Tag: Tenure

  • What HR Should Know About Tenure and Academic Freedom – CUPA-HR

    What HR Should Know About Tenure and Academic Freedom – CUPA-HR

    by Julie Burrell | February 6, 2024

    From an HR perspective, faculty positions can often look very different from other professional and staff roles on campus, especially when it comes to those faculty on the tenure track. But as HR’s role in academic staffing expands, it’s critical to understand tenure and its role in supporting academic freedom, says Joerg Tiede, the director of the department of research and public policy with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). In his recent CUPA-HR webinar, Tenure: Past, Present and Future, Tiede explains the nuances of tenure and academic freedom through an HR lens. Here are some key takeaways.

    Tenure and Academic Freedom

    Tenure

    Tenure is an “indefinite appointment that can be terminated only for cause or under extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency and program discontinuation,” according to the AAUP.

    Tiede notes that this simple definition is often surprising to many in higher ed, because tenure frequently comes with other advantages, such as sabbatical or the ability to vote for or hold a position in faculty senate. But these other benefits are often part of an institution’s culture or a faculty member’s contract, rather than inherent to tenure itself.

    Academic Freedom

    Tiede stresses that tenure exists not as an individual perk, but to protect academic freedom. The AAUP defines academic freedom as “the freedom of a teacher or researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss the issues in his or her academic field, and to teach or publish findings without interference from political figures, boards of trustees, donors, or other entities.” The concept of academic freedom applies to faculty members’ speech and writing on campus as teachers and advisors, in their research, and in their “intramural speech” (e.g., institutional governance) and “extramural speech” (e.g., when speaking as a citizen).

    The AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure is the most widely adopted description of both academic freedom and tenure at institutions of higher education.

    Non-Tenure-Track Faculty

    Not all professors have or are eligible for tenure, including non-tenure-track faculty who may work full time as salaried employees with benefits but are not eligible for tenure. An example of this kind of faculty may be someone whose job functions involve instruction rather than a mix of instruction and research. Other non-tenure-track faculty include adjuncts, who are paid per course and typically do not have a benefits package. The breakdown of who is eligible for tenure differs by institution, with some institutions not having a tenure system at all. See the AAUP’s data on the academic workforce.

    The Future of Tenure and Academic Freedom

    “Tenure is indispensable to the success of an institution,” says Tiede. This is because academic freedom not only strengthens individual institutions by protecting the teaching and research of faculty, but also upholds the public good. The AAUP’s FAQs on academic freedom states: “Those teaching and researching in higher education need academic freedom because the knowledge produced and disseminated in colleges and universities is critical for the development of society and for the health of a democracy, an idea often expressed by the phrase ‘for the common good’ or ‘for the public good.’” In theory, tenure shields faculty from political or religious agendas. It also protects tenured faculty who work in areas that are or may become controversial.

    Tiede notes that academic freedom would be made secure with more broadly inclusive tenure policies. One way this can be accomplished is by converting non-tenure-track positions into tenure-track positions, with the AAUP recommending “only minor changes in job description.” In particular, the conversion of teaching-focused positions from non-tenure-track to tenure-track is recommended. Though tenure is often tied to research accomplishments, Tiede and the AAUP do not view this as inherent to the definition of tenure.

    A more inclusive tenure process also includes reviewing for implicit bias. In breaking down who is tenured or on the tenure track, CUPA-HR has found that more women faculty are represented in non-tenure-track roles than in tenure-track roles. Moreover, with each increase in rank, the proportions of women faculty and faculty of color decrease for both tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty. Taken together, this means that women are over-represented in the lowest-paying and lowest-ranking positions.

    Who gets tenured also has implications for pay equity. Faculty pay raises are commonly tied to promotion and tenure, which is often the only time faculty see a significant increase in their salary. When there is bias in promoting women and faculty of color to successive ranks, this results in career earnings gaps.

    Additional Resources

    Watch Tiede’s webinar, Tenure: Past, Present and Future, which covers the origins and history of tenure and answers HR-specific questions, like whether academic freedom applies to provocative posts on social media and how best to nurture a merit-based culture within a tenure system.

    CUPA-HR’s Toolkit on Academic Freedom contains real-world examples of academic freedom policies at various institutions.

