University of Chicago -- Faculty Changes

There’s a temptation, given the academic discipline involved, to try to lay the child psychiatry division at the University of Chicago on the couch to try to figure out how things went awry. But because many of the parties aren’t talking beyond the niceties that are typical in situations like this, the salient fact is that about two-thirds of the department’s key staff members will pack up their research grants and teams and head crosstown to the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Monday’s announcement by Illinois-Chicago of the migration caps several months of turmoil for the Chicago department, which was set off by the university’s decision in November to remove Bennett Leventhal as chief of the child and adolescent psychiatry section.
A nationally recognized expert on autism, Leventhal had headed the child psychiatry section for 15 years and had been acting or co-chairman of the entire psychiatry department in Chicago’s medical school for much of that time. But days after the medical school selected a new chairman for the psychiatry department last November, Leventhal was stripped of all administrative duties and told that his contract as a faculty member — like most professors at Chicago’s medical school, he is not tenured — would not be renewed.
Chicago officials declined to comment at the time on the decision about Leventhal, citing the university’s policy of not discussing “specific personnel actions” except with the involved individuals. But the furor surrounding its treatment of Leventhal led the medical school to issue a statement in January which it called the decision “part of an effort to create a strong and consistent new leadership structure in a department that has experienced administrative turnover.”
The statement also said that experts inside and outside the medical school had concluded that the department “was in need of new leadership, and that without a significant shift in leadership it would be difficult to continue to attract first-rate new faculty, as well as top students, residents and fellows.”
On Monday, a spokesman for Chicago’s medical school, John Easton, amplified on those comments in one way, saying that “customarily, following the appointment of a new chairman, all section chiefs step down and are then reappointed — or not.”

Full Story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/05/17/psych