters and PhD?
Would it be a reasonable idea to seek for a PhD at Cambridge, spending one year more with a MPhil?
I hope someone can give me some information,
Thanks to all,
C.

How are your grades? Unless they are excellent, you most probably don't stand a chance in Cambridge.

My grades are high. I've obtained the BSc in Italy with 110/110 cum laude (highest grade possible), obtaining the title in advance, two years instead of three... My marks here at the Master are high too but I don't have a transcript yet because the I term has not finished yet...

The MPhil in Advanced Computer Science is designed as a preparation course for the PhD, so yes, it is absolutely normal to apply for the MPhil with the intention to apply for a PhD while there. Being there also gives you the opportunity to get to know your potential PhD supervisor better. And you can get support from the Computer Lab and your college during the application process.
The degree itself is comparable to a single year of a two year master's programme. I recommend not to just apply "to Cambridge" but to spot the group or even the advisor you would like to work with. The Computer Lab is great for some fields, but not ideal for others, because as any department they cannot have a research group on every subject.

Thanks for your answer, I just wanted to understand what the purpose of an MPhil is (somewhere on the Internet people say is for failed PhD applicants). I found myself in a situation in which I love studying and I would like to do research in the future, but I haven't had the opportunity to do it yet, so, my application (and my background) won't be good enough for a PhD there. Also, my interests are too broad and I need to understand what I like most.
I will start working on the application now.
P.S. Any further suggestion is truly appreciated!

It's fine not to know exactly in advance what you want to do! Just try to submit a consistent module selection.  You'll have opportunities to discover research there.


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Should a personal statement for grad school discuss large challenges in personal life?
"Large" includes "health issues", among other things.
I know someone facing this situation. She has successfully used her story in applications to important programs during undergraduate, and it did explain some time she had away from school (I believe this includes broken time during her undergraduate study in total, I also think it was earlier on.)
There are reasons grad school may be different: "Can she finish?" is arguably top concern and this concern is agnostic to reasons and may be as simple as "troubled past, troubled future." And also simply the fact that people discriminate - conscious biases and unconscious biases are both common. There's a reason employment law (and I believe similar laws hold for grad school admission in the U.S.?) protects against asking about stuff like this.
Plus my general feeling is that a personal statement can really only hurt you. It helps them know the person they are evaluating but obviously the rigor of course study and research experience is what counts.
In short, would the professionals here corroborate my instinct? Or does personal story like this sometimes add positive weight to an application? And, often enough that it may in fact be worth it?
I'll specify this is a science field for U.S. schools, I'm guessing that might help understand the circumstances but probably I don't need to be more specific than that.

There was an extremely similar question a couple of months ago, with quite different answers.  I'm very, very bad at digging up similar questions -- maybe someone else will remember better.

@aparente001 there's this where the answers are in the range of "possibly" to "cautious yes."

I think I found the question I was thinking of -- see what you think: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/58134/include-disability-in-statement-of-purpose

@aparente001 well there's only one answer, that was only voted on by you, and sounds creepy and Orwellian, and the you spent a long time arguing about it in the comments. And then it was closed as duplicate of the one I just linked...  so no not that useful..

Fair enough.  Plus, in that question, there was clearly a disability, whereas in this case disability was not mentioned or tagged.  If the other question is irrelevant, feel free to ignore it.  (The argument in the comments was not worth preserving, but the basic concept about discrimination was important, I thought.)  I guess in general I think that any mention of adversity overcome should be secondary to the background strengths and the research intentions, which should be at least the primary focus (if not the sole focus) of the essay.  Just my two cents.

@aparente001 I've been going back and forth on divulging more details of her situation. The language in the answers below suggest to me that the answerers are still underestimating the severity, but they gave me enough confidence to not discourage her from including it.

As long as you protect your friend's anonymity, it should be okay to be more specific.  //  Basically, my opinion is that the essay should focus on what is truly relevant to the application.  In other words, let's not sweep something relevant under the rug; but if something like, say, a suicide attempt, is irrelevant to the application, then let's leave it out.  A statement of purpose is not the same as a basement or attic where we can throw in everything that we think we might need someday.  Maintain the focus of the essay, I think.

