SDSU’s Filling of Psychology Post Is Faulted : Education: The department chairman’s wife was selected, and some professors claim little effort was made to find a good minority candidate.

A teaching post created this year to increase minority enrollment in the psychology department at San Diego State University was given to the chairman’s wife after what critics called an inadequate search for other candidates.

Several psychology professors say that, in particular, the department did not undertake a thorough nationwide search for minority candidates, despite pressure from university administrators and the American Psychological Assn. to address its current faculty composition of 51 whites and one Asian.

Underscoring their criticism is the nature of the job: The position was for a professor to specialize in community minority issues and to take a leadership role in programs for helping to recruit and retain minority students in the department.

“It appears to me and to others, I am sure, that the search has not been impartial,” one psychology professor wrote in mid-November to the head of the department personnel committee.

The professor noted that he and others believed the opening provided a major opportunity to hire a Latino or black but that “efforts to recruit qualified minority applicants were minimal at best.” The university’s brief search attracted only nine applicants for the prestigious opportunity, including one Asian and one Latino who did not make a group of three finalists interviewed by the department.

Added the professor: “(What) makes this entire search problematic is the appearance that it was designed to result in the hiring of our current chair’s spouse.”

The critics, however, do not accuse the chairman, William Hillix, of influencing the search directly but rather believe that friends of Hillix and his wife, Terry Cronan, wanted to hire her out of friendship to the chairman. Hillix himself was removed from the process by the dean of the College of Sciences.

SDSU’s vice president for academic affairs, Albert W. Johnson, who made the final decision in December to hire Cronan as an associate professor, conceded that aspects of the search made him suspicious, and that he “continues to feel uncomfortable over how (the department) handled the matter.”

But Johnson said Cronan, who had already been teaching in the department in a non-professorial capacity, was well-qualified to assume the new position, despite the taint surrounding her selection.

The dean of the college and several psychology professors strongly defended the search as honest and aboveboard, with one faculty member labeling critics as “ne’er-do-wells and irresponsible people.”

Cronan herself said that “as far as I am concerned, if I was offered the position, then I was the best candidate for the position.” She added that she has no knowledge of any professors being upset at the selection process.

The discontent has caused a rift within the psychology department that even the critics are loath to talk about openly, a closing of the ranks that Johnson said is “the usual faculty response” when a department has problems.

“I do have a problem with what happened in the department . . . and we need to do a heck of a better job in minority hiring,” Professor John E. Martin said when contacted by The Times. “But this is a very sensitive issue, a family matter that could do harm to the department, and I would like to see it handled like a family” would.

“I just can’t talk on the record about this,” another veteran professor said when contacted. “If I’m too outspoken, I will put myself at real risk regarding (cover) letters for grants, sabbatical time--just the way I’ll be treated within the department. Personnel things can tear a department apart.”

The professor who wrote the November letter, Alan Litrownik, a well-known researcher in child abuse and a member of the joint SDSU-UC San Diego doctoral program in clinical psychology, confirmed its contents but refused to comment further. (The letter was sent anonymously to The Times.)

Many members of the department feel that how the department handled the selection is no one’s business but those in the department. Gerald Rosenbaum, a strong defender of the search process and clinical training director in the joint doctoral program, chastised as irresponsible “anyone who discusses a private, in-house matter . . . that cannot be understood intelligently” by the public.

Based on interviews with several professors and from written material provided anonymously to The Times, the controversy results from the department’s decision in late April, 1990, to advertise for a new professor in the field of minority programs in psychology, for a job to begin in January.

Minutes of the April 25 psychology meeting say that faculty members were asked to approve the search and were aware that Cronan would be one of the applicants. She was already running on a temporary basis a faculty-student mentor program and Project Primer, an adult-child reading education program for minority parents in the San Diego area.

According to the minutes, College of Sciences Dean Don Short made it clear to faculty members that “such a position would require national advertising, a full search and full deliberations by the faculty. If there were a minority applicant with qualifications equal to Dr. Cronan’s, the department would have a hard time turning that applicant down . . . (faculty) indicated that Dr. Cronan was fully aware of this possibility.”

Short said in an interview that he realized several department members wanted the position advertised at the time so that Cronan could be hired.

“That was obviously the motivation of some,” he said, in large part because they wanted to forestall Cronan from accepting offers from other universities and her husband leaving with her.

“That’s why I knew that I would have to take great pains to make sure a search was done fairly,” Short said, explaining why he removed Hillix from any participation and appointed Professor Richard H. Defran as acting chair for the search.

Short said the search was done properly and gathered as many applicants as possible, in particular minority candidates.

“They did run ads, they did write to universities, they did make phone calls, so I satisfied myself that they had run a real search,” Short said.

Johnson added that the university’s affirmative action office said it was satisfied when he asked about the process after Litrownik came to him in November. Johnson was designated as spokesman by SDSU President Tom Day, who has said minority faculty recruitment is among his top priorities.

Defran said a three-member search committee ran an ad in the August and September issues of the Monitor, a publication of the American Psychological Assn. that features advertising for positions around the country. It also sent out 436 flyers to departments nationwide, including 290 to directors of minority research programs, he said. Individual professors also made telephone calls to colleagues.

“I telephoned the person from whom I got my Ph.D. at Bowling Green State University” in Ohio and asked if he knew of promising minority candidates, Defran said.

The university set an Oct. 15 deadline for applicants, giving those interested only about two months to get their materials and resumes to the search committee.

Although Short expressed disappointment that only nine people applied, including one Latino and one Asian, he said the numbers “really depend on what kind of position you’re looking for.

