The University of Louisiana System’s Board of Supervisors decided unanimously today to postpone voting on changes in its tenure policy. A vote on the proposed changes, which would make it easier to dismiss tenured professors and which have drawn sharp criticism from faculty members on the system’s eight campuses, was postponed to an unspecified future meeting. The board agreed to the postponement “so the UL system staff can consult with legal counsel and consider feedback of faculty to further refine this policy and board rule changes.”
RSS
Follow The Ticker through your favorite RSS reader.
15 Responses to U. of Louisiana Board Postpones Vote on Tenure
bertnb - August 27, 2010 at 3:47 pm
It’s good that they’ve postponed the vote. However, the right thing to do is to cancel it all together. To allow budget to be used as an excuse to get rid of tenured faculty virtually eliminates ALL protections of tenure. If your university doesn’t like what you have to say or how you are teaching, all they need to say is “We don’t have the money to pay you. Sorry.”
la4097237 - August 27, 2010 at 4:17 pm
It was The Chronicle’s story this morning that was the first to hit Baton Rouge and caused the Board to “chicken out” in the attempt to eliminate tenure. Apparently the only other newspaper to carry the story was an obscure weekly on the other end of the State that would still be traveling to BR via snail mail.
owsend - August 27, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Tenure is not a gift to faculty. Getting rid of tenure will not releave you of “lazy” teachers. What it means is that senior faculty with establishes reputations will eliminate new faculty with with new ideas. Want to see politics rather than productivity in research come forward remove tenure. What this really means is stagnation. Often faculty hide their political beliefs so this may not become an issue. But it is difficult to hide that your new paper imputes the foundation of your department chairs research. With tenure, it does not matter because you still have a job. Moreover, faculty will be pressured not to find what they natually are inclined to discover justified by peer reviewed papers in the context of a diversified field of research journals but what pet research interest your chair is interested and this goes on for the rest of your career. Research is not baking bread and efforts to motivate highly selected self motivated people proven by length years of education and research in order to obtain tenure by threatening them with being fired seems counter-productive. We will lose a generation of potentially great scientists and scientific advancement on the scholes of anti-labor ideology. However you will greatly enhance the control and ease of adminstration responsibilities at the expense of research productivity. Tenure did not develop for faculty but because it allowed universities to increase their research productivity by encouraging faculty to invest long term the extraordinary complexity of basic science. Its ironic that removing tenure starts is sold as a method of removing the “lazy” faculty members and will results in the most talented foregoing doctorate studies and faculty careers.
princeton67 - August 27, 2010 at 8:17 pm
A simple solution: Every dollar donated for athletics must be matched – from the same donation, if necessary – by a dollar for academics.Currently, Head Football Les Miles makes more than $3 million/year, and his assistant head coach, about $400k. Too bad the NCAA will never adopt this equalization of donations/grants/endowments.
wabbott - August 28, 2010 at 5:05 am
Actually, we at Lincoln Parish News Online broke this story. We publshed “ULS Proposals Would Significantly Weaken Tenure” on Wednesday afternoon, August 25. See the link here.http://lincolnparishnewsonline.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/uls-proposals-would-significantly-weaken-tenure/Walter Abbott, Editor & Publisher
lowb35 - August 28, 2010 at 8:08 am
princeton67, don’t know if you know much about athletics in the UL System, but for the most part they are very underfunded and don’t compare to LSU. 2 of the 3 Div I schools in the system have the smallest athletic budgets in the country. The rest are Div II and III schools because the athletic sides of the house in these schools are generally not funded to the level to support Div I. We had a consultant recommend that my institution drop to Div II–we didn’t, but our athletic budget is not adequate for a Div I program, either. There is no robbing Peter to pay Paul here. No big Tiger Athletic Foundations like at LSU (and LSU athletics does help fund academics on that campus–if they didn’t they’d be in deeper doo doo than they are now).Higher ed in Louisiana has been fully funded for ONE YEAR in probably the last 20 or 30 years. And all that means is that the schools got what they asked for and the legislature didn’t cut their budgets mid year. It doesn’t mean they were swimming in government funds. It just means they had enough to survive. Mid year budget cuts other than that ONE YEAR has been the reality for higher ed for as long as I have been working in the system (8 years now). I know my campus plans for it every single year.
jffoster - August 28, 2010 at 10:34 am
Folks, LSU is NOT repeat NOT in the “University of Louisiana”. So the salary of Les Miles is really beside the point. The “University of Louisiana” and its board include and govern most of the former regionals called “College” back in the 50ws and 60s (excpt for UofLa-Lafayette which was U. of SW La.). LSU is an entirely separate system with a Board of Supervisors, and clearly the “flagship” of the state.
div411 - August 28, 2010 at 1:27 pm
I taught for some years at the flagship campus, LSU in Baton Rouge. The flag that it should be flying is the upside one for SOS. The worst university in the US–save for other universities (I use the term loosely) in the state like the Univ. of Louisiana. Whatever money athletics brings in to the Baton Rouge campus is more than offset by the power that football has over academics. I taught more than a few football players in my time. Some were earnest, hardworking kids who really wanted an education. But many were illiterate. They got all kinds of special help. It was clear that their essays were written for them–and for all I know their tests taken for them as well. When I was there, the “chancellor” was a former football coach who could not speak grammatical English and who wound up being forced out when he took scholarship money intended for minority students, not athletes in particular, and gave it to white football players. The university has low academic standards for both admission and hiring. Its best dept., where I was, is history, where writing a biography of a Confederate general is not only sufficient for tenure but necessary.
newsjunkie01 - August 28, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Actually, with all due respect to Mr. Abbott, some news organizations have been covering this story for quite some time. For example:http://www.hammondstar.com/articles/2010/08/27/top_stories/education/5767.txthttp://www.hammondstar.com/articles/2010/08/27/top_stories/education/5761.txtNo one knows for certain which story, if any, made the difference. The important thing is that it’s out there now.
newsjunkie01 - August 28, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Those articles were July 2 and July 22, by the way.
aburstein - August 28, 2010 at 3:51 pm
I think it very likely the protests by the LA Conference of AAUP to the Governor, Commissioner, and SACS played a significant role. Alvin Burstein, Past-president LA Conference
jffoster - August 28, 2010 at 10:34 pm
No 9, divnnn, evidently was denied tenure when he wrote a biography of a Yankee (prefix ommitted out of politeness) general.
snwiedmann - August 30, 2010 at 8:41 am
Dear owsend,Have you considered the compromise of post-tenure review? Colleagues and supervisors regularly review the compiled records of tenured faculty (every 5 years at my institution) and evaluate the performance as excellent, acceptable, or below par. There are financial repercussions for poor performance.
tappat - August 30, 2010 at 9:51 am
Really great post by owsend.
sebclibrary - September 3, 2010 at 11:32 am
It’s about time changes were made.