A decade after the University of Colorado marched in the vanguard of a tenure-accountability movement, the furor over controversial professor Ward Churchill has triggered a likely overhaul of the school’s once- groundbreaking policies.
Post-tenure review, an assessment of senior faculty at intervals of five years or possibly sooner, has long been part of CU’s academic culture. But it apparently didn’t red-flag issues regarding Churchill’s scholarship that emerged after an inflammatory line in a post-Sept. 11 essay triggered national outrage.
Questions about Churchill’s work have prompted CU to revisit all its tenure-related procedures, including the system of post-tenure review that provides administrators the tools to either shape up flagging faculty or ship them out.
Post-tenure review, like annual performance reviews, relies on evidence compiled by the faculty member and evaluated by peers in the department. The thoroughness of the reviews hinges on how each individual department approaches the process – and that’s where CU may look to tighten its policy.
“Some take it very seriously, and some of them may make it more of a pro forma review,” says Mark Alan Heckler, provost at CU’s Denver campus and chairman of the newly minted Advisory Committee on Tenure- Related Processes. “That’s part of the reason why we’re looking at the whole system. Many folks at the university think we’ve got work to do on strengthening the overall rigor of the post-tenure process.”
Already, some have proposed that reviews be done by academics outside the institution – much as candidates for tenure normally are evaluated by outside experts in their fields.
“I don’t want to say it’s a perfect process,” says Phil DiStefano, acting chancellor at CU-Boulder. “As I’m looking at it now, I do feel some external review is going to be necessary in the post-tenure review process in the future.”
A comprehensive look
Heckler’s committee, which includes members from inside and outside the university, will take what he calls a comprehensive look at CU’s policies as well as the best practices nationwide before arriving at recommendations sometime early next year.
As lawmakers and university trustees made threatening noises in the mid-1990s about doing away with tenure and its virtual guarantee of lifetime employment, academia responded – almost in chorus – with a compromise.
Post-tenure review promised something for everyone.
For tenure critics and politicians frustrated by the inability to jettison faculty slackers, it offered a measure of accountability. For faculty fearful that job security and academic freedom might be at risk, it offered a sigh of relief.
“Post-tenure review became, from a faculty perspective, a way of protecting tenure,” says Eugene Rice, a senior scholar with the Association of American Colleges and Universities who has studied tenure for years. “They said they’d have post-tenure review, but mainly it was a way to keep those short- term legislators off their backs.”
CU was among the earliest to develop a review policy, starting in the early 1980s under then-President Arnold Weber. But while that policy focused more on faculty development, the 1997 policy followed the national trend into the realm of accountability.
“Every single year, my career is being judged on whether it’s meritorious,” says Rod Muth, chairman of the faculty council and professor of educational administration at CU-Denver. “People tend not to put that into the equation. Multiple reviews are going on. It’s not like we laugh this off.”
The character of the annual review process as well as post- tenure review varies by department, says Bill Cherowitzo, a professor of math at CU-Denver.
“You will find places where people spit and scream at each other over this process,” he says. “In others, people are very congenial. … The math department I belong to is fairly nonchalant about it. We’re happy with one another.”
Aiming for accountability
The current policy not only holds tenured professors to certain standards of teaching, research and service, but also works in conjunction with annual merit reviews to goose along underperforming faculty with confidential remedial improvement plans.
Although post-tenure review generally runs on a five-year cycle, tenured faculty found to be performing below expectations in an annual review must develop either a one- or two-year performance improvement agreement, or PIA, that brings them back up to expectations.
Tenured faculty tagged with more than one “below expectations” annual rating within the previous five years immediately move to a more extensive review that includes creation of a “development plan” encompassing teaching, research or creative work, and service. A system of peer review determines whether the faculty member has succeeded, and those findings are forwarded to the dean.
Those who don’t measure up face an array of possible sanctions, including reassignment, frozen or reduced salaries, and loss of tenure or their jobs.
At CU-Denver, provost Heckler says that five of six professors put on PIAs this year have “raised the bar.” He also claims a “ripple effect” on marginal faculty who see what their colleagues are going through.
“That process is very rigorous, difficult and painful for faculty members in these situations,” Heckler says. “As a result, I can show you in nearly every case where a PIA is in place, that faculty member has changed. It’s a situation no faculty wants to find themselves in.”
Mimi Wesson, a current CU law professor and former associate vice president for academic affairs, published a report in 1991, along with colleague Sandra Johnson, on “Post-Tenure Review and Faculty Revitalization.” They found the most significant faculty objection revolved not around fairness but a perceived waste of time and effort.
Fourteen years later, Wesson sees the updated post-tenure review policy – and to an even greater degree, the annual evaluation process – as “another somewhat insignificant bureaucratic reporting requirement.”
“But when I’m feeling grumpy about this,” she adds, “I think of my law school classmates who are practicing law and the requirements in the private sector to keep track of every hour. Giving an account of yourself and how you spend your time is irksome to people who know they’re working at top capacity and doing good work and wish for fewer distractions. But it’s the way of the world.”
Examining root issues
Churchill has undergone post- tenure review since 2001, according to CU spokeswoman Pauline Hale. Results of post-tenure review are considered confidential personnel records.
