= Premium Content

  • Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Previous

Next

Few Fail Post-Tenure Reviews at U. of Texas System

October 17, 2011, 10:15 am

Only about 2 percent of tenured faculty members across the University of Texas system received “unsatisfactory” grades in post-tenure reviews in recent years, and there are few, if any, firm sanctions for those who fall short in teaching, research, or service, according to an analysis by the Austin American-Statesman.

The newspaper studied five years’ worth of unsatisfactory post-tenure reviews, as well as the most recent year’s worth of all reviews. Faculty productivity is a hot-button issue in this state, where critics have charged that faculty members spend too much time on esoteric research and not enough time in the classroom; others counter that those charges are simplistic and misleading. Francisco G. Cigarroa, chancellor of the University of Texas system, recently unveiled a sweeping plan that includes calls for more openness about productivity and stronger post-tenure reviews.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

  • Print
  • Comment
  • davi2665

    Post-tenure review is a total joke, put in place to justify an antiquated tenure system and to try to satisfy those who realize that tenure is a guaranteed lifetime employment arrangement, no matter how unproductive and incompetent a person may be.  If a post-tenure review actually held faculty to the same levels of productivity, excellence, grant funding, publication, as required initially to obtain the tenure, the figure of unsatisfactory post-tenure review would probably be more like 40-50%. 

  • goodeyes

    I work 60 to 70 hour weeks as a tenured professor. 

  • 22038540

    I wonder who would run degree programs, serve in academic governance positions, undertake multi-year projects, or even try anything new in classroom if they knew that there was a 1-in-2 chance of dismissal every five years. Actually, we’re going to find out, as the percentage of adjuncts rises to a critical mass. I find that the greatest failure of the tenure system is that institutions decline to make use of tenured teachers who could be doing something else in the institution elsewhere.

  • jeffgryan

    Actually, if it were higher I’d worry about the hiring and tenuring processes at UT.   A university makes a very big investment in any new faculty hire – they pretty much guarantee they can’t be fired for 6-7 years barring unlawful behavior or gross incompetence (where else in the employment world is that true?), and in the case of science or engineering faculty they provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in infrastructural support for laboratories as well.  With that much money on the line, good institutions make darned sure that the person they hire is not only good now, but will be good for the long haul.  A high rate of post-tenure failure would mean they weren’t getting the best folks.

    Most critiques of tenure presume that it’s about job security, which is simply wrong.  Tenure is the process by which one earns the right to say unpopular things because the evidence indicates it to be so, without fear of reprisal from a supervisor or even one’s peers.  Tenured faculty can’t be fired for saying things people in power don’t want heard, but they can be terminated for every other reason that anyone else can from any other job.  Anyone who doesn’t believe that needs to look at what’s happened at Florida State or UF during the FL housing bust, or any New Orleans-based college after Katrina.

  • profjrdn

    davi2665′s hypothesis shouldn’t be too hard to test.  Not sure how you measure “productivity” or “excellence” [A&M System schools measure these by bodies in seats, how many passed,, whether your students like you a lot on student evaluations, and did you have enough students in those seats that with your grant money would fund your salary].  But, grant funding, publications, and classes taught are probably public via the online vitae required by the state.  I look forward to your analysis davi2665.  Oh, don’t forget to control for the administrative work that faculty end up doing more of with experience.

    On the other hand, if I had to maintain the 6-7 day week (and don’t forget nights) that I had to work to get tenure over a longer period of time, frankly, I would have changed careers a long time ago.   Oh, wait, I am working that many hours this term.  I beg you to make me an hourly employee and pay overtime rather than as an exempt employee.  I suspect that all of a sudden, my bosses would consider me too productive. 

    For those wanting to enter academic fields, you might want to look outside of Texas for obvious reasons.

  • puretoo

    What’s the % at other institutions and/or in other systems? Is 2% comparatively low, or about average?

  • la_profesora

    What?  You mean 8-12 years of college, comprehensive exams, writing a dissertation, publishing-or-perishing, peer review, and achieving tenure actually weeds out most of the incompetents?  Who’d have thunk?  Maybe our educational system works after all…

  • szielinski

    As an undergraduate student I watched while a large group of tenured professors suffer through a long phase of cognitive dissonance because their jobs were on the chopping block. As a former union member who had been laid off, I knew about some of what they were suffering. But I  never believed that my job or, for that matter, any job was permanent. My culture spared me from their cognitive dissonance but not the unemployment some of them confronted when the review process came to an end.

  • 11159766

    It isn’t clear to me why it is scandalous news that “only about 2 percent” receive unsatisfactory ratings — for the most part, faculty are hard working and in any case annually reviewed. The way the short article is written, these results are made to sound like an evasion or cover-up, as if a successful post-tenure review system would sweep away large numbers of faculty. This is gotcha journalism, according to which, by implication, large numbers would prove faculty are incompetent; small numbers would indicate somebody is protecting incompetents.

  • prof291

    Promotion to full professor typically requires at least the same amount of productivity as promotion and tenuring at the associate professor level, and moreover at a large university requires a progressively increasing reputation. It’s no surprise that most faculty do not “fail” their post-tenure reviews. There is no evidence for post-tenure slacking.

  • dopefein

    Where in the world do you get that 40-50% figure? You just pulled that out of hat because it felt good to you.  Why, oh why, are people discussing this issue who appear to know nothing about academic promotion and tenure? When you receive tenure, you may or may not receive promotion, and even if you do, you do not make it to full professor without showing at least as much as, if not more, work and productivity as it took to get tenure in the first place.  So, from the beginning of your career, to tenure, and then on to full professor, you are looking at at least 10, often 15 or even 20 years of “proving” yourself.  davi2665, what do you do for a living? I would like to know because you haven’t a clue what you are talking about here.