My own experience includes the opposite of what you describe. I have evaluated statements of purpose (SoP) with specific stories of overcoming adversity where the story helped me conclude that this was a courageous person worth taking a shot at. This was, of course, accompanied by strong grades (though not necessarily stellar) and supportive letters.
I strongly disagree with your notion that an SoP can only hurt you.

My perspective as a member of my department's graduate committee (who also reads through all of the applications) is similar to @ProfJoseMartinez's: specific stories of overcoming adversity are useful.
I'm not saying this in the sense of the American world of motion pictures where we like an uplifting story for itself. Rather, it tells me something about the applicant: they were down, and they got up. That's something that happens to almost all grad students once or twice throughout the several years they're in a program, and it is important that students have the resilience to make it through these phases during their grad student career.
In other words, a demonstrated ability to get back up when you're down is a positive statement I take into account when reading applications.

(After 30+ years on admissions committees in mathematics...) Echoing the other two answers: a record of coping with difficulties more-or-less successfully is a plus. Yes, one worries whether past difficulties will recur... but the real point is that many or most grad students will encounter "difficulties" in grad school in any case, if only grad school itself, so a prior record of successful coping with the vagaries of life is positive.
That is, to contemplate the opposite, a smart kid who's never had any difficulties with anything and always been "smartest in their class" may be very unpleasantly surprised by the challenges of a top-tier grad program, where everyone else has the same natural gifts, etc. ... and be completely flummoxed by this situation.
It's not that "suffering/coping is good", but since troubles seem inevitable, it is absolutely a plus to be able to show successful coping with unfortunate difficulties.
(And, indeed, as in other answers, it's not an issue of "like in the movies", but something very practical.)


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References in statement of purpose
I'm applying to math PhD programs in the US.  In my statements of purpose, should I include references to the literature?  I haven't done so yet, but I keep thinking I probably should.

Do you have a need to cite a paper in your SoP?  If so, go for it.  I've never heard of such a thing though - a statement of purpose is about YOU, not someone else's work.

Possible duplicate: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/31567/14716

@YuxinZhou: Could very well be - I'm just not sure if fourierwho wants to know if (1) they should include citations for references that they've used in their SoP, or (2) they should include references in the first place.

Most mores in academia are idiosyncratic. I wouldn't put references in my personal statement - it's seen as over-doing it (in my department - Psychology, at least). If you want to include literature in your statement, you should try to discuss the literature more generally and only cite specific authors if those research studies actually contribute significantly to your statement.
If you were to include a specific citation, I wouldn't advise that you include a reference list. Keep in mind that committees read through hundreds of applications every year and likely won't look favorably on you adding more paper content to their already large stack of applications.
Many schools also have page limits for their applications, and they may see your reference page as additional material and disqualify your application.

Everyone has different experiences - most mathematicians only see a handful of departments in their life - but I don't believe references to the research literature are very common in mathematics "statement of purpose" documents.
A mathematics statement of purpose is not the same kind of document as a grant proposal. Typically, students applying to math PhD programs are not expected to be familiar with the research literature. A general statement of the areas you are interested in (e.g. "algebraic geometry" or "graph-theoretic compbinatorics") would be fine.
If you happen to have a significantly above-average background with the literature, so that you can cite it in a meaningful way, then I don't think there would be any harm in doing so.
But you should not try to "stretch" to include references that you do not fully understand, because it is usually clear when someone is stretching in this way, and a reviewer might view it as a factor against accepting you to the program. It's better to be realistic about your background.
You should promote yourself and put yourself in the best light that you can, as long as what you give is an honest picture of your background and experience.

Thanks!  I could definitely see the stretching being seen in a bad light.  I'm excited about certain fields, but I don't want to be viewed as a "crank."


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How should a PhD student deal with an unprofessional and unhelpful advisor, who misses most scheduled meetings?
My advisor is extremely unhelpful and unprofessional.  I don't want to get into the details, but suffice it to say he has 0 interest in what he told me to do, and only rarely shows up for scheduled meetings,  maybe 1/4 meetings and even then many hours late.  (I came from a job in "the industry" where such behavior is completely unheard of.)
How should I deal with this?  If I was still in the industry, I would just go over my advisor's head, and explain what is happening, is this a valid strategy in academia?  (I am asking the question in the present tense, but I have already left the program).
Related question:  Is such unprofessional behavior common in the academy?  I never experienced anything close to this in my undergraduate education.
Edit:
Following the advice in a comment: I did ask for advice from the graduate committee chair and relayed some issues I had with missed meetings. His advice was more or less "work harder".  Well, I think the fact that I complained must have got back to my advisor because he was furious with me the next time we met.  Out of the blue he scolded and said something like "I meet with you every time you ask me to."  Of course this was completely false but I saw no point in arguing with it as we had plenty of other things to discuss.

