Tenured faculty will face more scrutiny

University officials are looking to widely apply a sporadically enforced policy to hold tenured professors accountable in place of stronger measures the University Senate failed to pass last year.

The 14-year-old policy calls to review tenured faculty once every five years, mainly based on a report card written by the professor under review. Faculty and administrators have criticized the system as overly vague. But without a stronger policy on the books, Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs Ellin Scholnick said she hopes a renewed emphasis on the existing system will step up oversight.

“Most faculty are extraordinarily self-motivated,” Scholnick said, explaining the need for post-tenure review. “But that isn’t necessarily the case for everyone because people run dry in one way or another, or they need some help in fostering things when they’re running out of steam and they need a little help in redirecting themselves.”

Post-tenure review was a hallmark of the university’s Strategic Plan, a 10-year road map for increasing the institution’s national prominence. But when the University Senate considered more thorough reviews last semester, faculty senators said the plan could effectively eliminate the dearly held tenure system and voted it down.

In place of the proposal, Scholnick said the current policy will have to serve as a good start. She said called the policy poorly worded and said she would prefer faculty to have clearer channels to appeal poor reviews.

Graduate Student Government President Anu Kothari said she was concerned about a lack of clear consequences for poor performance.

Without elaborating, the current policy states reviews should “should have major influence on a faculty member’s future, and on the rewards to the faculty member.”
Still, Kothari agreed the revisiting the policy was a step in the right direction.

“I think it’s high time it was implemented,” Kothari said. “I think that in all the talk of this being a research institution, teaching is being overlooked severely, to the extent that people drawing six-figure salaries in several departments are trying to shrug off their teachings loads.”

Senate Chair Elise Miller-Hooks said the new approach could burden faculty with additional work.

“If full-scale reviews are completed for all faculty every five years, as I believe the policy indicates, the people required to complete the reviews would be so overwhelmed that they would not be able to accomplish much else in terms of their regular duties,” Miller-Hooks said in an e-mail.

Her hesitance reflects the wider skepticism about post-tenure review that faculty senators expressed last semester. Many faculty members, upset the policy allowed for poor reviews to lead to salary reductions, vehemently opposed the policy, defeated the policy by such a wide margin that counting votes wasn’t necessary.

“I think the idea that salaries could be reduced as a result of the process was the tipping point,” Ken Holum, last year’s University Senate chair said. “That’s what gave it teeth, and a lot of people were very upset with that.”

cox@umdbk.com