ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 23, 1996 TAG: 9609230019
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL METZ
TENURE. JOB security. Lifetime employment. The laid-back life of a university professor. Great, eh? However, it's just not true.
Faculty read the papers too, and we understand that tenure is a blood-pressure issue for many people. It is a great source of frustration to many hard-working faculty to know that the public's perception of tenure is not founded in fact.
In a nutshell, the argument against tenure has four components. Tenure serves no good purpose. It gives faculty a lifetime entitlement of employment at good wages. It gives them license to do as they please. And it exempts faculty from accountability for their actions. Not one of these statements is correct.
The chief purpose tenure serves is to safeguard the atmosphere of questioning and discovery without which knowledge cannot advance. Periodic impulses within the larger society, such as McCarthyism or creationism or phrenology, have the potential to mandate conformity and chill the spirit of free inquiry, which has given America the finest system of colleges and universities history has seen. Periodic fads and orthodoxies within the academic disciplines have the same potential, and must be discussed and tested without fear of retribution.
Tenure does not confer a guarantee of lifetime employment. Faculty can be and are dismissed for poor performance. It does represent a permanent and significant shift toward positive presumptions about performance.
Outsiders often compare this to their own job experience. But most nonacademics are not typically subjected to a multi-year, probationary period, at the end of which they are compared with their counterparts throughout the world. Tenure is achieved only at the end of a rigorous review against high standards of exceptional - not adequate - performance. Every faculty member knows former colleagues who left because they were denied tenure.
Once tenure has been earned, it does not protect faculty who are guilty of sexual, financial or academic misconduct, or those who become disengaged from their disciplines and indifferent to their teaching. It does not even protect excellent faculty whose programs are discontinued due to major restructuring or large societal changes in enrollment patterns.
Tenure is not a license to do as one pleases. The courses a faculty member is asked to teach are determined by the needs of the department, which are in turn a combined outcome of core curriculum requirements, the requirements for majors in a field, and the level of demand from students.
While open inquiry is protected by tenure, faculty are not empowered to proselytize their personal beliefs in the classroom. Research and other signs of active engagement in one's discipline are expected, especially at the senior institutions. So are other kinds of service, such as committee work or student advising.
Finally, tenure is not an exemption from accountability. At the end of every one of my 17 years at Virginia Tech, I have written an annual report which has served as one of the bases for my boss's evaluation of every aspect of my performance. Increases in my salary have been based solely on this evaluation.
This pattern of rigorous review, practiced every year without exception and serving as the basis for all changes in compensation, has been true for every member of the faculty I know. Not only salary increases, but travel funding, research grants, teaching awards, promotion to administrative responsibility, and the hope of advancement from associate professor to professor all depend on performance.
At Virginia Tech we have made the process even more rigorous. Under a newly adopted system of post-tenure review, the performance of any faculty member whose evaluations have for two consecutive years indicated a failure to meet the minimal standards of his or her department will be studied by a group of elected peers, who will recommend from a range of options which include a university-level hearing to determine whether the individual should be terminated. Every institution of higher education in the state has adopted a policy with the same potential, though the details of implementation vary.
With post-tenure review in place, tenure is not a lifetime lease to a good house on Easy Street. But then, it never was.
Paul Metz is president of the Faculty Senate of Virginia Tech.
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