Dear List-members:

I am writing in reply to Dr Gordon's posting to this list on the instruction of Dr Sandra Penrose, President of the Academic Union, University of Western Australia. She would like to make the readers of this list aware of the fact that Dr Gordon's posting, quoted below, is factually incorrect. The Australian Universities Academic Staff Award to which Dr Gordon refers DOES NOT apply to ANY aspect of the tenuring process.

From this it should be obvious that any assurances he might have drawn from the Award regarding matters like "justice", "proper cause" and "due process" are simply untrue. While certain internal University Procedures are *said* to cover the process of tenuring, my case has proven that even these Procedures are subject to "interpretation" and need not necessarily be followed by the University Administration. I note that the Union contested the University's actions at several points during my tenuring proceedings, but to no avail.

Since the original, accurate albeit far from complete, posting by Hugh Jarvis, the University Senate met. Sadly the Union member of Senate was excluded during a presentation about my case by the VC and other Administrators involved in making the decision to deny me tenure. The Senate noted that the VC had been delegated power over tenuring; hence, her decision was found to be fundamentally unappealable, except in terms of procedure. I found it highly significant, and most encouraging, that members of the Senate have stressed they did NOT "confirm" the VC's action of denying my tenure. I have also found that I am the very first person to be denied tenure at UWA in over 30 years! Needless to say, the Press is having quite the field day with this story.

At the present time, I am unemployed but am being kept very busy consulting with both the Union and various lawyers regarding the next steps in this bizarre affair. I hope by next month to have the time to catch up with various academic projects which have had to be put on the back burner over the past year while I wrote report after report on my productivity, etc. Sadly, the Vice-Chancellor has cut off my net-access via University accounts, and accessing Gopher via this personal account is not practical. Hence, those of you who have contacted me about Anthro-gopher will have to wait for this stuff to become resolved before I can get back to work on that very important project. Sorry about that.

Best regards,
Dave Rindos