“I guess it bothers me (there were so few minority applicants), but we’ve come to expect that, in the science area, there just are not a lot of potential applicants,” he said.

(SDSU has one African-American, four Latinos and 10 Asians out of 287 professors in the College of Sciences. Representation in other fields is slightly higher.)

Added Defran, “If there had been a minority and a qualified one, we’d send a taxi for him, they’re in such demand.”

He acknowledged that Cronan “certainly had a resume that would fit within the job description,” but said, “I think we would have had to have given the nod to a minority candidate who would have been comparable, as an affirmative action gesture.”

But Litrownik disputed the adequacy of the department’s search in his November letter to Defran and in conversations with Johnson.

“What is even more upsetting to me is the fact that efforts to recruit qualified minority applicants were minimal at best,” he wrote, later adding, “In the past several years, we have not been able to attract quality minority applicants. We are now in a position to do so with our recently accredited doctoral program (with UCSD) and (with an opening) that has an emphasis in minority issues and training.

“Rather than make such a commitment, it appears that we have done everything possible to discourage qualified minority applicants as well as qualified applicants in general. . . . We certainly could have written an ad that would have attracted more applicants as well as extended the search beyond the stated closing date. (The ad did not mention the new doctoral program.) With only nine applicants, it is obvious we did not conduct a thorough search.”

Dr. L. Philip Guzman, director of the office of ethnic minority affairs for the American Psychological Assn. in Washington, said an adequate search for minority candidates must be more comprehensive than those traditionally carried out by universities.

Guzman said there are not an overwhelming number of minority psychologists, “but I would caution against using that as an excuse. They are out there, but it takes more time to find them.”

Guzman cited several California institutions that have found qualified minority members for their psychology departments, listing California State University, Bakersfield, with 22 minority members on the psychology faculty, Cal State Fresno with 13, UC Irvine with 15 and USC with 14.

“I think if you only give two months to the process, you are limiting yourself,” Guzman said, while noting he had no specific knowledge of the SDSU efforts. In particular, he said, a recruitment begun in August might prove more difficult, since many people already would have lined up jobs for the academic year beginning in September.

“And you have to talk to a lot of people, to talk to many of the 2,000 (minority) psychologists listed in our directory, because the most successful way to do things is by word of mouth, from one person to another person,” he said.

Nolan Penn, associate chancellor for affirmative action at UCSD and a professor of psychiatry, said universities, if serious, must send recruiters to professional meetings, seminars and other activities “in order to go beyond just the traditional things to cast your net widely. You have to go the extra mile, beyond putting an ad in the traditional journal and sending out notices.”

Although Penn said he was not involved in this specific search, he is connected with efforts to try to find minority professors for the joint doctoral program. The American Psychological Assn., in accrediting the program last fall, said in a letter that the program should “recruit more ethnic minority faculty.”

In carrying out the search, no one from SDSU contacted Robert Guthrie, a noted San Diego psychologist who teaches part time in the university’s Afro-American studies department and who two years ago was asked by Hillix to help with a minority student support program.

Guthrie, whom Penn described as a well-known author, is the former head of the minority fellowship program for the American Psychological Assn. and has contacts nationwide.

“I never heard anything from anyone about the position,” Guthrie said, even though he had written the department last year asking about possible teaching positions. Guthrie formerly taught at the University of Pittsburgh and at Georgetown University.

Defran, the acting chairman for the search, said he had never heard of Guthrie until last week.

Another department professor well-versed in campus politics said, “Look, it wasn’t a slam-dunk consciously to exclude a black or Latino but rather an attempt to keep Al (Hillix) and Terry (Cronan) here, sort of the good old boys and girls doing something for friends by not really looking hard for other candidates.”

But, he added, requesting not to be identified, “This type of thing gives blacks and Latinos on campus one more legitimate complaint about affirmative action.”

Judy S. Reilly, one of three professors on the search committee, said, “I would not have done it the way it was done,” but refused further comment because of her desire to handle the matter internally. A second member, Claire Murphy, refused all comment. The committee’s third member, Dennis Saccuzzo, could not be reached.

Johnson, the university academic vice president, said he was told that the department “went beyond what they ordinarily do” to try and recruit minorities.

“Ordinarily, we rarely have the money to do much beyond ads in specialized journals, the mailings and some calls,” Johnson said.

But Johnson said he told the psychology department last year that it would have to come up with adequate pools of minority candidates during job searches. “I don’t think they took me very seriously,” he said.

Now the department wants to fill two more positions despite a campus-wide hiring freeze due to budget shortfalls in the California State University system.

“I have canceled all searches unless there are strong minority candidates” where a department can improve ethnic diversity, Johnson said.

“And the department now tells me that they have strong (minority) candidates for these searches, one in the clinical area and the other for a statistician. So maybe now they are taking things more seriously.”

Hillix, the department chairman, insisted that the department has tried for several years to recruit qualified minority candidates.

“They’re simply not out there,” he said, adding that therefore his wife had set up the student mentoring and community programs to encourage more minority students to consider psychology as a career.

Johnson discounted a charge by Rosenbaum that the critics are motivated by personal animosity from past years toward Hillix. Rosenbaum said that “previous antipathies” by Litrownik and others--Litrownik was removed as chairman three years ago by a majority of his colleagues--led to negative feelings about Hillix and Cronan.

“Sure, there was a concerted move by the old guard in psychology to remove Litrownik, but I don’t think Hillix was directly involved in the campaign; his appointment was a compromise afterwards,” Johnson said. “I don’t think you can say this (dispute) results from rancor by Litrownik. I doubt he has any.”