Ohio University is pursuing a new African American Studies Department chair after the previous candidate stepped down amid allegations that she exaggerated her scholarly work in her application.

The university announced March 2 that it chose Harvard-educated historian Thelma Wills Foote as department chair, pending approval of a promotion and tenure committee and other high-ranking administrators, including Provost Kathy Krendl and President Roderick McDavis.

Had Foote completed the approval process, she would have become chair of the department Fall Quarter of the 2007-08 academic year with an $85,000 base salary. She would have replaced Vibert Cambridge, who has served as department chair since 2001.

The day after the announcement, a history professor looked into an item on Foote’s curriculum vitae: A book under her publications section titled Sally Hemings: An American Scandal: The Struggle to Tell the Controversial True Story that Foote indicated she co-authored with actress Tina Andrews.

Foote wrote a five-paragraph introduction to Sally Hemings and Andrews is credited as the sole author. The book is a first-person account from Andrews detailing the creation of a miniseries about Hemings. Half of the 200 pages of the book is Andrews’ screenplay.

An inadvertent mistake

College of Arts and Sciences Dean Ben Ogles brought the discovery to Foote’s attention in a March 5 e-mail, beginning an exchange that ended March 9 with Foote writing “my reasoning in listing myself as co-author within my CV and letter of introduction is that my scholarly work done for the book publication merits that designation.”

Foote wrote later that day, apologizing to Ogles and the search committee, adding she “neglected to say how very much I regret having placed the ... text under the books heading ... If I had to do it over again, I would have presented this work differently.”

The next e-mail she sent to Ogles was March 14, officially withdrawing her candidacy.

In an interview hours before Ogles disclosed her withdrawal, Foote called the placement of the book on her curriculum vitae an “inadvertent mistake,” adding she should have placed the book listing under the “Articles” section, listing only her introduction. She said she didn’t realize she listed the book in the “Publications” section until Ogles notified her March 5.

“It may turn out that things don’t work out,” Foote said of her then-pending job. “You know how people are; they tend to seize on people’s mistakes and make the worst of them.”

The curriculum vitae was not the only section of Foote’s application in which she indicated co-authorship of the book. In a Nov. 16 letter of introduction to search committee chair and English professor Amritjit Singh, she wrote: “Tina Andrews, the executive producer of the CBS mini-series, and I co-authored (the) book ... .”

Singh confirmed Foote’s withdrawal of her candidacy but declined to comment further for this article.

A qualified candidate

Ogles said things could have worked out, considering Foote’s academic reputation.

Foote applied to the position with a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an extensive list of credentials that included one book of which she is the sole author and two other books in the works. Foote’s published work, Black and White in Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial York City, was released in 2004 by Oxford University Press.

The book for which Foote wrote the introduction was released in 2001 by Malibu Press, a company not reputed as a scholarly publisher. That was the initial red flag to history department chair Norman Goda, who alerted Ogles of the inconsistency the day after the university’s announcement.

Foote was well-received during a four-day stay in Athens earlier this quarter, and had she submitted her application with only one published work as an author, Ogles said she still would have gotten the job, though likely without a full professorship.

“She could have come in as an associate professor and come in as chair,” he said. “That would have been A-OK with us.”

But Foote said she didn’t know upon applying that the college typically grants a full professorship if the candidate has published two books.

“That question of level (was) left open,” Foote said. “I applied for a chairship ... When filling out a vitae at my stage, you’re not really concerned about that area, and again, that’s why people should see immediately it was really a bad error.”

Even if the committee had resolved Foote’s “bad error,” Ogles said he was leaning toward rescinding the university’s offer.

“You don’t change standards just because someone says they’re sorry,” he said.

A risky move

Ogles said another candidate that he declined to name has gone through reference checks and was extended the job offer after Foote withdrew her candidacy. The college expects to announce the new department chair within the next month, but it is now dealing with errors Ogles said he takes full responsibility for.

While the authorship controversy on Foote’s curriculum vitae possibly could have been caught earlier, the real error was in announcing Foote’s acceptance of the offer before it became official — a move that has been made before but is still “risky,” Ogles said.

“There was this desire to announce it with the 200th commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade,” he said. “We were having lectures that weekend, and we thought it would be great to announce this at the same time. Had I waited to announce it until the process was over ... this wouldn’t have been a sticky situation.”