Were you doing a PhD? Was it in USA or another country?

It does happen; I don't think it's "common".  The usual solution is to switch advisors.

Echo to @NateEldredge. I think this kind of things happen "in the industry", too. The usual solution is to find another job or boss.

@alexadros It was in the US.

@Alexandros it was a Ph.D.

re. your "mods" comment specific details to a general question is ideal. I think this question is OK and more details on the problems you've had with your advisor and how you've tried solving them may improve the quality of your answers (avoid being rant-ish though).

@djechlin I added an example of how I tried to deal with the situation.  I won't add any more details of the difficulty I had with my advisor, I don't think that any good will come of it.

Time to find a new advisor.

This sounded terrible until he said "I meet with you every time you ask me to." and you "saw no point in arguing". Surely this is the issue you need to address?

@TheMathemagician Yeah, I see your point.  It was a total shock to me that he would say that and we were only a small fraction into our agenda for the meeting and had little time left so I let I, perhaps to my detriment, didn't address it. The meeting in which he said this was probably postponed three days in a row.  So it was absurd for him to say that.  That said, I don't claim that I handled everything properly.  I am trying to learn something from this.

@Alexandros I more or less brought the issues up in passing with the graduate chair.  It was more like, "how are things going?", "I am having an issue with ...". The graduate chair was and is someone I respect greatly, so I expected that he would handle things with the appropriate delicacy.  I also have no way of knowing if things got back to my advisor from my short conversation with the graduate chair.  Thanks for the powerpoint, I will look at today.

As a kid, I was at a private music school, and had a teacher similar to that. She would not come to teach, or come late, or being chatting with others and become utterly furious if I remarked on it. I was not depending on the teacher, really, and my parents paid, but there was a dearth of music teachers at the time, so either I would have to quit studying music on the side, or continue with her. The institution refused to allocate a different teacher (and there was no competing institution to pressure with). Only after 7 years, I managed to switch teachers - fortunately to the other extreme.

If you want me to take you at face value, it's not even worth completing the Ph.D. under your current advisor. You won't get a good problem, you won't get good guidance, you'll get stuck and won't get help, and you won't get a good rec letter for your next position.
That being said, a round of basic people skills may be helpful here. Have you tried asking your advisor such basic questions as how do they think your research is going? how can it be improved? You can even ask why they're frequently late. You can ask when would be better to meet, for instance.
That failing, the standard solution is to switch advisors, even though this is costly.
No, you can't really "go above" a tenured professor in any meaningful way, and even if you could, it wouldn't help you get sincerely better advising or a strong rec letter. Please research who else you can talk to though - another professor you trust who can advise you with some safety, resources through the grad school, etc.

Some schools have an "ombudsperson" - basically, a non-lawyer advocate who knows their way around the school and it's policies and can offer an impartial ear and hand to students.

@tonysdg at my university the ombudsperson was very clear that they do not act as a student advocate.  If I remember correctly they are only there to explain the university's policies and procedures and to help navigate them.

@someone: You're right, advocate was the wrong word! Apologies for that!

@someone honestly just ask other senior grad students. this is just a thing where very in-the-know, on-the-ground knowledge helps a lot. doing my best from my laptop over here but people who know the climate will be better.

@someone sr grad students, professor who laughed at your joke one time, and so forth.

authors: فواز فهد مسلم الدوسري


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Should I put funded projects/grants on my CV where I am not PI?
I helped writing some project/grant applications. In those applications, I am not the PI and not a funded member. Still, I am listed as an external collaborator, or a person of interest, or potential hire. So, my involvement is as "co-author" of the application (although only the PI is listed) and as "person to be involved". I guess this is the case of several other researchers.
Is it usual to put those instances on an academic CV? If so, how?

