Most people seem to have missed the key piece of his strategy - he made his disabled child an integral piece of his tenure case. Sure, he did a lot of work both

Most people seem to have missed the key piece of his strategy - he made his disabled child an integral piece of his tenure case. Sure, he did a lot of work both related to his child's disease and not, but if they denied his tenure at this point, it would have been like "denying tenure to a disabled child". And nobody wants to be on the record as having denied tenure to a disabled child. So, the true bottom line of this story is that he made a very shrewd political move (in the process compromising the privacy of his disabled child) in order to ensure tenure.