Best Defense
Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

Fun & games at NDU: Bad hiring practices led to reassignments & more

Military ways and academic ways continues to have trouble mixing.

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7555407606_433fb51901_o

Military ways and academic ways continues to have trouble mixing.

Military ways and academic ways continues to have trouble mixing.

At one part of NDU, I am told, they recently were “hiring irregularities at Eisenhower … and the dean and one of his deputies were ousted; the deputy — the real culprit — resigned completely, and the dean went back to the faculty.”

Meantime, down at Joint Forces Staff College, another outpost of NDU, I hear, a dean was “relieved by NDUP for allegedly subverting NDU hiring process by selecting an interim dean of administration earlier in the year. NDUP personally came down to drop the bomb on the faculty and our brand new commandment who had only been in the job two days.” I sent an email to the relieved dean to ask about this, but haven’t heard back yet.

What have you all heard about these goings on?

Here’s a statement from NDU about all this:

NDU follows standardized personnel processes for the selection and hiring of faculty. When the NDU president became aware of the appearance of hiring irregularities in these two colleges, he directed a team from the university’s Ethics program to separately examine each of these hiring processes. The Ethics program is part of the Academic Affairs department, under the leadership of the NDU Provost. Following a thorough examination of the circumstances and processes involved in both of these hiring actions, the team confirmed significant violations of NDU’s Title X hiring processes and authorities. If left unchecked, these violations would undermine the trust of faculty and staff that the university’s personnel practices are consistent, transparent, fair, and equitable. For this reason, the NDU president took corrective action, which included reassigning two individuals; a third individual resigned. He also met with the entire faculty and staff of each of these two colleges to explain why he had made these decisions to take corrective action and to reiterate the need to adhere to standard processes.

Image credit: tirtmaster/Flickr

Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military from 1991 to 2008 for the Wall Street Journal and then the Washington Post. He can be reached at ricksblogcomment@gmail.com. Twitter: @tomricks1

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