    In Opening Doors for Strategic Partnerships With Academic Leadership, Gonzaga University’s HR pros explain how they cultivated the relationship between HR and the campus community, including leveraging the power of HR champions on their campus.

    Check out CUPA-HR’s e-learning courses, including Boot Camp, which offers a higher ed perspective on essential HR topics, and Understanding Higher Education, which is designed to help all employees be more effective in their roles by developing a deeper understanding of institutional structure and culture.

    Ways to support an increasingly contingent faculty workforce are explored in the article The Way Forward: Envisioning New Faculty Models for a Changing Professoriate. The focus is on The Delphi Project, part of the University of Southern California’s Pullias Center for Higher Education, which explores how non-tenure-track faculty working conditions are tied to student success.



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  • CLASS BIAS AND RANDOM THINGS LAW REVIEW: DRAFT Excerpt from “In the Company of Thieves”: The Tenure Process

    CLASS BIAS AND RANDOM THINGS LAW REVIEW: DRAFT Excerpt from “In the Company of Thieves”: The Tenure Process

     

    Law professors are evaluated to determine if they should be tenured. Supposedly you must excel in scholarship, teaching, and service. You would think that if someone actually excelled at all three, he or she would be hired away by better law schools. Very few are. Why? Because in actuality there are three requirements:

    1.
    write something – anything would do,

    2.
    be politically correct, (or very quiet),

    3,
    be acceptable socially.

    (4.
    I have also heard isolated inane standards like “she is a good mother.” but these usually do not count.)

    As noted, decent teaching is supposed to count but I have seen many instances in which awful
    teaching was explained away as actually an indication of good teaching.     To
    determine      a candidate’s teaching there
    are class visitations by 2 or 3 professors and the students fill out anonymous
    evaluation forms at the end of the semester. Not wanting to offend someone who
    may get life time employment if they meet the above “standards” the visitors
    uniformly say the teacher was brilliant, engaging, showed respect for the
    students and so on. One has to keep in mind that the professor knows in advance
    who is coming and when. Not to be well prepared and energetic those days would
    mean you are an idiot. Still, there are some who go one step beyond. For
    example, at one point several students asked me why their professor gave the
    same lecture day after day. As it turns out these were the days when there were class visitation, and I suppose he had the one lecture down perfectly.

    The
    students fill out evaluations at the end of each semester. These are pretty
    much ignored whether high or low if one passes the three part test above. On
    the other hand, if they are low to average, they become the hammer to justify
    getting rid of the candidate who fails the three part test. But even here, many
    professors do not want to leave student evaluations to chance. I have seen
    professors going into classes with the forms the students must fill out in one
    hand and platters of cookies or boxes of pizza in the other. Sometimes the
    bribes are so shameful that even the students know what is up but this does not
    discourage them accepting the bribe. One professor would sponsor a softball
    game in the afternoon for his class followed by cocktails at a local pub. The
    tab could run in excess of $1000 dollars. There are far more subtle bribes like
    not calling on students and appearing to be deeply concerned about their
    welfare when you could not care less. One very subtle effort involves handing out your own evaluations a day
    or two before the official ones. A colleague who does this says it takes the
    sting out of what the students may say on the official evaluations and illustrates how seriously he or she takes teaching.

    Faculty
    who are able to turn evaluations into popularity polls take high evaluations to
    mean they are good teachers. Yet, the vast majority of studies find that there
    is no correlation between student evaluations and student learning. In fact, some
    find students of the highly rated professors actually learn less than those who
    have professors rated lower. Actually no one knows what student evaluations
    indicate. One interesting study showed students very short silent movies of
    teacher and asked them to evaluate them. After the course, they also filled
    out evaluations and they were about the same as the first set. One
    interpretation was that the students were responding to body language and
    facial expressions as much as anything else.

    If
    the whole evaluation of teaching process is a joke it stands right beside the
    evaluation of scholarship. I am pretty sure if someone wrote nothing, not even
    doodles in napkins at Starbucks he or she would not get tenure. I am just as
    sure that a person who writes next to nothing but satisfies the three part test
    described above will be tenured. There are two things at work here. Letters are
    sent out to experts in the field. It’s a small honor or form of recognition to
    be asked to review someone’s scholarship. Like many things in the law professor
    world, it is something people want to be asked to do but pretend that it is
    burdensome. And, it is actually burdensome to those who are popular reviewers.
    Who are the popular reviewers? Typically, they are people who write positive
    reviews. Who are the unpopular reviewers? Reviewers who are honest. The popular
    ones use terms like “rising star,” “insightful,” “major contribution,” etc. The
    unpopular ones are not afraid to say unoriginal, not carefully researched, a
    repetition of his or her earlier work.

