BY MATTHEW BOEDY
As attacks on higher education and tenure spread, it behooves faculty to make sure stakeholders such as legislators know the facts about tenure.
The most common reasoning for post-tenure review is the myth of the “deadwood” tenured professor. We on campus have always known it is a myth. But now the very institutions who used that myth to gut tenure are acknowledging that.
This week the University System of Georgia – which remains under AAUP censure for its tenure policy that erased faculty rights in termination hearings – reported data on the first cohort of faculty reviewed under that censured policy. While the system has had post-tenure review for decades, the system revised its policy in 2021 because it claimed it needed better ways to identify those mythical lazy professors.
Across the four sectors of schools in the system, 694 tenured faculty were reviewed last year. Only 23 failed.
The definition of failure is important here. There are four areas by which tenured faculty are judged and if they are deemed unsuccessful in one area, their whole review is deemed unsuccessful. That math doesn’t work in the classroom and one wonders why it applies to faculty.
But the point is clear: these failures may be only in one area. What is missing in terms of faculty action is given to them in an improvement plan. Only if a faculty member fails to do that plan do they face the possibility of termination.
The termination process is why the system is on the AAUP censure list. A final hearing is no longer a place for faculty peers to judge the merits of the possible termination, but a faculty committee is given purview only to note if “due process” had been followed up to that point. Tenure as a collection of academic due process rights was gutted when that change was made. As far as I know Georgia remains the only state to have such a policy.
To justify its changes in 2021 the Georgia system did a survey of post-tenure review for the previous five years.
That old survey of more than 3,100 faculty showed a failure rate of 4 percent system-wide.
I am sure the system would argue the changes worked. I say the opposite: the changes were not needed.
First, if the goal was to identify underperforming faculty there are way less this time.
Consider this stat: In the old survey seven of 25 schools had a 100 percent pass rate. In the new survey, 16 had a perfect rate.
At some schools, the failure rate halved. For example in that old survey, Georgia Tech had a failure rate of 5 percent, 23 out of 572 faculty. In the new survey, it had a failure rate of 2.3 percent, 2 out of 87. Nearly the same difference at University of Georgia: 3 percent in old survey, 1.7 percent in new one.
A second reason why post-tenure review fails at its own goal: we are most likely talking about the same professors in both studies.
In Georgia, faculty who are tenured are reviewed under post-tenure review every five years. A professor up for promotion to full professor five years after getting tenure won’t be reviewed under post-tenure review until another five years have passed. We are mostly talking about a review that happens in the second half of a 30-year career.
If a person was reviewed in 2018-2019 as part of that older five-year survey, they would have been in the cohort for this new, smaller one-year study.
Less failures in the same data set tells me that tenured faculty in Georgia are hardly underperforming.
And let’s not forget those miniscule few identified as underperforming in the old survey and who didn’t change are likely no longer with the system. If the whole point of the review is to identify and help underperforming professors, failing twice isn’t an option.
The raw numbers are astonishing at all levels. Consider in the new survey six faculty at R1s failed, out of 305. At R2s, there were nine failures, out of 207, thereby doubling the percent of failures. But 8 came from one school. That same school had one less failure across five years than the total in this one-year study. There is a problem there. But it’s likely not faculty performance.
Post-tenure review was justified to identify underperforming faculty. Despite the clear method of annual reviews already available, this other review has persisted because of the attacks on tenure. And those attacks have been centered on not merely activist professors protected with lifetime job security, but lazy ones who use years-old lecture notes or haven’t published in years.
The reality is far different.
Contributing editor Matthew Boedy is the president of the Georgia conference of the AAUP and works at the University of North Georgia. He can be reached through email or his Twitter account @matthewboedy.