  • starrett

    Little factoids like a two percent failure rate on post-tenure reviews aren’t very meaningful, since we lack a general frame of reference that would indicate that the number is either too high or too low (hence the arguments above over the meaning of the statistic).

    Even asking about what the numbers are in other state systems means little, since the requirements and processes for the reviews are very different from state to state, and sometimes even institution to institution. Some universities, for example, require outside letters for PTR cases–nearly a re-tenuring–while others require merely department-level review.

  • profmomof1

    I’m not at all surprised by these findings. I encounter very few faculty members in my institution who are lazy and unproductive. The type of person who does all that is required to obtain a highly-competitive tenture track job, then does everything required to earn tenure, is highly unlikely to suddenly become unproductive and incompetent just because he or she is now tenured. There’s the occasional person. Though Profjrdn is absolutely right that few people can maintain permanently the 7-days a week pace that was required through grad school and tenure efforts, without hitting burnout. At some point we all need to slow down enough to start and raise a family, make connections in the community, and recharge our batteries. And some end up doing fewer grants and  less research and more administration and teaching or advising; others vice-versa. We need all these types of contributions in academica.

  • cwm4c

    We do enjoy more stability than you state by, “Tenured faculty can’t be fired for saying things people in power don’t want heard, but they can be terminated for every other reason that anyone else can from any other job.”  Here’s just one example:

    http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/professor-who-flashed-woman-and-her-daughter-keeps-job/34326

    There are many more.  Tenure and union contracts offer much more job stability than most, and it’s not just for Freedom of Speech.

  • cwinton

    Given what is required to obtain the initial credentials, and survive the rather brutal process of obtaining tenure, why should anyone be surprised that reviews post-tenure show as few as 2 out of 100 performing unsatisfactorily.  Critics should keep in mind that most of these folks have a history of being achievers.  Sure, some do better than others, and by like token some abuse the system and deservedly get weeded out.  At the institutions I served in I personally was aware of several cases of tenured faculty who were quietly let go, and for good reason (poor performance, not showing up, criminal behavior, and so on).  What didn’t happen is that people were arbitrarily fired for standing up to the kind of self-serving behavior that some in authority seem to think it’s their right to indulge in.  Post-tenure review is a process, and as such has clearly stated criteria stipulating what is considered satisfactory performance, something easily achieved by almost anyone who has been awarded tenure.

  • tappat

    All of this is just to destroy fine, very fine public universities and to turn the state into a miserable, grunting, ignorant state of fearful peasant workers who die when they are spent. Not everyone thought or thinks the Dark Ages were so bad — some people actually think they were realistic and good.  Certainly, it is so much easier to destroy and make things brutish than to cultivate and make things civilized and beautiful. And this is now what the 4th estate is working toward — no more Tribunes, I see.

  • dean1114

    It is unfortunate that a few faculty slackers are defaming the reputation of so many hard working faculty. I have been on both sides of the fence, i.e., teaching/research faculty and administration, and in both positions I’ve observed that the vast majority of faculty are hard working and committed to the educational process and their research agenda. We have, however, been all too willing to avoid the unpleasant conversations, confrontations and in some cases, union actions that come with reprimanding the few problem tenured faculty. Those who are ideologically opposed to higher education use these few as the poster children for an entire profession. It is our obligation to deal with the problem people head-on in the P-T review process in order to maintain the integrity of our profession.

  • facultydiva

     The few PTR cases on my campus have been resolved with the faculty member retiring.

  • Stuart_D_Baker

    Texas made a big deal of imposing post-tenure review some years ago as an initial effort to dumb down the state’s educational institutions, which seemed on the verge of producing too many literate voters for the comfort of ambitious politicians.  The idea was to intimidate faculty, who supposedly would quake in their boots before risking the wrath of these hacks.  The process was put in place and, for the most part, made rational and appropriate, but, since major decisions were still made by faculty, the politicians, who had hoped that their bobblehead administrative appointees would serve as hatchet men, lost all interest in the process, and so did everyone else.  The process, though I opposed it when it first appeared, actually has much to offer, if it is allowed to operate without interruption from a corrupt system run by a crew of political operators.  Quality control is in itself a good thing, but will the controllers themselves be controlled by quality considerations?

  • davi2665

    I got the 40-50% figure from a couple of decades of sitting on tenure and post-tenure review committees, and watching the grant and publication productivity fall off dramatically in the post-tenure period, especially 3 or more years down the road.  I have evaluated hundreds of faculty tenure and promotion cases, and am not unfamiliar with the processes or the standards.  By the way, I received tenure very quickly in my career due to conspicuous productivity, and decided it was not worth the turmoil most people went through trying to obtain it.  In receiving several positions with full professorships, chairmanships, directorships, and higher level positions, I uniformly turned down the offer of tenure because I don’t believe in it.  If I don’t believe in it, it would be hypocritical to accept it, even if offered.  So don’t be so smug as to assume that you know what I do for a living.  I have been down the very road to which you are referring and find it wanting.  I actually prefer a business environment, where all employment is at will, guarantees do not exist, and one survives by one’s own value to the organization and one’s own competence.  I have experienced this both working for others in a business environment and in my own business, where there is NO ONE to fall back on and complain to, other than yourself.  And by the way, I continue in an academic environment because I enjoy the interactions; tenure and job protection continues to be of no interest and no value to me. 

  • procrustes

    The only scandal I can see in this article is the fact that little or nothing is apparently done about the two percent who fail.  Even though individual cases are confidential, something could have been said about how many get counseling, an improvement program, retire, or whatever.  it is indeed a failure of peer/administrative will in dealing with this that makes us look bad.

  • pnh22

    Is that you, Richard? 

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.