I have just found this question. It is closely related, but perhaps my questions is more specific. Just to bring it out so you peers can decide whether to mark mine as duplicate or not.

At the very least, the US NSF requires acknowledgement in the grant of all participants in the writing process. That's come up here before.

It is not the case of the grants I collaborated to, apparently. Those have all been national (abroad for me) grants, by the way.

In my mind, this will depend on how much you contributed to the grant, and what stage of your career you're in. I'll also ignore things like the NSF or NIH requiring reporting research support even if you aren't the PI for biosketches and the like.
If you're a graduate student or (depending on the grant) a postdoc, it's reasonable that you wouldn't be the PI, because you can't be the PI by institutional rules, or because in the current funding climate, or with the scope of the grant, etc. there's just no way a postdoc-PI grant is going to get funded. Never the less, putting it on your CV shows that you're thinking about funding and participating in the process, even if you aren't heading it up. It's the grants equivalent of being a middle author on a paper as an undergrad.
What's important though is, as with every element of your CV, that you be able to cogently talk about what it was about, and how you contributed to the writing of it. It's one thing to say "My supervisor was the PI, but I did the bulk of the writing and planned out the grant" and something else entirely if you were just along for the ride.

Absolutely agree: my CV makes this distinction by noting PI, co-PI, and "author" status.  Doesn't matter so much any more, but mattered a lot when I was a grad student and postdoc and had gotten two NSF grants funded with professors acting primarily as paper-PI and editor.


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Can tenured professors do more about injustice in universities?
This question pertains only to tenured professors, because untenured staff may fear and risk loss of employment if they protest or campaign against the university.
How much can tenured professors do, to combat and protest injustice and misconduct by the university (eg: exorbitant accommodation or food prices or libary fines, horrible teaching, low faculty-student ratio, scant attention and support to undergraduates, etc.)?
Please correct any errors in this conjecture, but it seems that if many famous tenured professors (eg: Nobel laureates, Fields Medallists, etc...) unite against an injustice, and perchance even threaten to leave the university because they can easily gain tenure elsewhere with their excellences, then certainly the university would address it?

University education differs a lot between countries. In many EU countries, professors are civil-servants, so your "countermeasures" do not apply. Also, universities may be public, so problems like "food prices" may also not apply. And why do you assume that "Nobel laureates" are good at teaching? or that one professor would threaten to leave if someone else is a horrible teacher. Would you quit your job if you had a lousy colleague with whom you have no interaction with?

Yeah, I pretty much agree with Alexandros. Tenured faculty in the us often rotate as faculty chairs and then sure, they can go meet with librarians or fire underperforming faculty members.  And when they aren't chairs they're still listened to by the people who are.

In academia as in most other places, "threatening to quit" is an incredibly ineffective strategy for getting what you want.  Your bluff is likely to be called.

I voted to reopen this question - per my answer below, there are some fairly common mechanisms by which faculty can make their voice known on issues. I think it's possible to talk about those without delving into opinions, or defining what's considered injustice.

There are a lot of things you're asking that are going to fall under opinions, vagaries of the university you're talking about, etc. But here are some concrete things they might be capable of doing:

If there is a faculty union, it is almost certain tenured faculty will have a voice on it. They can use that voice to advocate for any number of causes, including things like better treatment of adjunct faculty, etc. It is, of course, possible for this voice to be ignored.
Similarly, a faculty senate may have some voice in deciding university policy, weighing in on possible candidates for president of the university, etc., and may use this voice to prioritize certain causes.
Tenured faculty will likely sit on faculty hiring and admissions committees. This can allow them to exercise some power in who they hire, and how they are evaluated - for example, are women and minority candidates being given a fair shake? Are we admitting a realistic number of graduate students given the job market?
Similarly, they may serve on tenure promotion committees, curriculum steering committees, etc. and may advocate for teaching performance being a stronger criteria for promotion and tenure, shuffling some classes to better teachers or reclaiming a class from another department that is blowing off their students, etc.

That being said, there is a limited amount any group in the university system can do. For example, fees might be set by the state legislature in the case of a state school, class size is likely more a function of budget than anything else (tenured faculty can't conjure up new FTE positions), and some of these things, to be frank, may not rise to the level of "Something worth protesting over". Additionally, while more protected, the experience of any number of tenured faculty shows that they can be retaliated against.