    It
    is not a stretch to say there is something of a market for letters. Tenure and
    promotion committees want positive reviews for those passing the three part test.
    If someone fails the three part test they would prefer negative reviews. But
    negative reviews are hard to come by. Why? Because if you write  negative reviews you may not be asked again
    and, remember, being asked is a feather in your cap.

    There
    s a second factor in this letter solicitation process. What happens if someone
    passes the three part test and a negative letter slips through. The negative
    letter is either ignored or is subject to scrutiny with the result being that is is rejected. Let’s take the case of a professor who I believe had the most expensive
    education available in American – Exeter, Princeton, Harvard — a nice
    enough guy who fits in the category discussed later of law professors who
    really do not want to be law professors so they change the job. He passed the
    three part test. In fact, one colleague noted  how upsetting it would be
    socially if he were denied tenured. His specialty was writing about meditation.  A negative letter came in observing that one of his articles was in large part the same as an earlier
    article the reviewer had been asked to review for promotion. In this case, the faculty ignored
    the letter. The recycling of an idea was not addressed. In some cases, the
    treachery is especially extreme. We call the collection of review letters a “packet.”
    I have seen packets that included quite negative reviews and the committee
    making a recommendation to the faculty has said “all the letters were positive”
    and no one uttered a word because the three part test was passed with flying
    colors. 

    Remember,
    these are law professors so they will often game the system. They may tell the
    committee doing the evaluations who not to ask for a letter and who to ask for
    a letter. It can get pretty extreme. One well know professor/politician was
    said to have mailed drafts of an article to possible reviewers before hand to make
    sure when the reviewer received the manuscript to review they would, in effect,
    be reviewing themselves.

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  • Academic Freedom, Tenure & the U.S. Higher Education System – GlobalHigherEd

    Academic Freedom, Tenure & the U.S. Higher Education System – GlobalHigherEd

    This entry is available via Inside Higher Ed as well.

    ~~~~~~~~~

    2015 is surely one of the most momentous years in a long time regarding debates about tenure, academic freedom, the Wisconsin Idea, budget cuts, etc. Yesterday’s balanced article (‘Tenure or Bust‘) by Colleen Flaherty, in Inside Higher Ed, is but the latest of a series of nuanced pieces Ms. Flaherty has produced this year about the unfolding of higher education debates in this Midwest U.S. state of 5.75 million people.

    While I’m immersed in the tumult as a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I can’t help standing back and trying to look at the big picture. Studying, living, working, and visiting a range of other countries, including universities in Canada, England, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and France, as well as being based in the U.S. since 2001, often engenders a drive to compare. And when comparing and reflecting upon what this wonderful university and the state/national higher education system (systems, in reality) has to offer, I increasingly think too much is taken for granted, or assumed. This is a relatively risk-oriented society, and I’m struck by how many people (including many of of the people leaving comments below ‘Tenure or Bust‘) assume the system is ‘broken,’ resiliency can be counted upon, and mechanisms to turn the system on a dime exist, if searched for long enough. They also ignore path dependency, and prior developmental trajectories and agendas, the ones that have led us to where we are now, a nation that has some of the strongest and most dynamic universities in the world. Problems and weaknesses exist, of course, but people in Wisconsin and the U.S. more broadly don’t seem to know just how many other countries are desperate to create just the types of universities that exist here.

    And what are some of the deep (core) principles and conditions that have led to the creation of so many world-class universities and higher education systems (at the state-scale) in Wisconsin and the U.S. more broadly? This question brings me to the words of Hanna Holborn Gray, the esteemed president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993. In conference panel comments reprinted in the Summer 2009 issue of Social Research, Hanna Holborn Gray deemed universities to be a very important and special institution:

    …the only institution in our world, that is, as it were, commissioned to always take a longer-term look. The only institution in our world that is commissioned, so to speak, to concentrate on the mission of discovery and learning, and the transmission of learning, on the elaboration and interpretation and debate over important ideas, over what is most important in the cultural world.

