Last spring I signed 18 letters to faculty members that stated, in part: “I am pleased to inform you that the Board of Trustees approved my recommendation that you be granted tenure.”
Those otherwise formulaic letters held a special significance, particularly the words referring to my recommendation. It marked the first time I had made my recommendations based not only upon the candidates’ dossiers, as has been traditional here at the University of Toledo, but also based on a 30-minute personal interview I had with each tenure candidate. I learned much from those interviews.
I learned that there is wide variation across the university in the volume of published material that departments have decided qualifies a candidate for tenure. That was clear from the dossiers but was underscored in the interviews. In some departments a corpus of several peer-reviewed writings is expected; in others a publication requirement hardly seems to exist. Furthermore, the degree to which other forms of communication, such as artistic performance or a work of visual art, may offset a publication requirement is not codified at all.
I learned that in the 21st century, tenure is much less about academic freedom than it is about job security. Particularly fearful to candidates is the six-year, up-or-out anachronism to which our university still subscribes. Those fears are understandable in light of the great difficulty of selling a house now in Toledo as well as the situation of the academic job market in many disciplines.
I learned much about new and fascinating fields, and that knowledge left me feeling, throughout the 18 interviews, that I was the winner in the conversations. I learned about magnetorheology, a phenomenon I did not know existed. I learned that the piezoelectric shape change can be driven at many cycles per second. I learned that structuring questions for children, whether for a medical history or in a courtroom, has a critical body of knowledge associated with it, and that we have a world-recognized leader in that field on the campus. I learned that the intervals on the standard Likert scale—say between “good” and “very good"—are not linearly progressive, and that great care must be taken in developing those instruments.
I also learned some things from the interviews that have saddened me. I learned that disabled people are sometimes subjected to violent vituperation and abuse, and that hate crimes against the disabled are not uncommon. That is apparently related to our fear and abhorrence of disability.
Over all, I learned so much that I felt indebted to those 18 wonderful people who became tenured faculty members at the university.
However, a president can hardly justify disrupting the placidity of the university just to enjoy learning something. Being privately tutored is not one of the listed perquisites of the job. I decided to conduct personal interviews with each tenure applicant because they are a minimal and appropriate exercise of presidential responsibility. In previous years, I always felt vaguely guilty about basing my tenure recommendations merely upon written material.
I first announced my intention to interview tenure candidates on October 26, 2009, in a note to our provosts. At that time, I wrote in an e-mail: “In view of the net present value commitment inherent in the granting of tenure, I propose to interview personally all applicants for tenure.” I estimate the value of tenure for a 40-year-old faculty member to be in the range of $2.5-million. More important, in the ordinary course of events, a tenured faculty member has an impact on the institution for two or three decades.
The reaction to my announcement was interesting. I now understand why tenure has been called the “third rail” of higher education. Many reactions from the faculty were extremely negative. Indeed, one blog post criticizing my decision to hold the interviews made a vague but threatening reference to the murder of three faculty members at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, a tragedy in which tenure denial may have been a factor.
Other faculty members were less critical and suggested that the interview could be construed as an opportunity to showcase their work and to build a positive relationship with the university president. I, of course, subscribe to that view.
A number of interesting issues surfaced in the ensuing conversation. Some faculty members alleged that I am intimidating, and that tenure candidates would be disadvantaged by that. I was nonplussed to think that people as accomplished as these candidates would be intimidated by an aging person who knows nothing about their specific fields. Other objectors believed that biases, conscious or unconscious, would be injected into the process, even suggesting the possibility of racial stereotypes coming into the interview process. I have argued that I interview deans and vice presidents, why not candidates for lifetime employment?
The questions I asked in the interviews were standard: Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your research. Do you enjoy teaching? Do you think that there is, in fact, a revolution going on in higher education? The candidates handled them with ease; indeed, they hit them out of the ballpark.
The Faculty Senate passed two separate resolutions opposing my idea. In the first of them they asked me to “reconsider.” I did. I consulted mentors and advisers, and lost sleep over the reconsideration. In the end, however, I came out in the same place. I cannot, in good faith, make a $2.5-million decision that will affect the institution for decades to come without doing all the due diligence such a decision requires.
On February 16, 2010, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution with 37 votes in favor, nine opposed, and one abstention. The resolution included the statement: “The University of Toledo Faculty Senate wishes to express in the strongest possible terms its disapproval of the President’s decision to interview tenure candidates prior to approving their application.”
That was preceded on February 15 by an open letter from faculty members to the university’s trustees, published in The Independent Collegian, our off-campus newspaper. The letter stated, in part, that “however appealing to commonsense notions it [a presidential interview] might be, it is not a ‘usual’ part of the assessment of tenure candidates.”
The university’s board rejected those arguments and formally stated its support of the interviews on March 15. One other piece of encouragement came from John Silber, president emeritus at Boston University. In a kind letter, he wrote: “My congratulations on your decision to interview every faculty member up for tenure. I followed a similar policy at Boston University.”
In view of the controversy my decision caused last year, I made what might seem to be a cowardly decision—and certainly a pragmatic and expedient one. I decided to recommend tenure for all 18 candidates unless they were clearly unqualified. There were no candidates who could be so described. Of the 18, there were two whose work I thought was marginal, but I put them forward anyway. I judged those two candidates to be marginal against a very traditional criterion: excessively slim publishing records.
No utterance or gesture from any of the candidates during the interviews caused me to even pause.
So I’m planning to interview tenure candidates again this academic year, and I am resolved to raise the bar. I am prepared to make a negative recommendation if I encounter a marginal candidate.
I find myself looking forward to the interviews. My hope is that I will again be enchanted by learning something new; that I’ll have the pleasure of meeting new acquaintances; and that I will contribute, however infinitesimally, to the university’s pursuit of excellence.