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Failing a student for attendance or grade?
My problem is pretty weird to describe. This semester I didn't keep track of student attendance in classes because the university system didn't become functional until two weeks before the end of the semester. Now this student comes up complaining that he wants to fail due to absence in classes (which by the way he didn't attend at all) and not because he didn't do any assignments, and he argues that I cannot give any grade because he didn't do any assignment! That's because, for some warped logic, failing to attend classes isn't as bad as failing due to a bad grade: somehow the "system" cleans up attendance failures (but not grade failures) in the future school transcript. It is as if the student had never been enrolled in the course in the first place. Anyway, the "system" does not allow for failing students on both grounds either (that is, someone who hasn't attended enough classes and didn't achieve the minimum grade to pass). Moreover, this is an optional class and about half the students canceled their inscriptions in the first weeks.
So, the question is: should I bow down to this logic and fail the student because he missed classes (thus cleaning up the slate for him), or fail because he didn't do any assignments?

I think this will depend on your institution's regulations for how these two types of "fail" are to be used.  You should ask your department chair or dean.  Any answer you get here will just be a guess.

"That's because, for some warped logic, failing to attend classes isn't as bad as failing due to a bad grade" - are you sure you got this right? At my university, it is pretty standard (well, among some ambitious, but sometimes borderline, students) to intentionally fail by means of violating formal requirements (such as attendance), because failing (and thereby being allowed to retry later) isn't as bad as almost failing (with a bad grade).

I've seen cases where a student never attended the class but neglected to officially withdraw. Fortunately for the students, there's apparently someone in the administration (probably an assistant dean) who can magically produce a withdrawal long after the deadline if the instructor approves.

For other readers: I share the OP's experience with these different flavors of non-passing grade reporting. We have a similar system at CUNY. I've added an answer below giving more scope and details to a situation like this.

Agreed, this is pretty weird.  It sounds so predicated on the (weird) particulars of your university that your guess is as good as and probably better than ours. Anyway:

That's because, for some warped logic, failing to attend classes isn't as bad as failing due to a bad grade: somehow the "system" cleans up attendance failures (but not grade failures) in the future school transcript.

Figuring out exactly what that means is probably the key to treating the situation properly...at least if we assume that "properly" means according to the practices of your university, which sound pretty screwy.  Maybe let's take it this way: under what circumstances would it be appropriate to give a student a "failure to attend" grade which is subject to future white-washing?  As far as I can see, the most sensible case for this is for a student who neither attended the course nor attempted any of the course work, including homework and exams.  If so the registration for the course looks like some kind of mistake.
Does that describe your student?  I.e., did he never come to class -- had you seen him before?!? -- or do any of the assignments or exams?  If so, then just based on what you have said it sounds to me that this policy could reasonably be applied to him.  If he attended a bit at the beginning, turned in an assignment or two and then just stopped entirely then indeed it looks like he was a non-accidental attendee in the course who just did very, very little work and the other kind of failing grade would be appropriate.
Perhaps you should consider talking to someone in your university's administration to get them to explain this screwy policy?  If the policy makes sense in the minds of others -- especially, if the students have a consistent understanding that has largely been supported by the policy -- then even if you think it's stupid (and even if you're right!) you could be inviting trouble by calling it as you see it.
Anyway, good luck.
Added: OK, here's another, completely different interpretation.  Your university is in the process of adding a new, very formalized (you mention something about implementation coming up in the last two weeks of the semester; is that what you mean, a system for tracking attendance?) mandatory attendance policy.  If so, maybe the attendance failure works sort of like an "incomplete" in US university systems: it's a placeholder for future work on the part of the student.  Maybe the student makes up the class attendance in the future and they get....I don't know.  Either the grade they got the first time around or the grade they got in the new course, in which case indeed failure to attend is an easy loophole to get out of any poor grade.  Anyway, there are any number of curious policies that a university might have, and for sure I don't know what's going on in your case.

I think this is something like what my institution does: There is a first day attendance clause. Basically, all students must attend the first class day and have the instructor enter them in for attendance, or the university's system automatically drops them from the class. It's an involuntary withdrawal, before any tuition has been paid, that's as if the student never enrolled in the first place. If tuition's been paid, at best you can withdraw with a W before 50% of the course has been completed. Therein at best you can receive a WF (essentially a fail grade) or special circumstance.