    Emeritus President Holborn Gray then begged the question: “What is it that makes that profession or vocation possible? And what is it that makes the institution in which it is carried on a genuine institution?”

    Her question was actually answered 115 years earlier to this day (18 December 1900), by the founding president of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, in his ‘36th Quarterly Statement of the President of the University’:

    When for any reason, in a university on private foundation or in a university supported by public money, the administration of the institution or the instruction in any one of its departments is changed from an influence from without; when an effort is made to dislodge an officer or a professor because the political sentiment or the religious sentiment of the majority has undergone a change, at that moment the institution has ceased to be a university, and it cannot again take its place in the rank of universities so long as their continues to exist any appreciable extent of coercion. Neither an individual, nor the state, nor the church has the right to interfere with the search for truth, or with its promulgation when found. Individuals, or the state, or the church may found schools for propagating certain kinds of special instruction, but such schools are not universities, and may not be so denominated.

    Genuine ‘universities’ like the University of Chicago and those that make up the University of Wisconsin System are associated with conditions of autonomy, and are spaces that respect and uphold academic freedom. And from the faculty perspective, academic freedom is significantly realized via the mechanism of tenure, which enables faculty to focus upon things like “establishing revolutionary theories about economics” (one of Milton Friedman’s many contributions in Chicago), the sustained basic research that underlies the creation of the iPhone (that the University of Wisconsin-Madison contributed to), challenging research questions related to democratization, authoritarianism, sexuality or violence, complex global challenges such as climate change, and so on. And in so doing, these faculty members (in association with staff & students) play a major role in creating the conditions that have helped us facilitate the formation of one of the world’s first university-linked technology transfer units (WARF) in 1925, through to generating research activity and spin-off firms that has made the Madison city-region one of the US’s most advanced industrial bases (according to the Brookings Institution in 2015) — a now common process of geographical concentration that the World Bank and others (e.g., David Warsh) note is inevitable, but defacto functions as ‘engines’ for regional and national economies.

    I have no doubt the vast majority of the University of Chicago’s current faculty would make the same argument I am above: after all, that great university’s leadership has been doing so since it was founded 125 years ago in 1890. Visionary leaders like William Rainey Harper and Hanna Holborn Gray were aware that the long and challenging road to build one of the most dynamic and powerful higher education systems in the world depended upon more than platitudes about ‘academic freedom’ – academic freedom actually had (and has) to be realized each and every day.

    Kris Olds

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  • Reflections on Tenure in Canada vs Wisconsin – GlobalHigherEd

    Reflections on Tenure in Canada vs Wisconsin – GlobalHigherEd

    This entry is available at Inside Higher Ed as well.

    ~~~~~~

    In the context of some intense debates about tenure in the University of Wisconsin System, and at UW-Madison, I’ve been acquiring some interesting information and views about tenure and related governance matters in Canada vs Wisconsin. Reflections and data have been kindly provided by Canadian leaders representing faculty and university administrative bodies, both nationally and in select universities.

    Why focus on this issue in comparative perspective? First, leading Canadian universities (UBC, Toronto, Waterloo, McGill) have been poaching faculty from UW and could increasingly do so if proposed changes to tenure do not match existing standards/AAUP guidelines. Second, looking at different systems in a comparative way helps you realize what is working well here in WI, but also what might need to be changed, especially if higher education governance becomes more politicized in Wisconsin (as it has been in states like North Carolina).

    In the end, it is similar and different in Canadian peer universities vs what we experience in WI. I think the biggest difference is it is more unionized in Canada (for ~80% of the faculty base) and the details re. tenure and layoffs are embedded in collective agreements. This said, some faculty associations at peers – the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, McMaster University, and McGill University – though not officially certified as labour unions, nevertheless have negotiated collective agreements with standard grievance and arbitration procedures. Also, in Canada, the majority of part-time faculty are unionized and staff are unionized. It just goes to show you don’t necessarily need regulations re. tenure embedded in the state statutes (or equivalent) to guarantee strong tenure and shared governance, but, this said, there are other key differences (see below) so how it is all configured matters, a lot…

    In the end, no tenured faculty in Canadian universities (including 100% of our peers, the ones poaching our faculty) lose tenure except for engaging in serious forms of unethical behavior (i.e. ‘due cause’). Exigency-related rules do apply but it has not happened, to date, for all sorts of reasons. And if exigency-related layoffs of tenured faculty were to be proposed, it happens at a broader university-scale and the guidelines typically state that a task-force is to be appointed with diverse membership and/or it can only happen in specified ways.