Statistics reported, both officially and anecdotally, at CU and other schools show that very few professors face sanctions as a result of post-tenure review. Proponents of the process insist that they’re catching flagging faculty early in the process and bringing them up to speed.
From 1999 to 2002, CU reported 488 post-tenure reviews system-wide. Only 14 – less than 3 percent – rated below expectations. Another 10 faculty members retired, left CU, got reassigned or successfully appealed their bad review.
In the 2003-04 academic year, only one of 177 tenured faculty reviewed rated unsatisfactory. But CU noted that 19 other faculty failed to meet expectations in their regular, annual reviews and were told to develop improvement plans.
By immediately placing subpar faculty on improvement plans at the first sign of trouble, CU’s policy seeks to ensure that very few struggling professors are still struggling by the time they reach post-tenure review.
Does the system really work?
Richard Chait, a Harvard professor and a leading authority on tenure, calls post-tenure review’s “single greatest virtue” its ability to shift conversations on tenure from eliminating a cherished institution to examining root concerns.
“It has nudged people to retire sooner, created a reason to have conversations about people’s professional goals and performance,” Chait says. “But it doesn’t produce the pink slips some public officials would like to see. It does create mostly the illusion, with some reality, that institutions are attacking the problem that in the public’s eyes matters a lot – that there’s ‘deadwood’ all over the place. There’s not, but there’s enough to make poster children.”
Steve Wiest, a professor of horticulture at Kansas State, found that tenure couldn’t protect him after a string of poor reviews – and in 2002 became among the first to have a dismissal under a post-tenure review policy upheld in the courts.
After he failed to fulfill the demands of his improvement plan, a committee of tenured faculty voted unanimously to recommend his dismissal, and the university president concurred. Wiest sued and took the case all the way to the Kansas Court of Appeals, which upheld his firing.
“It’s a strange duck, because they were trying to get rid of me, kind of like Churchill – except from inside instead of outside,” Wiest says. “I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. They had no substantive evidence that I was any worse than anybody else in the department.”
Wiest, 52, says he ran afoul of departmental politics and colleagues who set him up to fail.
“Tenure doesn’t exist at K-State,” he says. “It’s a farce. They can get rid of anybody they want.”
At the University of Minnesota, the board of regents joined the rising tide of elected officials in the mid-1990s demanding more flexibility in personnel decisions and revisions to long- standing tenure policy. Sensing a serious threat to job security and academic freedom, the faculty launched a move to unionize – not unheard of, but an unusual and drastic measure among top research institutions.
E. Thomas Sullivan had just come on as law school dean and jumped in to mediate discussion. The result was expanded flexibility for the university in personnel decisions and the implementation of post-tenure review.
“How many cases actually get to the point where there’s a recommendation to terminate or reassign? Not that many,” explains Sullivan, now the university’s provost. “But when you have those conversations and work through this plan, most decide to retire. There’s an exit strategy one way or the other.”
Christine Licata, associate vice president for academic affairs at the Rochester Institute of Technology, has studied post-tenure review extensively and edited two books on the subject. She notes that the first cycle of post-tenure review did appear to trigger retirements but that the numbers have “settled down” since then.
Still, she emphasizes the importance of reporting outcomes “because those same people who were calling for discontinuance of tenure, if they’re not convinced post-tenure review is working, will come back to this question again.”
Missing the mark?
The outcome – or so far, lack of outcome – in the Churchill controversy has raised the question of whether CU’s policy functions as originally advertised.
David Longanecker, executive director of the Boulder-based Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, says that the system in its current form isn’t necessarily designed to flag issues like those now surrounding CU’s embattled ethnic- studies professor.
If a professor has published work in respected journals or contributed to books put out by respected academic presses, that often rigorous external editing process might be judged sufficient. A post-tenure review committee wouldn’t necessarily delve deeper into the scholarship.
“From what I’ve seen, I’m not sure this is evidence that post- tenure review failed,” Longanecker says. “He was still providing scholarship in his field. His work was generally considered solid research – the question was whether it was his. That’s hard to pick up unless you’re a qualified scholar in ethnic studies.”
Post-tenure review has become the standard at public universities in most states.
At about the same time CU was retooling its post-tenure review process in 1996, a similar undertaking had gotten underway in Arizona, based on some regents’ frustration over the university system’s inability to deal with faculty personnel matters – short of buying out the troublesome teachers.
Former Regent John Munger recalls how, at the time, he saw post-tenure review as redefining tenure into a series of five-year contracts. The faculty could call it tenure if that made them happy.
He now sees that assessment as “too facetious and cynical” and submits that post-tenure review has improved the system in important ways.
“A tenured professor in the Arizona university system is a proven product who has subjected himself to peer review on regular basis and achieved continuing success in his or her field,” Munger says. “I view a tenured professor today as a more prestigious position than it was previously.”
And that, ultimately, would be one outcome Heckler and others on his committee would like to see after they report their findings – including those of an outside auditor – early next year.
“My sense is that they’re very interested in examining what kind of change is going to be necessary to stand up and say we have the best system in America,” he says. “That’s the will of all the people around the table, including our faculty colleagues.”
Staff writer Kevin Simpson can be reached at 303-820-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com.
Staff writer Alicia Caldwell can be reached at 303-278-3216 or acaldwell@denverpost.com.