Some instructors, then, will simply mark everyone as present at the course start and never take attendance again.

A number of universities I've worked at have a grade option of X, which means (and I quote) "no basis for grade". My understanding of how this grade works is exactly the interpretation in your post. In contrast, the first day attendance clause described by @Kendall is designed to avoid financial aide fraud, so I don't think that is what this is.

@Kendall: my university does the opposite. If a student misses all the class meetings during the first week of class, the instructor may (at his or her discretion) effect an involuntary withdrawal of the student from the class. In particular, the student cannot count on it being an automatic withdrawal: if they want to withdraw from a class without grades reported, they better make sure they check with the registrar's office before the deadline.

Ask an Administrator At Your Institution
I honestly think there is only one answer to give here: you need to talk with someone at your University who understands the policies of your particular institution. At all institutions I am personally aware of (having attended or read through their student handbook), there is no such thing as a difference between failing because you didn't show up and failing because you showed up and got everything wrong. But given the extremely large variance between institutions, and especially between countries, your institution may have it's own unique rules.

If at your institution there is no such thing as "fail by absence", then of course you cannot comply with the student request.
If your institution provides a policy of "fail by absence", then you need to look at the definition of what this and whether or not this student qualifies. If indeed the definition is "did not complete X% of assignments or tests, or did not attend at least Y%" of classes", and your student meets this guideline, then you absolutely should mark "fail by absence" in accordance with your University policy.

One needn't actually agree that there is any difference in "not trying" and "trying and failing", and one need not even agree that one is not as 'bad' as the other. If your institution honors such a concept, and asks you to indicate which occurred, it is your duty to answer honestly and correctly.
The student might be a nuisance or annoying, or give you no good reason for their failure to attend - and the reasons might very well be none of your concern. But if your system distinguishes between attendance-related failure and exam-related failure, then you should too. Problems with the policy should be addressed to policy makers, not enforced willy-nilly on students.
If you wish in the future to go against such policies, and assuming you have the authority to do so, you really must place this in your syllabus at the beginning of the semester so that all students necessarily understand that policies normal to your institution will not be applied to that class. You should of course check with administration to ensure you  have such an option.

I'm surprised that people here are offering callous advice such as "I don't see any reason you should do this student any favors" and "Since he badly failed on both grounds, the worst wins: fail him for bad grades." Guys, have you heard of compassion? The student is failing either way, so no decision would be "doing him any favors." From an ethical point of view, since according to the OP he in fact did not attend any classes, both grade decisions are equally valid and equally in line with the spirit of the university's (admittedly, pretty stupid in my opinion) policy. So, it all comes down to whether you are a vindictive type who wants to inflict maximum pain on a failing student to teach him a lesson he'll never forget, or whether you have some compassion and understanding for human failings.
Personally I'd go with the compassionate approach. Pedagogical research also suggests that people learn better from positive reinforcement than from negative reinforcement (citation needed, but I don't have time to look it up right now) so if your goal is to teach the student some kind of lesson, I think the attendance fail will also be better from that point of view.

I indeed heard of compassion and I practice it a lot, surely beyond my duties as professor, but from the question it seems that the student just complains, without offering any reason for compassion. Should there be, I'd be obviously withdraw my remark, to lean toward compassion.

@Massimo Maybe the student is an unpleasant or annoying person who likes to complain, or is poor at communicating his wishes. Honestly I don't see why that should affect your decision, or why you need a special reason to choose the compassionate option (while still failing the student -- again, not doing any favors or compromising any academic standards).

Because if, for instance, the student couldn't attend for health or other serious reasons, I'd be willing to limit as much as possible the effect on his career (according to the OP, the "system" cleans up attendance failures), but if he just complains (maybe on and on) without offering any reason for not attending when attendance is mandatory (a side note: in general, I'm against requiring attendance and I do not require it), well, I fail to be compassionate. .

perhaps you mean positive or negative punishment rather than negative reinforcement?

(In the US) It isn't unheard of for students to use student loans to fund not-school related things.  After you fail X classes you loose the ability to withdraw more student loans. So it may not be the more compassionate thing for us taxpayers (if this is in the US) to let a student off with an I or something as they may just be using it to defraud the student loan program.  There are two sides to the coin since we don't know the real motive for the student.