    The other big (and important) difference is program-related changes are run through Canadian university senates and the senate is typically made up of senior administrators and elected faculty (the majority), staff, students, etc. See these senate membership lineups, for example:

    The UW Board of Regents equivalent in Canadian universities does not need to sign off on program-related changes like the Board of Regents does here. So decisions on closure or redundancy are senate decisions (i.e. the locus of engagement and control is intra-institutional in nature). And in unionized environments, redundancy procedure, after senate has declared program closure, etc., are governed by collective agreement processes. In general the UW Board of Regents here in WI has not been too involved in the fine-grained details of program-related decisions or the funding of centers – they approve what has come up via shared governance pathways. But they could, in the future, become far more active and micro-management in orientation.

    On a related note, boards of trustees or equivalent in Canada are university-specific and are more diverse and relatively autonomous from government involvement. You basically have government funded but privately (not-for-profit) autonomous universities. This keeps things less capital P political. The proposed New Badger Partnership (2011) Board of Trustees:

    UW-Madison governed by 21-member Board of Trustees, including 11 members appointed by the Governor, with no Senate confirmation. Remaining 10 members represent UW-Madison constituencies (faculty, staff, classified staff, alumni, WARF). All remaining UW campuses governed by the current Board of Regents.

    would have brought us half way to to this level of board autonomy vs the current system, though this proposed approach to governance should have also been applied to the UW System more generally and not just UW-Madison.

    Thus, what you see is a relatively more autonomous/less politicized university and higher ed governance system in Canada; one where the norms of tenure and academic freedom are sometimes constructed via agreements but often are just part of institutional-organizational culture. The faculty trust the system more, I would say, than they do here now in what could become, if we don’t watch out, a hyper-politicized context. And they do so partly because of the unionized context, the codified agreements, and the fact the premier (governor equivalent) and the ruling party (or parties) tend to be much more hands-off. Increasingly, in Canada, governments through sector-wide bargaining or recalibrating funding formula, or setting tuition fee parameters, are exercising more hands on approaches. Budgets are, of course, political, but they’re just budgets for the most part and they don’t embed policy matters re tenure into budgetary processes in Canada like it has been happening here. It’s a more deliberative context: not perfect, this said, just more deliberative in structure.

    The short-term take-away: don’t have unclear terms and procedures in a context where the potential exists for an increasingly more politicized and micro-management-oriented Board of Regents. Maintain tenure standards at UW-Madison and other universities in the UW System that match, in spirit and meaning, what they were before policy changes were injected into the Spring 2015 Wisconsin state budget. Faculty should not lose tenure except for ‘due cause’, as per AAUP guidelines. If program closure occurs after careful consideration by university-specific governance bodies, tenured faculty should have the right to shift to the unit of their choice, or become a professor of the school or college they are affiliated with. It is a clear and straightforward definition of tenure, and academic freedom, that helped make the US university system so well known, globally, for the production of innovative forms of knowledge. Unclear terms and procedures re. tenure has serious potential to destabilize the foundation of the entire system. And Canadian universities, not to mention hundreds of other US universities, will be salivating if this occurs.

    The medium-term take-away: think about the potential role of faculty senates in future debates/steps. And think about tenure and shared governance in the context of the overall governance of the UW System (incl. what has been happening, and what should be happening). In my mind we have a legacy-based governance system that does not reflect the new realities of fiscal (tuition as a majority funding stream), economic (a globalizing knowledge economy), academic, and societal contexts. An unraveling of tenure in the next year will be a proxy indicator the entire UW System governance structure needs to be rethought.

    We are, arguably, at risk of seeing the convergence of a legacy-based governance system with a more forceful and explicit political agenda – and this is not beneficial for a world-class university, and a world-class multi-campus state university system, in the 21st century.  Anchor tenure, tightly.

    Kris Olds

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