The Board of Trustees declined to vote on the tenure nomination of Terry Boychuk, an assistant professor of Sociology, on Friday, pending an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment.

The trustees were scheduled to ratify the lifetime tenure appointments of Boychuk and three other professors at their business meeting, but at the beginning of the meeting President Michael McPherson explained that there was to be a change in the schedule.

“Yesterday afternoon, we received a letter from some students with allegations that bear on the tenure decisions you are asked to vote on today,” McPherson said. “That timing, needless to say, is extraordinarily difficult for us.”

McPherson explained that because the personnel process is confidential, all discussion of tenure would be moved into the private Executive Session immediately following the normal meeting.

The trustees, the Provost and the President remained behind the closed doors of the Weyerhaeuser Boardroom for over an hour; when they finally came out, only McPherson offered a comment.

“The trustees voted to approve the tenures of Susan Fox, Ray Rogers and Kim Venn,” McPherson told The Mac Weekly. “The board did not take any other action in the Executive Session.”

The Faculty Personnel Committee, the President and the Provost must approve all tenure candidates, but “only the trustees can confer tenure,” according to Provost Dan Hornbach.

“To my knowledge, the board has never turned down someone the administration has recommended for tenure,” McPherson said. “I would also note that the board did not turn down anyone for tenure at our recent meeting; there was one case in which they did not act at this time.”

McPherson explained that the trustees could convene at any time should they wish to ratify Boychuk’s tenure. The trustees’ next official meeting is May 17-18, right before commencement.

The letter that stopped the tenure confirmation process came from seniors Kimberly Christoffel, Ann Pandjiris, Grant Loehnig and Melissa Colbert, and junior Sam Liberto, and was sent to McPherson and all 32 Trustees. “It has come to our attention,” the letter reads, “that a number of students have registered complaints of sexual harassment against Professor Boychuk and we fear that the college has not properly investigated a number of these complaints … We, the undersigned students demand that a complete investigation of these allegations be taken prior to the [confirmation] of tenure of Terry Boychuk.”

An investigation into the allegations has already begun, according to Associate Dean of Students Joi Lewis, who is one of Macalester’s three sexual harassment grievance officers.

Christoffel said Lewis called her just three hours after she dropped off the letters in the President’s office Thursday, and asked for any information she had.

None of the five students who signed the letter had personally observed or experienced sexual harassment from Boychuk, but they claim to have spoken with several students who have.

“I haven’t had a class with Terry Boychuk,” said Christoffel, who is acting as the students’ spokesperson. “I don’t know him, and I’ve never seen him sexually harass anyone. But I had heard enough that it concerned me that there would be a situation of sexual harassment on this campus and there would have been nothing done about it.”

Christoffel said that she has been in contact with more than one alumna who said Boychuk had made unprofessional remarks in class or to them individually.

Christoffel also alleges that students had contacted Macalester’s grievance officers about Boychuk before the administration decided last semester to recommend him for tenure.

“Just because someone has come and talked to one of the grievance officers does not mean that there has been a formal complaint,” Lewis said. “We can’t just put something in someone’s personnel file. If we want to put something in the file, we have to follow due process.”

Boychuk himself declined to comment on the allegations raised in the letter, out of concern, he said, for the confidentiality of college’s investigation.

“I wish to do all that I can to safeguard the integrity of the process for investigating sexual harassment, if such a process is indeed necessary,” Boychuk said.

Lewis said that while confidentiality is essential to the grievance process, it also tends to breed suspicion, because people may hear rumors about complaints, but not about outcomes of the grievance process.

“People will say: ‘I’ve heard that this thing happened, but then I don’t see the outcoe,’” Lewis said. “And it looks like nothing has happened, so people don’t trust the process. I get that … but these things are best dealt with in confidence, and you would appreciate it if you were making the complaint, or if someone was making it against you.”

Lewis was unable to give a timeframe for her investigation, and said that there would be no public announcement of her findings, or of what, if any sanctions would be handed down.

“But just because the outcome is confidential, doesn’t mean that nothing has happened,” Lewis said.

However, because the American Association of University Professors advises that colleges allow professors denied tenure to stay on an extra year after their tenure-track contracts expire, the investigation cannot go on indefinitely, according to Hornbach.

“AAUP guidelines suggest that something would have to be done within one year,” Hornbach said.

“I’m happy about what has happened,” Christoffel said, “if ‘happy’ is the word for it.”

Lewis believed that the students who wrote the letter could have gotten the same result had they just come and talked to her. Writing the letter, she said, “was fine, but it wasn’t necessary.”

Christoffel was not so sure.

“The letter made [the allegations] public,” Christoffel said. “But it also put the ball in the trustees’ court. Making this public is exactly what the administration would like to avoid. If we had just told them, without writing the letter, I don’t know that they would have done the same thing.”

Lewis hopes that if anything comes from the publicity surrounding the Boychuk case, it will be increased awareness about the sexual harassment grievance processes.

“All complaints are serious,” Lewis said. “I want people to know how to access the system; I want people to come in and talk to me.”