BY MATTHEW BOEDY
A decade ago a red flag about post-tenure review was waved in Texas. It was then that the University of Texas system put “more teeth” in its post-tenure review policy and Inside Higher Ed mused that “the step by UT—one of the largest public universities in the nation, with 5,268 tenured faculty members—not only gives rise to the question of whether more universities will follow suit but also the inevitable question about the viability of tenure.”
A new report by a working group formed by Georgia’s university system (where I work and lead the AAUP state conference) to revise its post-tenure review policy fulfills those Texas fears and aims at tenure. If Georgia’s revision is any indication, the scary sounds of attacks on tenure are coming from inside the house.
Like several states around the nation, Georgia’s post-tenure review policy states that a bad review and lack of progress toward improvement can lead to dismissal. In its report, the working group surveyed policies in several states including Texas.
The Georgia report specifies the once vague list of punishments for lack of progress after a negative review to now include “but are not necessarily limited to, suspension of pay, salary reduction, and revocation of tenure and dismissal.” Many states have policies on revocation of tenure, though they are rarely used.
One of the stated reasons for the systemwide revision of the post-tenure review policy was to make the process more consistent across state institutions. It then may change the experience for some and not for others. For example, Georgia College mentions revocation of tenure in its post-tenure review policy, but Georgia Southern only mentions the dismissal aspect.
Recent stories in other states of tenure revocations connected to bad performance reviews are certainly cause for concern. One can imagine a scenario wherein a college who wants to dismiss a faculty member for poor reviews might seek to revoke tenure first to make the firing process avoid the due-process protections that tenure gives. Or threaten to do so unless the faculty member resigns.
A survey of faculty that accompanies the proposed revisions offers a mixed bag of opinions about the current policy and changes to it. Some wanted more teeth, some thought the policy was good as is, some wanted less paperwork and a streamlined process, and about 12 percent, including me, wanted this review abolished. The working group—administrators, faculty, and members of our state’s board of regents who wanted more “oversight” of this process—responded with more paperwork, Likert scales, and a confusing visual rendering of the now more involved process.
One of the bright spots of Georgia’s proposed revisions to its post-tenure review policy is the mandate for data on such reviews. Scattered reports about the results of these reviews exist, all of them rebutting the assumed high quantity of “deadwood” professors. A 2002 AAUP review of challenges to tenure noted anecdotal results of post-tenure reviews. In 2012 the AAUP noted to Inside Higher Ed that it did not collect data on post-tenure reviews. No one knows for sure how many states have it nor, most importantly, the outcomes.
The new Georgia working group report gives a detailed look from each of the state’s twenty-five institutions with tenure on how many reviews it has done in the past five years, how many were deemed successful, and how many led to negative consequences. Only three schools had a below 90 percent success rate and two of those schools only had a handful of cases. The system overall success rate for post-tenure reviews was 96 percent from more than 3,100 reviews conducted.
Just looking at those numbers, one might think the current policy is a success. But the dark cloud in the data is the number of negative or unsuccessful remediations. While small in number compared to the overall total of reviews, the percentage of faculty finishing the improvement plan is strikingly low. The system total was 39 percent. About 60 percent of the remediation plans were given to faculty at the state’s R1 institutions. While that aligns with the percentage of reviews done at those institutions, clearly the burden of post-tenure review lands on the research-heavy schools.
Something is amiss in Georgia. But what to do about it? As we pleaded with the working group before it started, if post-tenure review must be a policy, let it be solely a peer review.
Matthew Boedy is the president of the Georgia state AAUP conference and associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia.
Well… I do understand that post tenure review can be problematic.. However, I dont see the main problem as the review per se, it is that workload criteria are often “one size fits all” so that everyone with tenure in a department has the same job expectations in regard to teaching research and service. This works OK in a teaching intensive institution, however, this does not handle the reality that it is difficult to maintain a highly productive research career over 40+ years, especially in a field with expensive research that requires high levels of grant funding to support. There are fads in what research is fundable, gaps in funding that may come from bad luck (or agency budget contraction like occurred during the financial crisis) and also the reality that it can be almost impossible to get back into funded research if you have more than a year or two of productivity gap. This yields folks who have a 50% workload in research who are unable to actually do any research in a field, and any “remediation” of this lack of research productivity is essentially impossible because NSF or NIH etc are not going to fund a mid career or senior investigator with a productivity gap.
The most humane thing to do for an investigator in a department with lots of undergrads is to accept this fact, and allow their workload to become teaching intensive instead of trying to threaten them to do the impossible.
However, for Ph.D.s in clinical departments, the reality is that there is no work for them that is not research as there is very little teaching there. So, the choices are to find them teaching gigs in other colleges, or to terminate them for not doing the job they are paid to do. That may be unfortunate, but the only other choice is to continue to pay someone who is not doing the job they were hired for.