I do not think it is all that strange to have a way to enter "registered but did not attend" as one of the possible outcomes of course and to treat that differently from "performed poorly". Our university does, as did every other university I am familiar with (small sample size, obviously). We are on a pay per credit system, so a "registered but did not attend" entitles the student to a refund of tuition.
However, I have never entered a grade of "registered but did not attend" of my own accord, Typically this request comes from the registrar's office to confirm that the student did not do any work in the course, has no attendance record, etc. In other words, instead of coming to me to plead his/her case, the student goes to the registrar's office first. And if I do have any evidence of the student contributing even a single assignment, then the inference is that they did use at least  some of the course resources, are not entitled to a tuition refund, and hence should not be given a "registered but did not attend" grade.

I write LMS software and have done a lot of university work.  Most fall into the following categories:

courses are wiped based on a cut-off date.  This is the most common.  Most universities allow one week, some two, some more (not as common).  If the student decides they want out before the cutoff their transcript is wiped clean even if they have graded work.
course can be wiped clean due to medical or financial problems.  This is basically ad hoc and student would have to work with school administrator to get the sign off for this.  Administrators team would go into my system and individually take care of this.
have schools that based on the first graded assignment the teacher records, then they are a student of the class.  If no scores then they can be wiped.

I can try to think of a few other cases since I am sure there are a couple I am missing.  But for your case, he never turned in anything, he didn't go to class... then he should be unenrolled for transcript purposes.  Your university cannot validly say this student can pass the class or not.  You cannot state that they are unable to do the work or not.  A university class is not about expressing your knowledge, not about meeting criteria.
Therefore the only logical thing to do is exclude this class from the transcript.  If you don't have records of attendance or grades then you have nothing to say against it.  Think about if a student went to half your classes, never turned in a paper... he just lost his mom/dad in an accident, suffering from depression, has some other issues, is it right that this student gets a failing grade when you don't have any idea what their knowledge level is?
Note:  That some universities handle this right.  If a student opts out like this student would the require that the class is retaken within the next calendar year to keep the old class wiped.  (of course the university ensures paying for another class too)

some more (not as common) — Really? Every university I've been affiliated with (all in the US) had a drop deadline 6-8 weeks into the semester.

@JeffE, nowadays for some reason the automated version often has a much shorter deadline. E.g., at my univ, it's just a week or so, while 20 years ago it was a few weeks.

The student is correct.  Its not his/her fault that the system is stupid.  The expectation was created by the system.  Not your place to try to change it or to punish the student for the expectation.  If you do think its a stupid system, then voice that opinion through the proper channels.

Since you were not keeping track of attendance, it does not sound like you were making attendance a component of students' final grades. If this is the case, then you can't fail him for lack of attendance, and must fail him for his low grade.
If, on the other hand, you were counting attendance in students' final grades, then I guess it's a coin-flip, but the student's argument that he lacks a grade, as opposed to having a grade of 0, seems like nonsense to me. I don't see any reason you should do this student any favors by failing him on the basis of attendance, but that's up to you.

If there is a requirement in the university for minimum attendance (and most of them have), then you should fail them by this criteria. Attendance comes first than grade, because generally the former is a prerequisite for the latter.

-1 for the claim that he "must" fail him for a low grade. No convincing argument for a "must".

@einpoklum Really? The argument was that if 0% of a student's grade is determined by attendance, then it is impossible for lack of attendance to be the cause of the student's failure. This seems pretty straightforward to me.

In the real world of real universities that have actual buildings with classrooms and stuff instead of browser windows, what you describe is called an "administrative fail" , or commonly AF or WF (withdraw-fail).  In brick-and-mortar universities there's typically a date cutoff, usually halfway or three quarters of the way through the semester.  Ask your virtual registrar if they have an faq on this.

Oh, come on, just Fail him the way he asked for and don't sweat it.
The system is silly/weird/stupid, the reporting system didn't work, he wanted to drop the class mid-semester and forgot, whatever. You're not giving him academic credit for something he hasn't done, so be kind and help him/her.

