Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 3, 1995 TAG: 9511030007
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROGER LEWIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Until the system is reformed, Virginia taxpayers should not be asked to add to the 4,600 tenured positions which, in effect, are public obligations to provide guaranteed lifetime employment.
That is said with the belief that most of those 4,600 university men and women are hard-working, highly qualified and dedicated teachers and researchers.
The Virginia General Assembly created the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. The commission is scheduled to report this year. Besides a temporary freeze on new tenures, the commission should recommend:
University teaching and research faculty should be covered by multiyear contracts - limited, not virtually permanent, tenures. The process adopted might be a strengthened version of that used by the excellent Virginia Community College System.
Contracts for new university faculty would be negotiated by a careful assemblage of faculty, administrators and students, plus a sprinkling of outsiders.
Present faculty, tenured or not, would be placed under contracts, initially at their present salaries. At contract-renewal time, the review team would have the power to raise or reduce pay in accordance with performance, the needs of the institution or both.
Appointments to university boards of visitors should include more individuals with vision not exclusively focused on the particular institution being served. These independent and powerful boards should not be parochial. (Community college boards are purely advisory to a state board and central VCCS administration.)
To assist these volunteer members of university and college boards, an independent unit should be created within the State Council of Higher Education. The small unit would be patterned after the General Accounting Office and the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission. Those bodies render advice to members of Congress and Virginia state legislators. When a proposal or problem comes before them, university and college board members could ask the unit for an objective but nonbinding second opinion.
By providing guaranteed salary and insurance, health and retirement benefits, tenure, including limited tenure, can encourage faculty to launch new enterprises. As the present system of near-permanent university tenure is pared back, a version of limited tenure might be created outside the university.
Citizen Smith has a good plan for a new business that would provide some decent jobs. Currently, he or she can borrow start-up money - probably mortgaging the house - and face zero salary, insurance, etc. for at least a year or two. Gov. George Allen and the General Assembly might experiment with a program that provides tax dollars for five-year tenures to cover these living expenses. These job-creation tenures could be administered by the small Center for Innovative Technology, not by universities that extract overhead money and may attempt to sell the entrepreneur university services whether needed or not.
Universities should abandon the practice of providing new administrators with two jobs: the $140,000, 12-month administrative job that needs doing and a more relaxed, nine-month, well-paid teaching tenure, complete with a paid full year off every six years. Availability of the fall-back job may discourage optimal performance in Job One. A distinguished faculty member leaving Virginia told me of a department heavy with ex-administrators who, having risen in salary faster than normal by virtue of their administrative duties, created a pay shortage for others.
A multiyear contract-review system would periodically adjust salaries according to teaching/research performance and university needs. A downward pay adjustment for some would provide extra monies for lower-paid faculty whose skills and productivity are more in tune with current needs.
The tenure-reform suggestions are spurred in part by recent articles from those who zealously defend the present tenure system. They admit there are tenured faculty who are lazy and incompetent. But, they claim, taxpayers have to accept this as the price for needed tenure, so we should stop seeking reform and accountability. That logic seems analogous to an auto manufacturer, holding a monopoly on production, saying: "Yes, we know at 65 mph the wheels fall off every 50th car we build, but that's the price the public has to pay for production freedom."
The best argument for broad periodic review of tenured faculty is the reminder constantly rendered investors: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
In addition, requirements of the university change. One factor may be the emerging effort to bring education to students rather than the traditional bringing students to education.
Faculty like tenure because it protects them not only from administrators but from the public, which employs faculty. (Administrators are not apt to be too anti-tenure because they usually are tenured teachers, too.) One could argue that university faculty members are less entitled to a higher degree of security than are the students they have trained and sent out to perform in the private and public sectors.
Out on the job, these students often face decisions more difficult than those faced by university faculty. Nonuniversity workers also contribute heavily to the knowledge base by constantly coping with on-the-job developments. Also, they continue their own formal education on their own time.
The desire for maximum security among university faculty is ingrained, and change will be difficult. On campus, advocates of big government and libertarian types are likely to link arms to maintain tenure status quo. Like all of us, educators ponder mass layoffs of even highly skilled people in all levels of government and in corporate America. Too, we are told that today's world requires people to prepare to change jobs every few years.
So a bunker mentality may be forming on the tenure issue. Adequate reform may be impossible in-house. All in all, one might conclude that university faculty are deservedly well-treated and the least they should do is subject themselves to tougher periodic review and accountability.
Roger Lewis, of Willis, is vice chairman of the New River Community College Board. This is taken from remarks made to the Commission on the Future of Higher Education.
by CNB