I'm writing a very late answer, partly for the edification of other readers, to support the OP's situation, and to highlight the academia varies more than you think it does principle.
I'm at a large U.S. university (CUNY) that currently uses a similar menagerie of final grade codes, that record different situations for not-passing, and handle them in different ways. A non-exhaustive list includes:

WN: Student never participated in class.
WA: Student was administratively withdrawn for immunization non-compliance.
WU: Student was withdrawn unofficially by virtue of stopping attendance at some point.
W: Student officially requested to withdraw from the class.
INC: Student had some component of work incomplete, and is expected to be able to complete it outside of class with instructor before end of next term.
F: Student completed the course but did not succeed at passing, due to failing-level work.

In addition to this, there's also a "refund period" of about the first week where a student can drop a class, get their tuition back, and have it be entirely expunged from their record.
I think that all of the W-type grades avoid having any impact on the student's GPA. The WN grade gets reported by faculty about two weeks into the term (and has monetary impact; I think financial aid gets clawed back by state/federal agencies). The WA is assessed by administration about one month in. W's are accepted at any time up to and including the last day of class. WU's are assessed after final exams are given.
The evolution of this system has (over the nearly two decades I've been at the institution) evolved to make it more and more likely that failing grades are kept off a student's transcript. For example, when I started, to receive a "W" grade, the student needed to be currently passing the course, had to get an instructor's approval signature on a form, and could only do so up to about the halfway point in the term. At some point that faculty sign-off form went away, as well as the requirement that the student be passing the course. Then the deadline was pushed further into the term, and now one can withdraw (at will, by web portal) at any time, including on the last day of class.
Moreover, the "WU" grade was introduced so that students are presumed to have withdrawn even if they don't ask for it -- and this is broadly what the OP is dealing with. If a student simply stops attending class, they are expected to get a WU grade. If a student attends class for the entire term, submits all assignments, and just skips the final exam, then the assumption is now that they should receive a WU grade (and so avoid reducing their GPA).
So: As others have advised in the situation, someone like the OP should read their school policies carefully. In our case, we have a very formal multi-page memo that everyone consults for the decision process on which flavor of grade should be assigned. In our case, the school really, really wants instructors to be assigning WU's instead of F's, because (I presume) it boosts student GPAs, likely increases retention, and lets the school retain their current and future tuition payments.
There's a piece of fine print in our policy that says instructors may instead opt to assign an F grade if students submitted more than half the work for term and received failing grades for it; but almost no one (faculty, students, administrators) is aware of that clause, so one needs to be cautious about using it. E.g., students who are failing late in the term will likely just ghost the course, not request a W, and be surprised if they get an F instead of a WU. Previously there was a window where W's were not available, but WU's still were, and in that era I would get some students requesting the WU from me instead of an F -- exactly like the case of the OP. (Now that W's cover the whole term, cognizant students use that option instead, so I haven't received these requests in a few years.)
In summary: The school likely has a formal recommendation/decision-process for the described grade zoo. The instructor in question should find that and read it very carefully.

As a relatively recent student, my university's policy would have been to fail the student.
It was understood that it is the student's responsibility to complete the withdraw form at the registrar's office prior to the drop deadline.  Reviewing the few course syllabuses I still have, the policies related to absence are:

Absence exceeding 6 class hours of instruction: Instructor may submit a grade of F immediately at their discretion.
Absence for a scheduled test: Grade of 0 for the test, most classes have a make-up exam or a policy where the final grade may be used in place of the lowest grade.
Absence for the final exam: Policy is an F.  Instructor may intercede on the student's behalf and record an I.  An incomplete grade must be completed during the following semester or it will automatically be changed to an F.

Absences are defined as non-attendance without approval from instructor or university.

I have exactly one syllabus where the policy was that if the student disappeared for an extended period of time prior to drop-date, the instructor would submit a grade of "W" on the drop date.  The instructor explained that this was her way of covering for a student who had mistakenly forgotten to drop the course and implied this was due to a prior incident.

Very similar at my U, way back when.  I think early withdrawals were not noted in the transcript at all. Then after some deadline you would get a W in the transcript: withdrawn.  Past some second deadline, the only option was a failure in the transcript (if that was to be the outcome). I definitely remember the W code.

A drop within the first two weeks cancelled the registration as if it had never existed.  Past that, you had until the 3/4s mark to withdraw with a grade of W if allowed (university and state regulations may prevent withdrawing in some cases.)

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